There’s a standard problem with exhibiting internet art: the internet is not an object, and a gallery is a room full of objects. The usual solutions — a screen on a plinth, a projection, a browser on a monitor — turn a live medium into a display of itself.
Exonemo solved it by not exhibiting the internet at all. They held a jumble sale.
The duo
Yae Akaiwa and Kensuke Sembo formed Exonemo in 1996 in Tokyo, and have been based in New York since 2015. Thirty years is an unusual run in a field where most practices don’t survive one platform shift.
Their work explores the relationship between technologies and their users, using humour and deliberately awkward perspectives on what digital media does to everyday life. Sembo now teaches in the New Media department at Tokyo University of the Arts, which means the practice feeds directly into the next generation of Japanese media artists.
They’ve shown at the Whitney Museum (0 to 1 / 1 to 0), the New Museum, NTT InterCommunication Center, and the Aichi Triennale.
Internet Yami-Ichi
The Internet Yami-Ichi — “Internet Black Market” — has run since 2012. It’s a flea market for things that exist because of the internet: discarded hard drives, obsolete gadgets, handwritten passwords, screenshots, memes materialised as physical objects, and entirely absurd products born from online culture.
It started because Apple rejected one of their apps.
That origin story is the whole argument in miniature. Shut out of the official distribution channel, the response wasn’t to appeal or to make a compliant app — it was to build a parallel, unregulated, physical marketplace and call it a black market. The joke and the critique are the same gesture.
It has travelled to New York, Berlin, Taichung, Seoul, Linz, Brussels and Amsterdam.
Why the format works better than an exhibition
Two things, and both are worth stealing.
It makes the immaterial tangible without representing it. A screenshot printed and sold for money is not a picture of internet culture — it’s a piece of internet culture that has acquired a price and a physical form. The “flotsam of cyberspace” becomes objects you can haggle over. Nobody has to explain what it means.
It is genuinely social. A Yami-Ichi is a room full of people talking, selling, buying and laughing, which is what the internet actually is and what an exhibition of internet art almost never is. Staging internet culture as a social event rather than a display catches the thing that a wall-mounted screen structurally cannot.
The travelling has an extra payoff the duo have noted: our relationship with the network shifts from country to country. A Yami-Ichi in Linz sells different junk than one in Seoul, and the difference between them is a portrait of two internets.
What holds up
Net art from the 1990s and 2000s has aged badly in one specific way: much of it depended on the technical conditions of its moment — a browser quirk, a plugin, a platform — and is now either broken or requires an emulator and a wall label.
Exonemo’s most durable work sidesteps that by being about the relationship rather than built on the infrastructure. A flea market doesn’t bit-rot. The Yami-Ichi has survived Flash, the mobile transition, social media consolidation and the AI wave because its premise — that the internet produces physical detritus and strange desires, and that these are funny and worth examining together in a room — hasn’t needed updating.
For anyone working in internet-native practice now, the durable lesson is that the medium doesn’t have to be the material.
Related Reading
- Internet Yami-Ichi — exonemo works
- exonemo: 0 to 1 / 1 to 0 — Whitney Museum of American Art
- exonemo — NTT InterCommunication Center archive
- A black market for people “consumed by the internet” — Rhizome
- Kensuke Sembo & Yae Akaiwa — New Museum
- exonemo — Civic Creative Base Tokyo (CCBT)
- The Internet Yami-Ichi — Aksioma