Indifferent Forms: The Cultural Politics of Medium Online, or the Formal Remit of Diversity and Difference

Concerned with the capacity of cultural form to represent diversity and difference, this text considers how the internet’s potentially plural media are realised in the writing about internet art. Discussion is referred to an anthology, You Are Here: Art After the Internet, ed. Omar Kholeif (2014), which is arguably typical. A detailed survey finds that its contributors pay little heed to media, if slightly more to medium. The article considers the reasons for this inattention. Reading Kholeif’s anthology against the grain, it finds that aspects of the online environment undercut distinctions between media. It then refers this situation to the idea of the ‘End of Art’ while claiming that media still do material work - which plays a significant role in the representation of diversity and difference. The article concludes by proposing a scheme of work for understanding the capacity of online media to facilitate multifarious subjects’ representations in art.