The last decade has seen an incredible growth in the production and distribution of images and other cultural artefacts. The internet is the place where all these cultural products are stored, classified, voted, collected and trashed. What is the impact of this process on art making and on the artist? Which kind of dialogue is going on between amateur practices and codified languages? How does art respond to the society of information? This is a book about endless archives, image collections, bees plundering from flower to flower and hunters crawling through the online wilderness.

Spirit Surfing is an attempt to preserve and share a body of texts and visual essays written by artist, actor and musician Kevin Bewersdorf between 2002 and 2010, collected and edited by Domenico Quaranta without the explicit consent of the author, but according to his philosophy of sharing. Bewersdorf has been very active online between 2007 and 2009, as one of the leading figures of the so-called “pro-surfers” generation. With his works and texts, he had a long-standing influence on the practice and theory of art, not only net-based. When, around 2010, he decided to stop actively promoting himself as an artist, ...