In a postdigital era, when everyday life is mediated by digital technologies and characterized by constant connectivity, it becomes increasingly difficult to find culture outside of digital media. In Michael Connor’s words, in the post-internet era “it no longer makes sense for artists to attempt to come to terms with ‘internet culture’, because now ‘internet culture’ is increasingly just ‘culture’”.
In this context, appropriation becomes a critical element of contemporary artistic practice, which operates online and offline to reflect how the internet shapes culture. The reuse, reinterpretation and reediting of pre-existing content become the modus operandi of contemporary forms of cultural production. According to Nicolas Bourriaud, these forms of postproduction, which reuse, reinterpret, or reproduce existing cultural forms, illustrate how “art reprograms the world” according to a “constant activity of signs based on a collective ideal: sharing”.
Post-digital appropriation seeks to reflect how art reprograms the world in this post-internet atmosphere of postproduction, in which authorship is omnipresent, challenging notions of copy and original. All cultural production is seen as a work in progress and circulation, which can be continued by any of its spectators.
The project is organized around four topics ranging from artistic approaches to the internet as a medium to post-internet art, including the proliferation of memes and digital folklore. Each topic is treated according to a different dynamic that seeks to evoke aspects of automation in cultural production, either through the exploration of platforms, structures, or tools available on the internet or through the appropriation of content searched online. This experimentation is complemented by the appropriated contents that inspire it, seeking to highlight the processes of recontextualization and articulation characteristic of current cultural production.
