Today marks the Internet’s symbolic birth date, thanks to the publication of the first “request for comments” or RFC, which allowed research, proposals and methodologies applicable to Internet technology to be shared publicly, way back in 1969. Although the thing we call the web was still a long way off (often cited as 1 January 1983) this moment heralded a huge shift in innovation and paved the way for a world where we spend hours scrolling through our smartphones, consulting Wikipedia and ordering next day delivery. It has also borne completely new forms of art that interrogate the information superhighway in myriad ways, earning the broad term “post-Internet art”. Hito Steyerl is one of the pioneers, known for her groundbreaking video work that investigates mass media, material culture, militarism and feminism. Her most well-known work, How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File (2013), mocks an instructional video designed to combat obscurity in the digital world, as discussed in Gary Zhexi Zhang’s feature for Issue 23.
