Immagini fluttuanti: operazioni estetiche e itinerari nell’immateriale visivo digitale

Abstract

The World Wide Web – with its apparently democratization of culture as well as the creative process behind it – has completely changed the way of defining the concept of authorship and critical fruition of the Image. The Online Community is simultaneously agent and audience of a growing digital imagery archive which is challenging the artists to find new ways of imposing themselves into the flow of images. This essay analyzes some of the most significant artistic elaborations appeared in the last ten years that approach the WWW as a digital “objet trouvé” in the framework of Internet Aware Art, as proposed by the definition of Guthrie Lonergan. The paper aims to present how artists reuse and relocate – online or offline – those opaque and anonymous clues of a shared culture. The ways that artists find, select and interact with those materials is the key to understand their engagement and fluency with new media’s lexical properties and techniques.