general

Neil Thrun, describing Michael Manning's current show in the Kansas City Star:

Manning’s work fits neatly into the post-Internet art movement, a phrase that has been championed by curators Karen Archey and Robin Peckham in a recent exhibition in Beijing.

In a nutshell, post-Internet art is heavily influenced by the chaotic nature of the Internet but differentiates itself from earlier works of “Net Art” by blending digital and real objects, taking things from the Internet into physical space and physical things into digital formats.

So that's what that term means. If we go through Rachel Greene's 2004 Internet Art book I bet we can find a few examples of "taking things from the Internet into physical space and physical things into digital formats."

Whoa wait, here's something: Heath Bunting -

During the day of Friday 5th August 1994
the telephone booth area behind the destination board
at kings X British Rail station will be borrowed
and used for a temporary cybercafe.

It would be good to concentrate activity around 18:00 GMT,
but play as you will.

[list of actual telephone numbers for the phone booth phones at the railway station]

Please do any combination of the following:

(1) call no./nos. and let the phone ring a short while and then hang up
(2) call these nos. in some kind of pattern
(the nos. are listed as a floor plan of the booth)
(3) call and have a chat with an expectant or unexpectant person
(4) go to Kings X station watch public reaction/answer the phones and chat
(5) do something different

Sounds an awful lot like "taking things from the Internet into physical space."

What Archey/Peckham are talking about is, essentially, commodifying the internet for gallery consumption. There's no theory there. They're wedded to this awful term, but unfortunately that's what mainstream journalists are using to describe anything digital in a gallery now. (My own attempt, in the mid-'00s was "digital non-sites," a joke on Robert Smithson's non-sites where the "site" was a URL. Not great but better than "post internet.")

Dinosaur, or soon to be dinosaur, products still being made and/or sold:

National Audio Company - High bias Chrome Plus audio cassette tape -- NAC's "own Audio Pro brand of labeled professional blank cassettes." Company based in Springfield MO that decided to stay in the cassette business and are apparently doing OK. Tapes come in 10-pack boxes. NAC has another version of this high-bias tape that you can print your own labels for, as well as all the supplies needed to print labels and "j-card" sleeves.

TASCAM audio cassette decks. Still being manufactured/sold.

MAM-A Gold CD-R - 650mb White Inkjet, Cake (50). CDs aren't quite as musty as cassettes but clearly on the way out, in favor of USB, or whatever incompatible standard Apple uses (thunderfuck? something like that). I've been mulling over DIY music marketing and bought some of these printable gold discs for prospective buyers -- the inket printing is good and supposedly these will last. Another US (!) company, based in Colorado Springs, CO.

JVC 17" Multi-Format CRT Color HDTV / SDTV Video Editing Monitor (not cheap - $1900) - "ideal for TV producers, broadcasters, & video pro's processing movie stock captured at 24 frames p.s" - a few of these are still being offered for sale new, despite being discontinued by JVC. That company looks to be completely out of the CRT business. LCD and LED etc flatscreens are certainly more convenient but they don't look as good as that ol' TV glow. This was a case of market forces completely overturning aesthetic considerations, with amazing speed.

Minor note to Firefox/VLC users:
The latest version of VLC is 2.1.5. Logically they should rename their browser plugin to conform to this numbering scheme. But they didn't! The npvlc.dll file still says 2.1.3.
So Firefox compares the .dll to the latest version of VLC and again, logically, informs you in the Add-ons tab that your VLC plugin is out-of-date and vulnerable.
When this was pointed out to VLC the developer, Rémi Denis-Courmont, got damn snotty in response:

What part of "This is a Firefox bug" do you not understand?
Complain to Mozilla. At this point, I am closing the discussion. This is a waste of time.

Sometimes "open source" means head up the you-know-what. VLC is clearly in the wrong here. I realize you are volunteers, but update the .dll, please.

"In Search Of: Ed Halter on the Art of Guthrie Lonergan" (before it goes behind the paywall)

"...it may be the case that your interpretation of the work is entirely wrong but conceivably so influential as to color the way the work is seen even by succeeding generations, so that you may in fact both be the one to recognize an artwork's importance and the person responsible for consigning it to infinite misreading." - jeremy gilbert-rolfe (had to shorten that one -- the key word here is not so much "influential" as "wrong")

@edhalter's mind still lives in 2006 while his body is imprisoned in mall-like social media, streaming TV and apps

cory arcangel's declaration of guthrie lonergan as "our bruce nauman" touched off several pages of explaining 2006

"our bruce nauman" became a fixture of the biennale circuit -- he didn't decide at 30 that he didn't know what to do

"hacking vs defaults" ceased being relevant when all the "hackers" moved to facebook

halter and his editors may not be aware that the phrase "mere artmaking" would get you decked at the Cedar Bar

it's not enough to merely make art you have to be a jaron lanier-like pundit noting how the internet is changing culture

one way to settle a whole raft of arguments you are a party to is to convince someone to let you write an artforum cover story

some context on "defaults" 1 / 2

Lonergan's "defaults" riff intrigued when it was about software and its influence on how artists (and others) "present" in the post-gallery world. It's perhaps less interesting as a buzzword for every trope, habit, and convention of the modern era, which is the spin Halter continues to put on it. Let's not talk about art, let's talk about culture and society, realms where we are more comfortable.