Continuing, from the thread on Rhizome about the panel topic "post-internet," a term that attempts to pull it all together without any consensus as to what it means (kind of like net art). Patrick Lichty said "we're flailing around, looking for a signpost." I said no we're not, and he said:
I think we've turned into an interesting galaxy of techno-media arts, and the people who I think who are flailing are not the artists, but select individuals who insist on trying to quantify things in an increasingly plural set of practices.
and yet
Diversity is a bitch to explain to the Board of Trustees or a collector. They like names.
So I chimed in:
On our panel in 2008 the NYC art gallerist Magda Sawon was in the audience and after listening to Petra Cortright, Damon Zucconi, and yrs truly talk about our work and what was happening on the group blogs she said, "I don't see anything new here, it's just the collage and the found object."
More than terminology, we need people who can see a bit more perceptively and help artists with the hard work of evaluating what's going on in these "cell" activities. This means learning more about people's processes in order to make distinctions between, say, found art and made art, between art and what Paul B. Davis called "instrument building," and between a "look" (such as what [James] Bridle mashed together) and actual core similarities in people's methods.
There's much to be done, and artists will continue to run the fork lifts and keep the bridges trussed while postindustrial panelists spin new unhelpful names for the infrastructure.