Cal Revely-Calder finds much to appreciate, and more to decry, in Omar Kholeif’s “Internet_Art: From the Birth of the Web to the Rise of NFTs.”
That’s exactly what we’ve done. As Natasha Stagg has put it: “[E]very person becomes an avatar in the mind once our main interactions with them are via social media feeds.” We loaned our souls to Facebook and Twitter, and we consigned knowledge, or its archive, to Google. The latter appeared in 1998, and has been the world’s most visited website, almost continuously, for the past 13 years. A number of projects have shown the sinister side of its gigantic data reserves. Charles Broskoski’s web page Directions to Last Visitor (2011) delivered to “you,” in a Google Maps box, just what the title said: directions from you, the user, to the page’s previous visitor. A human being, solitary and nameless, was represented as a pin on a map—a destination, but to what end? On his web page Location of I, Martin John Callanan used Google Earth to take the premise to an extreme: “Every minute of each day since the beginning of 2007 to July 2009, my exact physical location was published and archived online.” Such data now exists about me, and almost certainly you. It has become frightening and banal. In his post-internet project Map (2006–19), Aram Bartholl took the search engine’s power and made it gawkily manifest. He painted the Maps “location” pin on a hefty piece of wood, and then installed it in cities from Arles, France, to Taipei, Taiwan, at the point defined by Google as the “center” of town. Behold, an unspoken model that now governs all of us, all at once.