When new grows old

IN 1968 the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London held an exhibition called “Cybernetic Serendipity”, Britain’s first show exploring connections between art and new technology. It was hugely popular and in hindsight, well timed. It coincided with two crucial developments in the relationship between art and technology: the pop-art movement, which was demolishing boundaries between high art and everyday life, and ARPANET, the computer-to-computer network which would become the internet.

The internet has continued to erode established notions of what qualifies as art, and who can claim to be an artist. New categories flourish: net.art, new media art, the New Aesthetic, internet art, post-internet art. Online-only sales and exhibitions are increasingly common, as is art existing solely in digital form, bought and sold through websites such as Electric Objects (on a mission “to put digital art on a wall in every home”). Successful careers and expensive collections are built using social media, such as Instagram, the image- and video-sharing app that has users posting 80m photographs a day.

“Electronic Superhighway (2016-1966)”, a new show at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, looks at how artists have responded to technology and change. The exhibition, which takes its name from a phrase coined in 1974 by Nam June Paik, a video artist, to describe the potential of telecommunication systems, is arranged in reverse chronological order. This calls particular attention to how quickly technologies become obsolete, and how art tied to those forms ages with it.

The first room, which looks at the period from 2000 to 2016, is a cacophony of art made using the technologies and visual language of social media, gaming, 3D printing, computer-generated imaging, browser interfaces and smartphones. In subsequent rooms the technology becomes, like the bulky wall of analogue TV monitors that comprise Paik’s “Internet Dream” (1994), nostalgic for older visitors, and a mere historical curiosity for younger ones.

Artists working with technology today are acutely aware that their work is ageing. To reflect—or deflect—the inevitable outdating of their material, some, such as Cory Arcangel or Petra Cortright, use low-tech graphics, outmoded software and retro hardware as an ironic aesthetic. Others take the internet’s visual vocabulary to extremes. They include Ryan Trecartin, who populates video and installation work with hyper-real, extravagantly costumed characters; or Camille Henrot, whose film “Grosse Fatigue” layers video clips, photographs and internet screen-grabs over one another as proliferating browser windows.

Harun Farocki, a German film-maker who made “Parallel I-IV” just before he died in 2014, predicted of online culture that “Reality will soon cease to be the standard by which to judge the imperfect image. Instead, the virtual image will become the standard by which to measure the imperfections of reality.” Amalia Ulman recently provided a literal illustration of this in a social-media performance piece called “Excellences & Perfections”, using her Instagram and Facebook profiles to create a fake approval-seeking persona, and to stage her body having hoax plastic surgery. Douglas Coupland’s portraits (of which one is shown above) respond to the automatic face-recognition technology used by security services and Facebook. Geometric shapes in primary colours over their features highlight how, to a computer, a face is just a series of abstractable properties.

“Every large online corporation (Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, eBay) is optimising you,” Jonas Lund, an artist, has said. “So why shouldn’t an artist also use the same techniques?” His work incorporates analysis of viewer behaviour itself. “VIP (Viewer Improved Painting) 2014” contains an algorithm that creates a fluctuating, abstract composition based on where the viewer looks. In effect handing over the creative prerogative, Mr Lund sardonically gives the same impression as Instagram seeks to give: everyone is an artist. Indeed, it is a problem that plagues the Whitechapel show: it is often difficult to find any sense of individual identities or even real human feeling. Breaking down barriers between technology and art can raise technology to the level of art, but it also risks working the other way round, reducing art to the banality of an algorithm.