Combine a gif of an irate Sean Connery, an audio loop of his comment "You're the Man Now, Dog" from the film Finding Forrester, and bold, zooming text of the same statement and you have the simple recipe behind the popular internet meme http://www.yourethemannowdog.com/. Created by Max Goldberg, the site became a sensation in the early 2000's, and it soon lead to numerous spoofs. Goldberg began mirroring the sites in an effort to keep track of these rudimentary creations, and, eventually overwhelmed by the quantity of spin-offs, Goldberg developed a platform for YTMNDs, http://ytmnd.com/. For the current exhibition "YTMND" at Dallas gallery And/Or, Paul Slocum and Guthrie Lonergan have assembled some of their favorite YTMNDs and installed them on monitors placed in metal shelving units. A short essay "Picture. Sound. Text." by Lonergan on the significance of the genre's unapologetically lowbrow humor accompanies the show. Lonergan argues that the YTMNDs embrace and celebrate the reality that the "Internet turns culture into small pieces of shit." Regardless of one's opinion on the role of the Internet in the advancement of shittiness, the YTMNDs culled by Lonergan and Slocum are funny, weird, random, surreal and unquestionably entertaining, proving that YTMNDs bring something to the table.

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The National Museum of Contemporary Art (EMST) in Athens, Greece, has committed itself to curating a number of recent exhibitions of internet art. Their current show, "Tag Ties and Affective Spies," features contributions from both net vets and emerging surfers, including Christophe Bruno, Gregory Chatonsky, Paolo Cirio, JODI, Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar, Les Liens Invisibles, Personal Cinema and The Erasers, Ramsay Stirling, and Wayne Clements. The online exhibition takes an antagonistic approach to Web 2.0, citing a constant balance "between order and chaos, democracy and adhocracy." Curator Daphne Dragona raises the question of whether the social web is a preexisting platform on which people connect, or whether it is indeed constructed in the act of uploading, tagging, and disclosing previously private information about ourselves on sites like Flickr, YouTube, and Facebook. Dragona asks whether we are truly connecting and interacting, or merely broadcasting. While her curatorial statement doesn't address the issue directly, the show's title hints at the level of self-surveillance in play on these sites. Accordingly, many of the selected works take a critical, if not DIY, approach to the internet. The collective Les Liens Invisibles tends to create works that make an ironic mash-up of the often divergent mantras of tactical media, culture jamming, surrealism, and situationism. In their Subvertr, they encourage Flickr users to "subverTag" their posted images, creating an intentional disassociation between an image's content and its interpretion, with the aim of "breaking the strict rules of significance that characterize the mainstream collective imaginary..." JODI's work, Del.icio.us/ winning information (2008) exploits the limited stylistic parameters of the social bookmarking site. Using ASCII and Unicode page titles to form visual marks, a cryptic tag vocabulary, and a recursive taxonomy, their fun-to-follow site critiques the broader content of the web ...

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It is my intention to continue making an HTML drawing for every day in 2008 and beyond.

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The painting in the age of the internet? The idea for E.G. is simple: the machine is the new painter and its languages are the new painting techniques. The brush stroke is now replaced by a portion of HTML code, the painter is your own computer, each painting is generated each time and everytime is brand new. References to the past abstract masterpieces are evident, but today a work of art like a Rothko's painting is reduced to a mathematical formula that give instruction to the machine to create the final painting.

-- FROM THE ARTIST'S STATEMENT

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Every weekend in the month of March, "In Real Life" took over Capricious Space in Brooklyn, NY with four-hour residencies by various art-related web sites. We felt the project stirred up some compelling ideas surrounding the presentation of online artistic activities within a gallery setting, and we attended as many residencies as we could. Finding a format to review everything that went on last month wasn’t easy. We eventually decided to crib the form of curator Laurel Ptak's statement, a conversation between herself and art historian Leigh Claire LaBerge over Skype, and exchanged our impressions of "IRL" over email.

Ceci: The first "IRL" residency I attended was the performance for Club Internet. Some have grumbled that this "performance" was boring -- just a bunch of people around laptops. But I stayed at the gallery for almost two hours, talking to Laurel about the use of (and resistance to) digital manipulation in commercial photography during the 1980s, the subject of her academic research that preceded her blog iheartphotogaph. I also had an interesting talk with Club Internet founder Harm van den Dorpel. I don't know if we really needed the gallery setting or even the production of Club Internet in the background to have that kind of dialogue.

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