The Post-Internet Art Scene: A Network Map (2009-2026)

Post-internet art began as a way to grapple with the fact that the internet was no longer a novelty but an atmosphere--something artists lived inside rather than observed from a critical distance. The term itself emerged around 2008, when artist Marisa Olson began using "post-internet" to describe work made after the internet had become culturally ubiquitous. Gene McHugh's influential blog Post Internet (2009-2010) and Artie Vierkant's 2010 essay "The Image Object Post-Internet" solidified the vocabulary. What first appeared as an aesthetic language of glossy surfaces, commodity fetishism, and meme-poisoned sculpture gradually became a deeper attempt to understand how culture behaves when distribution overtakes production. In 2026, as AI systems reshape all forms of media, mapping the networks behind post-internet art is newly urgent. These artists anticipated a world in which images, identities, and ideas circulate faster than any author can control, and their intertwined projects now reveal the blueprint for today's hybrid art-tech ecosystem.

Timeline: Key Moments in Post-Internet Art (2006-2026)

2006-2008: The Foundations

• 2006: Nasty Nets, an early "internet surfing club," launches, prefiguring the post-internet aesthetic
• 2007: Daniel Keller (from Detroit) and Nik Kosmas (from Minneapolis), both born in 1986, form AIDS-3D
• 2008: Marisa Olson coins the term "post-internet" to describe art made in a world where the internet is ambient
• 2008: AIDS-3D creates OMG Obelisk, a neon and steel sculpture that will become iconic of the moment

• April 2009: AIDS-3D's OMG Obelisk is exhibited at the New Museum's "Younger Than Jesus" triennial, announcing a generational sensibility
• June 2009: Brad Troemel (born 1987) launches The Jogging as a Tumblr blog, initially with Lauren Christiansen
• 2010: DIS Magazine is founded in New York by Lauren Boyle, Solomon Chase, Marco Roso, David Toro, and others
• 2010: Joshua Citarella begins contributing to The Jogging
• 2010: Artie Vierkant publishes "The Image Object Post-Internet," a foundational theoretical text
• 2012: AIDS-3D dissolves; Keller shifts toward writing, podcasting, and crypto-native ventures

• 2014: The Jogging goes on hiatus, having transformed Tumblr into an exhibition platform
• September 2014: DIS is announced as curatorial team for the 9th Berlin Biennale
• 2016: Citarella publishes Politigram & the Post-Left, chronicling emergent online microcultures
• June-September 2016: DIS curates the 9th Berlin Biennale, titled "The Present in Drag," marking the institutional arrival of post-internet aesthetics

• May 2018: New Models podcast launches in Berlin, co-founded by Daniel Keller, Caroline Busta, and Lil Internet (Julian Klincewicz)
• 2018: Citarella launches the Doomscroll podcast, initially as "Politigram Podcast"
• May 2019: Holly Herndon releases PROTO on 4AD, an album made with "Spawn," an AI trained on her ensemble's voices--created with her partner Mat Dryhurst
• 2019: Citarella founds Do Not Research, an online platform for visual art and techno-culture criticism

• 2021: Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst release Holly+, an AI voice clone allowing permissioned collaboration
• 2021: New Models launches Channel.xyz, a token-gated publishing platform
• 2022: Herndon and Dryhurst found Spawning, an AI startup building consent infrastructure for training data
• 2022: Spawning launches "Have I Been Trained?", allowing artists to check if their work is in AI datasets
• 2023: Daniel Keller works as cultural strategist for Vaporware, an Urbit-ecosystem startup

• 2024: Jon Rafman begins developing Cloudy Heart, an AI pop star designed to evolve through interaction
• 2024: Keller leads Metropolis DAO, an AI-native investment DAO incubated through Tribute Labs
• February 2025: Rafman's "Proof of Concept" exhibition opens at Sprüth Magers Los Angeles, featuring Cloudy Heart as a "living, mutable stream" of AI-generated content
• December 2025: Cloudy Heart releases music and performs live, covered by Interview, i-D, and others as the first "pop star built for the infinite scroll"
• 2025-2026: Herndon and Dryhurst present "Starmirror" at KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin, an AI choir installation

The Berlin/New Models Axis

At the center of this network sits the Berlin/New Models axis, anchored by Daniel Keller (@dnlklr). Keller, born in 1986, hails from Detroit; Kosmas, also born in 1986, is from Minneapolis. The two met in the mid-2000s, bonding over a shared interest in technology, irony, and the internet's cultural detritus. In 2007, they formed AIDS-3D--a name that deliberately courted discomfort, reflecting the era's irony-poisoned sensibility. Their breakout work, OMG Obelisk (2007-2008), was a tall black column exclaiming "OMG" in blue neon lights, flanked by steel pipes that burned with small flames, filling the gallery with the smell of a campfire. The piece was exhibited at the New Museum's 2009 "Younger Than Jesus" triennial, a show that positioned itself as capturing the worldview of artists under 33. The New York Observer called the obelisk "the hottest" work in the show--an object that merged technological sublime with internet banality.

When AIDS-3D dissolved in 2012, Keller's role shifted from artist to architect of discourse. He moved to Berlin, where he co-founded the New Models podcast in 2018 with Caroline Busta, a writer and editor formerly of Artforum and Texte zur Kunst, and Lil Internet (Julian Klincewicz), a director and DJ known for music videos that captured the visual language of the feed. New Models rapidly became the clearinghouse for post-internet theory, capturing the anxieties and accelerations of late-platform culture through long-form conversations on topics from memetic warfare to algorithmic aesthetics. Its guests have included theorists, technologists, musicians, and artists working at the edges of networked culture.

In 2021, the trio launched Channel.xyz, a token-gated publishing spinoff that experimented with crypto-native media distribution, presaging a model where access and community membership intertwine. Though Channel.xyz has since been open-sourced, its experiments informed how many now think about decentralized publishing and token-gated content.

Keller has since woven himself into multiple fronts of the AI-curious art world: running cultural strategy for Jon Rafman's Cloudy Heart project, and leading Metropolis DAO, an investment DAO dedicated to AI-native ventures, incubated through Tribute Labs. His philosophy of unconditional accelerationism--embracing technological speed rather than resisting it--links directly to the broader Berlin milieu and provides ideological continuity between the ironic gestures of AIDS-3D and the earnest infrastructure-building of the AI era.

The Herndon-Dryhurst AI Avant-Garde

Berlin is also home to Holly Herndon (@hollyherndon) and Mat Dryhurst (@matdryhurst), whose partnership forms the Herndon-Dryhurst AI avant-garde. Herndon, an American musician who completed a PhD at Stanford's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, has long treated the laptop as an instrument and technology as a collaborator. Dryhurst, a British artist and technologist, has focused on questions of decentralization, ownership, and the politics of networked creation. Together, they have developed a body of work that offers the ethical counterpart to Keller's accelerationist speculation.

Their first major AI project emerged through Herndon's 2019 album PROTO, released on 4AD. At its center was Spawn, an AI system they described as their "AI baby"--a neural network trained on the voices of an ensemble choir who gathered at their Berlin home. Spawn learned to mimic human vocals, and the album used this capacity not to replace human performance but to extend it. Where many AI music projects sought to automate creation, PROTO treated machine learning as a form of collective performance.

In 2021, this work evolved into Holly+, an AI voice clone that allows anyone to perform with Herndon's voice in a permissioned way--a direct challenge to the uncontrolled proliferation of deepfakes. Users can upload audio, have it transformed through Herndon's voice model, and potentially share revenue if the work is commercialized. It was an early experiment in what they call "data dignity": the idea that creators should maintain sovereignty over their digital likenesses.

Together, they founded Spawning, a startup dedicated to negotiating consent in AI training. Their first tool, "Have I Been Trained?" (2022), allowed visual artists to search major AI training datasets to see if their work was included. Spawning has since developed broader infrastructure for opting in or out of training, working with both artists and AI companies to establish norms around data consent.

Their mantra, "All media is training data," distilled the central tension of the post-internet condition: the desire for artistic autonomy in a world where every upload becomes raw material for machine learning. Their influence extends across continents and scenes. Keller often credits them for reshaping his understanding of AI's cultural horizon. Their recent installations--including the AI choir at the Serpentine Gallery in London (2024) and the Starmirror installation at KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin (2025)--demonstrate how post-internet art ultimately evolved into a philosophy of co-creation with machines, where human and artificial voices blend into something neither could achieve alone.

The NYC Discourse Network

If Berlin provided the theoretical backbone, New York produced the social laboratory where these ideas first took shape. The NYC discourse network emerges most clearly through Brad Troemel (@bradtroemel), whose collaborative project The Jogging (2009-2014) defined the syntax of the post-internet era.

Troemel, born in 1987, launched The Jogging in June 2009, initially with collaborator Lauren Christiansen. The project treated Tumblr as an exhibition space, posting images of sculptures, installations, and objects with the dry titling conventions of a museum ("Egg Player, 2013")--except these works existed primarily as circulating images. A fried egg in an open DVD drawer. Monarch butterflies on a levitating magnetic pedestal. The distinction between physical object and digitally circulated documentation collapsed by design. A Yahoo News feature in 2013 noted that a single Jogging post could attract over 9,400 likes and reblogs within 48 hours--an extraordinary reach for "art" at the time.

In a 2017 New Yorker profile titled "Brad Troemel, the Troll of Internet Art," he was described as someone who found "the gallery system too slow, too insular, and too full of gatekeepers." His later experiments--meme-based criticism, pseudo-performance pieces documented as online ephemera, and Etsy art-market hacks--exposed the fraught economics of art production in a social-media-saturated landscape. Troemel deliberately blurred the line between sincere artistic production and provocation, embodying the ironic-yet-earnest sensibility that defined the post-internet moment.

Joshua Citarella (@joshuacitarella), born in 1987 in New York, was an early Jogging contributor who evolved these concerns into full-scale political analysis. After The Jogging, Citarella turned his attention to the emergent political subcultures forming on platforms like Instagram ("Politigram"), Reddit, and Discord. His 2018 publication Politigram & the Post-Left was an early, serious attempt to map the ideological drift of online microcultures--tracing how young people moved through anarchism, traditionalism, eco-extremism, and other positions in ways that defied conventional left-right mapping.

In 2019, Citarella founded Do Not Research, an online platform and non-profit for visual art, critical writing, and techno-culture analysis. His Doomscroll podcast, which began around 2018 and has grown into an influential show, chronicles online politics and culture with a methodological commitment to treating digital life as primary reality--not a distraction from "real" politics but the terrain where politics now unfolds. Guests have ranged from obscure leftist theorists to mainstream commentators like Ezra Klein, who appeared in 2025. A New Yorker profile that year called Citarella "the leftist podcaster who studies online radicalization."

Citarella's work frequently crosses paths with Keller's, especially around techno-acceleration and the question of whether to resist or ride technological change. Both share an intellectual commitment to understanding the internet as the ground of contemporary experience, not a reflection of it. Citarella has appeared on New Models, and both have contributed to Channel.xyz, demonstrating the tight mesh of this discourse network.

Their overlap with the DIS collective, whose DIS Magazine reimagined lifestyle publishing through a post-internet lens, completes the NYC cluster. Founded in 2010 by Lauren Boyle, Solomon Chase, Marco Roso, and David Toro, DIS operated at the intersection of fashion, art, advertising, and critical theory. Their visual language--stock photography aesthetics, corporate wellness imagery, and the uncanny surfaces of e-commerce--became a signature of the era. DIS's selection as curatorial team for the 9th Berlin Biennale (announced September 2014, staged June-September 2016) marked the moment when the aesthetics of feeds, brands, and networks became institutionally legible. The show, titled "The Present in Drag," was both celebrated and criticized for collapsing distinctions between art, commerce, and spectacle--which was precisely the point.

Key Projects and What They Represent

Across these clusters, certain projects stand out as emblematic mile markers in the movement's evolution:

AIDS-3D (2007-2012) captured the mood of a generation raised on both techno-utopianism and 4chan irony. Their objects--neon obelisks, steel flames, surfaces that oscillated between sincerity and trolling--embodied the affective confusion of living inside a culture that could no longer distinguish between authentic expression and performance.

The Jogging (2009-2014) demonstrated that a Tumblr feed could function as an exhibition space and that the circulation of images was itself a form of authorship. It anticipated the Instagram art world that would follow and the "post-studio" practice where production and distribution merge.

DIS Magazine (2010-present) and the 9th Berlin Biennale (2016) brought these aesthetics into institutional spaces, proving that post-internet art could command major platforms while remaining true to its critique of platform culture.

New Models (2018-present) reoriented the discourse from objects to systems, serving as a seminar on platform governance, memetic warfare, and algorithmic aesthetics for an audience that spanned art, tech, and crypto worlds.

Channel.xyz (2021-2023) brought these ideas into the crypto era, testing models of access control and community-driven publication that informed subsequent experiments in token-gated media.

Spawn (2019) and Holly+ (2021) reframed the artist's body as an editable, shareable model. Where deepfakes threatened to dissolve authorial control, Herndon and Dryhurst proposed a consent-based alternative.

Spawning (2022-present) attempted to build the infrastructure for consent in AI training, moving from artistic intervention to startup-scale impact.

Cloudy Heart (2024-present), Jon Rafman's (@jonrafman) AI pop star, represents the latest shift toward characters designed not merely to inhabit the internet but to evolve through it, financially and aesthetically. Rafman, a Canadian artist known for works like 9 Eyes of Google Street View and immersive video installations that explore internet subcultures, created Cloudy Heart as a "living, mutable stream" of AI-generated music videos and content. At Sprüth Magers Los Angeles in early 2025, the installation presented a kind of television for the AI age--endless, self-generating, and built to reflect the viewer's gaze back through synthetic pop. Keller serves as cultural strategist, connecting the project to crypto-native distribution models.

Metropolis DAO (2024-present) signals the next turn: artworks that are no longer static objects but AI agents participating in economic systems. Led by Keller through the Tribute Labs network, Metropolis DAO invests in AI-native projects, blurring the line between cultural production and financial infrastructure.

The Evolution: From Objects to Discourse to AI

Seen across time, the trajectory of post-internet art can be read as a move from objects to discourse to AI:

2007-2012: Object Phase
The movement dealt in physical or quasi-physical artifacts that gestured toward the digital--neon obelisks, DVD-drawer sculptures, objects designed to be photographed and circulated. The work lived at the intersection of gallery space and feed space.

2013-2017: Institutional Phase
Post-internet aesthetics entered museums and biennales. DIS curating Berlin. Critics debating whether the movement was critique or complicity. The question of what it meant to "sell out" became incoherent when the work already operated within commercial logics.

2014-2020: Discourse Phase
The center of gravity shifted toward commentary--podcasts, magazines, essays, and networks of discourse. New Models, Doomscroll, Do Not Research: the scene generated more theory than objects, reflecting a world where meta-commentary was itself a form of cultural production.

2018-2024: Crypto Phase
Crypto experiments reframed art as programmable media. NFTs, token-gated communities, DAOs. The technology matched the theory: if everything is already a token of exchange, why not make the token literal?

2024-2026: AI-Native Phase
AI-native projects began to dominate the field, treating the internet less as a site of display and more as a developmental environment for synthetic personalities, voice models, and autonomous agents. The artist's role shifts from creator to trainer, curator of datasets, architect of feedback loops.

Why This Matters Now

This history matters now because investors and cultural observers are scrambling to understand the convergence of crypto, art, and AI--the very convergence this scene has been rehearsing for over a decade. The post-internet network was early to recognize that the future of culture would be defined by composability, by the fluid exchange between human creativity and machine systems, and by the economic rails that allow both to coordinate.

The artists mapped here are not peripheral figures making objects for gallery walls. They are builders of infrastructure: consent layers for AI training, investment DAOs for AI-native ventures, voice models that challenge the legal frameworks of identity, podcasts that shape how a generation understands its own technological condition. What began as ironic sculptures and Tumblr posts has become a dense network of startups, protocols, and platforms.

What began as a niche art movement now functions as a strategic map for understanding how cultural products, AI models, and financial infrastructures intertwine. In 2026, as AI-native entities rise and media becomes increasingly synthetic, the post-internet art scene stands not as a historical curiosity but as the prototype for our present moment. The artists who made OMG Obelisk and Egg Player are now building the tools that determine how AI learns from human creativity--and who gets to decide.

Key Figures (X/Twitter)

• Daniel Keller: @dnlklr
• Holly Herndon: @hollyherndon
• Mat Dryhurst: @matdryhurst
• Brad Troemel: @bradtroemel
• Joshua Citarella: @joshuacitarella
• Jon Rafman: @jonrafman
• Caroline Busta: New Models co-founder
• Lil Internet (Julian Klincewicz): New Models co-founder

Visualizations