Apologies, classmates, I forgot to post my review of the MCA's I Was Raised on the Internet. My review below!
The Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) in Chicago held a both chilling and mind-boggling exhibit entitled I Was Raised on the Internet from June 23–October 14, 2018. The MCA’s website describes the exhibit experience as follows: “Fittingly, the viewer is an active agent, engaging new forms of networked behavior and participating both in the gallery space and beyond, through additional digital works hosted online. I Was Raised on the Internet plays with the dystopic connotations of our online multiverse but also is a direct reaction to the utopic beginnings of the world of computing.”[1] Dystopic, an apt term, characterizes the exhibit from the start, as viewers begin the tour with an introductory video: a futuristic, monotone female voice outlines the exhibit’s themes, and because of the 1984-like presentation, she almost seems to command both one’s attention and obedience. Matched with the video’s explanation of the mediated nature of exhibit’s media, the video’s voice over-emphasizes the mediation involved and calls one’s attention to that very mediation.
Being so aware of this mediation, I not only considered my own interactions with the artwork but also those of other museum attendees. A woman in her late thirties or early forties, perhaps a mother or sister, accompanied by a younger woman, either a daughter or younger sister, stand out in my memory. At Angelo Plessas’ installation entitled The Eternal Internet Brotherhood / Sisterhood 6, Dörnbeg (2017), the young girl leaned over in an awkward position to capture a selfie with the exhibit, perhaps for posting to social media, while the older woman observed the young girl, baffled and almost frustrated by her interaction with the exhibit, as if the young girl improperly engaged the exhibit and deviated from some normative mode of museum participation. Although my own interpretation may further mediate the pair’s encounter by reading too much into it, the exhibit in general called one’s attention to hyper-mediation or meta-mediation, the former being layers added onto already mediated experiences and the latter being a recognition of mediated experiences of the exhibit’s media/artwork.
Most striking to me, in the vein of mediated mediation, were the exhibit’s plastic and material representations of digital life. That is, many of these pieces represented the Internet, social media, games, etc., by abstracting them from their contexts and refashioning them into sculptures and paintings. My particular favorites, likely due to my background in website development, included the works of Joel Holmberg. Holmberg’s art carries on the tradition of genre painting, described in the placard as that which “depicts familiar subjects such as tables set with bowls of fruit and picturesque landscapes.” On his canvases, he paints what would be deemed “above-the-fold” content of websites, that which you see first in your browser at the top of a website. These sections usually feature large imagery or video, often stock photography, and direct the visitor where s/he should navigate first. For example, his painting Capabilities (2015) leads with a background image of a mountainous landscape in the lower half, and a white sky in the upper half (See Figure 1). The headings read “Our Solutions” and “Capabilities,” which typify corporate lingo. But below that, a sub-header explains: “If ever you could walk away from somewhere feeling satisfied that nothing about who you are as an individual needed to be compromised by being there in the first place.” We have, at the top, the corporate headers and empty white sky, while the bottom provides the rather obscure subtitle with seemingly unnavigable mountains. These contrasts parallel the contrasts of the representation of itself: a digital website on a material canvas. Instead of clicking the arrow icon to move forward, as one would do on a website, the painting leaves one to wonder: What comes next? What does it mean? The contrasts and obscurities arrest the viewer. The subtitle is key: the hopeless conditional statement cannot be resolved with a “then” conclusion. The painting demonstrates that, at the website, the corporation undermines the viewer’s satisfaction with her/himself and convinces her/him that something is somehow lacking—a problem, of course, that only the corporation can solve. One cannot traverse and transcend the mountains to the realm of the corporate gods in the sky. With nowhere to click, one stands at the foot of the mountain (or the website) only to ponder the self’s condition.
Figure 1 – Joel Holmberg, Capabilities (2015)
Other similar Holmberg works at the exhibit included Protean (2017), Baby’s First Words (2015), We Can’t Know Precisely What We Mean Until We Are Forced to Symbolize It (2015), World Maps without Borders (2016), and Trash Has Its Own Day (2015). Other notable plastic/material representations of digital life were 3-D printed sculptures by artists Aleksandra Domanoić and Oliver Laric. Domanoić’s Votive: Pomegranate (2016) combines old korai sculpturing with contemporary materials, and the sculpture results in a woman whose body is covered by 3-D printing with only her arms remaining (See Figure 2). This combination of old and new demonstrates the ways that the digital world inscribes material bodies. Laric’s sculpture reproduces by 3-D scan the 1834 statue Sleeping Shepherd Boy by John Gibson (See Figure 3). Here, Laric copied the original statute into a 3-D model, then printed a new version. Laric’s reproduction, however, uses various materials, giving the sculpture a striking heterogeneous constitution that calls to mind the mediation involved when attempting to both preserve and transmit cultural artifacts. From Holmberg to Domanoić to Laric, in addition to many of the other artworks, the exhibit continually calls the viewer’s attention to the hypermediated reality of digital representations.
Figure 2 – Aleksandra Domanoić, Votive: Pomegranate (2016)
Figure 3 – Oliver Laric, Sleeping Boy (2016)
Overall, I Was Raised on the Internet comprised four different sections, the titles of which not only construct a parallelism of names but also emphasize the self’s relation to the artwork. The titles included “Look at Me,” “Touch Me,” “Play with Me,” “Control Me,” and “Sell Me Out.” The section “Touch Me” included almost all of the pieces highlighted thus far: some of Holmberg’s work in addition to Domanoić’s and Laric’s sculptures. The pieces of the section “Look at Me” generally commented on the ways in which the digital mediates identities. For example, Mendi and Keith Obadike’s Blackness for Sale (2001) portrayed an eBay listing in which the Obadike’s invited users to bid on an item that documented racism throughout history. The exhibit placard gave a quote from Keith Obadike: “I really wanted to comment on this odd Euro colonialist narrative that exists on the web and black peoples’ position within that narrative…There are browsers called Explorer and Navigator that take you to explore the Amazon or trade in the eBay.” Another art piece entitled Excellences & Perfections (Instagram Update, 5th September 2014) (2014) by Amalia Ulman documented her experiment in which she played out the life of a woman living out all the beauty mores forced upon young women in our society. The Instagram art yielded numerous sexist and violent comments that demonstrated the hegemonic gaze of the male upon the female body, both online and off.
The “Play with Me” section featured various aspects of digital culture. One aspect covers the lighter side of play, such as the Internet’s obsession with cat videos and memes. Cory Arcangel’s Drei Klavierstücke op. 11 (2009) combines hundreds of cuts from YouTube videos featuring cats playing the piano to reconstruct a musical piece by Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg. Another piece, Cao Fei’s COSplayers (2004), is a film that documents teenagers dressed in martial arts costumes as they play out scenes from computer games. In a similar way that Holmberg’s and Laric’s works highlight multiple levels of reproduction, COSplayers starts with a video game storyline, then moves to its reenactment, followed by a re-digitizing into film. On top of the more playful pieces, the exhibit also housed several virtual reality works in this section. Regretfully, my inability to stomach the disorientation of virtual reality forced me to skip these installations. Other pieces considered play as gaming more directly. The most striking art here was Eva and Franco Mattes’ My Generation (2010). This work features a broken computer and its component parts and accessories scattered across the floor, while the monitor still plays a video of gamers gradually becoming more angry as they play. This video reminds the viewer of the impending shattering of the computer and the violence that gaming can inspire.
The following sections “Control Me” and “Sell Me Out” emphasized more heavily the role of politics and capitalism in the digital sphere. Sophia Al-Maria’s The Litany (2016) in “Sell Me Out” tells the story of a woman attempting to stop the construction of a futuristic mall, a clear representation of capitalism. Ultimately the story’s protagonist dies, calling the viewer’s attention to the outdated cell phones at the bottom of the screen’s video display. The cell phones, in a way, mirror the protagonist whose failure to be objective usefully to the capitalist system caused her destruction and discarding, like the obsolete cell phones. This section also devoted an entire room to artist Simon Denny whose art works explore the various ways in which blockchain technologies could undermine finance and politics endemic to globalization. In “Control Me,” Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Performance Review USB (2013) creatively combined 750 enlarged digital images of human thumbprints to form a large rectangle (See Figures 4 and 5). The glass finish clearly captures the viewer’s reflection, giving the impression one is under the thumbs of the work. Since the name of the piece shares its name with a large Swiss bank, one might conjecture that the art depicts the powerful control of finance capitalism.
Figure 4 – Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Performance Review USB (2013)
Figure 5 – Closeup of Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Performance Review USB (2013)
Overall, I was overly pleased to catch I Was Raised on the Internet on its last day at the MCA. Compelling, intellectual, and challenging, the art peels back the layers of mediation in digital life only to reveal hidden aspects unbeknownst to users. Some frightening and others light-hearted, the exhibit criticized and celebrated both the bad and the good of the digital world. Being a slightly older Millennial (born 1986), I admit I found some elements of the art peculiar and could have missed some of the art’s import. Nevertheless, anyone raised on the Internet would find many delights, inspirations, and frights should it return to the MCA or travel to a museum elsewhere.
[1] “MCA – Exhibitions: I Was Raised on the Internet,” Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, accessed October, 19, 2018, https://mcachicago.org/Exhibitions/2018/I-Was-Raised-On-The-Internet.