Image via Complex Original
Whether you believe that art imitates life or that life imitates art (or both), there's one thing we can all agree on—the advent of the Internet has changed the process of art-making and art's reception forever. In many cases, artists use their work to critique the aesthetic and impact of the digital age, using screenshots, collage, and an extreme combination of mediums to comment on the way we relate to the Internet. While many are skeptical about the place of this art beyond the world wide web, it's undoubtedly an important new lane in art history. Make sure you remember these 25 Internet Artists You Need to Know and their work next time you're thinking about your own Internet consumption.
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RELATED: 25 Artists to Watch in 2013
An Xiao
An Xiao
Based in: Uganda
An Xiao makes conceptual and performance work on and about social media networks. Some of her works return electronic communications to analog forms, such as "Morse Code Tweets" (2009) which brought together the two technologies to highlight shifts in both the means and content of communication. Likewise, "Nothing to Tweet Home About" (2009), is a series of "status updates" sent as postcards, with postmarks as "timestamps." On the flip side, she also plays with moving physical interaction into the digital realm. Spoofing the Marina Abramovic piece that allowed visitors to sit in silence with the artist, Xiao's "The Artist is Kinda Present" (2010) invited visitors to communicate with the artist via text or Twitter.
Penelope Umbrico
Penelope Umbrico
Based in: Brooklyn, NY
Penelope Umbrico makes photographic installations that identify and explore phenomena and trends in online visual culture. For "Signals Still" (2011), she found images of television sets for sale on Craigslist with static or solid screens, presenting them in a large grid. "Suns from Flickr" (2006-) assembles hundreds of photographs of sunsets found on Flickr, then crops and digests them into a universal pictorial structure. She expands on this project in "People with Suns from Flickr" (2011), a series of pictures that viewers have taken in front of her earlier work as it has been shown in various international settings.
Peter Stemmler
Peter Stemmler
Based in: New York
Peter Stemmler, A.K.A. Peekasso, combines pop culture images and characters from celebrities into cartoons, porn, advertisements, art, humorous GIFs, and digital collages. He put Kim Kardashian's face on Kim Jung-Un's body ("I Should Have Tried", 2013) and replaced Edvard Munch's emaciated screamer with Spongebob Squarepants's chunky friend, Patrick ("Spring", 2013). He also uses distortion techniques on human figures, turning NSFW nudes into artistic abstractions.
Rafaël Rozendaal
Rafaël Rozendaal
Based in: Everywhere
Rafael Rozendaal has the luxury of traveling and living all over world because, as he says, the Internet is everywhere. His best known works are bold, clever art websites, which he sells to collectors as discrete URLs with the stipulation that they must remain public—the collector's name appears in the browser header. On "Paper Toilet" (2006), a roll of virtual toilet paper can be endlessly unraveled and re-rolled. In "Jello Time" (2006), a Jell-o mold bounces and wobbles in response to mouse movement. Along with fellow artist Jonas Lund, he created the playful Google Chrome browser extension "Text-Free Browsing," a button that allows you to remove all text from any website, leaving just the blank, abstracted architecture of the page.
Tabor Robak
Tabor Robak
Based in: Brooklyn, NY
If many of his peers are playing with a Super Nintnedo [aesthetic], Tabor Robak has long since upgraded to a PS3. His sci-fi virtual environments are sleek, dimensional, immersive, and mesmerizing. Recently, in fact, he created a video game to accompany the LP "Exo"(2012) by the electronic duo Gatekeeper, as well as videos for a handful of other musicians. Other worlds exist without a sanctioned soundtrack, like the delectable "Cold Storage" (2012), a glistening landscape of candy and sweets, or the raucous "Explosions" (2010), 90 minutes of high-intensity explosion animations.
Ryder Ripps
Ryder Ripps
Based in: New York
Ryder Ripps is a voracious collector and dedicated chronicler of all things World Wide Web. As an archivist, he established Internet Archaeology in 2009, a repository for early digital images saved from defunct GeoCities websites, as well as a download-able archive of his own Facebook profile. As a creator, he maintains numerous Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook projects, is a co-founder of dump.fm, an image-sharing chatroom of sorts that is the birthplace of many JPEG and GIF memes, a partner at the creative firm OKFocus, and a collaborator with artists the likes of Ryan Trecartin and M.I.A. All before even mentioning his installation and physical-media work, like "Facebook Art" (2010-11). Ryder Ripps must be exhausted.
Lorna Mills
Lorna Mills
Based in: Toronto
Lorna Mills makes animated GIFs that range from cute to funny, strange, sexy, and beautiful. Her style also moves from a Windows 95 aesthetic to sophisticated organic abstraction.
Michael Manning
Michael Manning
Based in: California
Michael Manning is among the faction of young Internet artists interested in the already outdated functions and aesthetics of the "early" Internet circa 2000. "Mirrroring.net" is a prime example, a clickable a series of these outdated animations featuring iMac G3s, pizza, Satan, and Heidi Montag among other images. He also explores the capacities and limitations of software like Microsoft Paint, which he uses to create Abstract-Expressionistic digital works in his "Microsoft Store Paintings" and "Phone Arts" series.
Jonas Lund
Jonas Lund
Based in: Amsterdam
Jonas Lund's interactive web projects respond to user or networked information and produce real-time outcomes that are both useful and futile. "Paint Your Pizza" (2013) allows the user to combine the ultimate utility of the Internet, ordering delivery, with the pleasure of painting, resulting in a real-life pizza that comes to your door looking just like you wanted it to. Works such as "Over and Over Again" (2011), a website that loads and re-loads itself infinitely, or "This Click in Time" (2012), which loads a sequential record of every click on the website are self-referential and intriguing.
Guthrie Lonergan
Guthrie Lonergan
Based in: Los Angeles
With a hearty dose of humor, Guthrie Lonergan explores the boundaries between amateurism and expertise, along with defaults and specializations, in terms of how they relate to digital culture. One way he does this is by compiling pictures and videos posted by other people and making his own conception of their world, as with "Recent Music Videos" (2012). He sets snapshots of babies in hampers or friends playing Flip Cup to cheesy MIDI music, re-contextualizing the images in an act that is not explicitly authorized, but certainly made possible by public postings on social media and file-sharing sites. Likewise, "Internet Group Shot" (2006) is a long, scrollable, composite group shot made from photos found online. He also works with commercial stock images and footage, like he did for "Burgers" (2012), an interactive trove of burgers of all kinds.
Rollin Leonard
Rollin Leonard
Based in: Portland, ME
Using seemingly standard Photoshop techniques, Rollin Leonard turns photos of himself and his obliging friends into bizarre and trippy Franken-bodies. His work often capitalizes on the inherent strangeness of representing the three-dimensional body in two dimensions, and finds moments of confluence between physical movement and moving pictures. "Spiral Ravel/Unravel" (2012) uses photos of a bending torso to animate a dancing, worm-like image. In "Pig Pile" (2012), flat frontal images of people fall and melt digitally onto one another, morphing from human forms into pure pixels. "Self Portrait" (2012) is a Dada-esque collage of various parts and angles of Leonard's body.
Oliver Laric
Oliver Laric
Based in: Berlin
Through meticulous sorting of found material and careful splicing of footage, Oliver Laric creates montages that draw upon repeated forms and icons from ancient times to our online era. His video "50/50" (2007) pieces together hundreds of different performances of 50 Cent's hit song "In Da Club" posted to YouTube, humorously showing how a single piece of pop music can live innumerable lives. He even made a second version in 2008. He also returns every few years to the work, "Versions", a video essay in multiple iterations that calls our attention to the circulation of icons across time and media, from the distant past to the present day to religious icons and digital culture. You should also watch "Aircondition" (2006), which traces, frame-by-frame, each step of a highly choreographed and deeply charming dance.
Parker Ito
Parker Ito
Based in: Los Angeles
Parker Ito may be best known for his ongoing obsession with "The Most Infamous Girl in the History of the Internet/Attractive Student/Parked Domain Girl" (2010-13), a stock photo that frequently appears on vacant websites, which Ito has had turned into numerous oil paintings over the years. Though he is an avid web user and draws on it extensively, he creates a considerable amount of physical artwork in addition to his Internet-based practice.
Joel Holmberg
Joel Holmberg
Based in: New Haven, CT
Joel Holmberg is an all-purpose artist, who's formally trained as a sculptor and works in a variety of analog and digital media. His Internet work includes "Legendary Account" (2011), a long-term project in which the artist posted deep, personal, or otherwise unanswerable questions like "what does it feel like to be in love?", "what will happen to earth?" or "are you feeling lucky?" on the Yahoo! Answers forum. He also dabbles in the less profound, like "Pups & Order" (2009), a collection of YouTube videos of dogs howling to the "Law & Order" theme music. In his sculptural practice, he sometimes incorporates computer references through source imagery, materials like ink jet pigment, or processes like three-dimensional printing.
Martijn Hendriks
Martijn Hendriks
Based in: Amsterdam
Though he has recently moved away from this work, much of Martijn Hendriks' earlier work dealt with culling and/or categorizing Internet-based content. "Untitled (Black Video)" (2009) presents a series of comments left on the controversial YouTube video of Saddam Hussein's execution by users whose anonymity often emboldens them to be shockingly glib, insipid, curt, bigoted, or idle in response. The slide show "In the Black of this Long Night" (2008) is an attempt to organize altered images from a Google by the method of defacement. More recently he has begun to translate online material to traditional media, like with his "Tumblr Series" (2011), which turns found images into monumental abstractions.
Joe Hamilton
Joe Hamilton
Based in: Melbourne, Australia
Joe Hamilton's project "Hyper Geography" (2011) is a complex image-quilt residing on Tumblr. Each image relates to the ones around it as if to form an immersive environment rather than a series of images. The accompanying video takes us on a moving tour through the resulting space. He further explores these patchwork virtual spaces further in the video "Survey" (2013), while a work like "Div-Contour" (2012) emphasizes the more optic outcomes of his digital-collage techniques.
Alexandra Gorczynski
Alexandra Gorczynski
Based in: New York
Alexandra Gorczynski works in a wide variety of traditional and digital media to make work that reflect aspects of our heavily networked and digitized lifestyles. Computer imagery and aesthetics are prevalent in her collage and painting, like "Aurora" (2013), a mural depicting a standard Mac desktop. She also makes webcam videos, like "West Coast Bound" (2011) and "Cheerleading Machine" (2012) that move between mundanity, scandal, surrealism, and sincerity to explore the phenomenon of private spaces on public fora.
Constant Dullaart
Constant Dullaart
Based in: Berlin
Constant Dullaart remixes and re-contextualizes tropes and tokens of online experience. He frequently uses the Google homepage as a starting point, creating fully functional but utterly absurd search interfaces that shake, sputter, or spin like "The Revolving Internet" (2010) or read aloud like "Terms of Service" (2012). He also takes found Internet content and manipulates it offline, as in "Poser" (2007), where he digitally inserted himself into group photos found on Flickr, edging his way into social dynamics and memories that aren't his.
Website
Aleksandra Domanovic
Aleksandra Domanovic
Based in: Berlin
Aleksandra Domanovic examines the circulation of images in the Internet age, particularly as it affects her motherland, the former Yugoslavia. In line with these interests, she has studied "Turbo Sculpture" (2009-12), the recent phenomenon in former-Soviet countries of erecting monuments to pop culture icons like Bruce Lee and Johnny Depp rather than historical or political figures. She traveled in the region for her project "19:30" (2010), pursuing a collection of identities for the introduction sequences to news broadcasts. With the preserved clips, she has made video works and commissioned DJ mixes of their music, making the raw material available for download online. A conservationist tendency also appears in her columnar paper-stack sculptures (2009-), with images from Flickr printed along the loose edges of the paper to commemorate now-defunct .yu domains.
Website
Petra Cortright
Petra Cortright
Based in: Santa Barbara, CA
Like so many YouTube video bloggers and home-music-video-makers, Petra Cortright is often the star of her own webcam videos. In pieces like "Sickwoof" (2011) and "Angel Eyez" (2011), she dances and poses in front of her computer, then enhances the footage with distortions, special effects, and GIF images. She also creates videos and digital collages from such "found" digital material as bad porn animations and desktop art to create videos and digital collages like "Vicky Deep in Spring Valley" (2012).
Jennifer Chan
Jennifer Chan
Based in: Syracuse, NY
Using a deliberately kitschy and outdated style, Jennifer Chan's videos and websites pay particular attention to the role of gender and race in digital culture. "*A Total Jizzfest*" (2012) shares a swooning slide show of "dreamy" computer programmers and web moguls. "Infinite Debt" (2012) is a confounding series of images, including wok-fried Euro bills and mathematical proofs of pizza. Her witty website "Everyone I Have Ever Slept With"(2010) displays a Google Map with pins dropped at the geographic locations where she has shared a bed with someone, marking but not specifying both sexual and soporific encounters.
Mark Callahan
Mark Callahan
Based in: Athens, Georgia
Mark Callahan manipulates popular Internet content into slower, subtler works . "24-Hour Miss South Carolina" (2007) stretches a then-popular 30-second video of a pageant blunder into a 24-hour loop, both distorting and immortalizing it. For "House and Universe" (2011), Callahan meticulously erased the figures from popular YouTube blogs, leaving only the empty rooms that are the sets of the vlogger's performances. Similarly, he removed the contents of popular websites in "Internet Soul Portraits (I.S.P.)" (2005), leaving only their empty minimalist frameworks.
John Michael Boling
John Michael Boling
Based in: New York
Choosing to focus on other professional endeavors, John Michael Boling doesn't make much new work these days, but his portfolio to a couple years ago is rich. Through juxtaposition and careful editing, he highlights moments of absurdity and serendipity found online. Some are as simple as a fortuitous screen grab comprises "Premise of Footloose Naturally Occurring on Facebook" (2007), or "The Last 51 Years of Art History Represented by 51 Seconds of Battlestar Galactica Season 4 Episode 18" (2009). He also has a series of collaborations pairing music by Javier Morales with cheesy 80s video footage.
Michael Bell-Smith
Michael Bell-Smith
Based in: Brooklyn, NY
From stock images and promotional videos to classic films and art history as his base material, Michael Bell-Smith puts cultural material and imagery of all kinds to use in his work. True to its title, "Chapters 1-12 of R. Kelly's Trapped in the Closet Synced and Played Simultaneously" (2005) layers the first twelve parts of R. Kelly's infamous hip-hop-era on top of one another, concentrating its music and action into a dense and dramatic mass. Another act of condensation occurs in "Battleship Potemkin Dance Edit (120 bmp)" (2007), a distillation of Sergei Eisenstein's legendary Soviet propaganda film into a 12.5-minute montage set to an upbeat rhythm. "The Hamburger Presets" (2011), however, extends a shot slowly encircling a hamburger, ala any given fast food commercial, to the absurd length of nearly eight minutes.
Anthony Antonellis
Anthony Antonellis
Based in: The Internet
Anthony Antonellis has made a number of works that poke light fun at the distinction between Internet art and traditional art objects and exhibition practices. "Put It on a Pedestal.com" offers a selection of objects and pedestals to arrange in a virtual gallery space, and "Public Domain" presents a random, changing selection of animated GIF's "hung" on the web page in gold frames. He also makes videos, images, and objects with and about Photoshop, Facebook, Internet porn, among others.