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Up to code: geopolitics and its influence on cultural production on the Internet

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Content Up to Code: Geopolitics and Its Influence on Cultural Production on the Internet

By Heber Rodriguez

A Thesis Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC, ROSKI SCHOOL OF ART AND DESIGN
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF ARTS IN ART AND CURATORIAL PRACTICES IN THE PUBLIC SPHERE

May 2015

ii
Dedication

For Raul Rodriguez-Mayen
(1925-2013)
who opened my eyes to another way of looking at life.

iii
Acknowledgements
This manuscript is the result of an agglomeration of many hours spent thinking,
conversing, observing, and above all, listening. It represents the intersection of many interests,
discourses, and changing states of mind. As such, many people deserve to be thanked for their
part in the realization of this thesis. To begin, I would like to thank my first and most lasting
supporters, my parents, who still don’t completely understand what it is I do, but enthusiastically
encourage me nonetheless. Much credit is due to my thesis committee members, Vicki Callahan,
Charlie White, and John Tain, whose dedication and guidance helped me navigate the shifting
terrain of this investigation. I owe Charlie special thanks for being a firm supporter of my
academic pursuits and being a great source for dialogue and information on my research topic. I
am indebted to the artists and thinkers who shaped my thinking on this subject, especially Daniel
Escamilla for his time and willingness to share his insight. I must mention and thank the USC
Latino Alumni Association and Tomás Rivera Policy Institute, who granted me a Graduate
Research Award that allowed me to spend time in Mexico completing the research that informed
this argument. I would like to thank all of those involved in making my graduate studies at USC
an invaluable experience: Rhea Anastas, Connie Butler, Bruce Hainley, Amelia Jones, Dwayne
Moser, A.L. Steiner, Irene Tsatsos, and Noura Wedell. I have the upmost respect for my cohort,
Lucia Fabio, Samantha Gregg, Daniela Lieja, and Selene Preciado, who, despite the twists and
turns, shared in this experience and made it all the more enjoyable. I would also like to thank
Cesar Garcia for inspiring me to always work harder and reach higher. I could not have done any
of this without my partner Andrea Santizo, who has been there with me every step of the way.

iv
Finally, I would like to show my support for every individual who has ever been in a position of
powerlessness, especially those 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States who
work hard everyday but are not acknowledged by this government. The entire country owes you
a debt of thanks.
Heber Rodriguez
2015

v
Table of Contents

Dedication ...................................................................................................................................... ii

Acknowledgements ...................................................................................................................... iii

Table of Contents ........................................................................................................................... v

List of Figures ............................................................................................................................... vi

Abstract ....................................................................................................................................... vii

Introduction ................................................................................................................................... 1

The Internet as Social Interface: Geopolitics and Ideology ....................................................... 9

Ideology in the Interstices of Online Transmission and Reception ........................................... 10

Race Matters in the Digital Sphere ............................................................................................ 12

Analytics of Online Difference: Access .................................................................................... 13

Analytics of Online Difference: Language ................................................................................ 15

Analytics of Online Difference: Economy ................................................................................ 18

The American Internet in Foreign Territory .............................................................................. 20

Internet Polemics ....................................................................................................................... 22

Social Media Aesthetics, or Corporate Control of Digital Realty ............................................. 26

The Convergence of Contemporary Art and Online Cultural Production ............................ 29

Internet Biases Reflected in Post-Internet Art ........................................................................... 32

The Internet as Arena for Political Aesthetics ........................................................................... 35

Art and Social Media ................................................................................................................. 37

The Post Internet Art Network .................................................................................................. 39

Cultural Production From The Internet’s Subaltern .................................................................. 42

Networks Outside of the Internet .............................................................................................. 48

The Ideal Network ....................................................................................................................... 51

Conclusion .................................................................................................................................... 55

Bibliography ................................................................................................................................. 56

vi
List of Figures
Figure 1. Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto shaking hands with Facebook founder and CEO
Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook, 2014) ........................................................................................ 8
Figure 2: Daniel Escamilla, Nodes, holes, and gaps, 2012, Video loop, TRT: 1 min 26 sec,
Courtesy of the artist ............................................................................................................. 47

vii
Abstract
As cultural production increasingly moves online, the forces that are pushing this shift
forward must be interrogated. This thesis proposes that American neoliberalism shapes the
Internet and creates a biased value system that extends to online cultural production. This
conceptualization of the Internet as ideological mediator has geopolitical ramifications that affect
how this communication network is experienced. The geographic borders of the United States
and Mexico act as a frame for this argument. This binary allows for an analysis that compares a
country that benefits from the prejudices built into the Internet, as with the U.S., to a country like
Mexico, that is left to assimilate into this value system. These biases will be considered in an
inquiry of the cultural products that refer to the Internet but exist within the context of
contemporary art, with specific attention placed on Post-Internet Art and the practices of
Mexican artists working with art and technology.

1
Introduction
In 1998, in one of the earliest and most recognized feats of Internet activism, the artist
group Electronic Disturbance Theater unleashed an online collective resistance tool called
Floodnet to come to the aid of the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, a resistance group
made up of mostly indigenous people from the Mexican state of Chiapas, helping to increase the
visibility of the Zapatista’s plight against the Mexican government. This application, which was
made available through the web for free, allowed for anyone who downloaded it to stage or join
“virtual sit-ins” in order to create so much incoming traffic to a targeted website that it would
overwhelm its hosting server, causing the site to crash.
1
Throughout their campaign, the
Electronic Disturbance Theater besieged the website of Mexican president Ernesto Zedillo, as
well as several other U.S. government and international sites to show support for the Zapatista
movement. The collective, made up of members Ricardo Dominguez, Carmin Karasic, Brett
Stalbaum, and Stefan Wray, strategically took advantage of traditional media outlets to muster
public attention toward their online actions. Their campaign is not only notable because of the
media storm it was swept up in, but also because of the response it received from the U.S.
government, which was prompted to launch a counter attack in the form of an applet that would
shut down the browser of anyone who participated in the “virtual sit-in”.
2
While the Electronic
Disturbance Theater’s strategy has become a common form of online resistance known as a
distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, this was one of the first and most publicized events
in which the web became a battleground between a small collective of artist-activists and a

1. Molly Sauter, The Coming Swarm: DDoS Actions, Hacktivism, and Civil Disobedience on the Internet.,
(New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), 60-62.
2. Ibid., 110-111.

2
powerful governmental or corporate entity. While much of the media attention focused on the
novelty of the strategies employed by the Electronic Disturbance Theater, the group was very
specific with their political message. The web portal to the Floodnet tool provided the following
instruction: “Use the applet below to send your own message to the error log of the
institution/symbol of Mexican Neo-Liberalism of your choice.”
3

In 2014, the artist collective Astrovandalistas, following a similar trajectory of politically
inclined hacking as Electronic Disturbance Theater, constructed a network that mimicked the
Internet but instead served to disseminate information about cyberpolitics in Mexico for a project
entitled #EstoNoEsInternet. This project was activated during a series of workshops held as part
of Acciones Territoriales, an exhibition held at Ex-Teresa Arte Actual in Mexico City’s
historical center. #EstoNoEsInternet, which translates to #ThisIsNotTheInternet, consisted of a
network of hacked WiFi routers that bypassed the Internet and provided an alternative digital
territory to activate for political means. These routers, which were physically distributed
throughout different areas in Mexico City, provided a platform for the dissemination of a digital
zine that contained articles speaking against Mexico’s sweeping telecommunications laws that
allow for rampant government surveillance, violations of privacy, and unwarranted censorship
via the Internet. With #EstoNoEsInternet, Astrovandalistas created a space for discussion for a
community threatened by online censorship.
These two examples of politically motivated projects by Electronic Disturbance Theater
and Astrovandalistas each make use of networked technologies but allow for two vastly different
understandings of the Internet. With Electronic Disturbance Theater’s Floodnet campaign, there

3. Ibid., 112.

3
is a sense that the Internet is a realm where collective action against oppressive political regimes
is possible. The collective was able to mobilize users from different parts of the globe in support
of the rebel Zapatistas, in some cases leading to the temporary silencing of the online spaces they
targeted.
4
Cyberspace here is a territory where individuals can come together as a political
network and have equal footing with the governing entities they are combatting through
“peaceful” occupation. In this example, the Internet can be an effective place for political
expression. The Astrovandalistas on the other hand, provide an avenue for escaping an Internet
that has become a tool for governmental regulation and surveillance. While they make use of the
Internet as a resource for information, the ultimate goal of #EstoNoEsInternet is intrapersonal
communication facilitated, but not controlled, by technology. The excessive ties to government
and corporate organizations threaten the integrity of communication that passes through the
technology, prompting the creation of an alternative that falls outside this sphere of influence. In
the latter example, the Internet is not to be trusted.
What is it that prompts such contrasting views of the Internet? Can they both be accurate,
or are they mutually exclusive? Time is one factor that differentiates these assessments.
Electronic Disturbance Theater’s Floodnet arrived in 1998, and although the type of DDoS
attacks it pioneered still occur, the Internet is understood very differently today than it was
before the turn of the century. In the past few years, an unprecedented amount of information
about the political and economic ties governments and corporations have to the Internet has
become available and has led to the complication of views toward this communications
technology. In 2010, information distribution website WikiLeaks, founded by former hacker and
information liberation activist Julian Assange, released a large cache of classified information

4. Ibid., 49.

4
detailing facts about the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, making Assange a target of
governmental scrutiny. In 2013 Chelsea Manning, the Army intelligence analyst who forwarded
classified information for publication to WikiLeaks, was sentenced to prison for espionage as a
result of the breach. In another example of government crackdown on cybercrime, Internet
activist Aaron Swartz faced lengthy prison time after being indicted on federal charges for
allegedly stealing academic documents from digital library JSTOR. Swartz committed suicide in
2013 before a decision was reached in the case. Again in 2013, Edward Snowden, a computer
analyst working for a government contractor, leaked information that revealed that the U.S.
National Security Agency had implemented a broad domestic surveillance programmed that
logged the phone calls and Internet communication data of its citizens. The fact that corporations
like Google and Facebook were complicit in turning over this information to the government
sparked widespread concern about the safety of personal information over the Internet and its
availability to the government’s peering eyes. These developments have changed public
perception of the Internet and have forced users to reconfigure their position within the shifting
landscape of this global network.
The other major factor that affects the perspectives on the Internet described above is the
geopolitical boundaries that inform cultural production online. Geographic borders that separate
nation-states and sovereign bodies consequently affect how the Internet is experienced. The laws
and technological infrastructures that vary by location differentiate the type of Internet that is
available. Online cultural production that originates from or refers to these disparate geographic
locations contains inflections that point to the idiosyncrasies of the Internet as it is experienced
from these locales. Geopolitical factors affect cultural production that refers to the Internet
regardless if it exists on or offline.

5
Founded in Tijuana in 2010, Astrovandalistas’ practice straddles borders and defies
geographic fixity. The collective includes members from Mexico and Brazil and although they
operate transnationally, they are based primarily in Mexico City. This networked mode of
working makes evident the type of geographically displaced cultural production that is possible
because of the Internet. At the same time, the Astrovandalistas’ collective practice reflects a
concern for human-to-human communication at the local level that works against disembodied
virtuality. Despite hailing from geographically disparate locales, the collective comes together to
make work about the intersection of human and technology in the public sphere. In
#EstoNoEsInternet, the issue of locality is present in the content of a zine, which refers directly
to Mexican legislation governing telecommunications among other local and cyberspace issues.
Location is also addressed by the technology used to host the zine. The modified WiFi routers
emit a signal that can be detected by devices as a WiFi network named “Free WiFi” but in
actuality the only content of this “network” is the zine itself. Because the signal of the routers is
limited, to access the #EstoNoEsInternet network a user must be in physical proximity to one of
the devices. As the WiFi routers were distributed to different locations in Mexico City, nodes
were added to the network. By placing the routers in public spaces, the availability of the
information increased, but it was still restricted to anyone within reach of a device. This
emphasized the need to “connect” physically to one of locations in Mexico City that hosted a
device, increasing the possibility for interpersonal communication.
Both the Astrovandalistas and Electronic Disturbance Theater projects both demonstrate
the ease in which offline politics can migrate into the digital realm. But politics are not foreign to
online space. The Internet itself is a highly political sphere precisely because, counter to popular
conceptualizations, its infrastructure is very real and as a communications medium it has a wide

6
range of geopolitical and social implications. As a direct consequence of American post-war
ideology, a technology that is structurally built from a language steeped in colonial history,
whose chief function has been to extend the reach of globalization, the Internet is intrinsically
polemical. This semi-public virtual cultural sphere inherits the neoliberal values that helped
create and spread the technology. These values are integrated into the web itself, and are
ultimately transferred onto cultural production on the web via the structures and containers that
allow for the mediation of information. These parameters dictate the type of expression that is
possible online. The ingrained values give preference to certain users, resulting in segregated
user groups divided by social and economic criteria. The priorities of neoliberalism are fully
integrated into the infrastructure of the Internet, producing an online value system that mirrors
that of offline geopolitics and acts as the condition which cultural production on the web must
exist in and respond to.
Contemporary art that negotiates with the polemics of the Internet must work from this
understanding. The neoliberal values that allow for cultural production online present aesthetic
and contextual problems that must be dealt with in art discourse. In the first section of this
investigation I will examine how the Internet, as an ideological sphere that reflects the values of
American neoliberalism, creates favoritism toward English speaking users with economic
mobility. As the United States’ neighbor to the south whose differences in language, politics, and
culture create a different experience of the net altogether, Mexico’s relationship to the Internet
will serve to highlight the problematic consequences of these biases. I will also trace these
neoliberal values as they are expressed in cultural production on the web through social media.
In the second section I will take a closer look at the effects of the Internet on contemporary
cultural production, focusing specifically on practices from the U.S. and Mexico. As a result of

7
this cartographic view of the online landscape, this analysis will follow two distinct but
interwoven trajectories for cultural production on the web. The first considers Post-Internet Art
as a product of the convergence between the dominant neoliberal-Internet and the network of
contemporary art. The practices of artists working with the Internet as experienced in Mexico
will be presented as a counterpoint to those working from the Post-Internet, specifically the work
of Mexico City-based artist Daniel Escamilla, who works with issues of translation via visual
and linguistic means, and the artist collective Astrovandalistas, whose web of members come
together to build alternative networks and open-source technologies. The final section speculates
on ways to move beyond an Internet that replicates many of the offline problems created by
neoliberalism. This investigation proposes that cultural production that cites, is inspired by, or
uses elements of the Internet is necessarily dealing with American neoliberalism and should be
located not only within the framework of web culture, but any discussion of such work should
also take into account the geopolitical. In order to provide a more complete view of cultural
products that use the Internet as a point of departure, these factors must be considered.

8

Figure 1: Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto shaking hands with Facebook founder and CEO Mark
Zuckerberg. Source: Facebook, 2014.

9
The Internet as Social Interface: Geopolitics and Ideology
While readily evident in things like screens and surfaces, the interface is ultimately
something beyond the screen. It has only a superficial relationship to the surfaces of
digital devices… Rather, the interface is a general technique of mediation evident at all
levels… These levels, these many interfaces, are the subject of analysis not so much to
explain what they are, but to show that the social field itself constitutes a grand interface,
an interface between subject and world, between surface and source, and between critique
and the object of criticism.
5

On September 5, 2014, Mark Zuckerberg (or the intern, employee, or publicity person in
charge of managing the Facebook founder’s profile page) posted a picture of himself with
Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto. The image shows the two men standing behind a
strategically placed Mexican flag while their hands are firmly clasped in a handshake. Both stare
directly into the camera wearing matching smiles as they hold their manual embrace long enough
to ensure the moment is captured. The following statement accompanies this momentous image:
I enjoyed meeting Mexico's President Peña Nieto to talk about ways to work together
on Internet.org to make affordable internet access available to everyone in Mexico. The
internet offers huge opportunities for Mexico, from helping to share its talent, culture and
businesses with the world and making government services more efficient. Only about
half of Mexico’s population is currently online, and the President and I agree that we
need to do more to accelerate the growth of the internet in Mexico. I’m excited to see
what we can do together.
6

The entire scene is structured like a standard press shoot, and along with the accompanying
statement, it is designed for the dissemination of a specific message: The Internet is progress,
and Mexico needs the Internet. The stewards of this progress are the state, personified here by

5. Alexander R. Galloway, The Interface Effect (Cambridge: Polity, 2012), 54.
6. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook, September 5, 2014, accessed September 22, 2014,
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10101633723267271&set=a.612287952871.2204760.4&type=1&theate
r.

10
Peña Nieto, and the global corporations that have flourished in the neoliberal global economy, of
which Zuckerberg’s Facebook is a prime example.
This image and caption are exemplary of the rhetoric that dominates many discussions
about the Internet. The position taken by Zuckerberg (who is suggested to be the author of the
post) toward the Internet depicts the technology as a medium for globalization. It is one that
assumes that this technology is a positive and essential development and its subsequent
dissemination to every part of the globe must be accomplished as soon as possible. The question
is not “Should the Internet permeate every facet of human life around the globe?” but “When
will the Internet permeate every facet of human life around the globe and how can we get there
faster?” As illustrated here, state and economic powers are working hand in hand to make sure
this is accomplished.
Ideology in the Interstices of Online Transmission and Reception

As pervasive as Internet technology is, it is clear that it has not reached every corner of
the globe yet and its presence does not suddenly grant those who have access the same privileges
across the board. What this indicates is that there are certain parameters that preclude certain
populations from becoming users and that all netizens are not created equal.
7
While the
rhizomatic structure of the web and the lack of reliable data on the “global divide” in access
make it difficult to know exactly how wide the gap between those who can connect and those

7. Rebecca MacKinnon, "The Netizen," Development 55, no. 2 (2012): 201-204, doi:10.1057/dev.2012.5.

11
who can’t is, it is safe to say that the population of the former is smaller in relation to the latter.
8

The immateriality of the network obfuscates the structures that create this divisiveness, but they
can be identified through an analysis that considers the geographic boundaries that affect how the
Internet functions and is experienced in a given location. This means that the Internet is not
exactly the same everywhere. As the Zuckerberg post suggests, even in Mexico, a country
separated from the U.S. by mostly imaginary boundaries, the difference in technological
infrastructure is significant.
The Internet is not neutral ground for the mere transmission and reception of data.
Ideologies and power structures are imbedded deep within the operating protocols and
information systems that govern the technology and are also reflected in its material
infrastructure. What’s more, these underlying structures necessarily affect the type of content
that is created in this context as well as how it is shared, stored, received and interpreted. Lev
Manovich identifies this tendency in his essay “Post-Media Aesthetics”:
Authoring software shapes how the author understands the medium she/he works in; and
consequently, they play a crucial role in shaping the final form of a techno-cultural text.
For the reader who accesses this text through the software interface, this interface
similarly shapes his/her understanding of the text: what types of data the text contains,
how is it organized together, what else is possible [and] what is not possible to
communicate.
9

This reading of software interfaces can be extended to include web browsers, social media sites,
and web-based applications as well as to the Internet itself. Understood as an information portal

8. "World Internet Usage and Population Statistics: June 30, 2014 - Mid-Year Update." Internet World
Stats, accessed January 27, 2015, http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm.
9. Lev Manovich, "Post-Media Aesthetics," accessed January 27, 2015, http://manovich.net/content/04-
projects/030-post-media-aesthetics/29_article_2001.pdf.

12
that actively mediates content that moves through it, the Internet performs as a locus of control
that imparts Western neoliberal ideology onto all nodes of the network.
As a result of these tendencies, the Internet is a highly political, elitist space whose
infrastructure is intrinsically divisive, and requires vast resources in order to be literate in its
languages and signs. It is a developing technology, one among many telecommunication
technologies, but it is one that is insistent on and is in the process of infiltrating every corner of
the globe, carrying embedded ideologies along with it. Not since Manifest Destiny has an
American ideological system been so effective at spreading across physical terrain under the
auspices of progress with the promise to reshape affected territories in its own image.
Race Matters in the Digital Sphere
From its early iterations, the Internet has been misconstrued as a home for a culture
liberated from many of the identifiers that create difference and divisiveness within society such
as gender, race, and class. While it is true that identities can be built in the digital sphere that do
not necessarily correlate with biologically assigned gender or phenotype, the Internet is far from
egalitarian. Instead of these long-standing cues for discrimination, parameters based on
informatics are put in place to segregate users according to different criteria. To say that certain
sociological determinants of economic status and quality of life that have been around for
centuries are now suddenly gone is to admit that they are so engrained in the systems of power
life that they have become invisible. This process of obfuscation and denial has parallels in
notions of a post-race America. Lisa Nakamura, whose research delves into the ways race
markers are found online, sums up this position succinctly: “the ‘color-blind’ replaces the color-
line as the prevailing practice that permits resources to be unevenly allocated based on racial

13
identities.”
10
In this sense, the Internet becomes the most effective space to claim ignorance of
racial bias. As Alexander Galloway identifies:
The open societies of global neoliberalism have reached a state in which race matters
absolutely, but only because it does not matter at all any more…Thus racial coding has
not so much disappeared…but rather simply migrated into…the realm of the ideal, the
realm of pure simulation, and as simulation it remains absolutely necessary…After Jim
Crow, after civil rights, race today has been liberated, but only so it may persist in a
purely simulated form (and in its being simulated it finds a natural home in the digital).
11

In other words, the perfect space for strategies of racial differentiation is the digital sphere. The
Internet obscures the structures that create and enforce this difference. This arrangement results
in the normalization of dominant cultural modes that fit neatly within the existing paradigm of
the net. Furthermore, the systemic favoring of a dominant class neutralizes outlying cultures by
limiting possibilities for linguistic expression and forcing cultural products to fit within a rigid
set of parameters set by Western economic and political interests. Because the voices of those
who do not have regular access, are illiterate in its signs, or do not have an economic impact on
the net are being programmed out or disregarded, the Internet simulates equality while practicing
rigid segregation.
Analytics of Online Difference: Access
It is becoming increasingly clear that the rhetoric of a utopian, classless digital society
that dominated early conversations about the net are far from realistic. Here is where
Zuckerberg’s Facebook post can enter the conversation again. The post is meant to increase the

10 Lisa Nakamura, Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet, (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2008), 3.
11. Galloway, The Interface Effect, 125.

14
visibility of Internet.org, an organization whose mission it is to help the spread of connectivity to
the Internet. The following is the language from the “About” section of the Internet.org website:
Internet.org is a global partnership between technology leaders, nonprofits, local
communities and experts who are working together to bring the internet to the two thirds
of the world’s population that doesn’t have it…Sharing tools, resources and best practices,
Internet.org partners will explore solutions in three major opportunity areas: affordability,
efficiency and business models…We’re in this together. Making the internet available to
every person on earth is a goal too large and too important for any one company, group,
or government to solve alone. Internet.org’s partners have come together to meet this
challenge because they believe in the power of a connected world.
12

As this language and the aforementioned Facebook post emphasize, the disparity of access to the
Internet is very real. Despite the far-reaching efforts to increase its scope, the Internet is still
dominated by populations that meet certain socioeconomic standards or live in developed nations.
There is a metric for measuring the value of individuals on the Internet and this built-in method
for differentiation closely resembles the neoliberal value system that exists in the offline world.
Although not completely a culturally homogenous zone, the Internet today caters to a
predominantly American and European populace. In the United States almost 300 million people
(87% of the population) have access to the Internet.
13
Similar, if not higher, connectivity
numbers are normal in countries all across Europe.
14
As mentioned above, Internet access in
Mexico is at about 50% or 59 million users, which is around average for a developing Latin
American country.
15
But this is not the complete picture. Despite having over half of the world’s
users collectively, Asian countries are not equally represented in terms of content produced and

12. "About: Who we Are," accessed January 28, 2015, http://internet.org/about.
13. “United States of America Internet Usage and Broadband Usage Report." Internet World Stats,
accessed January 27, 2015, http://www.internetworldstats.com/am/us.htm.
14 "World Internet Usage and Population Statistics: June 30, 2014 - Mid-Year Update."
15. "Central America Internet Usage and Population Statistics." Internet World Stats, accessed January 27,
2015, http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats12.htm#central.

15
languages represented.
16
This disparity in availability, access to connections, and representation
within the network paints a landscape of the Internet in which users in countries with relative
wealth are the controlling constituency, and are allowed to dictate the shape and direction of the
web, while developing nations struggle to keep pace. This situation replicates the offline
formulation of majority and minority social groupings. To lack a connection to the web means
minority individuals are hindered in their ability to represent themselves as a community in yet
another space. “To possess access to the means of managing personal visual capital is crucial to
establishing one’s position as a digital subject rather than a digital object in the context of the
Internet,” posits Nakamura.
17
Thus it is not enough simply to have a connection to the web, it is
also important to have agency within cyberspace, especially for groups that are prone to
underrepresentation or control. Due to economic and linguistic discriminatory factors, ubiquitous
access, although a seeming inevitability, is a long way off.
Analytics of Online Difference: Language
[C]ommunications sciences and modern biologies are constructed by a common move -
the translation of the world into a problem of coding, a search for a common language in
which all resistance to instrumental control disappears and all heterogeneity can be
submitted to disassembly, reassembly, investment, and exchange.
18

Language is one of the most evident and consequential markers of difference on the web.
Aside from the regularity or quality of a user’s connection, the level of familiarity with the

16. "World Internet Usage and Population Statistics: June 30, 2014 - Mid-Year Update."
17. Nakamura, Digitizing Race, 33.
18. Donna Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late
Twentieth Century," in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991),
164.

16
technologies of the web determine the type of actions or amount of agency that can be expressed
through the medium. Gregory Ulmer’s term electracy is useful here in differentiating electronic
literacy from text-based literacy.
19
The former refers to the relationship the user has both to the
content on the web and the hardware interfaces used to access it and their ability to read or
activate them. Language is one of the biggest factors for determining how legible the web will be
for a user. Although there is content in many of the world’s languages online, there are many
more that aren’t represented. The technologies of the web may not even be able to support all the
characters used in the alphabets of certain languages. For Brazilian artist and educator Rejane
Spitz, the amount of knowledge necessary to understand and be an active participant of new
technology becomes a problem as the technology spreads to areas where populations may not
have the resources available to be text-literate, resulting in a double-illiteracy.
20
This additional
layer of technological semiotics that is blanketed over regions with access to the Internet leaves
individuals without access to any form of education at a further disadvantage.
Language has major implications in the digital realm. English is the most widespread
language online and, although it may soon be overtaken by Chinese in terms of the amount of
overall users, an overwhelming amount of the content on the Internet is designed for an English-
speaking audience. It is estimated that as much as 55% of the content on the Internet is in
English.
21
Every other language on the web pales in comparison to this number. To put this in
perspective, the language that has the second-most content, Russian, has only 5.9% and only

19. Gregory L. Ulmer, Electronic Monuments, Vol. 15 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005),
xxv.
20. Rejane Spitz, "Qualitative, Dialectical and Experiential Domains of Electronic Art," Leonardo 28, no. 4
(1995): 320.
21. “Usage of content languages for websites.” W3Techs Web Technology Surveys, accessed January 27,
2015, http://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/content_language/all.

17
4.7% of online content is in Spanish.
22
In Mexico, 95% of the population is able to speak Spanish,
the most common language in the country.
23
Although a significant portion of the Mexican
population can speak English, this ability is typically limited to those segments of the population
with a formal education or that meet certain socioeconomic criteria. With the sheer amount of
online content that originates from English sites or American companies, exposure to the
language is an unavoidable consequence of using the technology. Argentinian artist Lila Pagola
borrows Laura Baigorri’s term to describe this “characteristic of the Internet that affects all non-
English speakers” as Anglo-dependency.
24
The English language necessarily shapes the way in
which the Internet is experienced.
Language is important in online space not only because it affects the demographics that
can access its materials but also because the interfaces of the Internet are formed using language
as material. Communication on the World Wide Web is structured by the Hypertext Transfer
Protocol (HTTP), which essentially depends on the sending and receiving of text from client to
server, making text all-important to the web. Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), JavaScript,
and Python are just some of the languages used to write the experience of the web that have been
developed using the English language for its foundation. Most software, which includes web
access programs like browsers, is written in programming languages like these. The American
Standard Code for Information Interchange is yet another coding system based on the English
alphabet that is used heavily online. The English language’s structural impact on the web is
perhaps most visible through a website’s domain name. Since 1998, domain names have been

22. Ibid.
23. Ibid.
24. Lila Pagola, "Netart Latino Database: The Inverted Map of Latin American Net.Art," in Netart Latino
Database, ed. Nilo Casares (Badajoz: Meiac Museo Extremeño E Iberoamericano De Arte Contemporáneo, 2008),
43.

18
regulated by the American non-profit organization Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and
Numbers (ICANN).
25
This organization has strict rules for the characters that can be used in the
domain name system (DNS). It wasn’t until 2011 that the ICANN approved the use of characters
other than those in the ASCII in a top-level domain name and they are still not commonly used.
26

Many of the world’s languages, even major languages like Russian, which uses Cyrillic script,
require the use of characters outside of the ASCII set. Such a heavy dependence on a single
structuring language builds an inherent bias in the technology that is then transposed onto how
users conceptualize and use the Internet. “As a technology that can only manipulate explicit data
and symbols according to formal, syntactic rules, the computer tends to legitimize those types of
knowledge that fit into its framework and to delegitimize other kinds of knowledges,” says
Rejane Spitz of the computer, a notion that can also be applied to the Internet.
27
Although these
are just a few examples of the rules and conventions that govern virtual space, it is clear that
English plays a major role in this network.
Analytics of Online Difference: Economy
Even if a user is literate in and has access to Internet technology, the economic status of
that user plays a large role in the amount of agency they can have online. The Internet is a
vehicle for commerce. In the current digital environment, there exists a very thin line between
producers and consumers on many of the most popular websites. Social media is a great example
of this. A user’s ability to produce content for the web or consume media and/or commodities

25. Stacie L. Pettyjohn, "Net Gain: Washington Cedes Control of ICANN," Council on Foreign Relations,
accessed March 3, 2015, http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/141122/stacie-l-pettyjohn/net-gain.
26. "Internationalized Domain Names." Internet Corporation for Assigned Names, accessed March 3, 2015,
https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/idn-2012-02-25-en.
27. Spitz, Qualitative, Dialectical and Experiential Domains of Electronic Art, 320.

19
through the web determines their relative worth in net space. As a result, one of the biggest
incentives to increase connections to the web is the opportunity to tap into new markets.
28
If
there are too few users that can become active producer or consumers in an area, this might cause
service providers to pass up installing, upgrading or maintaining Internet utilities. The magnitude
of upkeep and maintenance that must be done in order to support the network means that areas
with more resources will have the most secure, reliable connections. These sections of the
network with a greater economic pull will be more visible as a result, giving users with access to
this stratum the power to define the predominant aesthetics and functionality of the web. This
can lead to the creation of what Taylor and Pitman identify as an “other Internet”, one where “the
developing world will have to rely on older versions of the Internet now abandoned by the
developed world,” or in effect “a ‘rich’ Net and a ‘poor’ Net.”
29
The lack of Internet due to the
economic unfeasibility of maintaining a stable infrastructure puts less developed nations in the
position of playing catch-up on yet another level.
These three factors—access, literacy, and economic mobility—play a large role in
establishing difference within population groups in online and, as an extension, offline space.
These disparities are symptomatic of the neoliberal ideologies that have predominated online.
Access points to the Internet are proliferating in order to increase the economic and ideological
reach of the network, imposing the vast infrastructure required to create connections onto
landscapes while intruding on native cultural tradition. The streamlining of language in order to
communicate faster, and more effectively can be read as the systematic erasure of dialects and

28. John C. Paolillo, "How Much Multilingualism?: Language Diversity on the Internet," in The
Multilingual Internet: Language, Culture, and Communication Online, eds. Brenda Danet and Susan C. Herring
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 424.
29. Claire Taylor and Thea Pitman, Latin American Cyberculture and Cyberliterature (Liverpool:
Liverpool University Press, 2007), 6.

20
the confinement of cultural expression to one dominant linguistic form. The virtual commodities
and the networked labor strategies that are possible via the Internet present a boon for neoliberal
economies. Online, these three markers of difference can be analyzed, quantified, and rated by
entities who create algorithms that alter the ways users interface with the web. They comprise the
new metric for discrimination. Although not as visible as offline discrimination, it is there
nonetheless.
The American Internet in Foreign Territory
The spread of the Internet to previously colonized territories can divulge similarities
between strategies of neoliberalism and imperialism, as well as reveal opportunities for
resistance and alternatives to this technological order. In Mexico, the Internet infrastructure is
controlled mainly by telecommunications monopoly Telmex. Until recently, Telmex, owned by
billionaire Carlos Slim, was the only option for Internet service.
30
While the access infrastructure
is decidedly Mexican, the sites that are popular in the country point to American influence.
Tellingly, the top ten most visited websites in Mexico all belong to or are a local subsidiary of an
American company.
31
These sites include Google, Facebook, and Yahoo among other large
multinational technology corporations based in America that have vested interest in encouraging
the spread of the Internet. These websites constitute the interfaces that structure a user’s
experience and determine their ability to navigate the web. To use these technologies means to
submit to the neoliberal logic and economic valuation system that is built into them. Rejane Spitz

30. Tracy Wilkinson, "Mexico Telecom Overhaul Passes, Billionaire Carlos Slim Loses -- Maybe," The Los
Angeles Times, accessed March 3, 2015, http://www.latimes.com/world/mexico-americas/la-fg-mexico-telecom-
slim-20140709-story.html.
31. "Top Sites in Mexico." Alexa, accessed February 25, 2015,
http://www.alexa.com/topsites/countries/MX.

21
arrives at a similar dilemma as an artist in Brazil who uses technology as part of her practice. She
expresses her concerns by quoting Brenda Laurel: “How [are we] to empower people from non-
Western cultures to use computer technology without confining them to the Western constructs
that are so deeply embedded in our interfaces, computer languages and the architecture of
technology itself?”(Spitz’ brackets).
32
Taylor and Pitman cite a comparable sentiment expressed
by Mexican cultural critic Carlos Monsiváis:
For certain individuals, the Internet is a symbol and the practice of globalization: it
provides them with the possibility of reading the contents of the world’s major
newspapers every morning, of feeling as though they belong to virtual community cut
adrift from any traditional sense of time, of surfing cyberspace…But what do those who
live in the ‘ranchos’ (the dwellings of the poor in rural Mexico and urban Venezuela or
Colombia) do? They know that this is just another…colossal social exclusion.
33

These authors identify the role that the Internet and computer technology plays in reinforcing the
dominance of Western cultural modes, especially in relation to populations that exist outside of
this archetype.
Zuckerberg’s post described earlier claims the Internet will allow Mexico to “share its
talent, culture and businesses with the world”. Similar claims for economic and cultural progress
were made when the North American Free Trade Agreement was put into effect in 1994. This
agreement between the United States, Canada, and Mexico was designed to facilitate and create
economic trade between the three countries. The treaty triggered many economic and political
events, including the Zapatistas’ declaration of war against Mexico. Another consequence of the
treaty was the spread of the maquiladoras that provided cheap labor for American companies
and jobs for Mexican nationals. While a conclusion on NAFTA’s long-term effects on the

32. Spitz, Qualitative, Dialectical and Experiential Domains of Electronic Art, 320.
33. Taylor and Pitman, Latin American Cyberculture and Cyberliterature, 3.

22
economic and cultural production in Mexico is still pending, it is clear that the country has not
fared as well from this deal as the U.S. The same neoliberal ideologies that fueled the ratification
of this pact are now pushing for the spread of the Internet to every pueblo in Mexico.
Internet Polemics
It is quickly becoming evident that the promise of the Internet as the catalyst that would
lead to a more equally structured society, which at one point was the belief of the firmest
supporters of the web, was premature. The Internet today is nowhere near ideal. The Internet has
become a domain embroiled in digital territory disputes where state powers battle for control of
information. The level of control that is being implemented through the technology has forced
many to reconsider the moral and legislative consequences of the spread of the network.
Furthermore, it doesn’t look to have the altruistically transformative powers it once did. But it
does still give users some amount of agency, which can be used for political means. From
institutionalized, government mandated programs of surveillance and espionage, to individual
and collective acts of resistance, the Internet facilitates a wide range of political actions that have
offline repercussions.
However expansive the sprawling global network of connections, the Internet is still not a
geographically placeless domain and is affected by traditional region-based politics and the wills
of sovereign powers. Geopolitical boundaries inevitably affect how the Internet is experienced.
Everything from policies that regulate telecommunications companies, languages and dialects
used, and the variation in tools used to access the web determine a user’s local experience of the
web. In 2011, the United Nations declared access to the Internet a human right, placing political

23
and moral weight behind efforts to spread the technology.
34
But the Internet does not translate
perfectly to every geographic area. The Internet in the United States, one that was deemed a
public utility by the Federal Communications Commission’s “Open Internet Order” of 2015,
35
is
not the same as the one in China, where the government runs a massive censorship and
surveillance program called the “Golden Shield Project” that limits the content that is available
to users there.
36

In Mexico, the Internet has undergone a transformative period under the presidency of
Enrique Peña Nieto. In July of 2014, Mexican politicians of the Institutional Revolutionary Party
(PRI) together with Peña Nieto pushed forward a broad telecommunications reformations bill
that, among many sweeping provisions, gives government the power to censor any
communications that may be construed as a threat to national security.
37
The bill also puts “net
neutrality” in the hands of corporate interests, and while it does intend to break the hold of
Mexico’s monopolies on this sector, it fails to address issues of public access to such utilities.
38

Comparable to the Patriot Act in the US, this bill may soon be joined by one similar to the Stop
Online Piracy Act (SOPA) that was abandoned by US legislators in 2012. Known popularly as
the “Ley Beltrones” after Manilo Fabio Beltrones, the politician who penned the bill, this piece
of legislation has the potential to put the rights of individual Internet users at risk in order to

34. Nathan Olivarez-Giles, “United Nations Report: Internet Access Is a Human Right,” LA Times –
Technology (blog), June 3, 2011 (6:42 p.m.), http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2011/06/united-nations-
report-internet-access-is-a-human-right.html.
35. Bill Chappell, "FCC Approves Net Neutrality Rules for 'Open Internet'"," National Public Radio (blog),
February 26, 2015 (11:46 a.m.), http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2015/02/26/389259382/net-neutrality-up-for-
vote-today-by-fcc-board.
36. Randy James, "A Brief History of: Chinese Internet Censorship," Time Magazine, accessed February 25,
2015, 2015, http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1885961,00.html.
37. "Get the Facts: Mexico's #LeyTelecom." Global Voices Online, accessed March 3, 2015,
http://advocacy.globalvoicesonline.org/2014/05/03/get-the-facts-mexicos-leytelecom/.
38. Wilkinson, Mexico Telecom Overhaul Passes, Billionaire Carlos Slim Loses -- Maybe

24
protect copyrighted materials from being shared illegally online.
39
The Internet is not a neutral
ground outside of the control or influence of state powers.
At the same time, actions like Edward Snowden’s information leaks point to the
possibility of online resistance to dominant power structures. As a single individual who was part
of a complex network of information technicians, Snowden exemplifies how the vastness of
contemporary data distribution is not only a threat but can also be an opportunity for opposition.
Online activity leading to political resistance is not limited to the United States. Social media has
proven to be a venue that facilitates organized resistance around the globe. As a phenomenon
that has begun to restructure human social interaction, social media is only just beginning to
show its political potential. The Arab Spring, a series of revolts in the Middle East in which
governments and regimes were overthrown or debilitated, has been pointed to as an example of
the power of social media to organize a grassroots rebellion around a cause. While there has been
much debate about how accurate these claims may be, there is no doubt that the very structures
of power under attack by Arab Spring protests felt that the activity on the Internet was a threat.
These acts of resistance led to the limitation or blockage of access to the web, and many social
media sites were censored in an attempt to quell the uprisings.
40
The very fact that state
authorities took steps to limit access to the Internet speaks to the power of the medium as a
political force.
Social media and online journalism have also proven to be an effective tool for
organization and protest in Mexico. This was evident during the Mexican presidential elections

39. Julio Sanchez Onofre, "PRI Revive La Ley Beltrones; Alertan Censura," El Economista, accessed
March 3, 2015, http://eleconomista.com.mx/industrias/2015/02/17/pri-revive-ley-beltrones-alertan-censura.
40. Ethan Zuckerman, "Cute Cats to the Rescue? Participatory Media and Political Expression" (Author's
final manuscript, forthcoming in Youth, New Media and Political Participation (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2015).

25
in 2012. This was the first Mexican presidential campaign where social media played a
significant role.
41
During the months leading up to the election, several protests were organized
via social media decrying the campaign of candidate Enrique Peña Nieto. This election divided
the population generationally, with the older populace that relied on traditional media outlets
tending to support Peña Nieto, a member of the PRI party that held power for 71 consecutive
years in the 20
th
Century, while younger, social media-adept voters supported the National
Action Party (PAN). In 2014, social media again proved an important venue for organizing
protests and political rallies in support of 43 missing students from the town of Iguala in the state
Guerrero, Mexico, who were suspected to have been killed by corrupt government officials.
Campaigns like the #YoSoy43 (#IAm43) and #YaMeCanse (#IAmFedUp) went viral at a global
scale, calling attention to the rampant corruption in Mexico. These actions reached a fever pitch
when the doors of the presidential palace were set on fire during a protest in Mexico’s historic
Zocalo square. While mainstream media failed to cover the momentous event, videos and images
of the event were shared all over the Internet.
42
Due to the prevalence of political corruption and
the complicit media outlets run by telecommunications monopolies, the Internet has become an
important venue for political expression in Mexico. In March of 2015 an alliance of eight
communication platforms and online rights activists launched MexicoLeaks with the hopes of
providing a forum, in the vein of WikiLeaks, for the safe disclosure of information.
43
As these
examples reveal, despite the many control mechanisms that are imbedded in the network, there is
still an opportunity for political expression and resistance on the Internet.

41. Louis Nevaer, "In Mexico Elections, it's Old Media Vs. Social Media," New America Media, accessed
March 3, 2015, http://newamericamedia.org/2012/05/in-mexico-elections-its-old-media-vs-social-media.php.
42. Francisco Goldman, "Crisis in Mexico: The Protests for the Missing Forty-Three," The New Yorker,
accessed March 3, 2015, http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/crisis-mexico-protests-missing-forty-three.
43. Nayeli Roldan, "Nace Mexicoleaks, Una Plataforma Independiente Para Combatir La Corrupcion,"
Animal Politico, accessed March 15, 2015, http://www.animalpolitico.com/2015/03/nace-mexicoleaks-una-
plataforma-independiente-para-combatir-la-corrupcion/.

26
Social Media Aesthetics, or Corporate Control of Digital Realty
Developing and developed nations today are replete with interfaces connected to the
Internet. In these areas it is becoming harder and harder to be disconnected from or refuse the
services supplied by this network. As Zuckerberg’s Facebook post suggests, there is both state
and corporate interest in expanding the reach of the Internet. Globalization, the process that has
shaped the globe and human experience since the age of Modernity, has been accelerated and
streamlined with the broad implementation of the Internet, making the technology a valuable
business tool as well as a market for economic activity. In the eyes of corporate interest, the
world population is a pool of potential users with each individual a possible node in a vast
network capable of being exploited for economic gain. The popularity and prevalence of social
media websites point to a future where this may be a reality.
Despite being able to be harnessed as a political tool, this is not social media’s main
purpose. Social media websites are first and foremost commercial endeavors intent on selling a
product or service. The typical social media site acts as a framework that is devoid of much
content other than that created or shared by its users. The websites themselves are somewhat
inconspicuous, operating mostly as a means for content distribution and communication where
the content is all-important. The minimal design that is typical on social media sites allows for an
emphasis on functionality and user content. Here, dissemination of information is expected and
instantaneous. A user is asked to create an online persona, fill their digital space with
idiosyncratic information and cultural artifacts, but must still comply with the limits of the site’s
functionality or the bounds set by the user agreement required to use the service. Social media
sites offer users this semi-public space so they can share acquired cultural material that speaks to
their distinctiveness with others. This material operates much like paintings hung on the wall of a

27
home or picture frames on an office desk would offline. It is in this context where an aesthetics
of social media has developed.
The shift to social media aesthetics is signaled by the democratization and pervasiveness
of the digital image as much as the endless availability of cyber realty on which to place such
images. Social media aesthetics constitute types of image making and cultural production that are
native to the web and place an importance on “viral” content. But while the origins of image
modes like the “selfie” and the image macro can be traced to specific online practices that began
on the periphery of net culture, social media aesthetics are born from the need to fill the spaces
allowed for by social media.
44
This activity performed through social media has the potential to
be tracked, indexed, and monetized. As such, cultural objects produced in this context are
inscribed with the neoliberal tendencies of the Internet.
Although the connections between the Internet and extant hierarchies are obfuscated, they
still exist; it is the ways that they can be identified that has changed. Social media is a zone
where these power dynamics are surreptitiously but readily exercised. Because of the availability
of resources in Europe and the United States, most of the content, production interfaces, and
control mechanisms found on social media originate from English speaking countries and are
typically heavily influenced by corporate economic interests. Donna Haraway’s conception of an
informatics of domination is useful here in identifying these underlying methods of control: “The
new technologies seem deeply involved in the forms of ‘privatization’ that Ros Petchesky has
analysed, in which militarization, right-wing family ideologies and policies, and intensified
definitions of corporate (and state) property as private synergistically interact. The new

44. Charlie White, "On ". (Author's unpublished manuscript, forthcoming in Vision Anew: The Lens
and Screen Arts, (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2015).

28
communications technologies are fundamental to the eradication of ‘public life’ for everyone.”
The line between commerce, surveillance, and culture in this arena is very thin indeed.

29
The Convergence of Contemporary Art and Online Cultural Production
As the Internet continues to grow and evolve, so has its potential to act as a forum for the
production and dissemination of cultural products. But if the Internet is understood as an
interface for mediation that is entrenched in the neoliberal values that cater to an English-
speaking affluent user, what does that mean for the cultural products that exist in or refer to the
Internet? The most immediate observation that can be made about these cultural products is that
the systems for valuation that surround these objects reflect the neoliberal tendencies of the
Internet. The online biases that favor certain users and define value can be transferred directly
onto cultural products. This view of cultural products formed in the context of the Internet will
also reveal how the geopolitical implications of cyberspace manifest in cultural products. Finally,
this angle of inquiry also makes clear the connections between corporate-commercial interests
and the proliferation of visual information sharing in cultural production on the web.
The same rhetoric that has accompanied the spread of the Internet has fueled discourses
surrounding Internet Art and, more specifically, the strain of contemporary practice that falls
within the Post-Internet Art label. It would be helpful at this point to differentiate these two
divergent forms.
Internet Art, at times known as Net Art or net.art, has evolved functionally and
aesthetically at pace with the Internet and its ancillary technologies and is a type of cultural
production that is native to the web. It emerged alongside the first public browsers in the early
90s, and as a result, the genre has progressed through different aesthetic movements and
dominant visual modes at a faster rate than more traditional forms of art making. For the

30
purposes of this analysis, Internet Art will refer to discrete works designed to be accessed and
interacted with primarily through the Internet, and are produced using networks, computer
programming languages, and related technologies. Internet Art in its early days was relegated to
the periphery of culture along with most of the activity that was happening on this burgeoning
technology. But as public access to the Internet grew exponentially, so did the number of net
artists and those aware of the new medium. Works on the Internet were slow to be accepted by
art historians and others as legitimate works of cultural significance. Today, there are many
organizations, online and off, dedicated to promoting, conserving, and commissioning online
artwork. Many major contemporary art museums now have digital space dedicated to Internet
Art or work in partnership with smaller organizations to have a presence in this field. Internet Art,
which seemed unmarketable or unsellable only two decades ago, has now found a niche in the art
market. These once marginal practices are quickly becoming an important part of understanding
contemporary cultural production.
Post-Internet Art on the other hand is a strain of discourse and art production that has
emerged relatively recently. Artist and curator Marisa Olson was the first to use the term in 2008
to describe contemporary art practices that “address the impacts of the Internet on culture at large”
and are “on networks but can and should also exist offline”.
45
Proponents of Post-Internet Art
argue that the widespread use of Internet technologies have resulted in the transformation of art
production itself. Post-Internet Art seeks to explore the effects of the net on art practices both on
and off-line and can be further defined as “a result of the contemporary moment: inherently
informed by ubiquitous authorship, the development of attention as currency, the collapse of

45. Regine Debatty, "Interview with Marisa Olson," accessed January, 27, 2015, http://we-make-money-
not-art.com/archives/2008/03/how-does-one-become-marisa.php#.VMf-mWTF_9s.

31
physical space in networked culture, and the infinite reproducibility and mutability of digital
materials.”
46
The “post” in Post-Internet implies that the Internet is a fixed condition, a prefix
that alters the meaning of any cultural products that come have come after its adoption. Post-
Internet Art begins as an artistic mode within contemporary art, a curatorial strategy that
attempts to locate the works being described both as the new development in contemporary art
and as a natural consequence of the broad use of Internet technology in everyday life. This line
of investigation follows many similar aspects of Internet Art and expands it to include work
influenced by the digital image and the culture that has grown out of the online world. While
Post-Internet Art has been met with much critical resistance (most notably from writer Brian
Droitcour), its impact within contemporary art cannot be denied.
47

But as Internet Art and Post-Internet Art move closer to the mainstream, the claims being
made by artists and curators about these practices should be comprehensively examined both in a
global context and within the continuum of the Internet as a developing technology in order to
better understand the implications of these cultural practices. There are many problems with the
way Post-Internet Art has been presented so far, chief among them the failure of both artists and
curators to critically investigate how the structure of the Internet determines cultural production
on the web. So far, Post-Internet artists or writers have not dealt with the polemics of the Internet
in a significant way.

46. Artie Vierkant, "The Image Object Post-Internet," accessed January 25, 2015,
http://jstchillin.org/artie/pdf/The_Image_Object_Post-Internet_us.pdf.
47. Brian Droitcour, "The Perils of Post-Internet Art," Art in America 102, no. 10 (2014): 110.

32
Internet Biases Reflected in Post-Internet Art
Instead, the Internet is treated as a condition that society has already arrived at, one that
all cultures and people must necessarily adapt to. Current discourse surrounding Post-Internet
Art works under the assumption that the Internet is a heterogeneous zone of cultural activity that
allows for unlimited expression. This view speaks to the multiplicity of online activity as being a
symptom of one singular Internet culture, one that cannot be stepped outside of due to its
ubiquity and influence. Art critic Gene McHugh, another major Post-Internet Art protagonist,
defines it as “Art responding to a general cultural condition that may also be described as ‘Post
Internet’ – when the Internet is less a novelty and more a banality.”
48
This sentiment is also
reflected in the foreword to the publication Post Internet Survival Guide: “In this world—that is
being tagged as post internet—the Internet is an invisible given, like roads or trees, and is used to
navigate not just information but also matter and space.”
49
In this respect, Marisa Olson makes
the most totalizing statement: “We are now in the postinternet era. Everything is always-already
postinternet.”
50
But treating the Internet in such a manner is analogous to treating the white cube
walls of a museum as a neutral space. To present work in the context of the Internet is to deal
with a history and ideology that is still influenced by the neoliberal power structures that begat
the technology. To say that everything is Post-Internet is to say that all systems, cultures, and
individuals are now forced to reorganize, acclimate and assimilate to the Western logic that is the
Internet. In order to begin to make claims about the ubiquity of Internet and how it is changing
image and art making, the sociopolitical aspects that accompany the net must be considered.

48. Gene McHugh, Post Internet: Notes on the Internet and Art (Brescia: LINK editions, 2011), PDF e-
book.
49. Katja Novitskova, "Foreword," in Post Internet Survival Guide, (Amsterdam: Resolver Publishing,
2010).
50. Marisa Olson, "Postinternet: Art After the Internet," Foam Magazine, no. 29 (2012): 63.

33
If Olson’s claim that “[e]verything is always-already postinternet” is to be taken at face
value, then that means that culture as a whole must be filtered through the Westernized lens of
the Internet and projected onto the rest of the world along with all of its proclivities. This filter
has resulted in impartial cultural and geographic representation, as the attention paid to Internet
and Post-Internet artists from Europe or America is disproportionate to that of artists from other
parts of the globe. Post-Internet discourse systemically excludes practices from Latin America,
Africa, and the Middle East. While this is and has been a symptom of many previous and current
art movements, its extension to the online space points to the fact that this realm is plagued by
many of the same problems in representation and equity that persist outside of the digital. As a
result of the extensive criteria it takes for any single person on the globe to be to be fluent in
forms of the web (i.e. have adequate access, be literate in English, and have ample economic
resources), artists working with the net tend to reflect the statistical tendencies and linguistic
biases seen on the Internet. These artists end up being highlighted by discourse on the subject
and get disproportionately more institutional support and visibility. Furthermore, because of the
availability of statistics about Internet connectivity and usage, claims can be made that identify
certain portions of the population that are predisposed to becoming an Internet or Post-Internet
artist or its audience. This means that in order to have this inclination someone must be literate
not only in web-based technologies but in contemporary art as well, further limiting the
population that can have access to these modes of cultural production.
The presence of the English language, both in content and structure of the web are of
great importance to the discourses surrounding art and its relation to the Internet. Works that
refer to the Internet make use of its languages and signs as material and content. They use the
web as a site, and are structured to reflect the organizational models of the network they exist in.

34
Internet Art was born out of this aesthetic exploration of the web. It activates the aesthetic and
functional qualities of both websites and browsers. It is a mode of art making that uses the
vocabulary, grammar, and syntax of the communication technologies, programming languages,
and cultural codes that make up the web. Coupled with data about English on the Internet,
Manovich’s formulation for how a “techno-cultural text” is produced and interpreted points to a
situation where the opportunity for truly diverse material diminishes exponentially.
Accordingly, some troubling developments in discourse and exhibitions on the topic of
Post-Internet Art are the lack of attention to cultural diversity, the abandonment of revisionist
strategies, and a dearth of self-reflexive criticality. These characteristics, which have shaped art
discourse since the late 60s, are being looked over in large part because the site of contention, the
Internet, is construed as a domain where race, gender, and social status are non-factors. One
reason the Internet seems to reflect this is because, as has been the argument so far, difference
has been programmed out. The predominance of Western artists can be attributed specifically to
the boundaries that separate those who have unlimited access to the Internet, are completely
literate in all aspects of web technology, and have the economic power to consume and produce
commodities online, and those who do not. But instead of attempting to question or criticize
these developments, curators, writers, and exhibition organizers have been complacent.
This trend can be readily observed in some recent events organized around the subject.
The selling exhibition Paddles ON!, which was touted as the first auction of digital art ever and
was organized in part by social media site Tumblr, included 23 artists. Of these artists, all but
one (Luis Hidalgo who works in Cuernavaca, Mexico) are based in a city where English is a
predominantly spoken language. Of the ten artist shortlisted for the Prix Net Art Prize, whose
tagline is the “international award for net art”, all but one (Chinese artist Cao Fei) hailed from

35
the U.S. or Europe. “Art Post-Internet,” an exhibition from October 2014 that was curated by
Karen Archey and Robin Pettham and held at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing,
China, set out to be the definitive survey of Post-Internet Art. Of the 39 artists or collectives
included in the exhibition all but one was primarily based in the United States or Europe. The
exception was GCC, a global consortium of artists from Kuwait, Senegal, Singapore, and the U.S.
Even with the few examples presented here, direct connections can be made between the
structural biases of the Internet and Post-Internet Art. As a field that is supposed to reflect
cultural activity on and offline, Post-Internet Art thus far has been very limited in scope.
The Internet as Arena for Political Aesthetics
If there is a relation between visual culture and electronic information, how can it be
thought outside of anxious affirmation or romantic revolution? One way is to invoke the
archive as defined by Foucault, ‘the system that governs the appearances of statements,’
and to ask what this new order might enable as well as disable.
51

In his 1996 essay “The Archive Without Museums,” Hal Foster acutely identifies the
oppositional nature of the trajectories defining the digital sphere and offers a way to approach the
burgeoning relationship between visual culture and electronic information while still being
critical of it. From this assessment, it is clear that the point of convergence among these two
factors, interpreted here as art and the Internet, offers advantages as well as disadvantages. Even
though the public Internet was quite young when Foster was writing, the sentiments he expresses
are prescient in the sense that he captures the general sense of contemporary discourse on Post-
Internet Art: its proponents describe it with a sort of “anxious affirmation or romantic

51. Hal Foster, “The Archive Without Museums,” October 77 (1996): 108.

36
revolution”. But what doesn’t typically enter these discourses is the question “What does this
new order, one where the Internet affects artistic production wherever it has a presence, enable or
disable?” This lack of self-criticality also points to another major criticism of Post-Internet Art:
its lack of a political stance on the developments it claims to describe.
The lack of a clear political stance or self-reflective critique among Post-Internet Art
artists, curators, and writers is particularly disturbing because the Internet is replete with political
activity and is itself the source of many contradictions and questionable practices, not to mention
its highly suspect military history. Making claims about the reach of the Internet or the ubiquity
of computing and its influence on art production on and offline is not political. Provocation yes,
cultural observation certainly. But if these claims are presented without being substantiated they
are not enough to qualify as political. Many of these shortfalls stem from the “anxious
affirmation or romantic revolution” that accompanied the embrace of Internet and computer
technologies in art production. “A noteworthy feature of the introduction of digital technologies
in the field of art was their widespread assimilation in an intuitive and acritical manner,” notes
Lila Pagola.
52
While previous generations of artists can be excused for the “acritical manner” in
which computer technology was speedily integrated into art production, given the information
that is available now about the political nature of the Internet, artists can no longer feign
ignorance. A position must be taken. James Bridle elaborates on the need for artists dealing with
the Internet to articulate a clear political position: “Without a concerted effort to raise the level of
debate, we just loop over and over through the same fetishizations and reifications, while the real
business of the world continues unexamined. Those who do not understand technology are

52. Pagola, Netart Latino Database: The Inverted Map of Latin American Net.Art, 53.

37
doomed to be consumed by it…Technology is political.”
53
While this view of technology may be
overly deterministic and points to the empowered position the author holds, the call to ground the
critique of Post-Internet Art in a global political frame is apt and essential. Artist Jennifer Chan
also speaks to this need when she calls out Post-Internet artists for not being political enough as
she ends her essay “Notes on Post-Internet” with the proclamation: “Stand for something.”
54

Art and Social Media
A parallel can be drawn from the rise of Post-Internet Art within contemporary art
discourse and the movement of culture to social media sites. Post-Internet Art becomes the
perfect cultural content to fill a Facebook wall, Instagram feed, or Tumblr page because it makes
use of the images strategies native to the web. These works are structured for interactive visual
consumption, and usually speak about online culture itself in some fashion. The visual culture
that is being referred to in these works comes from the generations that have come of age in the
West since the turn of the century. They have only known a world where the Internet has been
deemed a necessary tool for the production and consumption of knowledge and culture, requiring
them to become fluent in the logic of its interfaces. In this media environment, content that gets
high visibility can be construed as being the most important or culturally relevant. Artist Artie
Vierkant summarizes this development, stating: “[T]he cultural status of objects is now
influenced entirely by the attention given to them, the way they are transmitted socially and the
variety of communities they inhabit.” The effect that an online presence can have on cultural

53
James Bridle, "The New Aesthetic and its Politics," in You are here: Art After the Internet, ed. Omar Kholeif
(London; Manchester: Cornerhouse, 2014) 26.
54
. Jennifer Chan, "Notes on Post-Internet," in You are here: Art After the Internet, ed. Omar Kholeif, 2014) 121.

38
products can be seen clearly in what has been happening in the contemporary art world for the
last half decade.
As cultural production, dissemination, analysis, and consumption increasingly moves
online, the gap between a wired user base that has access to or is in control of culture (through
content production, clicks, views, or likes), and those who lack access, literacy, or consumption
power, becomes ever wider. This shift leaves cultural producers who have no connection to or
presence on the web at a major disadvantage. Writing of the “New Aesthetic”, a term linked to
Post-Internet Art as a distinct but parallel mode, James Bridle admits:
It is impossible for me, with an academic background in Computer Science and Artificial
Intelligence, with a practical background in literary editing and software programming,
with a lifetime of interacting with the internet and other systems, not to look at…images
and immediately start to think about not what they look like, but how they came to be and
what they have or will become: the processes of capture, storage, and distribution…the
weight of data centers, servers, satellites, cables, routers, switches, modems,
infrastructures physical and virtual; and all the biases and articulations of disposition and
intent encoded in all of these things, and our comprehension of them.
55

Bridle’s statement reflects a well-informed but self-admittedly myopic view of the current state
of online culture. The informed “super-user” position that Bridle occupies is one that is not
available to many outside of the English-speaking Western population that the Internet caters to.
The correlation between online images and their relations of production may be transparent to
Bridle because he is literate in all the signs that point to this information but the average Internet
user typically does not have the ability to make these connections so readily. “[W]hile there are
disagreements about just how empowering digital interactivity may be, there seems little
argument about its offering its users more in the way of agency. Indeed, there is a way in which

55. Bridle, The New Aesthetic and its Politics, 22-23.

39
possessing the ‘volitional mobility’ afforded by the Web, in particular, constitutes a particular
kind of viewing subject, one who possesses and is empowered by ‘visual capital,” writes
Nakamura.
56
Furthermore, those with “visual capital” are in the position to dictate what cultural
objects have value and are able to project these views through public distribution channels. Post-
Internet Art discourse originates from this empowered technological class.
The Post Internet Art Network
Computer technology’s potential to transform the world into a great network of
communication may be its most dangerous aspect for developing nations. The egalitarian
appearance of this potential hides the fact that leadership in the development of new
technologies and the design of new trends, as well as the power to spread and control
these new developments, will still be restricted to a few hands.
57

Despite claims to the universality of the Post-Internet condition, Post-Internet Art
represents the view of a small group of writers and artists who meet specific linguistic and
geographic criteria. This group of artists and writers are attempting to speak to a nascent global
shift in communications, culture, and economics attributed to the Internet. Taylor and Pitman’s
use of the term digerati, defined as “the new elite group with access to and knowledge of
dominant cultural forms,” is useful here for understanding the position from which this clique
operates.
58
Post-Internet artists and writers have a voice and an audience precisely because they
belong to this elite-user faction that can harness the power of social media, are versed in viral
marketing, have an awareness of search engine optimization, and have access to the resources to
establish and manage their “visual-capital”. The generation of artists who have been able to

56. Nakamura, Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet, 15.
57. Spitz, Qualitative, Dialectical and Experiential Domains of Electronic Art, 319-323.
58. Taylor and Pitman, Latin American Cyberculture and Cyberliterature, 15.

40
adopt these strategies of the current iteration of the net and construe them into what is now
known as Post-Internet Art practice tend to fall within a limited set of criteria: relatively young
English-speaking individuals from the developed world. To specify even further, the Post-
Internet is made up of an interconnected group of contemporary artists who stand to gain from
the canonization of the movement and are using the strategies made available by the Internet to
ensure that this happens. Tyler Coburn’s definition of the movement points to the make-up of
this matrix: “Post-Internet denotes a network of specific individuals ranged across physical and
virtual localities, making work in conversation over the past several years.”
59

While the network is limited to a few dozen practitioners, those working with Post-
Internet Art position themselves as symbolic of all cultural production in the digital era. As Jesse
Darling boldly states, “[L]et’s get one thing straight: every artist working today is a post-internet
artist.”
60
What is more telling about Darling’s statement is that he is in the position and has a
venue to speak for “every artist working today.” Such totalizing claims are a common occurrence
throughout many texts on Post-Internet Art. Another example can found in a text by Michael
Connor:
[I]t no longer makes sense for artists to attempt to come to terms with ‘internet culture’,
because now ‘internet culture’ is increasingly just ‘culture’. In other words, the term post-
internet’ suggests that the focus of a good deal of artistic and critical discourse has shifted
from ‘internet culture’ as a discrete entity to an awareness that all culture has been
reconfigured by the internet, or by internet-enabled neoliberal capitalism.”
61

59. Karen Archey and Robin Peckham, eds., Art Post-Internet (Beijing: Ullens Center for Contemporary
Art, 2014), 87. PDF e-book.
60. Jesse Darling, "Post-Whatever #usermilitia," in You are here: Art After the Internet, ed. Omar Kholeif
(London; Manchester: Cornerhouse, 2014), 137.
61. Michael Connor, "Post-Internet: What it is and what it Was," in You are here: Art After the Internet, ed.
Omar Kholeif (London; Manchester: Cornerhouse, 2014), 61.

41
These authors are imbued with an agency that puts them in the role of speaker for all cultural
practices that relate to the Internet on and offline. Although Connor is careful to attribute the
change in culture to “internet-enabled neoliberal capitalism” in addition to the Internet, it is
precisely the relationship between economics, politics, and the Internet identified in the latter
part of that statement that needs to be investigated further. This statement needs to be inversed. It
should imply that the neoliberal capitalism-enabled Internet has afflicted “Internet culture” with
the same problems it has thrust on all culture. To skip right ahead to an analysis of the way in
which culture is being affected in the aftermath of the Internet is to validate all of the power
relations that spawned the technology that continues its imperialistic quest.
But these grandiose gestures and categorical claims are not entirely unfounded. In many
ways the artists and writers of Post-Internet are representative of the type of cultural production
that is a result of the ubiquity of the web. But in the process they are also making clear that the
Internet, as a site for cultural activity that is beset with inequalities in access and entrenched in
power dynamics that replicate colonialist strategies for domination and repression, gives English
speaking individuals the power to speak for the entire network.
The totalizing claims coming out of Post-Internet Art discourse represent a digital land
grab. Post-Internet Art is the aesthetic regime that has arrived as a prospector in the still
developing realm of cyberspace hoping to exploit resources for personal gain. By being the first
to set a flag down in this era being dubbed Post-Internet, the artists and writers associating with
this term are giving themselves free reign to dictate the nomenclature and ethics of cultural
production not just online, but how an Internet aesthetic materializes in the physical world. By
doing so, they are limiting the opportunities for representation for anyone that may come
afterward. “The history that repeats itself is one written by archetypal, old, white dudes…who

42
tend to leave ladies out of their self-perpetuated boys’ clubs. The same could very easily happen
with Net art,”
62
warns Marisa Olson and continues elsewhere “art history so often leaves out the
women or ethnic minorities or less-cool-kids that were left out in previous iterations, and its
readers all too often accept these new narratives as dogma.”
63
The same is happening with Net
art and even more so with Post-Internet Art.
Online and offline minority groups have not been considered by the technocratic politics
of the Post-Internet, leaving cultural producers from different geographic and cultural positions
out of the conversation. In many parts of the world ubiquitous net connectivity is not a “general
cultural condition” but unfeasible, a distant goal, or even a cultural or environmental imposition
to traditional ways of life. Many in the developing who are just now gaining access to the
Internet are finding a cyberspace that has already been developed as a highly commercial space
under heavy government control. Post-Internet Art is the aesthetic that operates to legitimize and
propagate these conditions. Rejane Spitz identifies a similar tendency in computer technology:
“Some people will have access to the creation, development and control of computer technology
while others will have to follow—and fit into—the designs, rules, and logic established by the
first group.”
64
Post-Internet Art discourse assumes the position of this “first group.”
Cultural Production From The Internet’s Subaltern
Why look at practices dealing with the Internet, a seemingly amorphous, borderless space,
through a geographic lens? What are the benefits to considering international boundaries when

62. Marisa Olson, "Lost Not found: The Circulation of Images in Digital Visual Culture," in Words without
Pictures, ed. Alex Klein (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Musuem of Art, 2009), 284.
63. Olson, Postinternet: Art After the Internet, 62.
64. Spitz, Qualitative, Dialectical and Experiential Domains of Electronic Art, 320.

43
analyzing the digital sphere? Is the Internet that an artist in Mexico navigates the same Internet
that an artist in the U.S. surfs? Are they just different parts of the same ocean? What would a
work influenced by online culture but made by an artist in a country like Mexico, where just
under half of the population has access to the Internet, be called?
65
Can it be considered Post-
Internet Art if the culture in which it was produced has not reached the level of net saturation that
has predominated in the United States? Rejane Spitz looks for similar answers when she asks: “Is
the role of the artist who uses emergent technologies in the Third World different from the role
of those who deal with electronic art in developed nations?”
66
This line of questioning is picked
up by Lila Pagola in her contribution to Uruguayan artist Brian Mackern’s publication Netart
Latino Database: “In what sense is broadcasting ‘from’ Latin America significant or does it
define something ‘specific’ (recognizable, unique) in artistic practices on the Net...Is there really
a Latin American way of existing/acting online?”
67
These questions point to a need to identify
cultural production within the context of the Internet through a consideration of geographic
location. It is through this position of geographic and cultural difference where the greatest
revelations about the web can be made and it is the site from which the claims being made about
art after the Internet must be contested.
In this identification of works through a geographic and cultural lens, careful
consideration must be taken in order to avoid making general claims, oversimplifying or
overstating the effects geography can have on an artists practice, or other such problems that
have been identified in previous attempts at locating art through national and international
contexts. This may not only lead to the oversimplification, stereotyping, and essentializing of

65. "Central America Internet Usage and Population Statistics."
66. Spitz, Qualitative, Dialectical and Experiential Domains of Electronic Art, 320.
67. Pagola, Netart Latino Database: The Inverted Map of Latin American Net.Art, 34

44
works depending on the region in which they are produced but can also do a disservice to artists
who do not identify or work from these conditions. Here, credit must be given to Claire Taylor
and her research on Latin American cyberculture, cyberliterature, and Net Art for setting a
precedent for this type of analysis.
68
Her approach to locality in the examination of digital works
paved the way for this argument. Although there are risks in approaching art influenced by or
made to live on the Internet through this geographic trajectory, they are worth taking in order to
move beyond an understanding of the Internet as a largely neutral space for the mediation of
culture.
Artists from Latin America, living in the aftermath of colonialism and in the midst of
globalization, have reason to be wary of the idyllic claims made for the Internet. Working in an
environment of veiled racial demarcation entrenched in Western ideology, artists from the non-
West who use online language and symbolism in their practice both on the Internet and in offline
contexts operate from a categorically different position than that of the Post-Internet. The
embedded control systems of the web, when coupled with differences in language, politics,
culture, and aesthetics that are specific to geographic locales, leads artists working in these
liminal conditions to work reactively to a digital status quo. Despite these demarcations, online
cultural production is not new to Latin America. Artists like Arcangelo Constantini, Brian
Mackern, and Rejane Spitz have been working with web technologies since the mid-nineties.
Brian Mackern considers these geographic circumstances in relation to technology when he asks:
“Is the ‘low-tech’ made in Europe similar to the ‘low-tech’ made in Latin America? They appear
to be the same, but I think that one ‘works’ from ‘shortage’ whereas the other ‘fashions’ due to

68. Claire Taylor, Place and Politics in Latin American Digital Culture: Location and Latin American Net
Art (New York: Routledge, 2014).

45
‘over-saturation’.”
69
This “shortage” describes the position of artists working not just in Latin
America, but also anywhere that the Internet imposes its set of non-native cultural modes. Artists
working from a position of online difference, or “shortage”, as those in Mexico are, provide an
alternative narrative that counteracts the elitist position promulgated by proponents of Post-
Internet Art.
Artists from Mexico working in the context of the Internet exist on the periphery of
contemporary art discourse along with most online cultural production from Latin America.
While there is plenty of content on the web available in the colonial languages spoken in Latin
America (Spanish and Portuguese), the region still pales in comparison to more developed
nations in terms of content produced, availability of Internet connections, and the population’s
familiarity with the tools of the web. Despite this disparity in representation, artists working in
Mexico are making work that comments on the impact and influence the Internet has had on their
part of the world. Artists working in Mexico deal with a different set of conditions when they
access the web, conditions that are specific to this geographic region and are determined by
issues of access, language, politics, and cultural context. Mexican artists who are influenced by
or work within the Internet address these disparities while also dealing with issues specific to the
contemporary climate in Mexico (e.g. political corruption, extreme violence, telecommunications
monopolies, and cultural and economic globalization). The following projects by
Astrovandalistas and Daniel Escamilla, are not only great works of art, but they are symbolic of
the type of work being produced in relation to the nuanced position that Mexico has to the
Internet and its peripheral technologies. As a developing country replete with political corruption,

69. Ibid., 38-39.

46
telecommunications monopolies, and a complicated relationship with the U.S., Mexico is fertile
ground for artists making work that responds to the conditions of the Internet.
Daniel Escamilla’s video video Nodes, Holes and Gaps (2012) comments on the loss of
context and the resulting absence of meaning as information coded in language passes through
the space of the Internet. In this work, Escamilla took a list of the top ten most prevalent
languages on the Internet and used an online translation tool to convert the phrase “Nodes, holes
and gaps. There are many gaps to fill” successively into these different languages. As can be
inferred, the title is in English because it is the most dominant language online. He then proceeds
to translate each consecutive translation until it has passed through all ten languages. With each
subsequent translation, the meaning of the phrase degrades and becomes disjointed. The video
showcases the outcome of this process as the translations are read aloud by an automated voice
and displayed as white text on a black ground one after the other. This reading by algorithmically
syncopated voices represents yet another translation: that of an inputted set of texts outputted as
aural speech.
By presenting these languages together in one discrete work, Escamilla makes clear how
visually different each writing system is. This distinction is important on the web, as web
browsers are visual interfaces that have the ability to display only certain character sets and
usually don’t have multilingual content on one page. In order to access content that is written in a
different language, web browsers sometimes offer the ability to translate the page. But like in
Nodes, Holes and Gaps, these translations are never perfect.
The work was first presented at the World Event of Young Artists 2012 in London,
England. The event was touted as an “international platform” with “1000 artists from 100 nations”

47
that hosted a “selection of the best international creative talent, across a spectrum of artforms.”
70

In response to these claims of inclusion and internationalism that echoes the rhetoric of the
Internet, Escamilla chose to focus on language as a technology that informs and alters reality but
is dependent on context to provide meaning. The “nodes, holes and gaps” allude to the spaces for
mistranslation that are present in both language and artworks when they are found outside of the
context that gives them meaning. The piece, which has been exhibited in Mexico at different art
spaces, is also available for viewing online on the artist’s Youtube page. This suggests that the
Internet is just as valid, if not the most relevant context for the work.

Figure 2: Daniel Escamilla, Nodes, holes, and gaps, 2012, Video loop, TRT: 1 min 26 sec, Courtesy of the artist

70. "Who we Are." World Event Young Artists, accessed March 3, 2015,
http://worldeventyoungartists.com/information/about-us/who-we-are.

48
Networks Outside of the Internet
While the Internet is often spoken of as a single entity, there is not just one Internet.
There are an infinite number of Internets, as many as there are possible connections. The Internet
is different depending on the circumstances and experience of the user. The analogy of the
Internet to the rhizome, as conceptualized by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and popularized
by the arts organization Rhizome, provides a model for understanding the network in this multi-
faceted way.
71
Even though the rhizome may present a somewhat romantic view of the web, this
multi-nodal expansive system still presents advantages as well as challenges. Its size and reliance
on a sprawling infrastructure that spans the globe makes it hard for any one entity to dominate or
control the web completely. Years before the Internet was made available to the public, artist
Roy Ascott spoke presciently about networked communications: “Networking supports endless
redescription and recontextualization such that no language or visual code is final and no reality
is ultimate.”
72
It is currently impossible to account for every connection simultaneously, allowing
hackers the ability to hide behind anonymity. But, as evidenced by the hidden relations of power
rooted in its infrastructure, the digital domain is more arborescent than many would like to admit.
Because of this, many artists and technologically versed user groups have begun building
networks that fall outside of the bounds of the standard Internet.
This was the strategy employed by the Astrovandalistas for the #EstoNoEsInternet
project discussed at the beginning of this text. #EstoNoEsInternet was a way for the collective to
engage in dialogue about the state of telecommunications in Mexico while commenting on the
closed-loop, impersonal mode of social interactions that take place online. Together with the

71. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, "Introduction: Rhizome," in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, 11th ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 3-25.
72. Roy Ascott, "Is there Love in the Telematic Embrace?" Art Journal 49, no. 3 (1990): 241.

49
participants of a series of workshops held at the Ex-Teresa Arte Actual, Astrovandalistas created
a blog-like zine that contained articles on a broad range of subjects, but dealt primarily with the
politics of the web in relation to Mexico.
73
The online version of the zine is designed to look like
a mock governmental website. At the top of the page, next to the official seal of Mexico, is a
banner with a series of rotating satirical backhanded slogans that are meant to sound like
government entities. Throughout the page can be found articles whose titles take on many of the
tropes of the Internet such as numbered lists and hyperbolic, alarmist statements that beg for a
click. But in this context, these tropes point to a critique of the content of the net instead of
replicating it. The zine includes articles written by Astrovandalistas, participants of the
workshops, and allows for online submissions as well. One entry by the Astrovandalistas entitled
“Facebook Y Telmex Se Alian” or “Facebook and Telmex (a Mexican telecommunications
giant) Form and Alliance” simply reads: “Via Forbes: Carlos Slim and Mark Zuckerberg plan to
bring internet to 60 million more Mexicans. Obviously by having a Facebook account or through
Telmex. Their strategy to gain clients is to disguise marketing with philanthropy.”
74
This post not
only mirrors the strategy used by Zuckerberg and Peña Nieto described in the introduction, but it
also grounds the politics of the zine, and as an extension the project as a whole, within the
geographic and cultural specificities of Mexico. While the digital publication was the focus of
the first set of workshops, they were followed by a second series in which the zine was published
via a network constructed specifically to distribute the zine.
The second phase of #EstoNoEsInternet was the dissemination of the zine via a network
analogous to but separate from the Internet. The latter series of workshops that Astrovandalistas

73. A Wordpress version of the zine can be found online at http://astrovandalistas.cc/accionesterritoriales/
74. Astrovandalistas, "Facebook Y Telmex Se Alian," Astrovandalistas, accessed March 3, 2015,
http://astrovandalistas.cc/accionesterritoriales/?p=174.

50
led during the Acciones Territoriales exhibition focused on the transformation of Internet router
technology into a local network that could serve as a vehicle for the zine. Instead of acting as a
relay point to the Internet, the devices were hacked and converted into distribution nodes for the
zine. These hacked devices were then distributed to numerous public locations where Internet
connections are expected, like coffee shops and museums. Aside from hosting the zine, this
alternative network served to empower the Mexican public by giving them the information they
need to build these alternative networks themselves. #EstoNoEsInternet operates as an
information distribution tool as well as a community-building strategy. While the online version
of the zine contains a guide to performing this hack, the artists do include a caveat for any
Spanish speakers needing more information to replicate the process themselves: “Unfortunately,
the guides we found are only available in English.”
75

75. Astrovandalistas, "Replica Este Sitio," Astrovandalistas, accessed March 3, 2015,
http://astrovandalistas.cc/accionesterritoriales/?page_id=227.

51
The Ideal Network
The Internet is still a relatively new zone for cultural production and while Post-Internet
Art discourse seems intent on dictating what the aesthetics of this online space will be and how
they should be experienced offline, there are still opportunities for other visual modes to take
hold. With all of the digital aesthetic realty created by corporate social media sites alongside
other marginal venues, there is ample room to navigate beyond the limitations of the Post-
Internet and expand the discourse about the intersection of art, culture, and information networks.
As younger generations who are native to the web and are well versed in these communication
tools continue to correlate the online image with art and the act of selecting content as a
curatorial process, the more necessary it becomes to carve out space for subaltern voices in the
digital sphere.
A promising vein of aesthetic research into the intersection of web and culture is Zack
Blas’ formulation of the Contra-Internet. Contra-Internet is a term outlined by Blas in his essay
“Contra-Internet Aesthetics” and is based on Beatriz Preciado’s formulation of a contrasexual
position.
76
For Blas, “contra-internet aesthetics recognizes that the internet is a premier arena of
control today, bound to the mechanisms that vehemently and insidiously police and criminalize
non-normative, minoritarian persons,” and also “insist on alternative forms of understanding,
pleasure, knowledge, and existence.”
77
Contra-Internet works from a perspective of difference in
order to identify the structures that create, enforce, and propagate the conditions from which
alterity arises. Acting as a manifesto of sorts, the essay outlines the main qualities of the Contra-

76. Zach Blas, "Contra-Internet Aesthetics," in You are here: Art After the Internet, ed. Omar Kholeif
(London; Manchester: Cornerhouse, 2014), 89.
77. Ibid.

52
Internet aesthetic. These include “an implicit critique of the internet as a neoliberal agent,” and
an “analysis that highlights the internet’s intimate connections to the propagation of ableism,
classism, homophobia, sexism, racism, and transphobia.”
78
Taking the position of the
technological Other, Contra-Internet aesthetics intends to create a space for differentiation
among digital bodies by combatting the myth of online egalitarianism promoted by neoliberalism.
By identifying with this stance and giving a name to the practices that share these similar
qualities of resistance to the Internet, Blas creates the potential for an alternative network of
cultural production that allows for a greater scope of practices and points of view than the Post-
Internet. The Contra-Internet represents a mode of production that could eventually neutralize if
not supplant Post-Internet Art discourse.
The Internet as it exists today is far from ideal and could stand to improve in many ways.
If it truly is a global network, no one country should have an overwhelmingly large stake in the
control and management of its data and infrastructure, as the U.S. does now. The languages of
the web need to diversify. This includes programming languages. Could there not be a “global”
language in the vein of Esperanto that could be used for building and communicating within
online space? There should be networks that present a legitimate alternative to this massive
information database. It needs checks and balances. As this one singular communications
technology continues to infiltrate aspects of everyday life, there is a risk that governments and
companies will invest so much into the network that a similar “too big to fail” argument that
predominated over the financial crisis of 2008 could apply to the Internet if it was ever
threatened.

78. Ibid., 90.

53
Despite all the negative aspects of the current web, it does still contain some very positive
characteristics. I consider myself a product of many of the opportunities the web can provide. As
someone who emigrated to the U.S. from Mexico at a very young age, the Internet represented a
private-public forum of virtual entities that mirrored my own conditions of existence. Because I
was undocumented, I was essentially a ghost to society, needing to exist surreptitiously within
the country while also severing all connections to my birthplace. In this limbo status I essentially
existed as a virtual body. I was present in the country but only corporeally, lacking any agency or
formal recognition. I was a simulation, a data set with no function, a glitch in the system.
Growing up in a multifamily dwelling, I spent a lot of time in public spaces like parks and
libraries. These became public-private spaces for me that presented a reprieve from a very un-
private household. Having been raised in these conditions, the Internet seemed like a very natural
space to me when I first navigated the information superhighway. Although my first language
was Spanish, I had spent enough of my childhood in the U.S. that assimilation into this sphere
was not difficult. The cost of access was initially a hurdle. But this is how the malleability of the
web became clear to me. Because I was limited to a free connection through service provider
Netzero, I had to endure banner ads on my computer screen anytime I logged online. Thanks to a
tutorial from a next-door neighbor and some clever browsing, I was able to find a workaround
that eliminated the ads and allowed for unobstructed viewing of the web. Access to the
information on the net complemented my less than stellar public school education and primed me
for techno-competency in this digital age. I benefitted greatly from the pliability of the Internet
as well as the vast amounts of digitized knowledge that I otherwise would have been unable to
access. These are the qualities that must be taken advantage of and transferred over to the new

54
technologies that the Internet will spawn. The current iteration of the network should serve as a
model for what to do, and what to avoid in future information networks.
The goal of this argument is not to dissuade cultural producers from using the Internet as
a site of investigation. Quite the opposite. My hope is that this research will provide a model for
analyzing artworks dealing with the Internet that considers geographic specificity and will
encourage an increase in the breadth, scope, and diversity of surveys of this type of work. This is
a call for a change in discourse, one that points to a need for a deeper aesthetic investigation of
the forms and spatiality of the Internet. The web, despite its hegemonic proclivities, should not
be abandoned altogether just yet. It is a site that should be probed in order to locate where the
faults and opportunities lay. Only from critical analysis of the existing infrastructure can we find
the starting place for the technology that will replace the Internet. Because if the Internet
continues to spread uncontested, it will set a precedent for the development of an even more
efficient and totalizing tool for control and surveillance. Fortunately, cultural producers working
in critical manner in relation to the Internet stand to reveal many of the inadequacies that plague
this network, as well as point us in the direction of a more ideal network.

55
Conclusion
The polemics of the digital have consequences away from the keyboard. Geopolitical
borders, economic zones, and cultural territories affect the information that flows through the
information superhighway as much as the power relations built into the technology. Since the
Internet is necessarily a domain of language and ideology across different repositories of
information with diverse publics, any cultural object that exists within this frame is always
already imbued with the intrinsic problems of the net but is also imbued with the capacity for
political agency. If art and discourse about the effects of the web on culture are to be successful
they must take into account and question how and why society has arrived at such a place. The
more Zuckerberg asks us to share our culture, business, or creativity, the more we should ask
“why”? What is the value in it? Who is this serving? As Donna Haraway reminds us: “Social
reality is lived social relations, our most important political construction, a world-changing
fiction.”
79
The Internet is part of social reality and it will continue to spread. Artists should
continue to use this contested site is a space of opportunity. The Internet is at once a tool for
resistance, the forum for that resistance, and a force to be resisted.

79. Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth
Century, 149.

56
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Abstract (if available)

Abstract As cultural production increasingly moves online, the forces that are pushing this shift forward must be interrogated. This thesis proposes that American neoliberalism shapes the Internet and creates a biased value system that extends to online cultural production. This conceptualization of the Internet as ideological mediator has geopolitical ramifications that affect how this communication network is experienced. The geographic borders of the United States and Mexico act as a frame for this argument. This binary allows for an analysis that compares a country that benefits from the prejudices built into the Internet, as with the U.S., to a country like Mexico, that is left to assimilate into this value system. These biases will be considered in an inquiry of the cultural products that refer to the Internet but exist within the context of contemporary art, with specific attention placed on Post-Internet Art and the practices of Mexican artists working with art and technology.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Rodriguez, Heber (author)

Core Title Up to code: geopolitics and its influence on cultural production on the Internet

School School of Fine Arts

Degree Master of Arts

Degree Program Art and Curatorial Practices in the Public Sphere

Publication Date 04/22/2015

Defense Date 04/01/2015

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Art,art and technology,Astrovandalistas,Brian Mackern,Daniel Escamilla,digital,Electronic Disturbance Theater,geopolitics,Internet art,Latin America,Mexico,neoliberalism,net,OAI-PMH Harvest,online,post-Internet,Web

Format application/pdf (imt)

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Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Tain, John (committee chair), Callahan, Vicki (committee member), White, Charles Harry (committee member)

Creator Email heberrod@gmail.com,heberrod@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-556651

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