I Was Raised on the Internet (MCA Chicago, 2018)
I Was Raised on the Internet was a group exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, on view from 23 June to 14 October 2018 in the Griffin Galleries of Contemporary Art and the Turner Gallery on the museum's fourth floor. It was organised by Omar Kholeif, then the museum's Manilow Senior Curator and Director of Global Initiatives. The museum's text says the show "documents a specific moment in time, beginning with 1998 and extending to the present", with "nearly 100 works" in photography, painting, sculpture, film, video, interactive computer works and virtual reality (exhibition text). Harm van den Dorpel showed one work, Assemblage (About).
The sphere hangs on cables at the left of a large white room with a grey terrazzo floor. The works around it are by other artists; the photograph does not identify them.
The show and its sections
The museum's list of artists runs from Cory Arcangel, Ian Cheng and Constant Dullaart to Hito Steyerl, Amalia Ulman and Artie Vierkant, with Petra Cortright, Simon Denny, Eva and Franco Mattes, Jon Rafman, Trevor Paglen, Juliana Huxtable, Cao Fei, Zach Blas and Lizzie Fitch and Ryan Trecartin among about sixty names. Six of them had shown in van den Dorpel's online exhibition space Club Internet ten years earlier: Cortright, Aleksandra Domanović, Dullaart and Oliver Laric in its first show, First Selection (May–June 2008), Domanović, Laric, Chris Collins and Joel Holmberg in ORACLE (June–July 2008). Dullaart curated its fifth show, K.I.S.S., the same summer, and like van den Dorpel was represented by Upstream Gallery, which announced the two of them together.
The text divides the show into "five sections, each describing a different mode of interaction between the viewer and the art object": Look at Me (identity and the performance of the self), Touch Me, Control Me (surveillance and data collection), Play with Me (immersive and interactive technology) and Sell Me Out (corporate culture and consumerism). The museum's announcement, as reproduced on Gamescenes in December 2017, puts van den Dorpel in Touch Me, with Ian Cheng, Aleksandra Domanović, John Gerrard, Oliver Laric, Takeshi Murata, Jon Rafman and Elias Sime:
Touch Me traces the extent to which it is possible to translate information and digital images into real space. This chapter focuses on art's fluid boundaries between two- and three-dimensions, and addresses the ways individuals are increasingly seeing touch and sensuality as new concepts in the world of the internet.
The placement matches the history of the work. The Assemblages began, by the artist's account, as Cinema 4D renders of spheres posted beside real installation views; a London gallerist took them for physical works, and he decided to build them. "It's three clicks, assigning an image as a texture on a sphere," he writes on harm.work; "To make the same shape in physical material is among the hardest things you can do" (→ Sculpture and the Object). The section's question, how far digital images can be translated into real space, is the question the series started from.
Assemblage (About)
The strips are clear plastic, bent into rings that cross and are riveted where they meet. What is printed on them is the online reception of About, his 2012 solo show of Assemblages at Wilkinson Gallery in London, which he calls "My very first real solo exhibition". The widest band reproduces a page of the Contemporary Art Society's website, with its menu (Home, About, News, Programme, North East, North West, Collect, Archive, Contact), a "Membership" heading and a "News" item headed "CAS Director's Exhibition of the Week". A sharper photograph on harm.work shows the rest: a Tumblr post reading "Harm van den Dorpel @ Wilkinson", dated "7:55 pm – 1 March 2012", with "2 notes"; a black band with the line "Wilkinson Gallery is one of a more large open space"; columns of review text, reversed where a strip is seen from behind; and small photographs of works. The sphere is made of what was written about a show of spheres.
This is the recursion the wiki records for the 2012 sphere: 851, 834 and 930 document Assemblage (About reviews and press) (2012), "Digital UV print on hand cut synthetic glass (95 × 95 × 95 cm)", and the Abrons Arts Center show of 2013 presented it as a sculpture made from its own reviews (→ Recursion and Self-Reference, under A sculpture made from its own reviews; Release Early, Release Often).
The 2012 sphere was remade in 2018 for Pattern and Presence at Upstream Gallery (the artist, November 2026), and harm.work catalogues the remake as Assemblage (About), 2018. Upstream's announcement describes it as "UV prints on pet-g, CNC-cut", where the first sphere was cut by hand. The sphere in Chicago, three months after the Amsterdam show, was presumably the remake; the label a visitor copied, "Assemblage ('About' press and reviews), 2012, digital UV print on hand-cut synthetic glass", gives the year and making of the first version (→ Pattern and Presence).
Visitors' photographs
On harm.work the exhibition is documented partly by four screenshots of Instagram posts, taken on a phone. Three are by visitors, tagged with the museum or the hashtag #iwasraisedontheinternet; one has 79 likes and the caption with the label text quoted above. The fourth is the museum's own, a #MuseumMonday post from the show's last weeks, showing a child looking up at the sphere and liked by 336 others. The exhibition text asks for this: "the viewer is an active agent, engaging new forms of networked behavior and participating both in the gallery space and beyond." For this work it closes a loop. A sculpture printed with the web's response to a show in 2012 is documented, in 2018, by the web's response to it.
Post-internet
The text says the show "seeks to put into language the idea of the 'millennial'", "extrapolating the terms used by artists and creative practitioners in relation to the internet, including the so-called post-internet phenomenon." Van den Dorpel had addressed the term three years earlier, in the first-person press release for Loomer (Los Angeles, 2015): "I never minded the label 'post internet' but know it is not sustainable. The fact that the internet is my material doesn't mean much anymore. It's 2015 and modes of appropriation are default" (→ Loomer). The sculpture he sent to Chicago came out of the years the label described. While it hung there, his newer work, the genetic-algorithm Nested Exchange, was shown in Miami Beach and Berlin (→ E-State Realisms, Proof of Work).
See also
- I Was Raised on the Internet — exhibition text — the museum's text, the artist list and the Touch Me paragraph
- Sculpture and the Object — the Assemblages, About at Wilkinson Gallery and Travis Jeppesen's text
- Recursion and Self-Reference — the sculpture made from its own reviews
- Surf Clubs and Club Internet — the networks several of the show's artists came from