Much of the work in Unmonumental at the New Museum refers to our contemporary condition of over-stimulation, hyper-aggregation, channel-surfing, and accelerated consumption—all lumped together under the theme of collage. And an aesthetic rag-picking of discarded cultural products from political slogans to porn is vividly apparent in the gleaners-like approach to sculpture, the cut-and-paste 2-D works and layered assemblages of sound. (Over a period of two months, the New Museum added each of these sections one by one to create the now massive multi-media exhibition.) But a powerful influence underlying Unmonumental is the Internet itself. With its towering junk piles of spam and pop-ups and multi-windowed multi-tasking strata of screens, the Internet is the true home of twenty-first century collage. Or it could be.

There are 14 projects presented in Montage: Unmonumental Online (curated by Lauren Cornell and Marisa Olsen), the final section added to complete Unmonumental. Many of the artists in Montage—William Boling, Jessica Ciocci, Nina Katchadourian, Guthrie Lonergan—engage varieties of digital collage, arranging pictures from an endless well of recycled (and often bizarre) online imagery. YouTube-derived projects such as Oliver Laric’s 50 50 (2007), a spliced short of 50 people lip-synching to a 50 Cent song, and John Michael Boling’s triptych of long-haired hard-core guitarists in Guitar Solo Threeway (2006) remix the possibilities of collage karaoke. Each of these projects may offer a unique nod to topics like celebrity worship, or how images are weighted and valued online, but, on the whole, they don’t read as anything more than entertaining bits that reflect the overwhelming weirdness of what people post on the Internet. A strong sense of a life lived online—on MySpace, Second Life, YouTube, Facebook, blogs, hyperlinks, etc.—is apparent in the offerings of instant-gratification from concepts that don’t ask for a lot more than a click-share-delete attention span.

However, this also could be a result of the medium—even when displayed on fancy flat screen TVs in a museum, these projects can’t escape their online origins. Some don’t try to, like works by Charles Broskowski and Olia Lialina that engage the structure of the Internet itself, with a nostalgic sense of medium-specificity. Paul Slocum’s Time-Lapse Homepage (2003) is a frenetic self-portrait comprised of 1,000 screenshots of his evolving home page, filmed and shown in high-speed. As background colors and animal mascots flash by and various text headings are thrown around and highlighted, the role of the homepage emerges as an important site for identity-construction: One day I represent myself with digital skulls, a few days later, with a howling wolf. Lastly, and most arresting (for better or for worse), is Kenneth Tin-Kin Hung’s animated mash up of political figures and pop culture titled Because Washington is Hollywood for Ugly People (2007). Cheney is shown as a blow-up doll, Arafat as Godzilla, and Condi Rice as a flying turd, all bouncing around against day-glo backdrops. (South Park outlandishness is an obvious source of inspiration.) Perhaps this is the natural result, some 70 years on, of blunt political outrage that all began with John Heartfield’s 1930s collages of such images as a baby chewing on a swastika-embossed axe. In comparison to Hung’s visual barrage, Heartfield seems rather genteel.

Lyra Kilston is a writer living in New York. She is an editor at Modern Painters.