Cal Revely-Calder finds much to appreciate, and more to decry, in Omar Kholeif\u2019s \u201cInternet_Art: From the Birth of the Web to the Rise of NFTs.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That\u2019s exactly what we\u2019ve done. As Natasha Stagg has put it: \u201c[E]very person becomes an avatar in the mind once our main interactions with them are via social media feeds.\u201d 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\u2019s 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\u2019s web page\u00a0Directions to Last Visitor<\/em><\/a>\u00a0(2011) delivered to \u201cyou,\u201d in a Google Maps box, just what the title said: directions from you, the user, to the page\u2019s previous visitor. A human being, solitary and nameless, was represented as a pin on a map\u2014a destination, but to what end? On his web page\u00a0Location of I,<\/em><\/a>\u00a0Martin John Callanan used Google Earth to take the premise to an extreme: \u201cEvery minute of each day since the beginning of 2007 to July 2009, my exact physical location was published and archived online.\u201d Such data now exists about me, and almost certainly you. It has become frightening and banal. In his post-internet project\u00a0Map<\/em><\/a>\u00a0(2006\u201319), Aram Bartholl took the search engine\u2019s power and made it gawkily manifest. He painted the Maps \u201clocation\u201d 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 \u201ccenter\u201d of town. Behold, an unspoken model that now governs all of us, all at once.<\/p>\n\n\n\n