Interview - BLEND Magazine
August, 2010
Age / education
I'm 30 years old, and am a self-taught artist and technologist, living and working in Oakland, California.
Can you explain your work, what is it that you do exactly? What do you start with? What kind of programs do you use?
I usually start with an empty text file. Coming from a programming background, a big blank editor is a comfortable place for me. I then begin hand-coding a skeletal HTML document, and flesh it out from the <head> down with CSS and Javascript and some container elements for positioning. Most of my work is either encapsulated in HTML for online exhibition -- my Panoramic Dioramas and Atrophy series, for example -- or it's directly concerned with HTML and web objects as material and context, as with my Renders and Thresholds projects. So starting with this structured document gives me a focused base canvas to work from.
As far as other tools go, I spend a lot of time in Photoshop and Flash, of course, but actually prefer exploring specialized software packages, like this Russian autostereogram generator called 3DMiracle, and Bryce for big and fake-looking environments, and all of these insane jQuery plugins that I've been sleeping on for the last few years. I'm also pretty serious about ripping and storing web content for appropriative works, so I run a lot of site spiders and video downloaders and image archivers too.
When did you start working on these projects?
I started making digital art in late 2007. In the beginning I had some questions about the qualifications and artistic potential of the tools I'd been using professionally for years, and started approaching answers to these questions through experimental constraints. I looked at hex color qualities and generative designs and Javascript-based animation and so on, in an investigative way. Then around the middle of 2009 I began working on web collage pieces with a more directed intention, trying to feel out my own compositional value system, while picking up a better understanding of the textural capabilities of the different technologies I was working with -- the thickness of Flash and the slickness of Javascript and the qualitative differences between CSS-based opacity and PNG transparency.
How do you reach the public? You need a computer to view your work, unlike a painter or designer, who make fysical work. Can you also sell your work, like for instance selling an URL? And do you have exhibitions?
I generally post links to new work on my personal site, which then transmits those links to Twitter, Facebook, etc. From there, the exposure of my work tends to take on a fairly short tail / long tail relationship, in which there's a burst of traffic and then a quietude, until someone finds it down the road and links it to a new audience. I exhibit my work offline from time to time, and am looking to ramp up physical installations of my digital pieces in the coming year.
As far as selling this work goes, there are precedents of people purchasing and collecting digital art. I think those scenarios can have analogues with the purchasing of video or other media art, which can be encoded into a solid state artifact like a DVD or a USB key. But I think an important distinction that highly accessible digital art makes from classic studio art is the decoupling of value from scarcity. There's only one Guernica, and its rarity (at least) drives its price. The lossless reproducibility of digital art precludes us from applying the same terms of valuation to these new works. One alternative is to price a work based on its exposure and reach. Web marketers talk about eyeballs and attention economics, and associate visibility and recognition with value. Should a work become sufficiently popular, its consumption by a purchaser can become especially conspicuous, depending on the terms under which the ownership is transmitted. Examples of this are found throughout the Neen scene. Overall I think the monetary models available to us as digital artists are really open, and that we have the control in these early days to define the relationship between the production of our art and its patronage.
Can you clarify the works on renders.in?
Renders is an ongoing investigation of the experiential distance between web browsers -- both the individuals doing the browsing, and the software used to view the Internet. In commercial web applications, there is a tremendous effort made towards the creation of a unified vision for all possible browsers. That is, facebook.com will look as similar as possible to as many different people as possible, whether they're visiting the site through Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer, etc. But the reality is that our experiences online are all quantitatively and qualitatively different, and are based on things like the available light in our offices, the sights and feels we've absorbed from other sites seen that same day, and most fundamentally, the browser we choose to view the net through -- each version of which is equipped with a specialized rendering engine, capable of interpreting and displaying graphics.
By issuing a simple instruction -- an HTML request to enlarge a very small graphic file -- Renders illustrates how specific and personal each of our browsing sessions are, by presenting an image that varies in pixelation, refresh rate, and color tonality from browser to browser. There is also an exposition in play, of the trust relationship we engage in with our browsing software. In the Four Seagrams series within my Renders project, for example, four photos of paintings by Rothko were shrunk drastically, sacrificing much of the inherent photographic detail. When these images are blown up by our browsers, it's the browsers themselves that supply the additional detail that was lost in the shrinking process, and the way in which they add this detail is particular and differently affective. We often take this supplementation without question, but I think it's important to ask about the decisions being made by our browsers, as we give them tremendous responsibility over the way we see the online world.
What would have been your job if you had lived in an analog era?
Hell, that's hard. A florist maybe? I like flowers, but then, I don't love getting my hands dirty. I suppose I probably would have been an inventor of some sort, working in the most flexible (and ideally, immaterial) medium I could find. I like building and problem-solving, but I have a bit of a hard time with objecthood and permanence and so on. I understand that this disposition is a modern luxury, but it's really difficult to say who I would have been had I not grown up with the Internet, as it has influenced my worldview more than any other media.
What is your own favorite work?
Thresholds (http://thresholds.in). I feel like it's a pretty complete gesture for me, and it's something I'm proud of despite it not being one of my more generally popular works. It deals directly with the aesthetics of loss and with GIFs as elemental objects, woven into the fabric of the Internet. The images adhere to a set of real constraints, and simply cannot exist in the same form outside of the context of the page they're embedded in. I'm also still very interested in creating encapsulations of small time, and those works help me approach that idea (if in a Zeno's Paradox kind of way).
Were kaleidoscopes your favorite toy as a kid?
I remember having one growing up, and it had belonged to my grandparents; it was a foot-long tube, with gold fleck paint on the outside, and if you spent too much time with it the flecks would flake off on your hands. I liked the way it filtered the world, rather than presenting a new vision, like a Viewmaster does. That relationship seems like it parallels the different goals of immersive optics of today, with the renewed push towards sophisticated augmented reality, and our extant interest in a true and complete VR.
Wouldn't it be cool if your work would be in a digital photo frame (in someone's interior I mean)? Or would it lose its global accessible character?
I do think it would be cool, and I'm not so concerned about the democratized accessibility of any of my work. There's certainly a push and a feeling coming from a lot of digital artists -- specifically, artists whose work is principally experienced online -- towards the primacy of the web experience. And I think that's valuable but also often too convenient. The web is cheap and immediate and flexible, and provides a distinctive context for the viewing of digital works. But by placing those same works in digital frames, or projecting them onto a wall, I don't believe much of a work's formal power is lost. I do believe that there are some ineffable, feel-based losses, though, and I'm still grappling with how much priority those ideas deserve.
By placing a digital work in a gallery, your audience loses the volition of clicking a link and choosing to see a work, which is a subtle and important act, and one which serves a wholly different function from deciding to actually walk to an physical space to see art. There's a real barrier of entry issue there, and digital art melts that divide by dissolving the sacredness of a place, and by providing a continuum in its stead. Being along this continuum -- filled with a near-infinite number of other web sites, each containing news, beauty, novelty, horror -- and sort of floating between zones and being powered and pushed to see new things by a really natural self-determination and personal agency...for many artists this seems to be an incredibly crucial concern. And an offline gallery has the potential to supplant those vibes, and to replace them with whatever physical preconditions and white-wall prejudices -- positive and negative -- a wandering audience brings with it. I think it's a complex question surrounding the idea of domain, and it's being answered in different ways almost constantly now by practicing artists, which is exciting.
Whose work of the old days would you like to see online/ in a digital way?
It's hard for me to think of a work from the "old days" that I can't currently see online in one form or another. Brakhage and Kentridge's films are on YouTube. I just torrented a zipfile containing 100s of "Famous Paintings" (http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/3792606/Famous_Paintings) . Surely there are old prints and rare video works and sculptures which remain unphotographed, and their creators and owners may never decide to make them digitally available to the public. But my hope is that in time, all creative work will be digitized and made accessible online. As a consumer, I feel entitled to this progress, which might sound silly, but it's a common demand.
What are the benefits of operating/ working online instead of offline?
The speed of execution, the low cost of distribution, the availability of editable culture, the accessibility of a peer group, the constancy of technological progress as a medium generator, freedom from objecthood should you want it, and really overall the ability to manifest a new destiny for yourself with as pure an intent as you can muster.
Whose work do you admire?
I tend to admire people who work in significantly different ways from me, because I love being baffled and awed by art that comes from types of creativity that I don't have. I really appreciate Robert Irwin for his meticulousness and patience, Olafur Eliasson for his expansiveness, Anthony Gormley for his natural geometries, and Martin Creed for his cheek. Of course there are a lot of young cool heads who're making new work that I'm excited about too, like Parker Ito, Jacob Broms Engblom, Tabor Robak, Stephanie Davidson, Micah Schippa, Nicolas Sassoon, etc etc.
What kind of progress in art do you expect in the digital world?
We talk about the second or third wave of net artists making works with a certain vibe, or playing off tropes from a particular phase of the Internet's development. But I think those distinctions will go away once we see the roles of curators and gallerists and collectors being filled by people for whom digital works are a natural part of the contemporary art landscape. And I think that integration will help to create more works by more artists that operate with a different kind of digital / analog fluidity than we see today. This Post-Internet singularity we seem to be moving towards, where lots of art is Internet Aware, and has experiential possibilities that bridge connected and disconnected modes of consumption. Digital art and culture are becoming more transparent and integrated everyday, and I think it's the artists working at the forefront of this progress who're asking "What's water?", as they swim through it.
