The doubt of the matter: Post-Internet at the expository test

Abstract

In the background of an approach to the exhibition institute, we will reconstruct the circumstances in which the so-called Post-Internet Art took shape (in the international critical context, at least since 2006 through the work of Marisa Olson). A "web-aware" art form but detached from its telematic, technical and strictly electronic significance, assuming the Internet no longer as innovation but as banality, as a "cognitive effect" that reverberates in an offline sphere – though dominated by the prism of ubiquitous hyperconnection – in which museums and galleries also have a new concrete role. Among a performative (the return of the image) and a constative dimension (the archive and memory, now digital and algorithmic), we will investigate the controversial history of the term Post-Internet and its most important exhibitions, and also the doubt of critical trends floating between unquestionable declarations of Internet death (Hito Steyerl) and suspected rebranding phenomena (Domenico Quaranta).