Voices and Faces of Art in the Post-Internet Era

Since the arrival of the new millennium, art has experienced an unprecedented dissolution of borders. The separation between the digital and the physical, between the intimate and the public, between the artistic gesture and everyday noise, has collapsed into a landscape where the image is infinite, fluid, and lacking fixed anchors. In this context, a generation of artists has emerged who not only create in response to this condition but fully inhabit it, like architects of a perpetual present.

KUADROS © brings you these post-internet era artists who do not belong to a unified school, but who share a common concern: how to create in a world saturated with images, data, and spontaneous performances, where art is just one of the visual languages competing for our attention. Some explore saturation from within, others dismantle it, and others simply observe how art has ceased to be an object and has become flow and archive. What follows is a journey through some of the key figures of this ecosystem, each with a voice that reveals something essential about our time.

Beeple: The Chronicler of Visual Collapse

Mike Winkelmann, known as Beeple, is not a traditional artist, nor even a conventional digital artist. He is rather a maniacal compiler of contemporary saturation, an observer who does not seek to distance himself from visual chaos, but to immerse himself completely in it.

His most famous work, Everydays: The First 5000 Days, is not only a milestone in the history of NFTs, but a historical document of the visual culture we inherit and produce every day.

In his images coexist Donald Trump, Mickey Mouse, Elon Musk, Kim Jong-un, and mutant creatures in a visual frenzy that feels closer to a Twitter timeline than to a painter's canvas.

Jon Rafman: The Archaeologist of Surveillance

If Beeple reflects saturation, Jon Rafman digs through its rubble.

His series 9-Eyes, created from images extracted from Google Street View, transforms automated surveillance into accidental poetry.

In those images stolen from the real world, Rafman reveals moments of strange beauty, violence, or existential emptiness.

The world observed by machines is a cold and fragmented mirror, where the human barely survives. Rafman embodies the archaeologist of an involuntary digital memory.

Petra Cortright: Painting in the Age of the Selfie

In Petra Cortright, the distance between the canvas and the screen completely disappears.

Her webcam videos, where she plays with absurd filters and empty gestures, are not so much a critique as a resigned acceptance of our narcissistic relationship with the camera.

At the same time, her paintings digital works, generated from files and virtual brushes, recover the pictorial intuition in a world where every image is provisional.

Amalia Ulman: The Lie as Medium

With Excellences & Perfections, Amalia Ulman executed one of the most subtle and radical performances of the new millennium: turning her own Instagram into a living work of art, fabricating a fictional influencer who embodied all the clichés of contemporary aspirational femininity.

Her followers believed the fiction because Ulman understood something crucial: in the digital age, every identity is a market performance.

Pak: Art as Speculative Code

Pak, a faceless artist, without public identity, without biography, represents the speculative extreme of post-contemporary art.

His works are contracts, algorithms, experiments on the idea of ownership in the digital age.

In projects like The Fungible Collection, Pak not only creates art: he creates the economic rules that turn that art into an object of desire and speculation.

Banksy: The Ghost of the Street

And in the midst of this digital mutation, Banksy remains. Although his work is born in the physical space —the street— his true ecosystem is the internet, where each new intervention circulates like an instant meme.

Banksy represents the first global artist whose very existence is inseparable from his virality, a figure whose works do not need galleries to exist, because his message circulates directly from wall to screen.

While Banksy embodies the last breath of classic urban art, his message —political satire, critique of the market, irony towards power— has been reabsorbed by the same system he attacks.

His most famous work, Girl with Balloon, is no longer a work: it is a global symbol without an owner, appropriated by causes, brands, and movements around the world.

Refik Anadol: Artificial Memories

At the other end of the scale, Refik Anadol works with massive data flows to create works that are not just visualizations, but living ecosystems.

In his series Machine Hallucinations, Anadol feeds algorithms with millions of images to generate digital landscapes dreamed by artificial intelligence.

In his work, collective memory is not human, but artificial and mutable, a file that breathes and mutates with each new data point.

Sophia Al-Maria: Speculative Fiction and Cultural Capitalism

With roots in Qatar and the UK, Sophia Al-Maria works at the intersection of video art, science fiction, and cultural criticism.

In works like Black Friday, she transforms empty shopping malls into post-apocalyptic landscapes, where global capitalism leaves its mark even in emptiness. Al-Maria is a chronicler of a globalization that standardizes cultures into consumer experiences.

Cao Fei: Digital Dystopia from China

In Cao Fei, the post-internet vision takes on a specific cultural and political tone.

From China, Fei explores how modernization and digitalization dissolve traditional identities.

 

In works like RMB City, she creates virtual cities where Chinese history and global pop culture collide.

Her work is a portrait of a modernity where the past, present, and future coexist in an indistinguishable mix.

Trevor Paglen: Maps of Surveillance

We close this journey with Trevor Paglen, whose work reveals the invisible infrastructures of digital power.

From hidden military bases to underwater cables and spy satellites, Paglen documents the dark side of global connectivity.

His art is an act of visualization, an attempt to remind us that every data point, every image, and every digital word traverses a controlled physical landscape.

Conclusion

Together, these artists do not form a movement, but rather a fragmented narrative of the present that substantially enriches the culture of the world.

Each one, from their trench — the street, the screen, the cloud — explores how art can no longer be a separate object from life. In the art of the new millennium, Art is the algorithm, the meme, the surveillance, the fictitious identity, and the infinite archive, all at the same time. An art without a frame, without a clear border, but with an intact function: to make us aware of how we inhabit this era of endless images.

We hope you enjoyed the content of this article from KUADROS ©, as much as we enjoyed putting it together!

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