Long version:

The severely repressed and censored information flow structures of the Egyptian autocracy were–amongst other factors–a large contributor to the intense swelling and eventual organization of its citizens [to protest in disgust, its country's misuse of power]. Today, we have learned that public isn’t simply defined by what one knows, but rather that it is a meta-concept (Zeynep Tufekci) consisting of knowing what others know, one knows and so on. Overcoming pluralistic ignorance, or in other words, overcoming thinking that one is perpetually in the minority, seems to start with distribution and the rearrangement of receiving networks. Yet, this claim some how, comes off vague largely because of its specificities. At what weight of severity do such distributive techniques become powerful and actually effective? Is it with time and thus accumulation that allow for collective empowerment, criticality and awareness?

I would like to think, perhaps naively, that the organization of information and its subsequent dispersal–this only effective alongside leaking/intervening/subverting this information into specific channels and outlets–is enough to shift individual perception and henceforth introduce potentiality. We need propaganda and ideology, but a kind that is undeclared from the premise, a formation without an immediate graspable structure.

The, Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, was a large, voluminous, series of French encyclopedia’s edited by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert published between 1751 and 1772.  The Encyclopédie was made up of hundreds of contributors, including scientists, philosophers, scholars, craftsman, etc. and as one can only imagine, its contents were disparate and its contributors largely politically un-unified. Regardless, in an attempt to encompass and archive the world’s knowledge, the Encyclopédie was meant to be dispersed and read in order to educate the individual (in the process freeing her logic from the church).  Yet, while many of its contributors remained disinterested in reforming France and a great deal never actually read the immense volumes, the Encyclopédie played an integral precursory role in the French Revolution: its symbolic value represented changing paradigms.

Short version:

A conversation between Louis Doulas and Bunny Rogers

Sister Unn’s, 2011-2012

LD: A lot of your work seems to explore the transitional moments of adolescence into adulthood through sexual introductions like Dotyk and Waiting for Anne, as well as through sentimental mementos like the embroidered letterman jackets of Sister Jackets and even the webpage Dad’s Big Socks. With this type of memorialization, there’s also this recurrent fascination with animals as self-identifying symbols: Bunny Rogers, Pones, A Very Young Rider, Lambslut, etc. I wonder where these animal identities intersect with this loss of naïve youth and what your relationship to them is within these transgressive adolescent shifts? Why concentrate on the prepubescent stage? What role do animals play within this shift?

BR: I am interested in deconstructing the comfort felt regarding how we view the transition from girlhood to adulthood. I do not think I concentrate on the prepubescent stage, at least in the biological sense of the word. When my work is categorized with that term it sets up a discussion of a socially-familiar understanding of what [female] prepubescence means, the definition of which is confusing and contradictory. We build value systems based on that understanding. These terms are applied in an assessment of my work and me. Some of my works try to make these terms unstable, by questioning how we arrive at them. The challenge is how to broaden the grounds on which these concepts are positioned as is evident by the limitations of phrasing we have even when trying to interpret the works investigating these concerns. I see a lot of overlap in mass culture’s sexualization and exploitation of children and animals.

i.e.

Dance Precisions / Single Ladies / Pomona
The Chipettes – Single Ladies [Put A Ring On It

This area of conversation (which the above videos are a part of) is one I want to expand upon.

LD: Since 2008 you’ve been using Twitter to archive every Facebook status update you’ve made, rendering your Twitter account as regurgitory. Twitter has a 140 limit while Facebook’s is 63,206. By archiving with Twitter you have to make a conscious decision on your Facebook to keep within this 140 limit. This works out for you as your updates are generally a word or a sentence long. How do your status updates inform or continue your process of performance? Are they related at all?

BR: I have never been able to consistently maintain an up-to-date private journal in the traditional way that I know them to be – physical or online, despite wanting to and believing in the relevance of personal recordkeeping. As a kid I enjoyed re-reading and analyzing old diary entries while entertaining the fantasy of dying young and leaving behind evidence of my perceived precociousness and unparalleled imagination. In this way there has always been an audience in mind. I still relate to these feelings but I have gained a desire to share and connect with greater immediacy. Building a public archive is one way in which I am able to realize aspects of these motivations.

Pones, Ongoing

LD: As a tribute to the Rego Park flower shop and homage to the two characters in the novel, The Ice Palace, by Tarjei Vesaas, Sister Unn’s was a flower shop run by you and Filip Olszewski in Forest Hills Queens. The shop seems to have caught much of the local resident’s attention; curious and confused about its purpose and intention. A gallery is always immediately recognized as a space for art, but with Sister Unn’s this context is obfuscated. What were some of your intentions surrounding this allegorical intervention?

BR: To build a house of worship

“True love is a rose behind glass

It’s locked and kept closed”

LD: Grieving over someone, something and someplace are central themes found throughout your body of work. Could you talk more about the process of mourning and what it means to make it a focal point in your work?

BR: I think some things you get over and some you do not. I disagree that mourning is a finite experience (the ‘mourning period’). There are beliefs that there is a correct way or length of time to grieve the death of a loved one, yet it is popular and accepted to say, “you never really get over your first love”. This is a telling convergence of values that has informed a number of my magical artistic creations.

LD: Your entire online identity seems to culminate in an ongoing performance and I wonder where you differentiate between acting and a more consolidated separate persona? I’m also wondering how your online and offline performances such as 9years and Dotyk allow for playful, childlike gender representation or to what degree they reinforce them?

BR: It is freeing to be able to have subtle shifts between doing online works, presenting documentation of work, and connecting with like-minded people. I really enjoy working online because I can interact with a variety of audiences that are not easily accessible otherwise.

9Years, Ongoing

Originally published on Rhizome

2012

A conversation between Louis Doulas and Andrew Norman Wilson

The Inland Printer – 164, 2012

Through webinars, installations, power points, performances, audio meditations and videos, Andrew Norman Wilson’s interventions into the brands and infrastructures of Silicon Valley and other worldwide tech corporations question the roles of labor, power and capital; instigations, integral to understanding the movement of information economies in the global marketplace as well as the power relations that emerge from within them.

ScanOps, titled after the internal department for Google’s onsite book scanning contractors, is Wilson’s latest series of works that reveal the software distortions and hands of ScanOps employees found in the photographic scanning site.

x

LD: Workers Leaving the Googleplex, responded to two versions of the film Workers Leaving the Factory: one by Harun Farocki and the other, the original by the Lumière brothers. The premise of your own video of course was to make a work that captured the shift in labor from the industrial proletariat into the informational proletariat. The yellow badge workers were presented in parallel to Lumières’ workers and have become the focal point of another series of works, ScanOps. Could you first talk about the meta-hierarchies that existed at Google, specifically the perks, benefits, opportunities or lack thereof that existed between various color badges?

ANW: Using Workers Leaving the Googleplex as an illustration of these hierarchies, white, red, and green badge workers on the left side of the image are seen passing by, entering, and exiting a variety of buildings at the Googleplex. Some of them ride the Google loaner bikes, some of them enter a luxury limo shuttle headed towards San Francisco. Some of them may be leaving work, some may be walking to another building to pick up their laundry or exercise in one of the gyms, some may even be just arriving at the Google campus to eat a free meal from one of Google’s 20 gourmet cafes after a day of working at home. The yellow badge workers on the right side of the image are seen leaving the one building they are allowed access to. Much like the workers in the Lumière film, the yellow badge workers are leaving at the same time because their superiors have asked them to. But their synchronized departure is not especially arranged for a camera. They are leaving at 2:15 pm, like they do every day. The separation and exclusion of the yellow badge class creates difference in movement. Their movement is much closer to the industrial proletariat of the prior two films (by Lumière and Farocki) than the kinetic elite of the white, red, and green badged workers sharing the screen.

Representing movement was the primary goal of the Lumière film, and I was interested in doing the same with the Googleplex video. Yet, as Farocki points out in his film, we have come to recognize that moving images not only represent movement, but can also grasp for concepts. And so Workers Leaving the Googleplex suggests both transformations and continuities from where Farocki and Lumière had left us, grasping for connections in social/aesthetic systems.

LD: Could you extrapolate a bit more on these notions of movement, especially with regards to its positioning within particular social systems?

ANW: In all three works, what we see are work forces in motion, organized simultaneously by the work structure (a temporal synchronization), the factory gates (a spatial grouping), and the filmmakers’ choreography of this spatio-temporal relationship. In the Googleplex video, we are presented with a class-based system of access (or lack thereof) that can script different flows of movement. Google allows a lot of room for its white, red, and green badge workers to engage in free play; however, movement and action that exceeds the boundaries of that scripting and poses a threat to the company, such as my activity around the exterior of the yellow badges building, can set Google Security and Google Legal into specified movements around that atypical behavior.

Movement entails an object and its change in position with respect to time. As we transition from the dominance of analog media such as film and books to digital media such as video and digitized books, the newer forms are still wholly inseparable from the material world. There are voltages in electronic circuits, server farms, upgraded tech for every new product cycle, and a persistent necessity for repetitive, manual labor despite technological progress and the increasing prominence of cultural and informational labor.

The video also presents us with the expansive aesthetic distributive system that it participates in as a viral video. It includes a spatial montage of multiple images – like the ads, related content, icons, additional windows and tabs, etc. that compose a screen during the viewing of a video online. The colored borders in the video are an information visualization of worker ratios within the respective images. Even the use of color HD video (with sound) is conceptually important in relation to Lumières’ film. Both works are emblematic of their particular historical moments, and both now circulate through contemporary distribution networks.

The Jolly Beggar – 12, 2012

LD: The digitalization of the Lumière film is actually a nice transitional point into understanding the contained content of ScanOps–which attempts to document the manual labor that continues to permeate under technological progress. Because of the hyper specialization of industries existing within a global market, we are increasingly isolated from the production and politics of our commodities. The tech commodity, Apple products for example, seem to be ever more hidden and locked away from the consumer view: an opaqueness that conceals understanding and restricts infrastructural intervention. Friendly UI graphics and sleek, ornament free, minimal design begins to take on a fetishized aura that most digital ephemera is marketed from the ground up in. First, how were you able to obtain these scans? And second, what can you say about this type of containment/exposure as it relates to the Google commodity?

ANW: I have been quietly collecting anomalies from Google Books for a couple years now. It’s another way of getting closer to those people I worked with, while of course still remaining out of touch with them. Krissy Wilson’s blog The Art of Google Books has made my searching much easier. Her criteria allows for a much more broad collection of images than what I’m after, and I’m more interested in printing the images than posting my finds online. I prefer to call what I’m collecting photographs as opposed to scans. Mass market books can be sliced open and fed into scanners, but the books I’m looking at come from library collections and need to be photographed from above. Therefore we occasionally see the backsides of workers hands. The project is called ScanOps because that is (or was) the internal department name for Google’s onsite book scanning contractors.

The photographs that I chose are Google Books images in which software distortions, the imaging site, and the hands of ScanOps employees are visible. They’re both indexical, and medium-specific. Their processes, digital manipulations, and material supports are folded within them. Because of the speed and volume with which Google is executing the Books project, they can’t possibly identify and correct all of the disturbances in what is supposed to be a seamless interface. Removed “for me” The accidents then complicate the categorizations of “immaterial” and “informational” labor in the Information Technology sector.

I choose photographs that have formal similarities to contemporary photography that emphasizes the materiality of the photographic support, such as work by Walead Beshty and Elad Lassry. By positioning ScanOps in relation to theirs, they can “read” as photographs, and extend in relationships to painting and sculpture through the discourses surrounding those artist’s work. And then there’s the fact that they’re photographs of books.

As Karen Barad puts it,

“That which is excluded in the enactment of knowledge-discourse-power practices plays a constitutive role in the production of phenomena – exclusions matter both to bodies that come to matter and those excluded from mattering.”

The fingers and software distortions that obscure the “pure information” in the books complicate Google’s technocratic proposals for a utopia of universally accessible knowledge. What emerges is an argument for the inseparability of matter and meaning, fusing a discussion of knowledge with ontological, ethical, and aesthetic issues.

LD: And Sergey Brin and Larry Page initially got in trouble for attempting the project, right?

ANW: Yes, because the complete copying of an entire book violates copyright, the photographers have been faced with lawsuits from the Authors Guild, the Association of American Publishers, and more. The settlement they all came to was rejected in court last year, but they’re scheduled to go to court again soon. And that’s just in the US, there’s much more resistance in certain European countries.

LD: I’m sure, as most of the texts (at least the ones featured throughout your series) originate from western spheres. But, the momentary visibility of the hand in each of the photographs also signifies and reveals something else here too: the social systems the workers exist within. Which relates back to the two films, especially the ‘movements’ of Lumières’ workers.

ANW: Someone has to turn a page and press a button. The workers compose part of the photographic apparatus, which, conceived in a broad sense includes not only the machinery, but the social systems within which photography operates. The anonymous workers, electrons, Sergey and Larry, the pink finger condoms, infrared cameras, the auto-correction software, the ink on my rag paper prints, me, the capital required to fund the project – we’re all in it. It’s not a dematerialized image world.

Our Wonderful Progress – 515 and The Inland Printer – 164, 2012

LD: Right, the worker’s presence reaffirms, or rather reasserts the materiality of information production. I suppose that this is the inherent contradiction that’s become especially apparent today in networked western societies: the liberation of information, of knowledge as a public commons that should be free and distributed–which isn’t a new idea–and then its simultaneous commodification and profitability. Before, you’ve often stated that Google, in this sense, is actually a factory and with this in mind, your work perhaps isn’t rendered so ambivalently, so I’m curious to hear your positions in regards to this type of information economy, and Google itself.

ANW: Everyone who uses the free Google perks – gmail, cloud-storage, Google Books, Blogger, YouTube – becomes a knowledge worker for the company. We’re performing freestyle data entry. Where knowledge is perceived as a public good, Google gathers its income from the exchange of information and knowledge, creating additional value in this process. Google, as we know it and use it, is a factory.

A few years ago the company afforded me free Naked Juice every day, Metronaps and the ability to have a conversation with Obama. You and I, Louis, are on g-chat now and fact checking through Google search. All art and artistic discourse participates in the market economy. This isn’t to say that art either supports or rejects the notion of a market transaction, or that art can’t affect social change. Just that there’s no outside.

Art’s radical potential is in its transparency. It has come to reject the form/content divide, whereas other disciplines have not been able to do so. The discourse of art is capable of becoming continuous with the world it sets out to describe, fully embracing its own material condition. Google, however, is a multinational corporation, and it values both the simplicity of its products and the privacy of its internal functions. There’s not much room for the consideration of things like the monetization of thought. It’s a company.

The Encyclopedia Americana – 879 and The Inland Printer – 152, 2012

Originally published on Rhizome

2012

Limitless Torrent is an ongoing series of texts exploring the practice of Athens-based collective KERNEL

Engine

In Engine, a Google search engine is quietly modified so that whenever one types in a keyword of interest, what results are instructions for ‘action’ or potential for action. What is meant by this? Typing in, let’s say, the word ‘computers’, one will receive not historical or general information concerning computers per say, but results such as ‘How to Build a Computer’, ‘How to Keep Your Computer Safe’, ‘How to Fix Your Relatives’ Terrible Computer’, so on and so forth. This small modification demonstrates a type of edit; the search is not directed to open up all and everything on a particular topic but to narrow down its results to specified articles, blog posts, websites, etc. that provide one with tools, or ‘instructions’ (The Instructional Capital) on executing things. Such an edit arguably directs the user to approach the internet not merely as a network of pure consumption, but a powerful tool with a particular user directed function. Engine provides one with informational means to fulfillment, something perhaps one forgets over time when hours and days are spent exhaustively surfing through the infinite websites consolidated within our Google Readers.

KERNEL SFD

What’s first interesting in KERNEL’s Software Freedom Day project, is that physical forms become functional platforms for public congregation in [public] physical space for non-physical, ‘virtual’, networked congregations. Context and purpose are created through the declaration of a space (the use of multi-purpose shelving furniture set up in various environments such as the university campus, the side street, etc.) dedicated, in this case, to celebrating Software Freedom Day. Constructions become relational devices that allow for social interfacing, for trading peer deemed important information, etc. while also demonstrating that events, settings and gatherings like these can be initiated by nearly anyone and everyone impromptu.

Like most of KERNEL’s and Moris’ projects, space—be it online or off—is used and emphasized as a hub for distribution, organization and potential political action. This is probably what one can appreciate and take most of out of their projects.

2011 – Present

A conversation between Louis Doulas and David Kraftsow

Screenshot of At My Funeral, 2011

LD: Much of your work involves recontextualizing a lot of YouTube and Twitter content. Through this rearranging and reorganizing you compose and assign new meaning to the often banal, unwittingly revealing always-growing archive of user-uploaded videos and status updates. User content here surpasses individual critique and instead is aesthetically reframed and sometimes even gamified under your curation. What does it mean for you to work with the uploads of others? What can you say about the role of the curator in this process?

DK: I’m not really sure if “curation” is the right word to describe my YouTube projects. While I do, on occasion, go out and hand-pick specific content for display (like for my fun cat video blog or Violet Flame supercut), most of the rest of my YouTube work is either the result of an autonomous script, or a user-initiated generator.

For example, I have a cron (autonomously executing process) running for my At My Funeral project that specifies search criteria for YouTube videos with comments that contain the phrase “at my funeral”. The script has generated a database of (to date) 21,000+ videos that people want to have played in their honor after they die.

Does this kind of algorithmic selection count as curation? The result can be really interesting and even kind of comedic. There is something hilarious to me about mechanically collecting every single “better than Bieber” YouTube comment ever written. But, beyond the initial specification of the program that does the collecting, it doesn’t involve any of my creative/curatorial input at all. The content is selected and displayed automatically.

If curation can simply involve the design and execution of such an algorithm, then the role of the curator in this case seems to be very similar to that of a data miner. Both are interested in creating programs that mechanically extract hidden patterns to reveal new meanings from a large dataset.

LD: In a 2009 Rhizome interview it’s mentioned you received a cease and desist letter from Google for your platform YooouuuTuuube. After briefly explaining Google’s argument, you hoped that they would continue to stand behind their ‘don’t be evil’ brand. Slowly today, with revealing videos like Workers Leaving the Googleplex and corporations increasingly pressured into transparency, do you still feel their motto is applicable to themselves? Could you walk through the legal processes of your own Google interaction and explain its current legal status?

DK: I think the Google motto is interesting just in the fact that a corporation apparently felt that it wasn’t enough to leave an ethical no-brainer like “Don’t Be Evil” an unstated, common sense assumption. Instead they went and codified it into an actual corporate motto. This may have started originally as a kind of joke within the company about corporate culture or something. But as Google becomes bigger and bigger, and wields more and more influence in our lives, it seems they are under an obligation to take the motto very seriously. In some instances, they apparently don’t do this.

Having said that, I don’t think Google is currently, by-and-large, an evil company, but they could still change my mind! I did watch that Workers Leaving the Googleplex video when it first came out, and I remember thinking it was pretty overblown overall. I wasn’t very convinced of any Great Google Atrocities in watching it.

And regarding the whole YooouuuTuuube thing: basically, what happened was their lawyers sent me a C&D stating that their main concern was the name of the project being too close to the YouTube trademark name, and that my use of their favicon was also an infringement of their copyright. In a fit of teen-rebellion, I changed the favicon to the CopyLeft symbol, and ignored the request to take the site down. Eventually they sent me another one, and I wrote back with a long letter emphasizing the project’s status as an art piece with no competitive intention, and offered to move the project to a new domain but also to publicize the reason for the move. At this point the site had millions of visitors, and I guess they didn’t really want to bother with it anymore since they never wrote me back after that.

So, I can’t actually say what the current status of the project is exactly. My best guess is “legal grey area”.

A fun footnote on the topic of evil corporations: last year when I went to submit a mobile version of YooouuuTuuube to the iOS App Store, Apple rejected it immediately because the name was too close to “YouTube”. It wasn’t even their own trademark, but they still saw it as a reason for rejection. So I ended up being forced to change the name of the mobile version to (super lame) “MultiTube” because of this. Ironically, on the Google-controlled Android market, the original name was never an issue. Food for thought!

Screenshot of Lyrics, 2010

LD: You work exclusively on the Internet and I’m curious if you’ve ever considered translating any of your works offline? Perhaps, First-Person Tetris is the closest to maybe revealing some of these desires, but do you ever feel the need to work offline? Or is the web the most flexible and fluid environment for you? How do you think browser based works can be restrictive or limiting?

DK: I work mostly on the web because it reaches the most people. I grew up with it, and still love the idea of the web being this fluid, free, and open place. This has, sadly, started to change in the last decade with the rise of mobile platforms, walled-off social networks and other services. But as long as I can still make fun things that reach a lot of people, I’ll continue to make web-based stuff. That said, I’m starting to get more into making mobile apps and also desktop things, and I’ll probably be moving more in that direction in the future.

LD: Similar to the authorship conflicts of Relational Aesthetics, Internet-based artwork that incorporates the outsourcing of creative labor or the mining of user content faces contention when perpetuated within the art economy where autonomous authorship is valorized above all. As society and labor become more specialized where do you draw the line when acknowledging or attributing authorship? Are these notions merely misunderstood notions of democratic constituencies?

DK: Is it a cliché to invoke the “everything is a remix” mantra? When YooouuuTuuube first started getting attention, I found myself thinking a lot about questions of authorship, especially with regards to the most popular configuration, a mashup-style remix of Disney’s Alice In Wonderland. It’s a fun example to go through and try to count the number of contributing authors: there’s Lewis Caroll for writing the original narrative, then Disney’s team of artists for animating a version of that narrative, then Pogo, the Australian musician who remixed that animation and put it on YouTube, then there’s me for writing the YooouuuTuuube effect generator, and finally the person (as far as I can tell a Reddit user) who first decided to run Pogo’s video through it. So that’s five major points of authorship, but still ignoring the thousands of other people involved in making the work technically possible at all: YouTube employees, server managers, programmers who made the tools we use, etc.

I don’t see how any one entity can claim total creative authorship, although I’m sure Disney’s lawyers might see it differently. I don’t, however, think that this kind of case renders the notion obsolete. Authorship, at least in a very abstract sense, is actually pretty straightforward: you are simply the author of the part of the work that originated with you. Yes, you are always going to be indebted to a logistical and cultural background, but that’s the case with literally everything you do anyway. I think the idea is still a coherent one, at least insofar as it applies on an abstract level. Practical, legal authorship is another matter, which I think is hopelessly confused, and also kind of vulgar. It seems like legal authorship is really just about who has the monetary rights to a work, like in the Richard Prince or Jeff Koons lawsuits. I understand why those kinds of issues arise, and I’m actually somewhat sympathetic with the plaintiffs in those cases, but it doesn’t seem like the system is at all equipped to handle them with any real nuance. Though I’m not exactly qualified to be commenting on this kind of thing.

LD: As the web becomes increasingly trodden down with restrictions both hidden and brazen, how do you think it will impact your own practice as well as the creative applications of others? What can we do?

DK: The only thing I really hate about the Internet right now is the growing number of walled gardens and closed-off platforms that splinter the web into a bunch of disjointed, restricted factions. As far as my things go, I’ve mostly tried to just ignore this shift, or work around it, or engage with it in such a way that it forces an otherwise closed system to be open. I miss Web 1.0, but technology marches on. I don’t want to be get too weighted down with pointless nostalgia, so I just try to change with the internet, but on my own terms. I will always maintain total control over my own domains, and my own hosting, for example. But some of the conveniences of the modern web, as insidious as they might end up being in the long run, are hard to pass up. Tumblr’s simple blog format or Twitter’s ability to use their login on your site are good examples of this. I guess the only thing we can really do is use the services that are the least restrictive and vocally oppose the ones that don’t carry on in the spirit of the web’s early carefree days.

Screenshot of 4:33, 2010

Originally published on Rhizome

2012

A conversation between Louis Doulas and Art404

Art404 is comprised of Manuel Palou and Moises Sanabria.

Motorola Droid XL, 2011

louisdoulas: Let’s start with Art Not Found or Art404. Could you tell me a little more about its connotations?

artnotfound: Art404 is a pun for artnotfound, a motto that gives us a certain level of transparency. We don’t want to get hung up on making art and exclude anybody from our work.

louisdoulas: So the absence implies a kind of non-context for framing production?

artnotfound: Well the internet functions in a non-context anyway. We want to create content and value more than we want to create art.

louisdoulas: Right, without the prerequisite motivations of making an artwork per se, just ‘pure’ creative production.

artnotfound: It’s relentless creative production and discussion. That’s the future of content.

louisdoulas: So then there’s this awareness of the potential insularities or exclusiveness of the art world, or at least a hesitation to participate within this context? Perhaps which is why you’re attracted to the internet in the first place, as it levels out all content.

artnotfound: Yes definitely. By opening up the discussion to everyone it democratizes content. And if successful, any further discussion of that content gives it social value.

louisdoulas: Cultural Capital

artnotfound: Art404 likes this.

louisdoulas: I’m interested in these notions of ‘opening up discussion’, surrounding content, in this case specifically your work; what does this mean for you?

artnotfound: It means our mothers can engage with our work as much as a gallerist can. The internet is allowing people to take part in things they never would have before, opening up the possibilities for a much larger discussion. When both ends of the spectrum: high and low culture, exist on the same field, exciting things happen. The outcome of this discussion creates a higher, or “purer” value.

A gallerist once talked to us about “the kitty cat realm”, a world where artists are reduced to a sort of novelty, enjoyable by a wide audience, much the way a cute kitten is. The art world seems to try to stray away from this phenomenon, where we find value and possibility in it.

louisdoulas: And our relationship with the internet only seems to get more confrontational with sites like Mega Upload forced offline, Pirate Bay switching to their Swedish domain to avoid domain seizure, the increased exploitation of users within Facebook and issues with self-proclaimed ‘democratic’ art practices and ideology itself. Your poem, BE reflects on some of these conflicts, specifically on corporatization and lifestyle commodification.

artnotfound: In BE, we weren’t trying highlight the negative in advertising, but rather make a sort of mock manifesto for what advertising proposes. Lifestyle marketing is changing rapidly with the internet and while people complain about ads and search engines becoming more targeted, it’s actually making the ad industry more transparent. Technology is getting better at revealing our desires and making us aware of them, and this tension should empower people, not scare them. Now that the technology is here, people can be content aware.

It’s going to back to the idea of high and low co-existing. On one hand it’s opening these brands to critique, and at the same time linking to them so you can explore and form your own thoughts. In this way, we can accept and negate advertising at the same time.

louisdoulas: There is quite a divide on these issues of privacy and advertising. I think this simultaneity is interesting: this acceptance and rejection of advertising, of commodified desires that seem to be especially apparent in interface design and marketing campaigns for most digital ephemera. Seeing brands like Nike or Carhartt feature user product reviews directly on their websites as a kind of crowdsourced testimony to their product illustrate this type of transparency you mentioned.

What you seem to be alluding to though, is this empowering of the user, of the consumer, in an ultimate transparent society that eventually leads corporations and consumers to exist in a perpetual public sphere causing both to act within less deceptive, falsifying modes?

artnotfound: That’s the idea and ultimately what we hope will happen. People have always consumed products and content intuitively, but now we live in an age of information where people have the means to inform themselves and others. This “informed intuition” is an important principle to us in all aspects of life, from making artwork to getting the right product.

If you have the internet, there really is no excuse to be ignorant anymore.

louisdoulas: Then the decision to work with Verizon Wireless to make a supersized version of the Motorola Droid was obviously an important one?

artnotfound: For us, it’s important to diversify the people we collaborate with, especially to go beyond the art scene. We see big brands like Verizon or Google as an opportunity to reach more people. We plan on bringing the phone out in public to call attention both to the absurdity of the phone and to highlight the future of this technology by showing you the complete opposite. Phones are trying to get physically smaller while their function and importance in our culture is exploding. By using the Droid XL as a “practical” object instead of an artwork we can make fun of the technology while glorifying it as something that’s so important it needs to be mocked.

louisdoulas: The mockery of phone size to this reality of reliance produces a certain ambivalence for a future increasingly automated. Is this accurate? Perhaps some of the ideas and reactions in Droid XL can be found in Simages?

artnotfound: We’re obsessed with automation, both as something scary and beautiful. Simages starts to point at that. We created this lovely, “ideal” living situation and then let it run automatically, only to watch the Sims lives crumble as they run on autopilot. Dirty dishes begin to pile up, the family stops talking to each other and they lose the things that make them a “perfect” family.

As we move to a more automated culture, we’re making our lives easier while changing the perceived value of time management. We’re working on an app that will automatically text your mother every night. Both as a practical way of automating love, and as a comment on how technology is changing time management. By exploring the limits of automation, we can have a better understanding of what it means to us and what the best path to take is. We can make an “informed” choice, so to speak.

louisdoulas: Time, seems to have become more combative, or least its passing more ‘apparent’ today. Have you ever used Steve Lambert’s Self-Control app?

I think productivity and what it challenges and defines seems to be more and more of a preoccupation for this generation of cultural producers. These notions of leisure: recreation in contrast to ‘productivity’ and the strive for this supposed balance is something we think automation would hope to make easier, such as the app you’re working on. But of course we can see this becoming problematic, this gesture of an automated text to one’s mother.

artnotfound: It’s post-trolling, an ironic and almost sinister gesture that reveals something really telling. It definitely makes texting your mother manually more meaningful if you have the option to do it automatically.

louisdoulas: Going back to the potential threats the internet faces, your work 5 millions dollars 1 TB consists of a myriad of torrented software files ranging from Adobe Suite to the Rosetta Stone Language Pack. You’ve even made these files available to download online. You’ve made your politics quite clear here and so I wanted to ask what your role is as artists with a work like this?

artnotfound: Well we’re just playing devils advocate to the larger issue at hand, rather than trying to instill too much of our own politics. In 5m1t, the issue is obviously the amount of freely available content on the web and the translation of that value into the physical space. Our role as artists is merely to reveal the elephant in the room; these files already existed on the web and were easily searchable. It wasn’t until we started archiving them on the hard drive that we realized the magnitude of the situation.

louisdoulas: The presentation of this piece in the gallery: the external hard drive as this slick humming black monolith where upon realizing its hidden worth and actual ‘value’ becomes a sort of spectacle. Its physical manifestation creates this weight of worth and it becomes a banal and brazen presentation of the fixivity of ‘illegal’ data.

artnotfound: We like that description. Ultimately we think the piece succeeds in offering a point of reference to the rampant amount of piracy going on the internet. The grotesque value of the files being contrasted by the small, sleek hard drive is a nice metaphor for the ease of file sharing versus their perceived damage.

5 Million Dollars 1 Terabyte, 2011

louisdoulas: We’re used to being weightless in a way when it comes to dispersing and acquiring content online. We often forget the actual materiality and reality of our communicative devices, their storage and maintenance, electricity, etc. and also the actual repercussions of online activity. On one level that’s why SOPA seemed so profound (the success of the protests against it and experiencing this ‘win’ as an online collective).

artnotfound: All online activity has real life consequences. Our piece and SOPA are just physical incarnations of that. The digital coming into the real, and the real going digital, it’s a beautiful thing.

louisdoulas: Conrad I think is worth mentioning here—Conrad’s internet presence as a way of dealing with the loss of his wife. This work, along with Man’s Google Search for Meaning and even Simages all kind of depict an absence; there’s a hint of depression, or a self-devouring nihilism in these three.

artnotfound: If we can harness this nihilism in a way that has poetic resonance, we’ll have something of value. If we can get you to see it, understand it, and experience it, we can get you to reflect on it. Once people start reflecting they can form their own ideas and empower themselves through that. You can be nihilistic while still suggesting a resolution.

louisdoulas: And how did you stumble upon Conrad? What made you want to highlight him?

artnotfound: We stumbled on Conrad on a small, private message board and were immediately captivated. He’s such a perfect example of humans giving technology a higher significance. To record yourself is to quantify ones self, and he’s devoted quite a bit of time doing that. The motivation for him is simply to communicate, and the sheer number his videos really tells you how urgent it is. Because all his videos are essentially the same, it really makes it a digital ritual.

louisdoulas: Art404 seems to be very optimistic about the future, especially technology and the internet’s role in it, but what are some of your concerns at the moment?

artnotfound: We are digital natives, any concerns we do have about technology we feel comfortable confronting them. The more informed you are, the less vulnerable you are. Any problems with technology can be tackled with technology. As long as we’re responsible when using technology to replace and augment our lives, we think we’ll be OK.

There needs to be a humanist approach to the ethics of technology. Innovation and advancement without compromising the human, those are the types of things we are a part of.

louisdoulas: With these changes the role of the artist changes as well. Besides incorporating various digital ephemera/aesthetic into works of art, how do you see the position of the artist changing in all of this? The artist’s role in production and distribution?

artnotfound: We’re biased, but we see it as the most exciting time ever. Artists can do everything now, they can be their own photographer, gallerist, curator, critic, market team, audience, everything. Producing and distributing is no longer an industry thing, but an everybody thing. Anybody can post a picture and someone else can immediately remix it into something new and this is happening exponentially so. Even if most of the internet is creating content just to LOL, the energy that comes with that is inspiring.

The old “everyone is an artist” adage has never been more true in today’s there’s-an-app-for-that world. It’s no coincidence that this internet generation has seen a rise in artsy, creative people that are obsessed with sharing their ideas. Whether the content they’re producing has artistic merit or not is irrelevant, the enthusiasm to do so is what matters.

Now that everybody is a content creator, it’s going to push the artist wishing to rise above the clutter to work harder, do more, and innovate constantly. In a world where everyone’s fighting for attention, people are going to get more creative. A new breed of work and art making will lead the relentless content creating culture and we’re excited about it.

Anonymous Vs. Gagosian, 2011

louisdoulas: There is obviously a danger in complete democratization, or in everyone becoming an artist. Boris Groys talks a little about this in his essay, ‘The Weak Universalism’. But, I want to know where critique comes in for you? What is being done in the name of all this mass creative progress?

artnotfound: Critique is a very complex subject now that so many people are involved. Practically everything we say is public now and this really affects the way we communicate. When not covered by the veil of anonymity, our critique is subject to its own critique. We hope that this won’t become a norm, and that people will always speak their mind, otherwise the internet will devolve into a giant circle jerk.

louisdoulas: These ideas of public transparency, anonymity and collectivity are all pertinent strategies or alternative ways of ‘movement’ and governance. This dynamic between individualism and the group is interesting and I’m curious to hear your positions on these things. Maybe a good place to start would be on a tangent, with the Anonymous vs. Gagosian incident?

artnotfound: Anonymous vs. Gagosian was a sort of chance art happening, the kind that only happens on the internet. A hacker identifying with the internet “group” Anonymous thought it would be funny to take down our website, screenshot it, and email it to us. It was funny, and we immediately wanted more. After a few emails, he admitted he had been trying to get into the art scene for years. We convinced him/her that they would be better suited taking down more important art websites as institutional critique. The next day, he had taken down the front pages of Gagosian, David Zwirner, Hauser & Wirth, and Tate.

If one person can censor an entire power structure with the press of a few keystrokes, what does that say about the politics of digital culture? People aren’t afraid to take action behind a computer screen. The net allows everyday people can become leaders, tastemakers, and icons. By documenting these happenings we hope it will motivate people to talk, troll, spam and flame their thoughts to the world. We always look forward to collaborating with the internet.

The great thing is that you can be an individual and a group, you don’t have to pick a side. You can be a boy or a girl, old or young, whatever you want. There’s tons of up and downs to this new ability, and a whole new set of rules. Understanding the dynamics between real and digital culture will prepare us for the future.

louisdoulas: The Pirate Bay’s Aerial Server Drones are also a good example of some of these emerging techniques and strategies.

artnotfound: Those are really next level. Props to The Pirate Bay.

louisdoulas: I think as you said, ‘understanding the dynamics between the real and the digital’, will prepare us for the future. Often times social networking, emerging technology and the internet is treated, at least by the media, as a kind of new ‘revolution celebrity’ and so a lot of emphasis and faith is placed on these various kinds of cybernetic theories. And through all this it seems that there isn’t a declared political form, but rather that a form supposedly emerges in and out from reactions to various events. It’s an abandonment of political action by pure force that’s in favor more so of an accumulative power. I even want to draw a parallel to the practice of Relational Aesthetics and the type of technique used: the creation of ‘alternatives’ and ‘comprises’ rather than a complete redesigning and reconfiguring of society and the world.

artnotfound: Alternative sounds like it’s outside of something. We’re not splitting off from reality, just augmenting it. Now, the collective actions of a lot of individual people and small groups can snowball into something much faster. It’s the same strategy that’s always been around, just on steroids.

Originally published on Rhizome

2012

A conversation between Louis Doulas and Laure Prouvost

Before, before, 2011

LD: Works like IT, HEAT, HIT, Owt and The Artist—among many others—approach storytelling through frenetic, non-linear progressions and cuts. Narratives seem to emerge spontaneously from what seems to be your immediate environment without much premeditation. Why is it important for you to develop language this way? What is lost or gained through such fragmented communication?

LP: Anything that is not shown has to be imagined.

So here I am answering these questions, in the middle of the woods on this lovely Sunday afternoon on top of a beautiful big tree, water running beneath me…I shouldn’t drop the computer. Now it’s up to you to imagine how I got up here, the colour of the leaves and the smell in the air.

The condensing of films is a way of relating to our experiences, of the multiple textures we constantly have to deal with and how our brain constantly has to edit for us. The fact that a lot of the footage comes from my immediate surroundings is just me looking at what is around me – then I can start to create a story around, say the bread on the table, or whatever. It is a chance to look at things closely and then differently, to imagine things in another way.

Nothing is normal.

But sometimes it’s completely constructed environments as well, like in, The Artist.

Regarding editing: An image can generate different meanings depending what you see after or before it. This is what triggers associations, connections and eventually narratives and this is the potential in the editing that I love. Spontaneity is also important for me. I need to make mistakes. If things are controlled and pre-determined then often I am not happy with what I am producing.

Problems bring new levels to the work. Lacking control is an important part of my practice. Losing interpretation of the work too.

LD: For Frieze 2011 you made 28 black and white signs and scattered them around the fair. The slogans on these signs propose nonexistent scenarios ranging from the banal to the absurd—ones that can be rendered impossible or absent from the viewers local control. These works encourage a type of ‘escape’; a set of imaginative proposals used to confront the everyday, or a least the world of Frieze. The signs follow in similar vain to your previous works: maze like encounters and convergences between fiction and reality. How do you approach the dynamic between fiction and reality with these sign pieces? How do these worlds inform one another? What are its potentials?

LP: Imagination plays a strong part in my work. I like that the work exists in the someone’s head, that someone created its own vision, re-imagined the space, placed or worked in its head. Words are the most powerful tool to conjure images without using an image itself. More powerful in fact because a new image is created each time. I don’t need to produce anything anymore. It can always exist differently in each interpretation. I like using subtitles in my films as the audience then uses their own voice. Reading the text, you are a bit more part of the process, more linked to the work.

Also it’s about reinventing the meanings of things and I don’t even have to create it as a visual response. It’s about what is not shown but lets you imagine a fork dancing. A way for me to work with the fictional is to always link it to things that are very obvious that are here now and start a story totally normal, slowly it getting weirder and weirder but then realizing you already in it. Also bringing relics to the film as a way to assure the reality of the fiction.

I create these fictions but always want to make conscious the position of the viewer, of the audience. So I pull you along and then stop and talk about the space you are reading this text within. Or how you need to concentrate. IDEALLY THESE WORDS WOULD TAKE YOU SOMEWHERE ELSE ALL LYING IN THE SUN ON A BEACH, the computers buried under the sand.

Ideally these words would make sense.

Free!

Our reality is imagined; only constructed through rules of social norms.

Signs, 2011

LD: The actual materials that are used and featured throughout both your installations and videos are often found, hastily assembled and generally ‘sloppy’. Additionally, your videos seem to be shot on consumer grade equipment as if ready to be uploaded to YouTube. How do these materials inform your intentions and vice versa? Are they another attempt at imbuing everyday life with a ‘story’?

LP: I like the everyday. I like the fact we mix fiction to reality or vice versa. How everyone and everything has its purpose. I quite like the quote of Marcel Broodthaers:

“I don’t believe in film, nor do I believe in any other art. I don’t believe in the unique artists or the unique work of art. I believe in phenomena, and in men who put ideas together.”

The fact that it’s low tech, that it’s footage I collect gives me a lot of freedom and therefore technology or the perfect shot doesn’t interest me so much. I had this sort of idea that I did not want to create attractive, pleasing things. I have this thing that I thought was too easy, going against the idea of improving the world.

; )

My recent project was filmed on HD and with a crew so it’s not always like that.

; )

LD: You are the founder of the online moving image museum, tank.tv. Could you explain your motivations for initiating such a project? Why showcase content strictly on the internet? What is inferred by the ‘moving image’?

LP: I am not the founder of tank.tv but I directed it at its beginning.

When Tank started in 2003, video art was a totally different thing and there were very few platforms or appetites to show it, so TANK was really useful in that sense. But I think its definitely preferable to view a projection or installation in person –you get immersed in the work a lot more than you can on a computer screen. I think the internet is an interesting platform to discover things to get a terse idea of someone’s work but I think it’s definitely not as a good as seeing a projection or installation. It has a different purpose, and sometimes when it’s made just for that purpose it’s doing something else, it’s interesting.

But its all just moving images, images moving from one to the next. Its not real.

tank.tv

Originally published on Rhizome

2012

A conversation between Louis Doulas and Mike Ruiz

Auto-CAD Freestyle, 2010

LD: In many of your works (Blank is the New Blank, Replaced, Extensions, Auto-CAD Freestyle) you utilize chance operations to simultaneously demonstrate the creative successes and failures of software and technology. The calculated spontaneity of generative systems such as the Content Aware Fill or the Roomba, become exposed through their capacity to adequately finish or begin an artwork. Your works highlight the novelty of these systems and how they algorithmically output formal expression. Could you speak more about this automative process and the motives behind working this way?

MR: I am interested in automated improvisation. I design situations in which an artwork can take place. Often time what I am asking from the technology is something it is not intended to do. So there is a collaborative process between the automated tools I employ and myself. I am interested in co-authoring works–arriving at traditional media such as drawing, painting, prints and sculpture0–with various consumer forms of artificial intelligence.

LD: In Replaced you use Content Aware Fill on the Mona Lisa. The resulting image contains not a modified software interpretation of the sitter but rather her entire absence from the scene. Filling her place instead are assorted fragments of the background landscape; attempts made by the software to cohesively continue the vista; the portrait becoming a glitchy patterned landscape–though in a way ‘failing’ due to the lack of landscape found originally in the picture. From the software finishing your gesture to the outsourcing of your image to China to be made an oil painting, there’s a certain distancing, or alienation, found in both your making process and then carried out in its actual methods of production. Besides the obvious dynamic of image to object to image again, what does it mean for you to outsource this image and have it be made into a painting? Is ‘Replaced’ also just another attempt to historically continue the heavy mockery and modification this exhausted icon has endured? Is this your ‘upgraded’ version?

MR: The work was produced as a painting for conceptual reasons. I was interested in manufacturing the painting in a similar form to that of the original, a 77 x 53 cm oil painting. I wanted to make a painting that could essentially replace the original, and therewith also replace the entire history and mythos of the icon, literally replace Mona Lisa both physically and conceptually. In a more expanded form this work is an application of the many-worlds theory, by creating a mythology about the work and providing potential alternative histories and futures.

Extended Bliss, 2012

LD: Your Extensions series are first interesting because the Content Aware Fill that is applied actually works to fluently continue each images’ surrounding space. Within the series though I’m particularly interested in Extended Bliss and Extended Aurora. The default desktop images found on Windows and Mac computers are usually perfect, idealized, seemingly non-existent images of nature (Windows’ classic saturated hill) or captured natural phenomena (Mac’s Aurora Borealis). Similar to the purpose of skeuomorphic design, nature here is meant to coax the user into a familiarized safe, ‘authentic’ space while also simultaneously using that familiarity to conflate and coat the product with a certain impossible utopian aura, demonstrating an infinite exaggeration of user/product possibility and compatibility. Extensions becomes the over indulgence, the overkill; the residue of the over consumer. The scenes potentially extending forever if it were not for their fixed and paused existences as digital images / prints. Why choose to ‘end’ them this way? Is this done to hint at the banality of the Content Aware Filter’s subtle ‘extensions’?

MR: I like very simple ideas, beginning from the default, using the lowest common denominators or presets. What is the default situation for so many people? It is starring at a computer screen, and what are they looking at? The same image, Bliss, is probably the most widely recognized image of all time. What we see in Extended Bliss is an extension of this default from standard to panorama format. The idea was to just continue the piece to a feasible point. I didn’t want it to look exaggerated. I wanted it to appear as a realistic image, one that could have been cropped to create the original. I wanted to engage with the mythos of the image, create an alternate reality where this image supercedes the original.

LD: ’Ugly is the New Fun’, ‘Geeks is the New Currency’, ‘Learning is the New Wine’, ‘Ginger is the New Vegan’. These are just some of the snowclones that your website www.blankisthenewblank.info generates. ‘X is the new Y’, or ‘Blank is the new Blank’ is an expression that signifies a sudden, perhaps unexpected, rise in popularity amongst something. However, with your website there is no logic per se to the phrasal template. Because the phrases don’t reflect any solidified reality, in that they don’t actually represent any established cultural trends, they become immediately absurd and humorous, producing unforeseen linkages between concepts where literally anything is and becomes anything else. Randomizing the flow and delivery of content within an Internet of filter bubbles, predetermined search destinations and targeted advertising is one strategy of prioritizing creative thinking today, which also just means finding value in play and experimentation (Fluxus). Could you speak more about preserving and encouraging these aspects of non-productivity and randomness? Within art? Within your own practice?

MR: I think the work, although yielding random results, is quite productive. I don’t equate randomness with non-productivity, quite the opposite. If the situation is designed to create random results, there can be a very specific reason for that. In this case, I was interested in the arbitrary nature of this phrasal template or snowclone, rather than exposing that fact already inherent in the structure of the language, I was interested in the chance moments where the new statements actually created new ‘truths’, more convincing or real than their originals, when the words line up and create something of political, factual, or comedic significance. Essentially the work is an infinite poem, constantly refreshing it’s relationship to itself through the constant recombination of its elements.

LD: You freestyle for nine minutes straight over a muted Oliver Laric Versions (2010) video. Where in previous works you use CAF to literally fill a scene, in Versions Freestyle your stream of conscious rap is reduced to just that: a filler. Where CAF tries to mathematically determine new space by interpreting surrounding content, you use the video’s content, whatever is momentarily on screen, to feed, riff off of and contextualize. Rapping here becomes another tool used to achieve constant engagement with content in an accelerated environment, while producing meaningful unexpected improvisations. Lil’ B does this too. Can you tell me more about your relationship to hip-hop and rap?

MR: I have been freestyle rapping since I was about 16, I can improvise well. I have been a big fan of hip-hop and rap for as long as I can remember. But I have always been attracted to freestyling in particular, I like the idea that something is formed in a very specific way in a very specific moment under very specific conditions, which will never be duplicated, pure thought verbalized. This work was actually birthed out of my relationship with Oliver, a friend and fellow freestyle rapper. This was a way to engage with his work on a very familiar level. I wanted to literally create a remix of versions. Here my improvised vocals illustrate one interpretation of the work.

Replaced, 2011

Originally published on Rhizome

2012

A conversation between Louis Doulas and Jaakko Pallasvuo

Google image search of Jaakko Pallasvuo, 2012

LD: Your identity/brand is split between multiple internet presences. There is definite cohesion between the works on your artist website and your Tumblr, but your illustrations seem severed and separate. Google image searching you, your comics and illustrations actually appear more frequently than your other work. In Auditions you briefly meditate on identity association and representation on the internet and I’m curious as to how you intentionally shape this identity. How do you approach self-design?

JP: The way I think is fairly contradictory so it makes sense that the works would emerge that way as well. I question how satisfying maintaining a strict, programmed artistic identity would be in the long run. Making art is for me very much a form of learning. I will gladly sacrifice cohesion if it means that I can explore larger fields of knowledge.

I’ve been uploading works to various internet contexts since I was 16 and can accept that I cannot control their circulation. I do contemplate the way I represent / have represented myself online but I can’t completely dictate my “brand” anymore. I appreciate artists who are able to maintain a cohesive image, but I don’t think I could be / would want to be one.

LD: A lot of your image work utilizes 80′s and 90’s aesthetic and culture as a jumping off point. From the midi backing tracks heard in your How To video series, to the gradients, colors and photoshop brushwork found on www.dawsonscreek.info, where do you place nostalgia, irony and sincerity throughout these works? Where do these begin and end for you?

JP: Irony and nostalgia are difficult terms. I think of irony as snarky non-commitment and nostalgia as uncritical sentimentality. It feels unsafe to connect them to my own work. I have an interest in the recent past and have made attempts towards charting what I assume are generational experiences. I am genuinely fascinated by Tumblr culture, Dawson’s Creek as well; choosing the URL was not merely an ironic gesture to me. It’s easy to understand how people would perceive my work that way (as ironic), but my approach is quite serious and sombre. I guess it adds to the confusion that I do want to investigate nostalgia, irony and sincerity as themes. It’s a fine line between making works about irony and making works that are ironic. I’m treading that line.

Low Epic, 2011

LD: Previously, we’ve spoken about the influence of cinema in many of your video works. Your interest in a type of ‘cinema of the internet’ or the idea that many of your works are informed by cinema while also attempting to address their circulation as documentation on the internet, while becoming documentation in and of themselves. Could you talk more about this?

JP: I appreciate how sites like Youtube assign the same context to all video material. There’s something cruel and reductive about it, but it also makes obscure things accessible. I feel like the divide between short-form cinema and video art is often artificial and maybe the internet can help erase that divide. I have an ongoing interest in the idea of ethnographic/anthropological cinema and the methods of essay film. I have made videos that explore those interests. There is a fair amount of meta-commentary going on, the videos discussing their own failures. It’s the curse of self-awareness. I don’t really see my work as documentary, although I do understand how that connection could be made. The videos definitely have to do with awkwardly imposing dramatic structures onto reality, the relative impossibility of that.

It’s a tired observation that the Internet diffuses the divide between high and low culture, but I feel like I have to point that out because it’s central to my interest in the medium. I’ve recently been enjoying this SinäTuubaPaska (the Finnish equivalent of Youtube Poop) channel more than most institutionally verified art. The videos are edited in such a brilliant, hypnotic, varied way, it reminds me of Jazz. I also like how the Finnish dubbing of mainly American source material localizes and complicates the videos, how it ties them to 90′s childhoods. The videos deal with the unreliability of videos (I was trying to write “the unreliability of memory” before I got distracted).

I also like when this is reversed, an artwork that transcends art and becomes a meme. I think the best thing about the How To videos was how much attention especially the Internet Art related episode got from sort of random sources. I enjoyed reading the comments on Knowyourmeme.com (pro tip: don’t bother making a video if you’re gonna post a half-assed slideshow made in windows movie maker). It was reassuring to understand that I am somehow able to imitate the mechanics of meme content, and fun to receive feedback on the video as both art and content nugget, even if the feedback was mostly negative and related to the failure of the videos to be any of the things they alluded to being (art, critique or lulz).

LD: Low Epic and Screen Test discursively reflect on the social and cultural placement of the self within a networked age. These videos become personal and highly self-conscious yet you never really reveal yourself. There is always someone else narrating, posing for the camera, etc. Why choose to use an alternate identity?

JP: It’s about obscuring and obstructing, about freeing myself from the constraints of gender and national identity and about variation.

I don’t know if I should quote Barthes but I want to:

“In order to suggest, delicately, that I am suffering, in order to hide without lying, I shall make use of a cunning preterition: I shall divide the economy of my signs.

The task of the verbal signs will be to silence, to mask, to deceive: I shall never account, verbally, for the excesses of my sentiment. Having said nothing of the ravages of this anxiety, I can always, once it has passed, reassure myself that no one has guessed anything. The power of language: with my language I can do everything: even and especially say nothing.

I can do everything with my language, but not with my body. What I hide by my language, my body utters. I can deliberately mold my message, not my voice. By my voice, whatever it says, the other will recognize “that something is wrong with me.” I am a liar (by preterition), not an actor. My body is a stubborn child, my language a very civilized adult.”

To this I would add: the thing that interested me in early internet culture, that still interests me, is its elaborate anonymity. Using avatars and screen names to both diffuse yourself and be more yourself than you could actually be. I’ve tried to extend those tactics into my work, asking friends and professionals to stand in for me, other voices and appearances. I think of them as avatars. I recently read an interesting essay about the way Bresson thought of his actors (not as actors but as models, even props, icons?), that has something to do with it.

How To/Orientation, 2011

Originally published on Rhizome

2012

A conversation between Louis Doulas and Jesse Hulcher

Web Presence, 2011

LD: In Web Presence, you password-hack your deceased father’s gmail account and display it in the gallery on a computer, logged-in, as an ‘available to chat’, contact. The work is a loose ontological study of sorts, referring to both life during and after existence in the form of an always preserved online presence. It also demonstrates another way that aura sustains itself in digitally mediated space. Is this more than just sentiment? How do you confront or deal with the permanence of identity online, within the archive, etc.?

JH: It’s definitely more than sentiment for me because it’s about sentiment. I was actually hesitant to make the piece initially because I didn’t want it to be perceived as a strictly cathartic exercise. For me, it’s about a few things. It’s about these records of ourselves that exist online. It’s about the way time is represented online. And it’s about attempting to do something that can’t be done. We can’t communicate with people who’ve died. They’re not actually there on the other end of the gmail chat. But by password-hacking my father’s gmail account, I was able to reproduce his presence in my life. I didn’t live with him and didn’t live in the same city or state. So, his web-presence was his most common presence in my life. By logging him in on a dedicated computer, I’d recreated that presence and at times even managed to surprise myself for a split-second upon logging into my own account. It was always a pleasant surprise to see him “available to chat”.

Yes, there is personal sentiment. But it’s also simply about finding emotional or spiritual uses for technology. I’ve built a couple of machines that were also meant to provide some conduit for communication with the deceased; an automated ouija board, which spoke aloud to the gallery using the text-to-speech software of an old hacked power-pc and an automated theremin which was played by a servo controlled arm whenever an EMF meter measured a ghostly reading.

I’m currently not thrilled with the semi-permanence of online identity. My old URL was recently purchased and is now home to a blog about weight loss programs and online poker tournaments. It wouldn’t be a huge deal if the blog entries were signed using the name of the URL. Instead the entries are signed “COPYRIGHT © 2012 · JESSE HULCHER”. I find that fairly annoying. I also love it when I get an email from an ex-girlfriend and gmail decides that this is the right moment to provide us with links on “how to get back together”. The internet knows our histories.

LD: In 1971, when Abbie Hoffman wrote, Steal This Book, bookstores ceased from carrying it due to a large number of readers physically stealing the book. Today, with the Internet, ‘stealing’ is clearly more ubiquitous, made easy and largely contestable in its justification and implications. With, 40 Gigs to Freedom –or— Hot Shit, you begin to address these ideas of dissidence and counterculture by ‘consensually’ stealing music, movie and books that actually condone stealing. But what happens when this allegedly ‘free’ content ends up on the Best Seller’s List or can eventually only be purchased—severing itself from the author’s ideology? Could you speak more about the digital shift within pirated content? Where do you position yourself in it all?

JH: Yeah, it’s about the intentions of the artists and the publishers who’re creating these works. When you’re releasing a piece of media through a commercial publisher you and your publisher attempting to make a profit. It’s debatable as to where these artists lie in the spectrum of earnest intentions. But the publisher certainly has no interest in having these products stolen, aside from the brief amount of press that would arise.

My guess is that the phrase is used today, more often than not, to evoke some false pretense of counter-culture idealism. I’d be much more inclined to believe that Abbie Hoffman had a sincere interest in seeing readers steal his book. The band “System of a Down”, on the other hand, isn’t quite as convincing. I think that they were actually quoted as being upset that the record had been “leaked” (stolen) before its commercial release. If that’s not a philosophical conflict, I don’t know what is.

So, on one hand, the piece is probably meant to call some potential bluffs. But it’s also about following directions. I’ve been asked by these artists and their publishers to steal this media. So, this is what I’ve done. I’m also considering changing the title of the piece to “Empy Gestures -or- Come at Me, Bro”.

MIB, MIB II, MIB, MIB signed, MIB wardrobe, 2010

LD: Playing with authenticity, cult of celebrity and exchange value, you auction off mint-in-box copies of Men In Black and Men in Black II, both signed by comedian Michael Ian Black on Ebay. By ‘legitimizing’ or attempting to inflate the value of a highly acclaimed, popular film like Men in Black with the signature of a D-list celebrity you create a conflict that attempts to resolve itself when placed in auction. Can you elaborate more on your strategy here?

JH: This piece is about a certain level of supposed serendipity involved in this performative event. “Men In Black” and “Men In Black II” dvd’s are sold “Mint In Box” with autographs by “Michael Ian Black”, while my wardrobe for the event was provided by “Making It Big”, plus sized clothing for women. Once this explanation has been condensed to the small amount of text that is allowable in an ebay auction title it reads: “MIB, MIB II, MIB, MIB signed, MIB wardrobe”. There were some other contenders for possible MIB mentions. But they made even less than me wearing a tie-dyed maternity dress to a stand-up show.

So, there is a sense that this is somehow a perfect occurrence, or that the stars have somehow aligned for this ebay auction, so to speak. But it’s also about the reflexive nature of the performance itself. It is about D-List celebrity. It is about value.

There was a lot of planning that went into it.The most intense question, however, was, “How do I get all of this to happen without him refusing to participate because he’s uncomfortable with my behavior/appearance or uncomfortable with the items potentially being resold or uncomfortable with feeling like he’s being made fun of?” So, I made the decision that I wouldn’t speak to him at all throughout the meeting.

I took my sister to the show in DC, which is where she lived at the time. After it was over she asked him to sign the dvd’s for her and had a photo taken with him. Then she asked if she could get a photo of he and I together as well. I took off my jacket and the dress fell out. I had decided to make no expression whatsoever, if possible, because it’s the way that I’d imagined he might react, given the situation. He made the same face, the photo turned out well and some guy in Chicago bought the dvd’s. That is definitely the strangest part of it all.

LD: The Ramones were well known—amongst other things—for playing very fast and very brief sets. Most often times than not their song structure can be reduced to three-chords and most are only two minutes long. Road to Ruined repeats the already repetitive sounds of the Ramones, looping certain chord progressions and choruses all the while increasing the track length time in the process (Pinhead is 20 minutes long!). What results isn’t necessarily something that is annoying or painful, but a neutralization: it almost makes too much sense. What is being investigated through these repetitive extensions?

JH: My theory is that the cultural identity of the RAMONES is that they produced loud, fast and extremely repetitive songs, which were quite often very short. Listeners who aren’t exactly familiar with their output tend to think that much of their music “sounds the same”, to the point that they might not be able to differentiate between their songs. So, I took what I considered to be their most repetitive songs and made them even more repetitive. I actually attempted to identify the most repetitive parts of the most repetitive songs. Once a riff was labeled truly repetitive, I took that section and multiplied its length by ten. So, a four bar riff was then a forty bar riff.

The structure of their music is also really interesting. Some of their songs contain several distinctly separate riffs and sometimes even multiple bridges. “Bad Brain”, for instance, is basically a loop of 5 or 6 different chord progressions and bridges. So, in a way, their music is already a bit excessive and somewhat modular. I found myself slightly obsessed with some of these songs a couple of years ago, listening to them on repeat on the subway, wishing that the tracks were actually 20 minutes long instead of 2 minutes. So, it wasn’t an exclusively conceptual piece. It’s meant to be heard. I loved listening to the album after I finished it. So, I would agree with you that there is a succinct concept and an effective realization of that concept. But the result is also meant to be experienced. Maybe the conclusion is that, yes, their music is very repetitive, and one might find that to be fairly annoying. However, if you give them a chance, you’ll find some really unique songwriting and begin to discern an almost structuralist agenda.

Maybe they themselves felt that their music was too repetitive to be played for more than 2 minutes at a time. That could have plenty to do with why many of their songs were so short. My feeling is that they almost couldn’t be long enough. I still really enjoy listening to the “Bad Brain” edit, because it’s a track that features so many different riffs and bridges and it’s the only one that I allowed myself to rearrange, to some extent. All of the other tracks begin and end as they always did. They just feature longer sections throughout. Because “Bad Brain” contains so many different sections, which just abruptly seem to come out of nowhere, one after another. I kind of wanted to be lost in the middle of that song, and to be randomly bombarded with an unexpected riff. So, for me, the piece is also experiential.

Steal This Album! by System of a Down, 2002

Originally published on Rhizome

2012