This is the experience of living full time on the Net, newly free in some ways, newly yoked in others. We are all cyborgs now. The ability to channel the commercial return from music or film has allowed many people to create who otherwise could not. This is the proper function of copyright law, and its only good justification. Visual art’s ongoing double attachment to intellectual property and physicality threatens to jeopardize its own relevance in the forthcoming decades.
The Web dwells in a never-ending present. It is—elementally—ethereal, ephemeral, unstable, and unreliable. Digital images on a museum website can’t offer transcendence any more than an Instagram feed can, but institutional websites do tend to offer the illusion of control, the sense that visitors can curate a museum’s collection by arranging images to their liking.
The new hyper-visibility is difficult because it can transform a unique installation into commodified image; the work’s lasting political power could easily be mistaken for a fleeting trend...the exhibition does not only present certain images to our gaze, but also demonstrates the technology of presenting, the apparatus and structure of framing, and the mode in which our gaze is determined, oriented, and manipulated by this technology. The documentation of the art-making process is already an artwork.
The internet is by its essence a machine of surveillance...the only difference is that this surveillance is more hermeneutic than disciplinary. If philosophy is that fraction of human thought dealing with that which cannot be explained by the sciences, then systematic literacy is the thinking that deals with a world that is not computable, while acknowledging that it is irrevocably shaped and informed by computation.