You Are Here: Art After the Internet

This April, Cornerhouse, Manchester, and SPACE, London, are delighted to announce the release of You Are Here: Art After the Internet, a major publication to critically explore both the internet and post-internet, studying the effects they have had on contemporary artistic practices. 

Edited by London-based curator and writer Omar Kholeif and featuring a selection of 22 internet artists, writers and curators who reflect and respond to art after the internet through essays, criticism and images, contributors include lacerating video artist Jennifer Chan, Brad Troemel from the Jogging Collective, ‘Famous New Media Artist’, Jeremy Bailey, pioneering figure James Bridle who coined the term New Aesthetic, and ‘Internet artist’ Constant Dullaart. Focusing on an era that has increasingly chosen to dub itself as ‘post-internet’, the collective text traces a potted narrative exploring the relationship of the internet to art practices from the early millennium to the present day, positioning itself as a provocation on the current state of cultural production and relying on first-person accounts from artists, writers and curators as the primary source material. 

The unique project began during a residency at London’s new centre for art and technology run by SPACE, The White Building, when Kholeif, its then curator, invited a number of artists to discuss how technology changes the way we make art today. 

Divided into three main sections: essays, provocations and projects, You Are Here: Art After the Internet showcases essays exploring wide contextual subject matters such as history of art and the internet, how we define art after the internet and how the internet changes structures in society, alongside more critical and polemical texts and a series of image-based artist projects responding to the themes of the book. Referred to by Kholeif as a curatorial project in itself, the publication will feature a series of over-lapping voices, some that talk to each other and others, which contradict and complicate existing beliefs or attitudes about art and its agency after the rise of the web. 

Kholeif, who is also a Curator at both the Whitechapel Gallery, London, and Cornerhouse, Manchester, says: 'I believe that this project will be a critical reference point for anyone interested in the relationship between contemporary art and the internet for years to come. I have attempted to assemble as broad a spectrum of views from some of the most exciting artists, writers and curators working in the field. The publication is epic in its scope and ambition and seeks to function as a provocation about the way our relationship to art is changing in the twenty first century'. He adds ‘I hope that the book will encourage a more nuanced conversation about the relationship of the internet to art and that it will inspire readers to ask their own pointed and provocative questions.’ 

Authors: Basel Abbas & Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Sophia Al-Maria, Sam Ashby, Jeremy Bailey, Stephanie Bailey, Erika Balsom, Zach Blas, James Bridle, Jennifer Chan, Tyler Coburn, Michael Connor, Model Court, Brian Droitcour, Jesse Darling, Constant Dullaart, Ed Halter, Omar Kholeif, Gene McHugh, Lucia Pietroiusti, James Richards, Basak Senova, Brad Troemel. 

Artists: Jeremy Bailey, Jon Rafman, James Richards, Jamie Shovlin.