Talk: Post Internet Curation: Online Art Ecologies of the Web 2.0 Era
Pita Arreola-Burns and Elliott Burns
Summary
Pita Arreola-Burns and Elliott Burns examine the architectonic and curatorial characteristics of online galleries that emerge during the Web 2.0 era, a period often described as post-internet. They situate their own platform, offsite project, founded in 2017, within a wider ecology of online curatorial spaces that support new-media artists and address techno-social themes, encompassing downloadable zip shows, a Google Maps residency, offline exhibitions and a writing practice, as part of an ongoing, non-definitive research project. Drawing on Marisa Olson’s 2008 coining of “post-internet,” they trace a community of surf-club practices that sample, remix and circulate digital imagery. To illuminate online exhibition design, they compare the dense, hierarchical hanging of the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition and the Paris Salon with the contained frame of the laptop screen and browser window: both construct a central coordinate and a navigable field, even if the body moves differently in each. They argue that post-internet aesthetics flow from online to offline alongside a countercurrent of curatorial properties that hybridise exhibition design, and that this lineage continues into three-dimensional metaverse spaces and Web3 curation. The talk frames these online galleries as generative sites for folding histories against one another and rethinking curatorial space in the 2020s.
This AI summary was generated by kimi-k2.7-code (13th August 2026).