Across various online art accounts and spiritually-aligned galleries, a certain tendency has gradually been taking shape. Assimilating organic and synthetic objects, and more recently, dark fantasy or folkloric elements, the sensibility could maybe be described as something like ‘weird nature’ or ‘fantasy realism’. Usually employed within a post-conceptual mode and lineage of art, it also often morphs, as if elaborating or iterating from some deranged or esoteric seed kernel, in a hi-res formalism of blade-like
or craggy shapes and genre motifs. In contrast with Post Internet art, which it can be most aptly
identified or compared with, it leans often more heavily on biological pigments or earthtones, rougher
textures, and other more terrestrial influences (including even hand-crafted techniques), while still
retaining the former art movement’s vivid, eye-popping quality that flips the work, even in person, into
a condition of quasi-virtuality.
Navigating the methods by which online / offline art practice operates (let alone tracking the lore of its
adjacent online aesthetics and cultures) can be much to untangle. This is a brief history and overview of
one such zone of practice within this extended, hybrid environment. This involves tracing this aesthetic
and practice – that I’ve been calling Dark Eco (more of an umbrella term encompassing a range of
connected styles and approaches) – back through the phenomenon of the Offsites scene and its winding
roots.
A recent approach to alternative art exhibition, the Offsite format typically involves physical artworks
being installed at any non-gallery site such as a meadow, creek, or abandoned building, photographed
or recorded (sometimes additionally edited or manipulated with various software tools), and then the
photodocumentation artifact – either as an extension of the original source work - or as a new art object
– is exhibited and circulated online; usually posted across various art accounts and aggregators, online
galleries, websites, and other platforms. While the community participating in this exhibition network
encompasses various, diverse personal practices with their own distinct approaches, it is at the same
time a teeming memetic engine, trading certain motifs and themes, and its formal and conceptual
output has since in turn trickled back into the more conventional gallery ecosystem, providing a visual
lexicon that ideogrammicaly rhymes with recent conversations around lore and online myth-making.
To locate the origins of this practice, we have to go back to Post-Internet. Readers here will likely be
familiar with the term, but as a brief definition, Post-Internet can refer both to the period following the
advent of the Internet (but particularly since Web 2.0 / smartphones), and, more specifically, to a post-conceptual art movement and paradigm consciously working with this context and its available
platforms, tools, and various logistical and aesthetic affordances. This period and its conditions, shaped
by platforms, devices, protocols, and algorithms, arguably extends into the present moment. While the
original arc of the art movement occurred between the mid-2000s and the mid-2010s, its conditions and
dynamics still define the problematics of current practice, as strategies and online cultures spawned
from this period still evolve along different trajectories that continue to adapt to new technological and cultural micro and macro-shifts.
More of a meta-context or even entity than one style or strategy, original Post-Net encompassed a
variety of approaches, including early image blogging and art aggregation experiments in the form of
Surf Clubs, performative online performance and video work, conceptual photography that incorporates
posting and memecraft, and a hyper-aesthetic and photogenic approach to sculpture adapted to the
conditions of online virality. This initial period also saw the emergence of microaesthetics - hatched
concurrently on platforms like Tumblr – which Post-Net had a large role in shaping, which had a function
within the art movement as sort of a connective tissue - style-as-content or content-as-style. It is this
microaesthetic activity in particular, as well as the sculptural approach (beginning in practices of artists
such as Katja Novitskova, AIDS-3d, Timur Si-Qin, and Kari Altmann) that’s of the most relevance to the
lineage being outlined.
In his 2011 article “Art and Transmission”, Michael Sanchez describes how the arrival of the iPhone
shifted art reception from the slower, seasonal rhythms of monthly exhibitions and print reviews, to a
situation of being able to instantly view exhibitions as they’re posted up online. The scrolling interface
of art aggregators and blogs like Contemporary Art Daily replaced the pages of print media, and their
simple white interface imitated the gallery space. Physical galleries in turn adjusted to these conditions
by installing fluorescent lighting that made exhibited sculpture and painting better optimized for this
digital mode of display. Art practice itself also adapted and experimented with these new conditions –
including a sculptural approach involving, as Sanchez describes, neo-Surrealist objects using “jarring
juxtapositions” in hues that “tended towards neon”. These high-information sculptures, designed with
an awareness of their being posted online, were circulated within a process of increasingly accelerated
group collaboration, with visual memes and strategies reoccurring across different artists’ work. At this
time, new approaches to galleries and exhibition – in the form of the Dual Site – also emerged. No
longer needing to be located within one of the main urban art centers to play a more directly involved
role within an advanced art system, these various satellite physical galleries, often located in smaller
urban locations or towns, alternative spaces, or even artists’ homes, experimented with a new hybrid
status of exhibition straddling online and offline, within a gallery ecosystem becoming increasingly
decentralized and ambiguously located.
In addition to a certain hybrid quality or status of the Post-Internet art object and exhibition as being
simultaneously both real and virtual, there was also a blending or merging of the synthetic and the
natural that was happening in art and discourse. Isa Genzken was a key influence on this art aesthetic -
her sculpture having pivoted in the late 1990s to an approach that lent a vivid, strangely biological
quality and presence to her synthetic assemblage sculptures. By the early 2010s, certain artists and
academics had taken an interest in philosophical alternatives to the more linguistically-oriented Post-Structuralism and related discourses that had dominated Contemporary Art since the 1970s.
Speculative Realism (which had arrived on the scene just a year after Post-Internet in 2007), Object-Oriented Ontology, Actor-Network Theory, Accelerationism, various Post-Humanism discourses, New
Materialism, and writers such as Jane Bennett and Timothy Morton, provided various novel frameworks
for considering technology, culture, and the virtual, often within or extending from an ontologically real
or natural. There were also emerging discourses around this time around the Anthropocene and
ecological collapse, and a growing interest among some artists and formerly humanities-centered
theorists and academics in subjects like biology and geology. The influence of this realist and ecological
turn was (and continues to be) palpable across certain (post-)Post-Internet and related practices. New
Materialism for its part has had a kind of science-fictional effect; a logic of synthetic, natural, and virtual
forms evolving parallel according to the same fundamental processes. This aesthetic; of synthetic, often
ergonomic designs mirroring biological forms and natural dynamics was particularly first evident in the
work of Timur Si-Qin and Katja Novitskova. A similar quality can be seen across Anna Uddenberg’s
biopolitical figuration and appliance/furniture-like sculptures, and in the work of Alisa Baremboym and
Dora Budor. Parallel to this style, there was also a Post-Anthropocenic and sometimes OOO-associated
aesthetic zone of tangled or teeming ecosystems or assemblages of synthetic and cultural objects
situated among or appended to natural objects, including, in some of the earlier forays, the work of Ajay
Kurian, Max Hooper-Schneider, David Douard, and Veit-Laurent-Kurz. Many of the tendencies that
proliferate in the online exhibition scene today spawned from this nexus of theory and practice.
In her 2013 essay “Flatland”, Loney Abrams suggested that the Internet was becoming the main location
for art viewing. The gallery in this new arrangement now served as the site for staging the installation
photo, and for lending its institutional authority and cultural clout to the image-objects that might now
exist in several, possibly photo-manipulated versions online - the photographic backdrop of the white
cube further bestowing the image its institutional designation. By the mid to late 2010s, various
alternative curatorial projects, exhibition platforms and aggregators that were now primarily digitally
based – increasingly on websites or Instagram accounts - began to shift their center of institutional and
curatorial gravity away from the still necessarily white-cube-tethered Dual Sites format, transferring it to
a new symbiotic relationship located between the digitally-based project or platform and various
decentralized, off-site exhibitions. In 2016, with the institutional art world suddenly moving its curatorial
and critical gaze to a more Resistance-themed program, becoming decidedly less receptive to – and
even wary of - any net-oriented practice due to a sudden older-generational distrust of meme culture,
more online-oriented practice and communities found themselves subsisting increasingly through these
new extra-institutional and alternative experimental projects, over time somewhat siloing themselves
off across various podcast, meme account, Avant NFT, and Substack-oriented microcultures and Dark
Forest Discord communities.
Much online art viewing and activity took place increasingly within such obscure networks, where,
between various collectives, projects, and art aggregators such as Rhizome Parking Garage, Dharma
Initiatives, Solo Show, Light Harvesting Complex, Boreal Throne, and Sinkhole Project, and documented
(along with a larger ‘weird objects’ approach) on Tveznik and O Fluxo, the emerging Offsite
phenomenon gelled into its own community and memetic incubator, in turn absorbing various Gen Z
memetic, design, and fashion influences into its lexicon. While these projects usually have an active
presence on Instagram, they seem to remain decidedly aloof from certain algorithmic pressures and
incentives; the conversations happening in Discord spaces and other communities defined more by an
almost INFP-like character and often mystical or intuitive relationship to signs and ephemera. Unlike
certain adjacent online/offline art networks that have foregrounded personality-as-medium, there is
less emphasis on the recent Discourse or hot takes, or on autofictional games with microcelebrity; its
own excursions in lore and community-craft channeled more into an encrypted and formalist, ritual
exchange of make-shift totems and artifacts. As a decentralized exhibition structure, while there is
sometimes showings of more established artists; it has also provided an environment where new artists
experiment with concepts outside the pressure of the more gamified algorithmic and market incentives.
There’s even a kind of pastoral atmosphere permeating the space, partly evoked by so many Offsite
exhibitions being installed and shot at natural locations, which lends the larger project a dimension of
being vaguely like a virtual equivalent of the rural destinations artists sometimes historically retreated
to, where they could hone their approach in a close community of other practitioners.
While the first ventures in Site-Specific work and Land Art had always applied the simple, stark forms
and gestures of ‘60s Minimalism or Conceptualism to their chosen site or environment, the recent
approach to site-specific work, adopts the high-information and networked logic initiated by Post-Internet. These photodocumented locations, similar in logic and affect to the kind of vibey, aesthetic
environment and ‘liminal space’ images shared on Tumblr or Instagram, are not so much simply a
backdrop, as part of the constitutional makeup of the unified image, increasingly transferring their own
influence onto and into the sculptures, paintings, or drawings positioned within the scene. This
continual iteration in response to so many environmental and viral inputs only helps intensify a gnarled
formal aesthetic that can become comparable to the designs for the fantasy film The Dark Crystal, in
which concept artists Brian and Wendy Froud – inspired by the ‘fae’ essence of forest environments -
had similarly conceived the film’s characters, props, and architecture within a language of meandering,
weird shapes and archetypal and animal characteristics pulsating through their designs. The weird
formalism of the Dark Eco aesthetic, absorbing influences from the physical site as well as other living
points of contact within the exhibition network, has recently additionally displayed a strong post-gamer
influence encompassing a host of online Zoomer aesthetics, including what could be described as Anime
Formalism (lately sometimes labeled Animecore, increasingly almost a lingua franca for various online
and Gen Z cultures) and Blade Formalism (jagged tribal designs and Final Fantasy-esque sword
silhouettes, recently often known – in its tattoo or drawn form - as Cyber Sigilism).
One possible way to interpret how such formalism and abstraction seems to operate in this ecosystem
(in contrast with previous paradigms and uses of artistic abstraction) is through the notion of “shape
language”. In video game and animation design, concept artists give various character, prop, and
environment assets within a project their distinct, unified character through the use of a distinguishing
formal language, such as the stylization particular to games like Warcraft or League of Legends. These
various shape languages and charged objects, resonant to a generation raised online and versed in a
multitude of styles and sources, seem to ripple and interweave through these sculptures and online
paintings - just as the works similarly mash concepts and content - as the ‘jarring-juxtaposition’ strategy
of the Post-Internet object becomes even more dense and crystalline with arcane cultural and image
data. Perhaps this is an uncanny analog to a similar processing and synthesis of data happening in AI, an
iterative game of pattern recognition and skewed mimetic interpolation. How these two intelligences –
artificial and human - converge or diverge regarding their interpretation and iteration of such materials
may, negatively and by necessity, delineate how the human end of the equation, as enigmatic as the
inner workings of AI, might trace out the strange sigil line of its next path.
Images:
1. Jonathan Santoro - The Four Horsemen (Angry), Floaters (presented by Collision’s Craft), Baltimore Country, 2021
2. Leilei Wu - Curious, if true, curated by Yicong Sun Alcova, 2022
3. Youri Johnson - Black Rose Altar (the revenge of Artemis), Dirty Laundry, KEIV, Athens, 2022
4. 011668, APEX, FITNESS, H.R. Giger, Andrew Rutherdale, Ben Sang – FALCONER III, America’s Dead Sea, Great Salt Lake, Utah, 2021
5. Eetu Sihvonen - The House That Stood on Tall Legs, Mystic May, The Community Garden, 2021
6. ASMA – Vain Kisses to the Source, Deli Gallery, NY, 2022
7. Katja Novitskova – Shapeshifter 3, Shift, Future Gallery, Berlin, Germany, 2013
8. Veit Laurent Kurz – Frog Dope, Bed-Stuy Love Affair, NY, 2015
9. Gaia Del Santo, Specktral Meltdown, Neck of the Wood, 2021
10. Theodor Nymark, Das Geistergefäß des Verfalls, Seven Sages Laid Its Foundations, Kur Space, Wien, Austria, 2021
11. Georg Jagunov & Nina Schack Kock – Martha’s Secret Garden, Cascade Valley, Liselund, Møn, Denmark, 2022
12. Runuru and Caulis – Gothic Pastoral iii, 2022
c_hristian: offsite origins
