Post-Internet Art: Art Aware of Its Existence After the Internet

In 2007, an artist named Petra Cortright sat in front of a webcam and recorded herself staring into the lens. The video, titled VVEBCAM, shows Cortright adjusting her hair, looking bored, making faces, and doing almost nothing else. Little pizza animations and digital effects float across the screen, the kind of decorations that came built into early webcam software. The video was uploaded to YouTube, where it could be watched, commented on, and embedded. It was also exhibited in galleries. VVEBCAM is a quintessential post-internet artwork: it was made with consumer technology, it existed online as naturally as it existed in a gallery, and it treated the webcam as both a medium and a subject. The line between the screen and the gallery was irrelevant because, by 2007, that line had already dissolved.

Post-internet art is art that is aware of its existence after the internet. The term does not mean art made after the internet has ended. It refers to art made in a condition where the internet is so embedded in everyday life that its presence is invisible, like electricity or plumbing. The artist and curator Marisa Olson coined the term "postinternet art" in 2006 to describe her practice. The UCCA Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing explained that rather than referring "to a time 'after' the internet," the term refers to "an internet state of mind." Read the overview at Wikipedia, which compiles primary sources from the movement.

This entry covers what post-internet art is, how it emerged from net.art and social media, which artists defined it, and how it has been historicized as a movement that is now effectively over.

What Is Post-Internet Art?

Post-internet art is art made by artists whose lives are so saturated by the internet that the distinction between online and offline experience has collapsed. The work may appear on a screen, in a gallery, or both. It may use digital tools, physical materials, or combinations. What makes it post-internet is not the medium but the sensibility: an awareness that every image, object, and interaction now exists within a network of circulation, reproduction, and surveillance that did not exist before the internet became ubiquitous.

Frieze published a retrospective essay on the movement noting that "the term post-internet started circulating in 2006, coined by artist and curator Marisa Olson, who used it to talk about a frame of thinking affected by scrolling and clicking." The essay observed that "when post-internet art really took off, around 2010, so much of the work was defined by its relationship to images, especially on platforms like dump.fm, whose mission was to 'talk with images,' or The Jogging, a Tumblr shared by a group of artists." Read the essay at Frieze.

The movement is distinct from net art, which emerged in the 1990s when the internet was new and artists explored it as a novel medium. Post-internet art came after the novelty wore off. Domenico Quaranta, a scholar of the movement, wrote that "if early net.art was a futurist Avantgarde, post internet was a presentist art movement." The critic Gene McHugh observed in 2011 that "any hope for the Internet to make things easier, to reduce the anxiety of my existence, was simply over. It failed. It was just another thing to deal with. What we mean when we say 'Internet' became not a thing in the world to escape into, but rather the world one sought escape from." Read Quaranta's essay at DAM.

Origins and History

From Net.art to Web 2.0 (1990s-2006)

Post-internet art grew out of net.art, the practice of making art for and about the internet that emerged in the mid-1990s. Artists like Olia Lialina, Jodi, and Alexei Shulgin created works that existed only online, exploring the browser, HTML, and early web culture as artistic media. When Web 2.0 arrived with platforms like Facebook (2004) and YouTube (2005), the internet shifted from a specialized space for the technologically minded to a mainstream world for everyone. Cory Arcangel, a bridge between net.art and post-internet, gained recognition for works like Super Mario Clouds (2002), a hacked Nintendo game cartridge that displayed only the scrolling clouds from Super Mario Bros.

The Movement Takes Shape (2006-2010)

Marisa Olson coined the term "postinternet art" in 2006. In 2009, the writer Gene McHugh adopted the term and authored a blog titled Post-Internet, which discussed and popularized the concept. That same year, artists Brad Troemel, Artie Vierkant, and Lauren Christiansen created the Tumblr blog The Jogging, which showcased Google Images and online products photoshopped together as artworks. The blog grew in the summer of 2012 with the inclusion of several new members. Artie Vierkant also developed the concept through his Image Object sculpture series and an accompanying essay distributed as a PDF.

Mainstream Recognition (2010-2016)

Between 2013 and 2016, post-internet art moved from a niche of media art to an art world trend with support from both institutions and the market. The 2014 exhibition Art Post-Internet at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing was named by ARTnews as one of the most important exhibitions of the 2010s, describing it as a show that "set out to encapsulate the budding movement." Artists like Oliver Laric, Jon Rafman, Aleksandra Domanovic, Petra Cortright, Parker Ito, Constant Dullaart, Katja Novitskova, Cecile B. Evans, and Artie Vierkant gained attention from the mainstream art world, alongside artists not directly connected to the "surfing clubs" generation but close in topics and form, such as Simon Denny, Trevor Paglen, Ed Atkins, and Hito Steyerl.

The End of Post-Internet (2016-Present)

Frieze declared in a retrospective that "the only thing I can definitely say now is that post-internet is over." The artists associated with it have moved on to other concerns, and the cultural condition it described has shifted. The internet of 2010 was a place of social media, memes, and image circulation. The internet of 2025 is a place of AI-generated content, algorithmic governance, and platform capitalism. The 2025 exhibition Post Internet, Now What? at TAF The Art Foundation in Athens asked "whether contemporary artistic practices can invent new narratives and alternative representations of identity that break the link" between users and the algorithmic governance of social media. Read about the exhibition at Monoskop. The traveling exhibition Poetics of Encryption, curated by Nadim Samman, ran from 2023 to 2025 with stops in Berlin and Prague, featuring works by artists including Jon Rafman, Simon Denny, Trevor Paglen, and Hito Steyerl that explored "the age of AI" and cryptographic aesthetics.

Key Artists and Works

Marisa Olson (b. 1974)

Olson coined the term "postinternet art" in 2006 to describe her practice, which combined performance, video, and online presence. Her work explored the experience of growing up with the internet and the way digital culture shapes memory and identity. She described her practice as existing in a state where the internet was no longer a novelty but a condition.

Artie Vierkant (b. 1981)

Vierkant's Image Objects series (2011-ongoing) reflects the dissolving boundaries between physical objects and digital images. Each work begins as a digital file that also has countless variations, which are then rendered as prints on Dibond and cut to create three-dimensional sculptures. Vierkant also wrote a theory of the image object that he distributed as a PDF, placing post-internet art in relation to both new media theory and conceptual art. Frieze noted that Image Objects "reflects the dissolving boundaries between physical objects and digital images."

Jon Rafman (b. 1981)

Rafman's Nine Eyes of Google Street View (2008-ongoing) collects images captured by Google's Street View cameras, presenting them as found photographs that document the world as seen by a machine. The series raises questions about surveillance, authorship, and the way automated systems produce images of our lives without human intention.

Petra Cortright (b. 1986)

Cortright's VVEBCAM (2007) is one of the defining works of post-internet art. She recorded herself staring into a webcam with digital effects layered over the image, then uploaded the video to YouTube and exhibited it in galleries. Her later works include digital paintings created in software and printed on materials including silk and aluminum, blurring the line between digital and physical production.

Ryan Trecartin (b. 1981)

Trecartin's video works, including A Family Finds Entertainment (2004) and the Any Ever series (2009-2010), create frenetic, hyper-edited narratives that reflect the logic of internet culture: rapid cuts, identity fluidity, language mutation, and the collapse of public and private. His work has been described as capturing the psychological condition of growing up online.

Amalia Ulman (b. 1989)

Ulman's Excellences & Perfections (2014) was a performance conducted entirely on Instagram. Over several months, Ulman posted images of herself as a fictional character undergoing a transformation: arriving in a new city, getting cosmetic procedures, adopting a new persona, and eventually "recovering." The performance was revealed to be art after it concluded, raising questions about authenticity, gender performance, and the construction of identity on social media.

Post-Internet Art and Related Terms

Post-internet art grew out of net art, the earlier practice of making art for and about the internet. It connects to digital art in its use of digital tools and platforms, and to conceptual art in its emphasis on ideas over medium. It relates to appropriation in its reuse of found online images and content. The movement shares concerns with video art in its use of moving images and with glitch art in its aesthetic engagement with digital errors. For broader context, read our blog post on net art, or explore our guide to the history of digital art.

See Post-Internet Art in Person

Post-internet art is exhibited in major museums and galleries worldwide, though the movement itself is now considered historical. The Museum of Modern Art in New York holds works by Cory Arcangel, Ryan Trecartin, and Petra Cortright. The New Museum in New York has exhibited post-internet artists including Jon Rafman and Hito Steyerl. The traveling exhibition Poetics of Encryption, which ran from 2023 to 2025 with stops at KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin and Galerie Rudolfinum in Prague, featured works by many artists associated with post-internet art engaging with themes of AI and encryption.

For a historical perspective, the 2014 Art Post-Internet exhibition catalogue from the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing remains a key document. For contemporary work by artists who emerged from the post-internet moment, galleries including Pace, Spruth Magers, and Kunsthalle Basel regularly show their work. For more on related movements, read our entries on net art and digital art, or explore our post on the history of digital art.