Creativity in the digital age: how has the internet affected the art world?

In 1989, New York artist Gretchen Bender deconstructed the American flag. She divided the flag’s red and white stripes by large blocks of black paint. While some herald its importance for the comment it made on a divided country, it was also of note for its early adoption of the new media art movement that followed.

This piece and more will be on view as part of Art in the Age of the Internet, 1989 to Today, an exhibition of 60 artists opening at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston on 7 February.

“It’s a show about how the internet has affected art,” said curator Eva Respini. “It’s not just for digital natives.”

Back in 1989, the internet was just for those in the know. British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee first invented the world wide web when he wrote the fundamental specks of HTML, URI and HTTP – the stuff of browsers today.

But through the lens of art, technology tells a completely different story. “Just as the internet has affected dating, travel and the way we see ourselves and understand the truth,” said Respini, “we see a lot of changes in how we view older art forms, like painting, today.”

Don’t expect a bunch of screens around the gallery space; it’s more than just so-called “digital art”. “The canvas is the oldest virtual medium, oldest screen there is,” said Respini, who has included the paintings of Michel Majerus and Avery Singer.

The exhibition highlights ground-breaking media art from the 1990s, like Naim June Paik’s Internet Dream, a wall of 52 TV monitors created in 1994 – a year when many people didn’t even know the internet existed. Also on view is Imagination Dead Imagine, a 1991 video installation by Judith Barry where the human form is wrapped around a cube of video screens.

To break down this gargantuan group show, the exhibition is divided into five sections. Among them are Hybrid Bodies, which looks at how perceptions around the human form have changed since the internet, as well as States of Surveillance, which attempts to decode how a whole resistance movement was born out of WikiLeaks.

“In our post-Snowden world, surveillance is something we all worry about,” said Respini. “The internet has paved the path to resistance.”

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The surveillance section of the show includes artworks by Chinese artist and hacker Aaajiao, who shows a piece called The Great Firewall of China, where he prints out a list of websites banned in China. “It shows visibility in a world where surveillance is very on our minds,” said Respini.

There’s also a section called Performing the Self, which looks at how we represent ourselves online in comparison with our real lives – specifically in the realm of social media and narcissism.

“It’s about how social media has changed how we understand ourselves,” said Respini. “Many of the artworks here were made before the YouTube era.”

There are pioneering works by Ryan Trecartin, who trail-blazed a fast-paced style of video art in the early 2000s, in a time long before Instagram and Snapchat. Trecartin, who now works alongside artist Lizzie Fitch, creates reality TV-style plots with fame-hungry valley girls and drag queens, showing the shallow side of millennials. Another artist, Kate Cooper, who creates Photoshop-perfect photos of glossy robots, taps into our need to perfect ourselves with face-polishing apps like Facetune, which many use before uploading selfies.

“A lot of the works look at the idealized notions of beauty in advertising,” said Respini. “It questions what it means to be human in a digital age.”

There are also a series of nude photographs by Thomas Ruff from 2000, which are sourced from pornographic website thumbnail galleries, as well as a 3D-scanned plastic sculpture by Fran Benson which features Juliana Huxtable, an intersex-born artist who completed her gender transition after college.

“Juliana was able to find her gender-fluid identity online first before in real life,” said Respini. “It was freedom, performing online before able to do in real life.”

While Bender’s artwork is the oldest piece in the show, it set the stage for a lot of what we see in technology today – even though many artists might not even know her name.

“Bender was not only a pioneer of video art, but in our age of YouTube, she contributed to how we process images today,” said Respini. “She was sharing like Tumblr back before social media even existed.”