I WILL NEVER VISIT YOU IN MARFA, AND YOU WILL NEVER TAKE A FLIGHT TO VISIT ME ON MARS
ideas of autonomy in politics, everyday life and personal relationships. This critique also extends to digital culture, as shown most clearly in the introduction to Artist’s Statement No 45,730,944: The Perfect Artistic Web Site. Here, they state, deadpan, their thoughts on “the newest multimedium: the web. The biggest art space: the web. The greatest chance to say something or make something dumb. Or, better yet, boring”. There is a distance to this type of self-reflection that is itself a commentary on the ruthless judgement of the ever-changing internet. In the blink of an eye, or in the time that one takes to watch one of YHCHI’S videos, the new becomes the old; what was once thrilling becomes banal; and what was once a space of freedom can transform into one of hyper-surveillance and control.
UNREALITY IS REALITY IS UNREALITY
“Once upon a time, the internet was supposed to be a place for ‘liberty’. Nowadays it’s so uptight. So let’s turn off, log-out, and drop in, on the real world”—so begins the online mission statement for Internet Yami-ichi (yami-ichi.biz), a physical flea market for internet paraphernalia organised by Japanese internet artist-duo exonemo. In the first edition, held in 2012 in New York, visitors could purchase items such as cookies stamped with memes; a now-obsolete invisible image file called a spacer GIF, used by web designers to create white space in websites; and a “real world re-tweet”, in which the vendor excitedly shouts out any text provided by the buyer.
These playful, physical manifestations of the digital contain a larger message of shifting realities. As we become more dependent on digital interactions, the once-distinct worlds of offline and online blur and collide, simultaneously birthing rich, virtual secondary lives and inviting possibilities for transgressions and restrictions. These developments fuelled Beijing-based Cao Fei’s best-known project, RMB City (2008-11), in which she built a fictional Chinese city within the popular online game Second Life. For three years, she maintained the semi-apocalyptic society—iconic urban landmarks, such as Beijing’s Bird’s Nest, are envisioned as rusted or ruined—under the guise of her online avatar China Tracey, inviting others to participate. Those who played, such as collector Uli Sigg, who was governor of this digital world for three months, became part of the artist’s experiment in exploring the tensions between the physical and virtual realms, utopia and dystopia, fiction and reality, and the past and present.
For example, one activity comprised searching for the late scholar Wang Guowei, who drowned himself in 1927 but was rumoured to have been sighted in RMB City as the avatar “Wangguowei Wasp”. In this way, Cao suggests that cyberspace is not just a facsimile of society, but a portal to all worlds that exist in and outside our imagination.
What is our position in such a space; how do we navigate it and how does it change us? Shanghai- and Berlin-based Xu Wenkai, who has been operating online and as an artist under the moniker aaajiao since 2006, uses his art to tackle these questions and our relationship
with the internet, which he considers inextricable from our day-to-day lives.
“The internet has long been our daily life and, like the air, we are always breathing it,” he says. In his early work, he highlighted the gap between us and the internet by pairing the humanistic with the technological, but later in his career he began to focus more on the closure of this gap as we experience the world via internet culture. This is seen in Bot. (2017-18) (aaajiao.bot-gluttony.com) a dreamlike website-video set to familiar music—such as Auld Lang Syne or the soundtrack to Super Mario—that shows a stroll through a Chinese city, Google Earth images, the feeds of various apps, a github webpage and Pacman aesthetics via a first-person player perspective, indicating the interchangeability and fusing of the corporeal and the intangible.
While there are many neutral or even positive aspects arising from the internet, there are also drawbacks. As Cao wrote in her manifesto for RMB City: “New orders are born, so are new, strange wisdom[s].” Cutting-edge technology makes online censorship possible, and massive corporations can collect digital data and profiteer from people’s use of various platforms. In exploring the rise of internet culture and art, one also is reminded of cultural theorist Paul Virilio’s warning that “When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck… Every technology carries its own negativity, which is invented at the same time as technical progress.” Aaajiao confirmed these concerns: “In 2006, I seemed to enjoy the possibility of the internet, but today, we are facing more difficulties caused by it.”
JUMPING INTO THE FIREWALL
Uber, Yelp, Google, Facebook, Airbnb, Apple—the distinctive logos of these corporations, printed on a simulated fabric, float elegantly in the breeze. As a camera pans out, the words blur, harder to read but still recognisable—we see digitally rendered trees, unicorn spirals, more of the same branded tents, all pinned to a patch of grass, which bobs lazily on the surface of the sea.
Much like the landing page of a five-star resort, Miao Ying’s website Hardcore Digital Detox (2018) (hardcoredigitaldetox.com) teases viewers with a landscape; except instead of wide-sweeping scans of bucolic hills, it presents the view of a digital island, one overpopulated with problematic corporations accused of voter manipulation, data leakages, distortion of reality and other moral com