Post-Internet art has broken out of the screen and is finding its way into physical galleries. Can a movement so dependent on its digital roots survive in the real world?

Mixing computers and art isn’t a new idea, it was happening as far back as the sixties when the ICA in London dedicated an exhibition to the burgeoning digital art scene. Cybernetic Serendipity explored the role of computers in artistic creation, from machines that improvised music and created paintings to Nam June Paik’s experiments in distorted monitor images.

In the 70s and 80s, digital art began to lose its identity: it was encompassed by post-modern art and struggled to find its place within the art market alongside fellow subsidiary movements such as intermedia, installation art, conceptual art and multimedia art. But recently, with a major survey opening in Warsaw’s Museum of Modern Art, the Digital Revolution exhibition at the Barbican and the first auction of digital art at Phillips in London, it would seem that digital art has embraced the market and the institution again. It’s done so under the label ‘post-internet art’ and is using digital strategies to create objects that exist in the real world.

Before the advent of post-internet art, the internet was heaving with digital art works, the scope of which tested the confines of the internet and challenged our concept of the medium. Progressive digital pieces included Jon Rafman’s 9 Eyes project which used screenshots from Google Street View to explore uncanny moments captured by the impersonal eye of its roving cameras.