Contagion, Malfunction, Surveillance

‘You see the things that were inside you. This is the womb, the original site of the imagination.’ Jon Rafman, STILL LIFE (BETAMALE) voiceover.

Contemporary internet art displays the symptoms of a health anxiety that remains unaddressed by art historical academia. Published texts examine internet art’s political importance, impact on global communication, and detachment from traditional art infrastructure, but insufficient art history inspects the internal effect internet art has on our bodies. The internet is a highly personal intimate space, often experienced alone. We tend to treat cyberspace as separate to our corporeal forms, outside the skin — but the internet and its hardware have an organic presence in our lives: computers can become infected, links can rot, websites age and die. Contemporary internet artists are increasingly playing with this bio-digital cleavage, materialising technological fears through the seemingly contradictory visual language of the medical, the virological, the corporeal and the explicitly bodily. Kris Paulsen’s 2014 essay Ill Communication: Anxiety and Identity in 1990s Net Art is one of the few academic texts that investigates online art with both anxiety and health, describing how early ‘net artists’ such as JODI, Prema Murthy and Mark Napier engaged with ‘[internet] user’s fears of contagion, malfunction and surveillance’, linking net art anxiety with ‘AIDS-era concerns about illness and viral contamination.’ However, Ill Communication engages predominantly with identity anxiety. From Paulsen’s starting point of ‘contagion, malfunction and surveillance’, using Søren Kierkegaard’s definition of anxiety and four contemporary internet artists as case studies: Jon Rafman, Ed Akins, UBERMORGEN and Molly Soda, I will offer a reappraisal of Ill Communication, updating it for the modern internet’s turn to health anxiety: the fear for one’s physical well-being after internet exposure. Ultimately, the often upsetting art of internet health anxiety encourages us to moderate our exposure to the digital world to protect our health. While health anxiety in contemporary internet art has not been addressed within academia, it has begun to be recognised by brick-and-mortar art exhibitions — from the Science Gallery’s ‘On Edge: Living in an Age of Anxiety’, Somerset House’s ‘24/7: A Wake-Up Call for Our Non-Stop World’, and the various encounters between biology and technology at the 2019 Venice Biennale, with Anicka Yi’s Biologizing the Machine (2019), Hito Steyerl’s This is the Future (2019) and Jon Rafman’s Dream Journal (2017). Furthermore, medical conceptualisation of internet art is not entirely new. The seed of this thesis was not only drawn from Ill Communication’s alignment of net art with viral anxiety, but from Joline Blais and Jon Ippolito’s At The Edge of Art, which hypothesizes that art functions as an antibody for the social body that technology is invading, isolating and comparing six stages of immune response to mediums of contemporary art. Melissa Gronlund’s From Narcissism to the Dialogic: Identity in Art after the Internet, while focused similarly to Ill Communication on identity anxiety, encouraged me to continue the digital theory practice of closely updating twentieth-century texts for the twenty-first century in her reappraisal of Rosalind Krauss’s 1976 Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism. The little art historical scholarship on health in contemporary art takes the form of short articles — both Jill Bennett’s Are We All Anxious Now? and Nina Power’s Artist, Heal Thyself! explore growing anxiety disorders within the social context of our age, mapping health art within similar parameters to ‘contagion, malfunction, and surveillance’. However, both articles fall short of specifying a trend of health anxiety in internet art. Language surrounding internet art is myriad and variable — Paulsen’s term ‘net art’ is reserved for pre-2005 internet art working with the software and hardware of early computers. This era of the internet is distinguished from the current ‘Web 2.0’ era, the highly participatory form of the web beginning roughly around 2004. ‘Post-internet’, ‘art after the internet’ and ‘internet art’ are often used interchangeably — I will use ‘internet art’ to describe contemporary art reflecting the artist’s time on Web 2.0, either through internet mediums (video files, websites, social media platforms) or through traditional mediums, while still engaging heavily with internet culture. Furthermore, the brevity of Paulsen’s text results in her not defining ‘anxiety’. Anxiety definitions are various and disparate, and this term’s centrality to my work requires consolidation. Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927) roots anxiety in facing ‘the ultimate conditions of existence’, arguing that anxiety’s temporary detachment allows for experience of the authentic self. The distressing symptoms of anxiety in Jean-Paul Satre’s Nausea (1938) lead to ‘revelation’, a new understanding of existence. However, the definition offered by Søren Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Anxiety (1884) fits the anxiety described in Ill Communication, present in contemporary internet art. Using Kierkegaard’s text allows the location of a comparable, precise form of anxiety in the art of Jon Rafman, Ed Akins, UBERMORGEN and Molly Soda. The Concept of Anxiety defines anxiety as an unfocused, un-specific fear, a symptom of the overwhelming choice of free will. Kierkegaard describes how ‘[h]e whose eye happens to look down into the yawning abyss becomes dizzy … Hence anxiety is the dizziness of freedom … In anxiety there is the selfish infinity of possibility, which does not tempt like a choice but ensnaringly disquiets with its sweet anxiousness.’ The text is primarily a theological discussion of the Original Sin: divine prohibition of eating fruit from the tree of knowledge implied Adam free to obey or not, spawning anxiety in the face of an ‘abyss’ of choice. ‘The prohibition induces in [Adam] anxiety, for the prohibition awakens in him freedom’s possibility … the anxious possibility of being able.’ In contemporary internet art, the ‘yawning abyss’ of endless choice on the internet and the increasingly expanding technological field causes a Kierkegaardian ‘dizziness of freedom’. This anxiety threatens that incorrect internet usage will result in illness, disease or death.