Vanishing Acts

In Vanishing Acts, Eileen Isagon Skyers looks at the role of network-based art practices as an aesthetic critique of our engagement with interface technologies that are increasingly seamless and, largely, undetectable. There’s a direct correlation between the imperceptible interface and the distracted nature of human cognition. There are certain urgencies assailing our nervous systems now that were simply never there before. And despite our endless customization of web content, we’re unable to observe the computational processes that make the information manifest. In this situation, net art has the ability to reveal something quite crucial about the changing nature of subjectivity in relation to technology’s gradual “vanishing act.” Net art often employs retromediation and anachronism to call into question some of the actions inherent to networked space. These practices subvert the ruling tendencies and assumptions of screen-based operation, namely, transparency and interactivity.