Envisioning critical post-internet art through the lenses of decolonial pedagogy and critical media literacy in art foundations education

Expanding on my 2018 FATE in Review article titled "What Might a Post-Internet Art Foundations Course Look Like?" this presentation seeks to reframe post-internet art as a catalyst for decolonial pedagogy and critical media literacy in digital art foundations. Post-internet refers to the overall condition in which artists have become immersed through such highly networked environments in the twenty-first century. However, most of the discourses around post-internet art fail to grapple with the important critiques toward the attention of mainstream contemporary art to post-internet artists who are generally white, from the West, and tend to avoid situating their practice within political action and societal change. This presentation will address this problem through a discussion of several artists of color that engage counternarratives of intersectional feminist, queer, trans, anti-racist, and disability subjectivities within new media and post-internet discourses. Beyond viewing these artist practices as token inclusion into a predominantly hegemonic contemporary art and new media foundations curriculum, this pedagogical approach focuses on the artists’ voices as a fluid framework for teaching concepts of decolonial decentering and critical media literacy through digital art foundations. These counternarratives open vital classroom dialogues that critically engage assumptions of fixed and universal categories of formal skills and techniques of artmaking, while disrupting narratives of fixedness of artist identity and subjectivity. The session will conclude with a list of flexible principles teachers might follow or adapt to augment a digital art foundations that deploys a critical post-internet curriculum toward decolonial and critical media literacy.