Charlotte Fooks

Has a contemporary reappropriation of the Internet advanced the medium of art?

Charlie Fooks Communication,
Theory and Empirical Methodologies II
Summer Semester 2017
MA Cognition and Communication
København Universitet

Download the pdf here:  Internet Art Reappropriation- Charlie Fooks

Introduction*

With this paper I will discuss the concept that the contemporary genre of Internet Art is a reappropriation of the medium of the Internet. Despite Julian Stallabrass stating that “the Internet is not a medium” (Stallabrass, 2009: 169), I suggest Internet art’s reappropriation of the Internet has birthed it as a contemporary medium upon which art now lives. My use of the terminology ‘reappropriation’ relates directly to the way that the art world is now utilising the Internet as a medium which was previously disparaging of it, thus the Internet has acquired new purpose and authority within 21st Century art. In focussing on the Internet as a reappropriated space for art, it is important to address and analyse “what is happening to digital technology as a tool, as a context [and] as a culture at large” (Goriunova, 2012: 2). In this way, I intend to conduct a research project on the hybridisation of technology and creativity (or the Internet and art respectively); in unearthing the affect this is having on arts world-wide consumption, authorship, ownership and conception within the new context of technological reappropriation.