Link Editions: Post Internet, second edition

On the occasion of the reconstruction of the Post Internet website for its inclusion in Rhizome’s Net Art Anthology, the Link Art Center is proud to announce that the Post Internet book is now available in a fresh new, re-designed edition.

Post Internet was a blog developed between December 2009 and September 2010 by Los Angeles based writer Gene McHugh, thanks to a grant of the Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant Program. For almost a year, McHugh kept filling this folder with his personal notes. Writing and posting became a daily, regular activity, that sometimes produced many posts a day, sometimes longer texts posted at a slower pace.
However, Post Internet is not just a piece of beautiful criticism – it’s also, in itself, a piece of Post Internet art in the shape of an art criticism blog – “criticism as performance” (Domenico Quaranta).

After the publication of this book’s first edition (2011), Post Internet went offline somewhere at the end of 2015. In 2019, Rhizome’s Digital Preservation team, led by Dragan Espenschied, restored the blog and made it available online again through the Net Art Anthology, drawing edited texts from the 2011 Link Editions publication based on the blog and from Internet Archive. Check out the restored website at https://122909a.com.rhizome.org/.

“What feels most relevant in these pages, ten or so years since they were written, is anything having to do with the effect of time. Post-internet art and writing about post-internet art is at its best when it evinces a self-consciousness about the precarious relationship of digital culture and time. What was so vital then, often appears dated now.
That fact, it’s becoming more and more clear, is the ontological condition of post-internet art. Most of it is an art of the right now and quickly becomes dead, at best a historical example. That sounds disparaging, but I don’t exactly mean it that way. At the time it mattered more than anything.” Gene McHugh, March 12, 2019

Gene McHugh is a writer based in Los Angeles.