Walled Gardens

This book analyses the relationship between art and the Internet from 2008 to 2016. As well as offering a critical account of the field, it also proposes a wider historical argument about what it means to live, work, and make art with the Internet in the twenty first century.

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Walled Gardens: Autonomy, Automation, and Art After the Internet is the study of a young generation of artists characterised by their engagement with new Internet technologies that have come to reorganize life and labour online, from mobile Internet and social media to Cloud Computing. Often grouped around the much-contested term 'post-Internet art', these artists work across a range of genre – including sculpture, performance, and moving image – in order to confront the relationship between technology and society in the twenty first century. Focusing on art works produced between 2008 and 2016 in Europe and the US, this book situates the emergence of the field in a historical context of global economic downturn and climate catastrophe, positing that new Internet technologies were developed in a mutually co-constitutive relationship with crisis. Characterised by ease of use, portability, and accessibility, such technologies are the reason why the Internet has become an ever-increasing part of daily life. Yet they are also examples of 'walled gardens': proprietary formats in which one's control over functionality or content is highly restricted. Strikingly, many artists have chosen to work with rather than against these technologies and, in so doing, perform complicity with the very structures that they seek to interrogate. Walled Gardens asks how might we make sense of this assimilation with proprietary technologies, and argues that what these artworks reveal is a model of subjectivity conditioned by a dynamic between autonomy and automation.