For some time now I've been making photo books disguised as hard-to-approach pseudomagazines and posting photographs I like online. For the second issue of that magazine I wrote an essay on the internet and art as per the theme of 2012. I've just posted it online and wanted to share it with y'all, hope you have some thoughts about it.

We come to learn that we must not look into the sun long before the time our memory serves us and yet we constantly defy our nature in fires and eclipses as well as screens: our pupils are moths to their scarcely bearable light. Our newest flames stand at an advantage for they contain any sort of data as well as social media, the network concept nurtured by the chemically replete well of social anxiety. We live in an era that should pass when digital media will no longer need backlight for support and when social media evolves into a biologically entangled format. Once this time passes it will inevitably become historic and its art (or should I say our art) is distinguishable within this temporal context. Our art aims to appease our new cosmic digital beings like the Incan sacrifices and creations in praise of their sun god, Inti. Our art raises to appearance the internet’s socially disruptive mutations of souls. Our art responds to the crest of a new human existence: a veritable Second Life. The question now is not “what’s next?” but rather, “what colour will we paint our flag?”

Most readers of our time will not get past the term social networks without sticking a fork in their own kneecap but not even if these networks were outlawed would we be rid of them. To our generation they are unavoidable lest you wish to remain in the dust of where society once stood. Of these websites those that have grown to most prominence involve using birthnames instead of pseudonymic usernames. This has eliminated the psychic distance between our two worlds—although they still remain distinct—and so you now must tend an inanimate ambassador. Feed it only your superego: your strongest words; your achievements; your best poses; suddenly waking life steps backstage to your online theatre.

To think this networking does not affect the work of artists is forgivable. Do schools of fish realise they are in a movement or are they just swimming? Few artists directly refer to the internet’s effects on the human experience in their work but its traces are widely evident. In fact to many in our generation, our human experience has been affected by the internet almost since birth. And since the fragmentation of style in our art is so severe it may seem that there is an unlimited variety of movements at work, but much—if not all of it—is contextually related. They are entangled not by the internet per sé but by the effects of online social representation.