LAN Party in Conversation with Fakewhale
LAN Party is a networked curatorial & research duo based in Paris, Tokyo, and online. Founded by Vienna Kim and Benoit Palop, the project channels the raw energy of the internet, gaming theory, and digital art.
For the past year and a half, they’ve been refining their signature style—curating exhibitions like The Crypto Pawnshop on SuperRare and TEXTSCAPE: ASCII Art Textmode & Its Derivatives on Zora, publishing texts, hosting community events, and dropping BLOG by LAN Party, a monthly HyperSub delving into digital art and internet (sub)cultures. Their work examines how we engage with art in an era where the internet is both a playground and a battleground, where technocapitalism tightens its grip, yet new creative possibilities and theoretical frameworks continue to emerge.
In this interview, we talk about how they bring fresh perspectives to the digital art world, initiate critical dialogues, and challenge conventional narratives in the field.
Can you tell us how you both met and what brought the idea of forming a curatorial duo?
Benoit: Vienna and I were both freelancing at SuperRare in 2022, working on editorial gigs, when we started reading each other’s texts. We quickly clicked over a shared passion for digital art, gaming, aesthetic theory, Animal Crossing, and the weirdest layers of the web. We both have an academic background in art, have been grinding in the industry for over a decade, and are internet-pilled & terminally nerdy. We like smart, long, and painful theoretical texts, but above all, we love having fun online. We’re on the same page, especially when it comes to the deep internet (sub)cultures, so working together has been super fluid.
We first connected on socials, sharing silly memes and bonding over the internet’s playful side. The idea for LAN Party really took off when ONBD invited me to curate a show on SuperRare. I pitched the idea to Vienna, and we decided to work on it together, writing our first essay (published in Massage Magazine) and bringing together artists like Polygon1993, Saeko Ehara, Guruguruhyena, Occulted, and Olivia Pedi. A few months later, we officially named the project, and it’s been a super dynamic journey ever since.
Your work is clearly tied to internet cultures, but the internet itself is always changing. How do you approach curating in such a constantly shifting space, and where do you feel your practice stands right now?
Benoit: The internet is always evolving. But rather than pushing back against change, we are working with its loops. Aesthetic revivals like Y2K, ASCII, low-poly, and hyperpop, along with the craving for the wildness of the early internet, show that digital culture isn’t linear. It echoes. Curating within this context is super exciting but also not easy. It demands a hybrid approach, part archivist, part researcher, part experimenter, and fully tastemaker.
With LAN Party, we recontextualize these endless cycles, not just through art but by critically exploring how online (sub)cultures sustain themselves. Whether it’s through forum-based community building, decentralized networks, onchain art platforms, or Web3 socials—even the less degen, less nerdy ones— we map out these cultural shifts while building spaces for independent creativity. The internet might be restless, but within that chaos we find patterns, and through our work, we try to amplify the ones that bring freedom.
Internet art has evolved from net.art to post-internet, crypto art, and now what we might call onchain culture. With online spaces becoming increasingly corporatized, are we witnessing its peak, a transformation, or a decline? Do you think there’s still a distinct movement emerging from the internet today, or has ‘internet art’ simply dissolved into a broader digital aesthetic?
Vienna: The ‘onchain culture’ phase of internet art’s trajectory phased out of favour two years ago, although of course back then we called them NFTs. One year ago, Kat Kitay offered that the ‘new’ internet art movement is ‘Technoromanticism’, which favours materialising the digital through processes such as 3D printing, and through this materialism ‘allegorizes the beauty and horror of postmodern life’.
It’s true that I’ve seen quite a lot of these types of artworks emerge. But the problem is that the internet moves at such a rapid pace and I already feel we’ve moved onto something else. Now there are discussions of ‘Internet-Realism’, which is maybe a less sexier (but definitely way more practical) approach to thinking about the internet that acknowledges both pessimistic and optimistic arguments for technology, and aims to recontextualise the internet as supplementary to our lives, rather than the source of a virtual one.
Of course, all this bearing in mind that there are still artists engaging with net.art, post-internet art and crypto art, so these strands are all existing concurrently. That’s the beauty of art on the internet, I suppose. It’s as diversified and rhizomatic as the internet itself.
Beyond aesthetics, what do you guys see as the deeper cultural or sociopolitical implications of these influences on digital art and internet culture?
Benoit: Technostalgia hits hard because it reminds us of a time when the internet felt more DIY, personal, and less gentrified. But looking at today’s landscape, alternative gaming, the cosy and resilient web, and decentralized socials like Lens or Farcaster are directly responding to the overly organized and broligarchy-owned platforms that dominate the mainstream internet. These platforms often prioritize monetization and visibility over genuine creativity and art. In my opinion, the resurgence of older internet models reflects a desire to regain autonomy. Perhaps it’s less about nostalgia and more a critique of how corporate forces and centralized control have shaped the internet into the doom-scrolling experience we have today.
It’s crucial to break down the expectation that everything online must be monetized or gamified for visibility. The deeper cultural implication is about reclaiming space that is independent of these capital-driven structures. I think this is what everybody wants. At least for us. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The monetization of digital art and online subcultures often waters down their original ethos. From an anti-capitalist standpoint, how do you approach curating in a way that resists commodification while still giving visibility to the artists and movements you engage with?
Vienna: It is incorrect to think that having an anti-capitalist approach to art negates any means for artists to live from their work. It is not the act of selling art that leads to dilution of its ethos, but rather when commercialisation of art becomes commodity fetishism.
Web3 was once hailed as a radical alternative to platform capitalism, but now we’re seeing many of the same patterns of centralization, gatekeeping, and financial speculation emerge. Given your thoughts on the commodification of digital art, do you still see potential for on-chain culture to break these cycles, or is it just another illusion of decentralization feeding into the same old power structures?
Benoit: Web3 has a lot of potential and I truly believe in it, but it’s clear that right now some of the same issues such as centralization, gatekeeping, and speculation, are creeping in. The dream of decentralization is still alive ofc, however, it’s a work in progress. It’s not perfect yet, and some of the systems that were meant to disrupt the status quo are starting to mirror the same power dynamics we’ve seen before. That said, there are many frens grinding hard to make it happen, and I believe we will get there. Eventually. It’s just going to take time, effort, and dedication to push through and build the kind of fully decentralized culture we’re after.
Vienna: I would argue that speculation and the trap of platform economies have always existed in the Web3 space since the previous bull market. The very fact that major NFT market places from back in the day, such as Foundation and SuperRare, began as gatekept spaces that required an invitation to join, is proof of this. This sense of platform centralisation has just compounded with the extended effects of the current bear, with Zora making major changes to their platform at a frenetic pace (first migrating from an art platform to a social media platform, now turning all creations into coins…) and multiple marketplaces having shut down in the past year or so.
The solution to this: artists and creators need to use the tools that Web3 and the blockchain offer independently of company-owned solutions. The promise of Web3 is not a matter of using crypto rails packaged and provided for by companies. The whole point is that individuals can take the technology into their own hands. We haven’t reached the point where artists are able to do this easily; it’s a technical learning curve, and most artists just want to focus on making their works, not learning how to code their own smart contracts or integrating tools provided by companies like Manifold into their own websites (this latter option is already kind of reliant on a third party, but feels slightly more autonomous than relying on a platform). But then, I wonder, if artists don’t want to learn and address the technical aspects of the blockchain as a formative part of their practice, what’s the point of being in Web3?
With the internet and digital art changing so fast, do you think there’s still room for real experimentation, or has everything just turned into flat content? How does LAN Party keep things fresh and create a space that still feels alive?
Benoit: I do think there’s still space for doing cool and innovative things, but it’s getting harder to find amidst all this noise compared to a few years ago. Everything is turning into flat content. That’s exactly why LAN Party tries to stay away from that trap by staying true to our vibe. We don’t have any pressure to conform. We’re curating not just digital art, but the wider culture of the internet: niche aesthetics, forgotten platforms, disruptive gaming, and the ways people slay online.
Our goal is to document, uplift, and keep internet (sub)culture weird. We’re here to build a cozy, thoughtful community that feels authentic, rather than chasing trends that standardize everything.
Vienna: I personally don’t think everything is turning into flat content, but I think it’s pretty obvious to state that most digital art created within and outside of web3 remains pretty surface level. It looks interesting to the eye, can appeal to our personal tastes, but at the end of the day most of it is just cool or pretty things to look at. That’s not a judgment statement btw–I think such artworks are also valid and important and can make people feel something significant (joy, nostalgia, sadness, whatever!), and beautify our internet. But perhaps such artworks do indeed veer closer to the category of ‘content’? Again, I don’t think this is necessarily bad. A lot of content online is really really cool.
Where I’m focussing my attention these days are on digital artworks that have something to say politically. This impulse comes from an observation that under the current trend of far right politics across the globe, where tech accelerationism is often an integrated part of its agenda, I think artists working with technology should take a stand. This can either be done through subject matter or experimentations in technique (especially with AI), or perhaps even a secret third way. I’m still researching what this looks like concretely, but these types of works are clearly the ones that avoid the ‘content’ definition–veering even towards Anti-Memetics–and can present a fresh or important point of view.
What’s coming up next for LAN Party?
Benoit: Our monthly drop on HyperSub, BLOG by LAN Party, keeps rolling. Each edition hooks up our subscribers with a freshly written text or essay, our nerdy picks in reading, gaming, exhibitions, and whatever we think is cool, plus an exclusive visual from an artist in our community.
We’re also working on an exhibition at the moment, alongside some upcoming texts and ideas that are still brewing. What’s really on our radar for the next chapter is shifting from our research in technostalgia. We’ve done a lot of that over the past year and a half and want to move onto new research. While technostalgia will always be important and somehow present in what we are doing, we’re gradually moving into gaming subcultures, exploring its theory a bit more, and, of course, having even MORE fun online. At the same time, we want to avoid locking LAN Party into a rigid model. The project evolves with the internet itself, staying unpredictable, progressive, and always plugged into the chaos.
Vienna: ദ്ദി(˵ •̀ ᴗ – ˵ ) ✧
*All visuals in this interview are by our artist fren from the cosy internet, elle. tysm <3
Vienna is a Paris-based art historian, writer, curator and web designer with a specialisation in new media art and technologies. After obtaining her BA in Art History from the University of St Andrews, and her MA in Art Business from the Sotheby’s Institute of Art, London, she has dedicated her career to exploring the intersection of the art market and technology. She has worked as a freelance writer for seven years, exploring a range of topics about art on the blockchain, internet subcultures, and video game art. Publications include WIRED Japan, Fisheye Immersive, LeRandom Editorial, Photo London, and Business of Fashion.
Benoit is a Tokyo-based digital culture producer, writer, and curator specializing in digital and web-based art. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Design & Fashion Research, and a Master’s degree in Digital Media Art Research from Sorbonne-Pantheon University, Paris. He has published texts in/collaborated with WIRED Japan, VICE, SuperRare, MUTEK, GALLERY, i-D, Lens Protocol, Kaiber.AI, Society for Arts and Technology, and Creators (VICE + Intel). Through curatorial & research projects, Benoit has researched internet-based art and net-subculture for over 12 years. He has been featured in media outlets like Forbes Japan and the Google Media Lab’s blog.
fakewhale
Founded in 2021, Fakewhale advocates the digital art market's evolution. Viewing NFT technology as a container for art, and leveraging the expansive scope of digital culture, Fakewhale strives to shape a new ecosystem in which art and technology become the starting point, rather than the final destination.
You may also like
Sasha Katz in conversation with Karmacowboy: Hyperreal Heroines
Introducing Sasha Katz Artist: Sasha Katz – Birthplace: Moscow, Russia. – Living in: Ath
Pablo Rodriguez-Fraile in Conversation with Fakewhale
Introducing Pablo Rodriguez-Fraile Digital Art Patron Visit Profile Co-founder of the RFC Art Collec
Patrick Berube, Autre/Fois at Art Center of Kamouraska, Kamouraska, Quebec
“Autre/Fois” by Patrick Berube at Art Center of Kamouraska, Kamouraska, Quebec, 15/06/20
