The possibilities for these transformations, alternative methods of viewing “media” which essentially amounts to an arbitrary assemblage of data, has thus far been most thoroughly examined in the field of “information aesthetics,” a field as distanced from Post-Internet art as it is close to design, cartography, and indexing. Its fault is in its attempt to encapsulate large amounts of data—practical information, experience—into an aesthetic and understandable shorthand. In other words, information aesthetics provides in one object both a representation and the components which make up its source in an attempt to illustrate or arrive at knowledge.
While Conceptualism as outlined by Kosuth may be limiting in its reliance on art propositions as enclosed tautological systems, its foundations—delineating progressive art with the same zeal Greenberg applied to ascribing modernism its “purity”—hold true: “art’s viability is not connected to the presentation of visual (or other) kinds of experience.” For us to receive a piece of art and determine from it some piece of empirical information about the world at large would seem almost a bewildering proposition, even in a cultural climate where we have accepted that the singular qualification for the moniker “art” is the intention of any one individual to label it as such.
