Image culture after the platforms: compression artefacts, screenshot logic, lo-fi 3D and retail display treated as material, with online and offline kept deliberately blurred
What it is, when it works, who it is for, and where it already exists.
Record 035-PI - when it works, who it is for, what it looks like
Where this aesthetic shows up in the real world · ↗ opens the source site
Where Post-Internet came from, what makes it recognisable, and the fingerprint it leaves.
2008-present · New York, Berlin and London, coined and argued online
The term was in use by 2008, credited to Marisa Olson, and it was always a description of a condition rather than a medium. Net art of the 1990s made work that lived in the browser; post-internet artists assumed the browser had already changed how every object and image was seen, and made work for galleries, print and shops that behaved accordingly. Artie Vierkant's Image Objects from 2011 are the cleanest statement of the method: printed sculptures whose documentation was altered in software, so that the photograph and the object never agreed and neither was the original.
The visual language came from the platforms and from the stock and retail imagery that fed them. DIS magazine ran editorials shot in the register of catalogue photography and product listings. Jon Rafman collected images from Google Street View and presented them as found photography. Hito Steyerl's essay In Defense of the Poor Image, from 2009, gave the compressed, copied and degraded JPEG a politics: the low-resolution image was the one that actually circulated. Lo-fi 3D renders with default shading, acrylic display stands, shrink-wrap, watermarks and browser chrome all became legitimate material because they were the material of everyday looking.
By the mid-2010s the tendency had a name, a market and a backlash, and the artists mostly stopped using the word. The language stayed. It is the native register of a generation of designers who photograph products to be reposted, print screenshots on vinyl, and treat a lo-fi render as a finished surface. Its defining quality is a refusal to say which version of a thing is the real one: the object, the listing, the screenshot or the print. Done well it is intelligent about circulation; done lazily it collapses into Y2K nostalgia, cyberpunk or a mockup of an app.
“Not art about the internet. Art made in the condition the internet left everything in.
The visual DNA: what makes it recognisable
8-channel console with the fingerprint on its display. Save the card, or share the page
The definitive color scheme for this aesthetic
How to shoot it, how to prompt it, and how to board it.
How to shoot this aesthetic
"A product listing photographed, printed, displayed and photographed again"
Shot list
Lighting
Retail and screen light: LED strips, monitor glow, flat even white. Slight colour mismatches between sources are welcome. Avoid warmth, avoid drama, avoid anything cinematic.
Drop this into Studio to generate in this aesthetic
Post-Internet art and design, contemporary image culture after social platforms, compression artefacts and JPEG blocking, screenshot logic, lo-fi default-shaded 3D renders, retail display stands and shrink-wrap, browser chrome fragments, printed vinyl, ambiguous online and offline space, knowing and flat, not Y2K, not cyberpunk, not an app mockup
A Pro feature: a board generated from the record
A generated board, with membership
Opening soon
Whether to use it, what it costs to do properly, and where it stands right now.
Two written calls, seven meters, and when to walk away
Build the circulation into the frame. A photograph of a print of a screenshot says what the style is about; a clean product shot does not, so every image needs at least one loop. Keep it flat and knowing rather than glitchy. The moment it could be a tech advert, a Y2K throwback or an app mockup, it has drifted off the subject.
Right when the brand lives on platforms and wants to say so with intelligence rather than pretend otherwise. Its defining move is refusing to say which version of a thing is real: the object, the listing, the screenshot or the print. The moment it becomes a period style or a product demo it loses the one thing it has to say.
Stock imagery, a phone, a printer and an acrylic stand.
The intelligence is in the loop between object and image. Without it, it is a product shot.
Compression and mismatch have to look deliberate, not like a mistake.
Drifts into Y2K nostalgia, cyberpunk or a literal app mockup the moment the idea goes.
The native register of brands whose product is a feed, whether or not they name it.
It describes the present condition of images, which is not going anywhere.
Stock, screenshots and a printer; the spend is intelligence, not production.
A Pro feature: origins, practitioners, and pitfalls
The editorial depth, with membership
Opening soon
Neighbours, cross-references, blends, and the questions people ask.
Connected across the creative knowledge graph
Where it stands now, and what it costs you to use it
Post-internet is the honest description of how most images now live, which makes it the native language of brands that exist to be reposted: streetwear drops, music releases, galleries with online-native artists, media companies whose product is a feed. It is intelligent about attention and circulation in a way earlier digital aesthetics were not.
The line it has to hold is between knowing and nostalgic. Y2K borrows the look of an old internet; cyberpunk imagines a future one; an app mockup is a picture of software. Post-internet is about the present condition of images, and the moment it becomes a period style or a product demo it loses the one thing it has to say.
Mix Post-Internet with any of the library's 170+ styles
Post-Internet 50%Vaporwave 50%Merged palette
#5A7CFF
#1A1A2E
#C9CDD3
#B967FF
#F5F6F7
Leads digital, maximal, expressive
Typography · from Post-Internet
Space Grotesk over Inter
Materials
The calls this blend forces
These two disagree on one thing, and a blend cannot average them: you pick a side. At this mix:
Futuristic or Nostalgic? Post-Internet is futuristic, Vaporwave is nostalgic. This mix lands nostalgic.
Use it
Post-Internet art and design, contemporary image culture after social platforms, compression artefacts and JPEG blocking, screenshot logic, lo-fi default-shaded 3D renders, retail display stands and shrink-wrap, browser chrome fragments, printed vinyl, ambiguous online and offline space, knowing and flat, not Y2K, not cyberpunk, not an app mockup (50%), infused with Vaporwave aesthetic with glitched Greco-Roman statuary, VHS chromatic aberration, dreamy pastel-and-neon color mood, ironic consumerist nostalgia, color palette strictly #5A7CFF #1A1A2E #C9CDD3 #B967FF #F5F6F7, leaning futuristic over nostalgic, overall character: digital, maximal, expressive
Work made on the assumption that the internet has already changed how all objects and images are seen. It treats compression artefacts, screenshots, lo-fi 3D, stock and retail imagery as material, and moves freely between the gallery, the print and the feed.
Net art of the 1990s lived in the browser and was about the network as a medium. Post-internet assumes the network as a condition and makes objects, prints and photographs that behave as if they will be circulated, copied and degraded.
Artie Vierkant, Jon Rafman, Camille Henrot, Hito Steyerl as its theorist, the DIS collective, Cory Arcangel, Petra Cortright, Oliver Laric and Ed Atkins.
Every style in the library is broken down like this one: the palette, the typography, the materials and the lineage.
Explore the style library →