Since the arrival of the new millennium, art has undergone an unprecedented dissolution of boundaries. The divide between the digital and the physical, the intimate and the public, artistic gesture and everyday noise, has collapsed into a landscape where images are infinite, fluid and without fixed anchors. In this context, a generation of creators has emerged that not only responds to this condition, but fully inhabits it, as architects of a perpetual present.
In this article, we bring together ten defining voices and faces of so-called post-internet art. They do not form a unified school or work in a single medium, but they share one concern: how to create in a world saturated with images, data and spontaneous performances, where art is just one more visual language competing for our attention. Some explore saturation from within; others dismantle it; others observe how art has ceased to be solely an object and has become flow and archive.
What Post-Internet Art Reveals
The term does not simply refer to works made with computers or intended to circulate on social media. Rather, it describes a sensibility formed in a world where the internet is no longer separate from everyday life. The screen shapes how we see, the circulation of works changes their meaning, and identity can be constructed, edited or sold like any other image. This overview offers an inevitably partial map of that ecosystem: each artist reveals a different tension between technology, desire, the market, memory and power.
Beeple: Chronicler of Visual Collapse
Mike Winkelmann, known as Beeple, is not a traditional artist, nor even a conventional digital artist. He is, rather, a manic compiler of contemporary saturation: an observer who does not seek distance from visual chaos, but instead immerses himself completely in it and returns it as a scene.
His most famous work, Everydays: The First 5000 Days, auctioned as an NFT in 2021, is not only a landmark in the history of crypto art, but a hysterical document of the visual culture we inherit and produce every day. Its mosaic format encapsulates a practice marked by accumulation: one image after another, without pause or stable hierarchy.
Politicians, pop icons and mutant creatures coexist in his images in a visual frenzy that feels closer to a Twitter timeline than a painter's canvas. His work brings together news, memes, technological fears and apocalyptic fantasies on a single saturated plane. Beeple does not organize the noise: he makes the vertigo of living within it visible.
Jon Rafman: Archaeologist of Surveillance
If Beeple reflects saturation, Jon Rafman digs through its debris. His gaze lingers on what platforms automatically record and what, seemingly, no one ever intended to become an artistic image.
His series 9-Eyes, created from images taken from Google Street View, transforms automated surveillance into accidental poetry. The panoramic camera does not seek emotion, composition or narrative; precisely for that reason, it can capture strange moments with unintended rawness.
In these images "stolen" from the real world, Rafman reveals moments of strange beauty, violence or existential emptiness. The familiarity of a street, road or everyday gesture becomes unsettling when we understand that it was seen by a system before it was seen by a person.
The world observed by machines is a cold, fragmented mirror, where the human barely survives. Rafman embodies the archaeologist of involuntary digital memory, composed of millions of automatic captures that no one conceived as art.
Petra Cortright: Painting in the Age of the Selfie
With Petra Cortright, the distance between the canvas and the screen disappears completely. Her work asks what happens to expression, gesture and intimacy when the front-facing camera becomes a constant presence.
Her webcam videos, in which she plays with absurd filters and empty gestures, are less a critique than a resigned acceptance of our narcissistic relationship with the camera. The apparent lightness of these materials reveals a familiar choreography: posing, trying effects, looking at one's own image and repeating.
At the same time, her digital paintings, generated from files and virtual brushes, recover painterly intuition in a world where every image is provisional. Cortright demonstrates that "painting" can exist in layers of pixels without losing emotion or gesture, and that a painterly sensibility can survive even within shifting interfaces.
Amalia Ulman: Lying as a Medium
With Excellences & Perfections, Amalia Ulman carried out one of the most subtle and radical performances of the new millennium: she turned her own Instagram into a living work of art, creating a fictional influencer who embodied the clichés of contemporary aspirational femininity. The work used recognizable visual codes to make fiction seem ordinary.
Her followers believed the fiction because Ulman understood something crucial: in the digital age, every identity is a market performance. Her later projects continue to explore that blurred boundary between character, advertising and biography. Her contribution lies not only in deceiving the audience, but in showing how much online credibility depends on carefully constructed images.
Pak: Art as Speculative Code
Pak, an artist without a face, public identity or shared biography, represents the speculative extreme of post-contemporary art. Their anonymity shifts attention from the authorial figure to the mechanisms that circulate, value and enable ownership of a digital work.
Their works are contracts, algorithms and experiments on the idea of ownership in the digital age. Each piece functions both as an image and as an economic system: it does not merely appear before the viewer, but also establishes conditions for participation, exchange and scarcity.
In projects such as The Fungible Collection, Pak does not simply create art: they create the rules that turn that art into an object of desire and speculation, pushing the relationship between market and artwork to its limit. Thus, code ceases to be an invisible support and becomes a central part of the artistic experience.
Banksy: The Ghost of the Street
And amid this digital transformation, Banksy remains. Although his work begins in the physical space of the street, its true ecosystem is the internet, where every new intervention circulates like an instant meme and reaches an audience that quickly surpasses the place where it first appeared.
Banksy represents one of the first global artists whose very existence is inseparable from virality, a figure whose works need no galleries to exist because his message travels directly from wall to screen. The shared, commented-on and replicated photograph becomes a crucial extension of the mural.
While Banksy embodies the last breath of classic street art, his message—political satire, critique of the market, irony in the face of power—has been reabsorbed by the very system it attacks: his murals are auctioned, protected behind glass and replicated without control.
His best-known image, Girl with Balloon, has become a global symbol with no owner, appropriated by causes, brands and movements around the world. This circulation illustrates the central paradox of his work: the more accessible an icon appears, the more complex its relationship to authorship, the market and reproduction becomes.
Refik Anadol: Artificial Memories
At the other end of the scale, Refik Anadol works with massive data streams to create works that are not merely visualizations, but living ecosystems that occupy façades, immersive galleries and public spaces. His language transforms data into atmosphere and architecture into a sensitive surface.
In his series Machine Hallucinations, Anadol feeds algorithms millions of images to generate digital landscapes dreamed by artificial intelligence. The result does not reproduce a specific memory: it offers an experience of an archive in motion, made up of associations, patterns and visual mutations.
In his work, collective memory ceases to be exclusively human and becomes artificial and mutable, an archive that breathes and changes with every new piece of data incorporated. His installations turn this abstract idea into a physical, immersive experience.
Sophia Al-Maria: Speculative Fiction and Cultural Capitalism
With roots in Qatar and the United Kingdom, Sophia Al-Maria works at the intersection of video art, science fiction and cultural critique. Her works combine Gulf mythology, pop culture and dystopian futures, refusing to present globalization as a neutral or uniform process.
In works such as Black Friday, she transforms empty shopping malls into post-apocalyptic landscapes, where global capitalism leaves its mark even in silence. Al-Maria chronicles a globalization that homogenizes cultures until they become consumer experiences. Her settings suggest that behind the commercial gloss, there is also a sense of abandonment and estrangement.
Cao Fei: Digital Dystopia from China
In Cao Fei, the post-internet vision takes on a specific cultural and political tone. Her work does not treat technology as a universal abstraction, but as a force that runs through labor, urbanism, youth and memory under specific historical conditions.
From China, Fei explores how accelerated modernization and digitalization disintegrate traditional identities and produce new youth subjectivities, caught between the factory, cosplay and the virtual world. This coexistence of disparate registers makes her images especially revealing.
In works such as RMB City, she creates virtual cities where Chinese history and global pop culture collide. The digital world allows her to condense architectures, symbols and desires that could hardly coexist so clearly in real space.
Her work is a portrait of a modernity in which past, present and future coexist in an almost impossible-to-distinguish blend. In this overlap, dystopia is not merely a future projection: it is also a way of reading the present.
Trevor Paglen: Maps of Surveillance
We conclude this journey with Trevor Paglen, whose work reveals the invisible infrastructures of digital power. Against the apparent immateriality of the network, Paglen insists that every connection rests on territories, devices, institutions and political decisions.
From hidden military bases to submarine cables and spy satellites, Paglen documents the dark underside of global connectivity. His research shifts our gaze from the comfort of the screen to the physical systems that enable, monitor and organize the circulation of information.
His art is an act of making visible, an attempt to restore our awareness that every piece of data, every image and every digital word passes through a controlled physical landscape. Seeing these infrastructures also means recognizing that technology is never entirely neutral.
A Fragmented Map of the Present
Taken together, these artists do not form a closed movement, but they do create a fragmented account of the present that enriches global culture. They offer us a partial map of how we live caught between screens, algorithms, identity fictions and virtual cities. Their differences matter: turning the archive into immersion is not the same as documenting surveillance, constructing a fictional public persona or intervening in the street to activate viral circulation.
Each one, from their own trench—the street, the screen, the cloud or the metaverse—explores how art can no longer be an object separate from life. In the art of the new millennium, art is the algorithm, the meme, surveillance, fictional identity and the infinite archive, all at once. It is art without a frame or clear boundary, yet with an intact purpose: to make us aware of how we inhabit this age of endless images.
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