The Digital Time of Internet Art

Alexander Galloway in his 2004 book Protocol highlights a moment from philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s 1990 interview with fellow philosopher Antonio Negri. Deleuze writes: “Each kind of society corresponds to a particular kind of machine – with simple mechanical machines corresponding to sovereign societies, thermodynamic machines to disciplinary societies, cybernetic machines and computers to control societies”. Accodring to Deleuze, computers are historically concurrent with control societies. What Deleuze refers to in 1990 as “computers” we can examine today at internet technology and the web. The internet has enabled a massive shift in communications, sociality, knowledge production and politics. It has created a new era by providing the technological basis for the organisational form of the information age, the network (Castells 1996). This is the first technology to achieve global scope, so it is today more than ever that we can imagine the world as a whole. At the same time, this is the first technology that allows human information processing close to real life situations through virtual reality, while it is also the first technology that provides us with time-shifting tools and time-control over lived experiences. Through this massive shift from enclosed structures to entangled systems is how our current conditions of experiencing life through the internet are being formed. As it is expected, culture changes along with technology, and today, the ubiquity of internet technology has re-invented the way we perceive and thus, the way we go about experiencing art and artmaking. As cultural production takes place online, contemporary internet art – postinternet arttransforms our way of thinking art by challenging the nature and the life of the artwork itself.