After Internet? F.A.T. Lab’s farewell and reconsiderations of the post-internet trope in art

Abstract

In August 2015, F.A.T. Lab art collective announced their shut down after eight years of activity, claiming that the cause of the internet, of ensuring its potential as a liberating medium, had been rendered futile. Its orienting towards centralization, surveillance, and consumerism, they claimed, would be no longer reversible. This presentation takes on this statement as a starting point to reconsider contemporary artistic practices which critically engage with the internet. Particularly, it argues that the proposition of the post-internet –as discussed by Marisa Olson, Artie Vierkant, Jeniffer Chan, Michael Connor, and others– however descriptive of a current state of internet’s mainstream pervasiveness and naturalization, is not sufficient in the face of other critical and often radical practices which go against this current. Thus, it pursues an analysis and contextualization of F.A.T. Lab’s shutdown, also in relation to theories of internet politics and culture –such as Wendy Chun's, Alexander Galloway's, and Jonathan Crary's–, and identifies other paths of current critique of the internet which, rather than assimilating aspects of the post-internet scenario, seem to resist it. In this sense, this presentation picks up on Zach Blas’s suggestion of a contra-internet aesthetics but proposes further nuances. Among them, the presentation identifies in the practice of different artists: expressions of mourning over the passing of free internet imaginary; critical engagements with the internet, which conjoin connectivity with control eluding tactics; and, ultimately, attempts to evade internet infrastructure through offline practices or autonomous networking strategies.