This expansive, hybrid set of digitally mediated aesthetics overlap in content, concept, and disciplines: web-based, net art, wi-fi installations, networked art, post-internet videos, photographs, paintings, gifs, objects, graphics, moving image, interactive installations, artistic texts, etc. Prey to technological determinism and semiological idealism, it is an art that acts on the network or is acted on by it. The postmodern break and the proliferation of signs, spectacles, and simulacra erase autonomous and differentiated spheres of the economy, polity, society, and culture posited by classical social theory in favor of an implosive theory that also crosses disciplinary boundaries, thus mixing philosophy and social theory into a broader form of social diagnosis. This chronicling of material culture unveils a collective composition of contemporary culture. Subconsciously, we are structured by this repertoire of codes and grammar of meaning that dissects binary structures. The illusion of penetrable and impenetrable space compresses the past and present. Through recontextualizing web art, the imagery adapts new meaning.
