23 Artworks to See and Hear Online – ARTnews.com

As museums, galleries, and other art spaces have shut down across the world while officials work to contain the coronavirus, many of us are left to contend with looking at art from home. The good news is this: While many artworks are best engaged in person, many others come across just as well when seen or heard through speakers and screens. Below are 22 suggestions for works you can experience right now, from the comfort of your own home.

Louise Lawler, Birdcalls (1972–81)
Louise Lawler is best known for her cunning photographs of artworks in the midst of being installed, but back before she became famous as a figure of the Pictures Generation, she made this sound piece in which she intones white male artists’ names in such a way that the sound like bird calls. Whether as a powerful feminist work or otherwise a funny piece about appropriation that involves literally parroting her male colleagues’ names, Birdcalls is unforgettable—especially for the creative ways Lawler squawks out words like “Richter” and “Artschwager.”
Where to listen to it: Ubuweb

Barbara Hammer, Dyketactics (1974)
With 100 shots over the course of four minutes, Barbara Hammer’s most famous film features a cast of nude women who inhabit an idyllic forest and create a community together. Hammer envisioned Dyketactics as a work wholly removed from the ever-present male gaze, and it has become a landmark work of queer cinema for the way it portrayed real intimacy from a lesbian point of view.
Where to see it: Company Gallery’s online tribute to Hammer

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Mouth to Mouth (1975)
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha lived to be just 31 years old, but over the course of her short life she developed a pioneering and fascinating oeuvre that considered how ideas are translated through language. In this video, eight written characters in Korean get shown via text and via Cha mouthing them as staticky noise obscures what she is saying. The title, which puns the phrasing “living mouth to mouth,” implies that certain ideas are only communicable in person.
Where to see it: Ubuweb

Eduardo Kac, Reabracadabra (1985)
Starting in the early 1980s, Videotexto—a network that prefigured what we know as the internet today—offered Brazilians the chance to send each other videos and images using technology that prefigured what the digital sphere is today. Eduardo Kac opened up that digital space to allow for more artistic interventions, and in this moving-image work, he animates a poem in which the letter A appears to float through a void-like space.
Where to see it: Rhizome’s Net Art Anthology

Raphael Montañez Ortiz, The Kiss (1984–85)
Part of a movement in the ’80s in which artists relied on appropriation to understand the cultural contexts for mass-produced images, this video takes a six-second clip from the 1947 film Body and Soul (focused on a boxer whose life is turned upside-down by the business of the sports world) and, through a variety of editing techniques, expands it to last nearly seven minutes. The image stutters and jerks, offering viewers time to consider and re-consider what it would have meant to watch this couple lock lips on screen.
Where to see it: Ubuweb

VNS Matrix, A Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century (1991)
At the time this work was made by the four-person Australian collective VNS Matrix, the internet—then only just beginning to become a fixture of many people’s daily lives—was considered largely male. This work (a poster made available online to be printed by users free of charge) aimed to fight against that notion by bringing attention to what it called the “saboteurs of big daddy mainframe.” Upon its release, it was faxed, mailed, and wheatpasted all over the world.
Where to see (and print) it: Rhizome

Olia Lialina, My Boyfriend Came Back from the War (1996)
A classic of a loose movement known as net.art, this interactive work allows users to explore a vague narrative focused on a soldier’s trauma and his crumbling relationship with his partner through a series of black-and-white images, many of them rendered through low-resolution pictures culled from the internet. Lialina’s most famous piece has been celebrated for the various ways it translates cinematic style for a new medium—the artist has even called it a “netfilm.”
Where to see it: The artist’s website

Paul Pfeiffer, John 3:16 (2000)
This short video’s premise is seemingly simple, though it belies a rigorous use of technology. Over the course of 41 seconds, a basketball seems to glide into and out of players’ hands—the result of a painstaking and labor-intensive process that involved stitching together many appropriated images. Paul Pfeiffer has said that the passage of the New Testament that the title is referencing can be related to the flow of digital images—which “never break down and literally can live forever.”
Where to see it: Ubuweb

Mendi + Keith Obadike, Blackness for Sale (2001)
“Mr. Obadike’s Blackness has primarily been used in the United States and its functionality outside the US cannot be guaranteed. Buyer will receive a certificate of authenticity.” So reads the eBay listing that formed this work, in which the husband-and-wife artist duo tried to sell Keith’s race on the digital marketplace. Bidding started at $10; it ultimately was bid up to $152.50 over the course of 12 days.
Where to see it: The artists’ website

JODI, My%20Desktop (2002)
Since the mid-’90s, the artist duo JODI has been one of the foremost net.art entities, crafting digital works that open the ordered look of the internet and basic computer technology into spaces where text and images flow freely. For their “Desktop Performances,” the artists recorded themselves mucking around with folders and windows on their Apple desktops, delighting in the bizarre arrangements and sounds that resulted when they’d open a bunch at once.
Where to see it: The artist’s Vimeo

Petra Cortright, //EBCAM (2007)
A key work of a style commonly referred to as “post-internet” art, this video features the artist staring into her laptop’s lens while chintzy digital effects—swimming fish, pulsing hearts—dance beneath. Having been deleted from YouTube after the video-sharing service objected to the exhaustive and seemingly unrelated list of tags Cortright added (“trans fat” and “KFC” among them), it has since been restored and put back online.
Where to see it: Rhizome’s Net Art Anthology

Hito Steyerl, Lovely Andrea (2007)
During the 1980s, while she was a student in Tokyo, Steyerl modeled for photographs in which she appeared half-naked and bound up. A little over a decade ago, the acclaimed video artist went searching for those images in this piece that turns bondage into a metaphor for the many ways in which all of us are tethered to many different political contexts. The video prefigures Steyerl’s later interests in how the constant flow of digital images through the internet can be a violent act.
Where to see it: Ubuweb

Cao Fei, RMB City (2008–11)
Throughout her career, Cao Fei has pondered the various ways in which Chinese citizens have relied on fantasy as a way of escaping a reality marked for some by unfettered capitalism and oppressive governments. She took those themes to the internet with this work, which allows users to access a fictional city filled with a bizarre amalgam of structures, including a giant floating panda and a huge spinning wheel. It remains active, and Cao has documented it repeatedly over the years.
Where to see it: The artist’s website

Jon Rafman, Nine Eyes of Google Street View (2008–ongoing)
Starting more than a decade ago, Rafman began combing through Google Street View—the portion of its Maps service that offers views of given locations—and picked out some of the strangest images he found. Among the ones he reproduced on a viral Tumblr blog are a woman being dragged by her hair through an apartment complex, a nude female on a jetty, and a man in a skeleton costume in a stroller. Just last week, Rafman announced on Instagram that he officially returned to the series and would be posting more images in the weeks to come.
Where to see it: The artist’s Tumblr

Cory Arcangel, Drei Klavierstücke op. 11 (2009)
Just last week, a popular TikTok video featured a cat playing a Tangerine Dream–like tune on a keyboard. Consider it a debt to contemporary art as embodied by these three YouTube-based works, for which Cory Arcangel stitched together images culled from hours of cat videos. His montaged versions of those videos feature felines amateurishly playing the piano—though they’re cut in such a way that it sounds as though they’re performing a complex work of music, namely an essential Arnold Schoenberg piece that is considered innovative for its use of atonal sounds.
Where to see it: The artist’s YouTube channel

Ryan Trecartin, The Re’Search (2009–10)
During the early 2010s, Trecartin’s hyperactive videos made him an unexpected art-world sensation. Sitting through any of them can be a challenge, but for those up to the task, all four included in The Re’Search are worth the effort. As with many of Trecartin’s other works, the cast features a range of gender-bending young people who spout narcissistic and semi-nonsensical statements about their desires—in what many have considered an important reflection on how digital technology had fundamentally altered the way people present themselves in the world.
Where to see it: The artist’s Vimeo channel

Lin Ke, Washing Hands (2015)
Pounding electronic music becomes the unexpected soundtrack to a placid image of two hands being lathered in soap in this video, for which Lin Ke attempted to retrace the motions of hand-washing through his keyboard and mouse. Though it was made five years ago—well before most of us started thinking about appropriate hand-washing technique amid a coronavirus outbreak—it has taken on new relevancy.
Where to see it: The artist’s Vimeo channel

Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Walled/Unwalled (2018)
From the 2019 Venice Biennale straight to your laptop (for now, at least), Lawrence Abu Hamdan posted his work from the world’s biggest art event to his YouTube channel. In keeping with the Venice exhibition’s theme about borders, divisions, and divisiveness, Walled/Unwalled focuses on legal cases in which sounds heard through walls became key pieces of evidence.
Where to see it: The artist’s YouTube channel

Alejandro Cesarco, Learning the Language (Present Continuous 1), 2018
This tender video features Argentine pianist and scholar Margarita Fernández playing a movement from a Franz Schubert sonata and then, in voiceover, analyzing how it is used in Robert Bresson’s famed film Au Hasard Balthazar. Cesarco’s interest in the relationship between sound and image can feel at times academic, but his compassionate look at Fernández and her style for playing the Schubert sonata bring the work to life.
Where to see it: Galleria Raffaele Cortese’s online viewing room

Carolyn Lazard, A Recipe for Disaster (2018)
An episode of Julia Child’s TV show The French Chef forms the basis for this video, which ponders how filmed images communicate—or fail to communicate—ideas to their audience. While footage of Child cracking eggs plays, a text scrolls over the images and a voiceover is read to match it: “3 INGREDIENTS. EGGS. SALT. BUTTER,” the text reads. “3 MATERIALS. IMAGE. SOUND. TEXT. NO MORE INTERVENTIONS AS THE CONDITION OF ACCESS.”
Where to see it: The artist’s website

Leilah Weinraub, SHAKEDOWN (2018)
A feature-length version of this work (among the finest inclusions in the film program of the 2017 Whitney Biennial) unexpectedly became the first non-adult film to stream through the website Pornhub earlier this year. Why? Weinraub, the former CEO of the fashion brand Hood by Air, focuses on the importance of a Black lesbian strip club in South Los Angeles and features interviews with people who frequented it.
Where to see it: Pornhub through the end of March, then the Criterion Channel

Sky Hopinka, Cloudless Blue Egret of Summer (2019)
The protagonist of this video is Castillo de San Marcos, a fortress in St. Augustine, Florida, that acted as a prison for Indigenous people on two occasions—during the Seminole Wars in the 1830s and the Indian Wars in the 1880s. Typically split across two channels, the video considers how places seemingly untouched by history contain records of traumatic events.
Where to see it: The artist’s website