Page 182 - The Black Box Book

and aesthetic potential of the networked culture and its users. In other
words, museums have generally approached the digital as a tool rather
than as culture and thus have missed out the opportunity to engage
with its aesthetic currents and to produce cultural value on the web, via,
for instance, “the moderation of intelligent and nuanced conversations
online” (Cornell, 2017).
Historically, the lack of understanding of networked culture from
the side of the museums has left a void which artists often have filled
creatively, by taking up the role of curators or museums directors. This
was the case of the Museum of Internet (MoI), an online project run
by French artists Félix Magal and Emilie Gervais from 2012–2019 on
a Facebook page which collected and archived the “temperature” of the
Internet at that time, via a stream of networked images, memes and gifs
(more about it in Tedone, 2022). Responding to the lack of institutional
interest for Internet culture on the Parisian art scene, Magal and Gervais
built their own museum in the form of a Facebook page on the Internet and
about the Internet, collecting and archiving the flow of content represent-
ative of the time of the Web 2.0. Outside of the context of the platform
the museum existed simply as a folder, containing “a lot, lot, lot of memes”
(Magal, 2019). Inside of Facebook, the museum was a content feed of
networked images posted and streamed daily, which captured the aes-
thetic currents and the online iconography emerging around the 2010s.
The history of MoI was bound to the specific human-technical assemblage
of its hosting platform. In fact, Facebook guidelines regulated and moder-
ated the project’s aesthetic currents and set the limits of MoI’s collection
– no nudes, no hate speech, no violence. As a museum, MoI was indeed
quite atypical. It featured no exhibition and refused curatorial authorship
and stardom, as Magal and Gervais decided to remain anonymous. It
provided no mediation and no interpretation since memes were shared
without content and captions. Instead, MoI chose to give prominence to
Figure 6: Museum of Internet. (2020)
Retrieved from https://www.facebook.com/Museu- its content and users, exercising a form of radical ‘communality’ (Stalder,
mOfInternet/ 2018) with the aim to democratize aesthetics. As a result, the operation
demonstrated that the network is already in the museum by virtue of its
audiences (Dewdney, 2019). In other words, the project celebrated Inter-
net art, or more precisely, it celebrated Internet as art, and thus art as
a potentially accessible, participatory and humorous event and practice.
Throughout the process, MoI grew a community of over one million fol-
lowers spread across more than hundred countries.
Yet, there is something particularly revealing about this project
being called a ‘museum’. For Magal, the title of the project played to
a certain collective perception that he felt compelled to address for two
contradictory reasons: on the one hand, in his view, kids who are inter-
ested in Internet culture tend to avoid going to museums. On the other
hand, museums do not understand the Internet and are often skeptical
to embrace online culture. This can be considered somehow paradoxical,
as the Internet is continuously producing a new aesthetics and there is
no place where to archive it, whilst museums approach “the potential of
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