Miltos Manetas is a pioneer in rethinking the role of art in the age of the Internet. Positioned in the 1990s pantheon of relational aesthetics by Nicolas Bourriaud, Manetas proceeded to experiment with new relationalities, collective strategizing, and potentialities for cultural dissent after the launch of the World Wide Web. He studied shared agency in innovative online video games such as DOOM (1993). In 2000, Manetas founded NEEN, the first art movement of the 21st century. He commissioned Lexicon to copyright this palindrome name in order to signal a new, present tense horizon in web-based practice. Along with Mai Ueda, Manetas organized the Electronic Orphanage space in Los Angeles’s China Town, and launched the WhitneyBiennial.com, a tactical initiative producing dissent on the 2002 Whitney Biennial’s definition of Net Art, while circulating NEEN alternatives via this yet unregistered web domain. Manetas’s work foresees the post-Internet era by focusing on the ambiguity of web-based production: new ways for storytelling interlace with commercial design and corporate strategies. At AB6, Manetas’s iconic paintings re-pictorialize the digital. AB6’s main venue, TTT, used to be his parents’ work place.

#internet #painting #digitalpoetics #post-internet #storytelling

photos: Nysos Vasilopoulos, 6th Athens Biennale 2018 ANTI