1 00:00:00,350 --> 00:00:11,410 Angel: Our speaker today is Evan Roth. 2 00:00:11,410 --> 00:00:16,039 He's a multi-disciplinary American artist based in Paris. 3 00:00:16,039 --> 00:00:20,110 He's working with sculptures, prints, videos and websites 4 00:00:20,110 --> 00:00:26,410 and in the upcoming hour during his talk he'll take you on a journey about art, 5 00:00:26,410 --> 00:00:30,910 politics, culture, the misuse of communication technologies 6 00:00:30,910 --> 00:00:34,339 and how all of these are connected to each other. 7 00:00:34,339 --> 00:00:37,670 Please give a warm round of applause for Evan Roth, our speaker today! 8 00:00:37,670 --> 00:00:39,670 Thank you very much! 9 00:00:39,670 --> 00:00:41,159 *Applause* 10 00:00:41,159 --> 00:00:49,960 Evan: Hi everybody, thanks so much for coming, I'm really humbled and honoured to be here. 11 00:00:49,960 --> 00:00:53,949 It's my first time on this side of the internet with you all, so thanks so much for joining. 12 00:00:53,949 --> 00:00:59,030 Ya, my name is Evan. I'm an American, I'm living in Paris at the moment. 13 00:00:59,030 --> 00:01:02,670 I'm an artist, and so I'm gonna talk a bit about the art I've been making the last few 14 00:01:02,670 --> 00:01:02,799 years, 15 00:01:02,799 --> 00:01:08,240 how it's changed as the internet's changed, and hopefully weave some threads through here. 16 00:01:08,240 --> 00:01:12,490 The work I'm making primarily shows up in these three areas of the gallery, 17 00:01:12,490 --> 00:01:13,860 public space and the internet. 18 00:01:13,860 --> 00:01:18,890 The mediums I'm using are often quite different, but historically the work I've been making 19 00:01:18,890 --> 00:01:23,719 has been connected by this relationship between misuse and empowerment, 20 00:01:23,719 --> 00:01:29,429 and how misuse can kind of be this lens that we, as we all know, look at technologies 21 00:01:29,429 --> 00:01:32,960 but lots of things in life around us is sort of see things that have other 22 00:01:32,960 --> 00:01:35,270 sort of unintended uses, right. Female voice in bg: Introducing the iRobot 23 00:01:35,270 --> 00:01:35,429 robot.. 24 00:01:35,429 --> 00:01:42,329 Evan: To make things, like consumer domestic products much more interesting, right, 25 00:01:42,329 --> 00:01:45,820 so this is the doomba, this old old internet meme, right, 26 00:01:45,820 --> 00:01:47,490 *laughter* but, so good, right, 27 00:01:47,490 --> 00:01:49,729 such a wonderful gift that the internet gave us 28 00:01:49,729 --> 00:01:50,490 with the doomba, 29 00:01:50,490 --> 00:01:52,700 like I can't wait until.. I really feel like this 30 00:01:52,700 --> 00:01:53,979 should be in the permanent collection 31 00:01:53,979 --> 00:01:56,600 of the Museum of Modern Arts, this is one of my favourite sculptures 32 00:01:56,600 --> 00:01:58,340 I've seen in the last few years. 33 00:01:58,340 --> 00:02:02,700 But for me, I tried to have like doomba vision when I'm doing activism 34 00:02:02,700 --> 00:02:05,009 or when I'm doing art and thinking about like 35 00:02:05,009 --> 00:02:09,360 what else can I ducttape knifes onto to make it more interesting than it was 36 00:02:09,360 --> 00:02:15,130 the way the manufacturer sort of er, advertised it to me, right? 37 00:02:15,130 --> 00:02:20,160 Ahm, and so that's kind of a main inspiration for a lot of the art work that I look at, 38 00:02:20,160 --> 00:02:24,520 that I'm a fan of and that I'm trying to make in my own practice. 39 00:02:24,520 --> 00:02:29,000 And so two maybe more specific themes I'm gonna try to show through different projects 40 00:02:29,000 --> 00:02:34,420 are 1) this idea of technological empowerment, which is part of the reason I became an artist, 41 00:02:34,420 --> 00:02:38,520 and the other this idea of visualisation through misuse. 42 00:02:38,520 --> 00:02:43,760 And my kind of .. my history with technological empowerment went back to the .. 43 00:02:43,760 --> 00:02:47,080 when I was an architect. I was at university and I was.. 44 00:02:47,080 --> 00:02:50,600 I had one class about computers, that my dad sort of forced me to take, 45 00:02:50,600 --> 00:02:52,130 and I didn't think it was that interesting. 46 00:02:52,130 --> 00:02:56,370 This was back when I was literally still doing, like, graphite with a straight edge on vellum, 47 00:02:56,370 --> 00:02:56,590 right? 48 00:02:56,590 --> 00:02:58,700 This was like the first class where they're gonna 49 00:02:58,700 --> 00:03:01,010 do things like 3D modelling on Autocad, 50 00:03:01,010 --> 00:03:05,410 and there was one week about the internet. And I had like this really vivid memory 51 00:03:05,410 --> 00:03:08,540 where the professor brought up this fetch window on an old Mac, 52 00:03:08,540 --> 00:03:11,750 and like edited it in a little text document and dragged it in and the dog 53 00:03:11,750 --> 00:03:14,290 ran it up to the internet and then he'd refresh on the browser 54 00:03:14,290 --> 00:03:18,110 and it updated. And of course this is like small news now, 55 00:03:18,110 --> 00:03:20,530 but for me this was huge. I couldn't believe it, 56 00:03:20,530 --> 00:03:25,660 like I really just couldn't believe that for free I could say anything to anybody 57 00:03:25,660 --> 00:03:29,360 and nobody could really censor it. It just seemed like it was too good to be 58 00:03:29,360 --> 00:03:30,070 true. 59 00:03:30,070 --> 00:03:32,760 And that was kind of the death knell on my architectural career. 60 00:03:32,760 --> 00:03:35,030 Like I would go on to graduate and work for a couple of years, 61 00:03:35,030 --> 00:03:38,570 but very quickly I was falling in love with the internet in the early kind-of-like 62 00:03:38,570 --> 00:03:39,410 flash days, 63 00:03:39,410 --> 00:03:42,060 remember, that time was really fun. 64 00:03:42,060 --> 00:03:44,670 And so I was coming home from my architecture job and sort of trying to 65 00:03:44,670 --> 00:03:45,630 learn code 66 00:03:45,630 --> 00:03:48,410 and trying .. kind of had my first introduction to open source, 67 00:03:48,410 --> 00:03:51,910 like reading Joshua Davis' praystation FLA files, 68 00:03:51,910 --> 00:03:54,250 if anybody remembers that day. 69 00:03:54,250 --> 00:03:57,760 But that was kind of my introduction to technology, and it was really empowering, 70 00:03:57,760 --> 00:04:01,680 like, it was a feeling, that I still remember and try to, like, hone in on 71 00:04:01,680 --> 00:04:03,810 when I'm getting more depressed these days. 72 00:04:03,810 --> 00:04:09,580 And so, how this shows up in some of my work, I'm gonna start around, like, 2005 73 00:04:09,580 --> 00:04:13,180 with some projects that I've been doing up to projects that I've been doing right 74 00:04:13,180 --> 00:04:14,730 now. 75 00:04:14,730 --> 00:04:19,839 Back in 2005/2006 I co-founded an organisation called Graffiti Reseach Lab 76 00:04:19,839 --> 00:04:25,180 with a friend named James Powderly, while we were in residency at IBM in New York. 77 00:04:25,180 --> 00:04:29,050 And the basic idea we had with Graffiti Research Lab was that 78 00:04:29,050 --> 00:04:32,170 technologies were getting a lot cheaper to the point where they're almost getting 79 00:04:32,170 --> 00:04:32,730 disposable, 80 00:04:32,730 --> 00:04:37,160 like LEDs, digital projectors were getting really cheap, lasers were getting really cheap, 81 00:04:37,160 --> 00:04:41,380 and we were interested in trying to make projects that would start to get graffiti writers and 82 00:04:41,380 --> 00:04:41,890 activists 83 00:04:41,890 --> 00:04:44,290 talking to the free software movement more. 84 00:04:44,290 --> 00:04:48,450 Like have a common dialogue for these two very different groups of toolbuilders. 85 00:04:48,450 --> 00:04:51,560 And so, with that as, like, a premise, we sort of thought of ourselves 86 00:04:51,560 --> 00:04:54,470 as the Q branch for graffiti writers, right? 87 00:04:54,470 --> 00:04:57,190 I'll just show one quick project. This was called 'Laser Tag'. 88 00:04:57,190 --> 00:05:01,760 This was a in retrospect very simple computer vision project, 89 00:05:01,760 --> 00:05:05,389 but we would basically go out with a digital projector 90 00:05:05,389 --> 00:05:09,040 and we'd invite activists and we'd invite graffiti writers, 91 00:05:09,040 --> 00:05:13,300 and we'd set up on this sort of biggest buildings that we could find in town. 92 00:05:13,300 --> 00:05:16,389 And we would just have this kind of open system, like, the only rules that we had with the 93 00:05:16,389 --> 00:05:16,650 project 94 00:05:16,650 --> 00:05:19,320 was that there couldn't be a censor button. People had to be allowed to say 95 00:05:19,320 --> 00:05:22,420 whatever they wanted. Most of the times we did it without permission, 96 00:05:22,420 --> 00:05:26,590 which isn't saying much because at the time there wasn't a lot of people 97 00:05:26,590 --> 00:05:28,320 projecting in public so there weren't a lot of 98 00:05:28,320 --> 00:05:30,920 sort of laws in this sort of grey area. 99 00:05:30,920 --> 00:05:35,350 So even when the police usually came it was more of a conversation than a ticket. 100 00:05:35,350 --> 00:05:38,240 And so we were making, this is one example of lots of projects 101 00:05:38,240 --> 00:05:42,090 we were making where it was kind of about amplifying free speech, 102 00:05:42,090 --> 00:05:45,460 like trying to use technologies that were getting cheaper and cheaper and 103 00:05:45,460 --> 00:05:45,740 cheaper 104 00:05:45,740 --> 00:05:50,680 to level that playing field between people who live in cities and people who advertise 105 00:05:50,680 --> 00:05:51,080 in cities, 106 00:05:51,080 --> 00:05:54,430 and what kind of visual language and visual communication we have in both those 107 00:05:54,430 --> 00:05:56,560 places. 108 00:05:56,560 --> 00:06:01,930 So that was the work Graffiti Research Lab was doing. 109 00:06:01,930 --> 00:06:04,110 At some point we realized with Graffiti Research Lab 110 00:06:04,110 --> 00:06:06,940 that the sort of technical hacking we were doing 111 00:06:06,940 --> 00:06:10,950 was much less interesting than the more social hacking we were doing. 112 00:06:10,950 --> 00:06:14,120 And we also, we were getting much more press than we deserved, 113 00:06:14,120 --> 00:06:16,710 and we were trying to figure out why that was happening, 114 00:06:16,710 --> 00:06:20,430 and one thing we sorta came to was we were sorta fulfilling this narrative 115 00:06:20,430 --> 00:06:23,720 that the media wants, which is that we are living in the future now, right? 116 00:06:23,720 --> 00:06:26,790 Which is why everyone is reporting on hoverboards now, like, ??? 117 00:06:26,790 --> 00:06:29,760 we're here, you know? And graffiti writers with lasers 118 00:06:29,760 --> 00:06:33,900 was one of those apparently, like, monumental future points that we'd hit, 119 00:06:33,900 --> 00:06:36,810 and so the media was trying to write about our projects, 120 00:06:36,810 --> 00:06:40,270 and we realized that this was sort of a social hack where we could start to 121 00:06:40,270 --> 00:06:42,680 empower other people with maybe more marginalized voices 122 00:06:42,680 --> 00:06:45,060 to get in the newspapers more often. 123 00:06:45,060 --> 00:06:49,300 And so, our mission changed slightly, and so we kind of morphed the energy that 124 00:06:49,300 --> 00:06:49,490 we had 125 00:06:49,490 --> 00:06:52,770 with Graffiti Research Lab into this group called the Free Art and Technology Lab, 126 00:06:52,770 --> 00:06:56,540 which didn't really have a sort of set code or manifesto, 127 00:06:56,540 --> 00:07:02,210 but the basic idea was that we were gonna use what even Franco called radical entertainment, 128 00:07:02,210 --> 00:07:05,270 This idea that you could make sort of engaging media on the internet 129 00:07:05,270 --> 00:07:08,240 that people are gonna want to click on, not because they agree with the politics, 130 00:07:08,240 --> 00:07:12,520 because they wanna see people acting a fool in the streets, right? 131 00:07:12,520 --> 00:07:14,990 So I'll show, I'll show one project here. 132 00:07:14,990 --> 00:07:19,400 This was from a suite of projects we did in Berlin, gosh, a few years ago now, 133 00:07:19,400 --> 00:07:22,240 called 'Fuck Google', where we came together to make Fuck Google projects. 134 00:07:22,240 --> 00:07:27,300 So this was one where we rented a.. actually, Aram Bartholl was over here, 135 00:07:27,300 --> 00:07:29,180 you can see him seated there in the driver's seat, 136 00:07:29,180 --> 00:07:31,080 rented this car for very cheap, 137 00:07:31,080 --> 00:07:34,139 bought a roof rack off of ebay i think, for, like, 15 Euros, 138 00:07:34,139 --> 00:07:37,330 and then everything above the roof was just cardboard, ducttape and wires. 139 00:07:37,330 --> 00:07:40,860 There was nothing technical in this project, it was purely a social hack. 140 00:07:40,860 --> 00:07:44,949 And this was probably my second greatest technological empowering moment. 141 00:07:44,949 --> 00:07:46,770 Driving the google car is fucking amazing. 142 00:07:46,770 --> 00:07:50,190 Here is what that looks like. 143 00:07:50,190 --> 00:07:52,550 *music* 144 00:07:52,550 --> 00:07:54,919 *laughter* 145 00:07:54,919 --> 00:08:07,530 So once we had the car, we were just brainstorming, 146 00:08:07,530 --> 00:08:12,500 like, what are the little skits we could play out, that would kind of put google 147 00:08:12,500 --> 00:08:16,720 in a compromised position. And so, yeah, it was breaking down. 148 00:08:16,720 --> 00:08:21,080 This is the drinking and driving. *Laughter* 149 00:08:21,080 --> 00:08:22,610 *applause* 150 00:08:22,610 --> 00:08:31,050 And if you wanna know how strong google's brand is, this is a staged carjacking, 151 00:08:31,050 --> 00:08:35,828 where someone off the street risks their life to save a corporate automobile 152 00:08:35,828 --> 00:08:58,600 engaged in spying practices. *Laughter* 153 00:08:58,600 --> 00:09:04,059 And so the idea is that we were then leaking these on the internet and 154 00:09:04,059 --> 00:09:08,839 this was a long time ago back when we were not sure if google was evil or not, 155 00:09:08,839 --> 00:09:09,100 right? 156 00:09:09,100 --> 00:09:10,399 So this discussion was happening. 157 00:09:10,399 --> 00:09:12,769 It's happening more in Germany than in other places, actually. 158 00:09:12,769 --> 00:09:16,860 But the idea was to get those conversations happening outside of places like this, 159 00:09:16,860 --> 00:09:21,040 and outside of places like our gallery and art institutions and more in, like, 160 00:09:21,040 --> 00:09:23,449 the mainstream press, and, like, people over coffee 161 00:09:23,449 --> 00:09:23,999 picking up this story 162 00:09:23,999 --> 00:09:25,759 and starting to talk about these issues. 163 00:09:25,759 --> 00:09:29,850 That was kind of the idea behind F.A.T. Lab function. 164 00:09:29,850 --> 00:09:33,119 I was also maintaining a solo practice at the same time as I was doing these 165 00:09:33,119 --> 00:09:35,980 more collaborative projects. 166 00:09:35,980 --> 00:09:41,089 This is one called 'Free Speech' I did in Vienna in 2000.. I don't know, like 3 or 167 00:09:41,089 --> 00:09:42,470 4 years ago now? 168 00:09:42,470 --> 00:09:48,160 This is again, like, a very simple technology, this is another rented car with vinyl letters 169 00:09:48,160 --> 00:09:50,720 of a mobile phone number, mobile Viennese phone number, 170 00:09:50,720 --> 00:09:53,420 and an arrow pointing to a loudspeaker on the roof. 171 00:09:53,420 --> 00:09:55,449 And that's the only input you get as the viewer. 172 00:09:55,449 --> 00:09:58,069 And we just drove this around Vienna for three days, 173 00:09:58,069 --> 00:10:01,809 and people that were sort of curious enough to call that would have their phone 174 00:10:01,809 --> 00:10:04,540 routed directly to the speaker, and there was noone on the other line, 175 00:10:04,540 --> 00:10:07,679 so their first realisation that they were sort of in the system when they would just 176 00:10:07,679 --> 00:10:11,439 hear themselves, like, 'Hello?' echoing throughout the streets. 177 00:10:11,439 --> 00:10:19,029 I'll show a bit of that that looks like. 178 00:10:19,029 --> 00:10:27,759 *noise* Female voice: Hallo? Hallo! 179 00:10:27,759 --> 00:10:34,740 Ich bin der Champion! 180 00:10:34,740 --> 00:10:39,970 Male voice: *Laughter* 181 00:10:39,970 --> 00:10:41,709 *noise* 182 00:10:41,709 --> 00:10:48,689 Children: Hallo! Fick dich! 183 00:10:48,689 --> 00:10:59,160 Male voice: Laura! Ich liebe dich! 184 00:10:59,160 --> 00:11:00,910 *Music* 185 00:11:00,910 --> 00:11:07,889 Group voices: Hallo? Niiiiice! 186 00:11:07,889 --> 00:11:08,149 So fresh, man. TschĂś. 187 00:11:08,149 --> 00:11:09,569 Evan: And so, like, that guy was maybe my favourite, 188 00:11:09,569 --> 00:11:10,749 or maybe that guy who picked up 189 00:11:10,749 --> 00:11:14,860 and just started laughing, even though when confronted 190 00:11:14,860 --> 00:11:14,929 with this sort of 191 00:11:14,929 --> 00:11:17,689 louder voice in public, and they were.. maybe thought that were gonna have, 192 00:11:17,689 --> 00:11:21,350 when they set out, commute to work or go to coffee, 193 00:11:21,350 --> 00:11:25,339 even though maybe they didn't choose to say these more poignant points, you know? 194 00:11:25,339 --> 00:11:30,980 Maybe just the laughter to me was this more pure feeling of what technological 195 00:11:30,980 --> 00:11:33,519 empowerment feels like, right, like just laughing on the streets 196 00:11:33,519 --> 00:11:35,449 because you kind of have this empowered voice. 197 00:11:35,449 --> 00:11:37,689 Like, that, that's the feeling I wanna get as an artist and so, 198 00:11:37,689 --> 00:11:41,369 some of the work I was doing was trying to sort of set up, set up these systems 199 00:11:41,369 --> 00:11:45,709 that would allow other people to have these sort of experiences. 200 00:11:45,709 --> 00:11:48,269 So again, like very simple tools for empowerment, 201 00:11:48,269 --> 00:11:50,689 very low-tech tools for empowerment. 202 00:11:50,689 --> 00:11:54,769 The other thread that I was doing throughout that period and maybe more so 203 00:11:54,769 --> 00:11:55,410 in the last 3 years 204 00:11:55,410 --> 00:11:58,470 has to do with sort of this idea of visualizing the invisible 205 00:11:58,470 --> 00:12:01,989 which I think is something that artists wrestle with quite a bit. 206 00:12:01,989 --> 00:12:05,220 And specifically thinking about visualizing the network, 207 00:12:05,220 --> 00:12:08,009 thinking about visualizing the internet and how the internet is sort of touching us 208 00:12:08,009 --> 00:12:12,939 and we have this new connection culturally to each other. 209 00:12:12,939 --> 00:12:16,220 And so I did.. this was maybe 3 or 4 years ago, 210 00:12:16,220 --> 00:12:19,439 I did this sort of homage to wikipedia. 211 00:12:19,439 --> 00:12:21,749 I still love surfing wikipedia. 212 00:12:21,749 --> 00:12:25,679 For me as someone who sort of maybe has a bit of nostalgia for the old days of the 213 00:12:25,679 --> 00:12:25,929 internet, 214 00:12:25,929 --> 00:12:29,100 I feel like wikipedia is one of these few holdouts on the internet 215 00:12:29,100 --> 00:12:32,470 where there is semi-egoless uploads still happening. 216 00:12:32,470 --> 00:12:33,709 You know? 217 00:12:33,709 --> 00:12:36,489 It's not necessarily... people are making uploads not because 218 00:12:36,489 --> 00:12:41,389 they're trying to craft their own avatar online, but they.. because they really want to explain 219 00:12:41,389 --> 00:12:44,709 how a doroknot (?) functions, or they really want to explain 220 00:12:44,709 --> 00:12:50,610 how a boxer engine works, right, it's content that if Konstant were here 221 00:12:50,610 --> 00:12:53,660 he would call media with an alibi, right? 222 00:12:53,660 --> 00:12:57,559 It's media that has reason for existing beyond just sort of supporting our own 223 00:12:57,559 --> 00:13:00,110 online visions of who we are and who we aren't. 224 00:13:00,110 --> 00:13:01,699 And so for this reason I really love wikipedia. 225 00:13:01,699 --> 00:13:06,329 It feels like this really sort of free and honest place to surf sometimes. 226 00:13:06,329 --> 00:13:11,139 And so, I made this series of eleven websites, kind of as a monument to wikipedia, 227 00:13:11,139 --> 00:13:15,209 where I spent a summer just surfing for animated GIFs on wikipedia 228 00:13:15,209 --> 00:13:17,879 which was a really awesome way to spend the summer. 229 00:13:17,879 --> 00:13:21,420 And then, when I found ones that I would wanna kind of use as raw materials 230 00:13:21,420 --> 00:13:24,499 I would just copy and paste it a couple of hundred times 231 00:13:24,499 --> 00:13:27,300 and rename the files so that when the browser tries to load it in 232 00:13:27,300 --> 00:13:31,679 it doesn't cache them all immediately. It thinks they're all separate files. 233 00:13:31,679 --> 00:13:33,300 And so what ends up happening is.. 234 00:13:33,300 --> 00:13:36,470 And of course, it can't load them all at once, right, 235 00:13:36,470 --> 00:13:39,739 so it just starts loading them in as the packets are sort of delivered 236 00:13:39,739 --> 00:13:44,869 in this linear fashion, and.. so the pieces never quite look the same. 237 00:13:44,869 --> 00:13:47,129 They're all... in a sense these kind of unique views 238 00:13:47,129 --> 00:13:50,399 were depending on your process, your speed and what browser you're using 239 00:13:50,399 --> 00:13:51,970 and how fast your internet connection is. 240 00:13:51,970 --> 00:13:55,689 They're always gonna load in slightly different as the packets sort of traverse the network 241 00:13:55,689 --> 00:13:57,709 in this linear fashion. 242 00:13:57,709 --> 00:14:00,829 And so what you get is.. are these compositions that are very simple 243 00:14:00,829 --> 00:14:03,749 but they're not, in this case, like a perfect circle, right? 244 00:14:03,749 --> 00:14:07,559 You kind of see this visualization of the data kind of as it's going 245 00:14:07,559 --> 00:14:08,399 through the network. 246 00:14:08,399 --> 00:14:12,980 And if you view these same pieces in the TOR browser, 247 00:14:12,980 --> 00:14:15,059 which I don't have to explain what it is in this audience, 248 00:14:15,059 --> 00:14:18,610 which is really fun for the first time, *laughing* 249 00:14:18,610 --> 00:14:21,319 you get get a sense of how... so this is the exact same website 250 00:14:21,319 --> 00:14:24,139 just viewed through TOR. And you can see in the piece 251 00:14:24,139 --> 00:14:28,600 how the composition is altered, right, because, as the pieces are moving around 252 00:14:28,600 --> 00:14:31,170 and it's being rerouted to different nodes, they kind of come back together 253 00:14:31,170 --> 00:14:33,100 in a way that's very different than the way it's happening 254 00:14:33,100 --> 00:14:36,119 as a straight connection through Firefox, and so 255 00:14:36,119 --> 00:14:40,769 the resulting composition is less fluid, it's more staggered and you can kind of.. 256 00:14:40,769 --> 00:14:47,429 There is some kind of visual clue of how that piece went through the network. 257 00:14:47,429 --> 00:14:51,019 Another series I've been doing for several years now is.. 258 00:14:51,019 --> 00:14:54,549 I've been archiving my own browsing folder, my cache directory, 259 00:14:54,549 --> 00:14:57,949 I've been basically archiving that every couple of weeks. 260 00:14:57,949 --> 00:15:01,569 And then when I get invited to show a piece from that series I just basically.. 261 00:15:01,569 --> 00:15:05,209 I use a image packing algorithm, so just pack all these images 262 00:15:05,209 --> 00:15:08,569 into the smallest amount of room possible, and I'll make these prints 263 00:15:08,569 --> 00:15:11,459 that are just straight print-outs of my internet cache. 264 00:15:11,459 --> 00:15:14,879 So this is what one month of my internet cache looks like. 265 00:15:14,879 --> 00:15:18,369 That is what 3 months looks like. 266 00:15:18,369 --> 00:15:20,059 They're relatively uncensored. 267 00:15:20,059 --> 00:15:23,480 I go through it to look and make sure, 'cause sometimes my wife will use the computer, 268 00:15:23,480 --> 00:15:26,439 I'll make sure there is nothing of hers she doesn't want on there, 269 00:15:26,439 --> 00:15:29,379 and I check it for banking details, but besides that it's pretty.. 270 00:15:29,379 --> 00:15:31,759 pretty much uncensored. 271 00:15:31,759 --> 00:15:35,910 And so, it's meant to be.. I kind of think of them as self portraits. 272 00:15:35,910 --> 00:15:39,449 They're.. I think of them actually more like false self portraits, 273 00:15:39,449 --> 00:15:43,579 'cause it's.. unless you truly think that you are your browsing data, 274 00:15:43,579 --> 00:15:46,529 it's not.. it does.. it's.. these prints aren't who I feel like I am. 275 00:15:46,529 --> 00:15:50,309 But in.. I think over the long term the idea is more they are meant 276 00:15:50,309 --> 00:15:53,470 to be this sort of portrait of the internet at this one moment in time, right? 277 00:15:53,470 --> 00:15:59,459 And as sort of screen size has changed and screens shift from our laps to our pockets, 278 00:15:59,459 --> 00:16:02,929 and as browser resolutions and all these standards change, 279 00:16:02,929 --> 00:16:04,839 and the kind of fabric of the web changes, 280 00:16:04,839 --> 00:16:08,179 and these prints hopefully, when someone digs out of my basement, 281 00:16:08,179 --> 00:16:10,569 like, 20 years from now, they'll have these sort of prints 282 00:16:10,569 --> 00:16:13,029 of what the internet felt like in this one moment in time. 283 00:16:13,029 --> 00:16:16,089 That's the idea anyway. 284 00:16:16,089 --> 00:16:20,959 Another related series has to do again with this kind of shift from 285 00:16:20,959 --> 00:16:21,929 the screen to the pocket. 286 00:16:21,929 --> 00:16:24,679 Like, I'm really sort of fascinated with this idea of casual computing 287 00:16:24,679 --> 00:16:26,879 which I feel.. I feel like that move when we started 288 00:16:26,879 --> 00:16:30,739 having computers in our pockets every day was a really fundamental shift. 289 00:16:30,739 --> 00:16:32,509 And so I had this series called 'Multi-touch Paintings', 290 00:16:32,509 --> 00:16:36,749 that are created just from, basically just take a piece of tracing paper 291 00:16:36,749 --> 00:16:40,779 and put it over my phone and then perform the sort of interface tasks 292 00:16:40,779 --> 00:16:41,730 that it asked me to do. 293 00:16:41,730 --> 00:16:46,209 So this one's called 'Slide to unlock'. 294 00:16:46,209 --> 00:16:48,709 This is a.. this one's called 'Zoom in, zoom out'. 295 00:16:48,709 --> 00:16:50,949 And they're literally just ink on paper. 296 00:16:50,949 --> 00:16:54,290 So the capacitive touch still works through the paper 297 00:16:54,290 --> 00:16:58,069 and it's.. I'm kind of like a, maybe a short term it's meant to be, 298 00:16:58,069 --> 00:17:01,199 maybe purely a visualization in a sense. 299 00:17:01,199 --> 00:17:04,490 But I think maybe.. I hope that there's more, there is also 300 00:17:04,490 --> 00:17:07,319 like kind of an artistic side of these too, where they're also kind of commenting 301 00:17:07,319 --> 00:17:09,019 on the way we're consuming media right now. 302 00:17:09,019 --> 00:17:11,250 So this one's called 'Next next next', right? 303 00:17:11,250 --> 00:17:13,589 So this is.. and 'next next next' is the way 304 00:17:13,589 --> 00:17:17,189 probably this piece will be consumed in 99% of the time, right? 305 00:17:17,189 --> 00:17:19,319 For the 10 people that see this hanging on a wall, 306 00:17:19,319 --> 00:17:22,388 the rest are just gonna 'next' through this on instagram, right? 307 00:17:22,388 --> 00:17:26,880 And so it's meant to sort of, kind of archive, like, the bug in amber 308 00:17:26,880 --> 00:17:29,250 a little bit, these moments that we're going through right now, 309 00:17:29,250 --> 00:17:31,179 where we're touching pixels for the first time, 310 00:17:31,179 --> 00:17:36,059 and these things that kind of feel, sort of high-tech in a sense, 311 00:17:36,059 --> 00:17:38,240 but quickly are feeling very blunt, like to me this feels like 312 00:17:38,240 --> 00:17:41,830 a very blunt way to consume media, a very blunt way to have a relationship 313 00:17:41,830 --> 00:17:43,860 with art. 314 00:17:43,860 --> 00:17:48,340 So hopefully it's commenting on that a bit too. 315 00:17:48,340 --> 00:17:49,860 This is a related piece from the series. 316 00:17:49,860 --> 00:17:52,470 This is.. this piece is called 'Level Cleared'. 317 00:17:52,470 --> 00:17:56,029 This is me playing Angry Birds from start to finish. 318 00:17:56,029 --> 00:17:57,360 *Laughing* And so.. *Applause* 319 00:17:57,360 --> 00:18:07,470 So the grid starts in the upper left corner with level 1-1. 320 00:18:07,470 --> 00:18:11,389 Whoever else has a Angry.. or had at one point an Angry Birds addiction, 321 00:18:11,389 --> 00:18:12,639 you know the level well. 322 00:18:12,639 --> 00:18:13,980 And then I just played straight through. 323 00:18:13,980 --> 00:18:17,299 It takes me full-time Angry Birds play, like 8-10 hours a day for 3 days 324 00:18:17,299 --> 00:18:18,350 to get through. 325 00:18:18,350 --> 00:18:20,740 And they keep adding levels, so when I have to remake the piece now 326 00:18:20,740 --> 00:18:23,330 it's even more of a nightmare. 327 00:18:23,330 --> 00:18:24,440 And it just marches straight through. 328 00:18:24,440 --> 00:18:29,320 I have one sheet per level.. per attempted level, 329 00:18:29,320 --> 00:18:31,370 and so again, this piece, like, I've been thinking a lot about 330 00:18:31,370 --> 00:18:35,370 how the art.. how art and the internet relate in terms of the consumption of art 331 00:18:35,370 --> 00:18:38,630 and how time is affected with our consumption of art. 332 00:18:38,630 --> 00:18:42,769 And I was, actually, I was thinking about conversations we had earlier 333 00:18:42,769 --> 00:18:43,090 on the F.A.T. days 334 00:18:43,090 --> 00:18:46,659 where we were both kind of joking at one point about how we felt like the internet was 335 00:18:46,659 --> 00:18:50,470 sort of.. we always had to load projects up, like, if we didn't release something in 2 336 00:18:50,470 --> 00:18:50,630 weeks, 337 00:18:50,630 --> 00:18:52,010 it was like we were dead on the internet, right? 338 00:18:52,010 --> 00:18:54,370 And we felt this kind of like push from the internet 339 00:18:54,370 --> 00:18:56,730 that we had to keep making and keep making and keep making. 340 00:18:56,730 --> 00:18:58,880 And there was something interesting about participating in that culture, 341 00:18:58,880 --> 00:19:00,799 but then more and more I've been thinking about 342 00:19:00,799 --> 00:19:04,230 how can you maybe still contribute and participate in that kind of consumption 343 00:19:04,230 --> 00:19:05,190 of media, 344 00:19:05,190 --> 00:19:08,330 but then have the same piece mean something slightly different 345 00:19:08,330 --> 00:19:10,730 for people that are gonna invest more amounts of time in it, right? 346 00:19:10,730 --> 00:19:15,100 And how pieces, even if people consume it in a blog post title and have one reaction, 347 00:19:15,100 --> 00:19:17,510 which might be a familiar reaction like laughter, 348 00:19:17,510 --> 00:19:19,730 which I actually really like from this piece. 349 00:19:19,730 --> 00:19:23,510 I'm trying to embed in these other kind of readings of the work, 350 00:19:23,510 --> 00:19:26,159 where you come in and you sit on this bench, right, 351 00:19:26,159 --> 00:19:30,149 and this is maybe my interpretation of the piece, right, 352 00:19:30,149 --> 00:19:33,620 and you sit in front of these, like 1500 sheets of paper 353 00:19:33,620 --> 00:19:36,380 and after the kind of wave of laughter leaves you and you realize 354 00:19:36,380 --> 00:19:39,419 like, all the things I could have done at that time, right? 355 00:19:39,419 --> 00:19:41,940 Like, I coulda learned French, I coulda lost ten pounds, 356 00:19:41,940 --> 00:19:46,080 I coulda learned how to cook more, I could've read a whole bunch of books, 357 00:19:46,080 --> 00:19:48,799 and instead I was like just flicking, like, birds at pigs 358 00:19:48,799 --> 00:19:51,279 over and over and over and over again. 359 00:19:51,279 --> 00:19:53,630 And so it's.. I like both readings. 360 00:19:53,630 --> 00:19:57,659 Like, I like the reading that.. it can be consumed in Instagram quickly. 361 00:19:57,659 --> 00:20:01,100 I like the reading.. I.. if people are able to sit with it 362 00:20:01,100 --> 00:20:05,240 and maybe contemplate these larger issues I like it as well, but I think 363 00:20:05,240 --> 00:20:08,750 in art-making right now there is this.. I'm trying to make work that isn't 364 00:20:08,750 --> 00:20:12,059 just addressing the internet's drive to have things faster and quicker 365 00:20:12,059 --> 00:20:13,720 and in blogpost titles, right? 366 00:20:13,720 --> 00:20:19,039 'Cause I felt it sort of affected the art I was making. 367 00:20:19,039 --> 00:20:21,860 And also the internet has like fundamentally changed, right, 368 00:20:21,860 --> 00:20:26,809 like I think.. I think the times that we were at IBM and 369 00:20:26,809 --> 00:20:29,299 we were doing F.A.T. Lab and the times that we were 370 00:20:29,299 --> 00:20:31,919 sort of wrestling with that work - things really changed, like, 371 00:20:31,919 --> 00:20:32,559 we all felt it. 372 00:20:32,559 --> 00:20:34,990 And in this crowd I don't really have to talk about it, right? 373 00:20:34,990 --> 00:20:40,259 But for a while, the internet to me felt like this, and shame on me, you know? 374 00:20:40,259 --> 00:20:43,090 But as I've been making work and the work's been changing, 375 00:20:43,090 --> 00:20:46,730 and my relationship to the internet has been changing, 376 00:20:46,730 --> 00:20:49,299 and so I'm gonna into some things that I know you all know, 377 00:20:49,299 --> 00:20:51,649 but this is kind of like my personal take on it, right? 378 00:20:51,649 --> 00:20:55,029 My.. this is like how I came to think about the situation that we're in now. 379 00:20:55,029 --> 00:20:57,450 I used to think the internet was the Big Bang, right? 380 00:20:57,450 --> 00:20:58,539 That was how I was introduced to it. 381 00:20:58,539 --> 00:21:01,049 Like, I thought, holy shit, this is gonna happen 382 00:21:01,049 --> 00:21:03,120 and it's just gonna keep multiplying, getting bigger and bigger 383 00:21:03,120 --> 00:21:05,669 and there'll be a server for every interest, and everybody'll be a publisher, 384 00:21:05,669 --> 00:21:07,730 everyone's gonna be empowered. 385 00:21:07,730 --> 00:21:11,480 And I thought it was this Big Bang model of what was gonna happen. 386 00:21:11,480 --> 00:21:14,419 And I think more and more that, like, it's actually the Big Crunch model, 387 00:21:14,419 --> 00:21:16,700 which is when the universe expands to a maximization point 388 00:21:16,700 --> 00:21:19,049 and then at some point starts contracting down, right? 389 00:21:19,049 --> 00:21:23,490 And I think, I think that that middle point.. I think that middle point was when 390 00:21:23,490 --> 00:21:24,450 we accepted Gmail. *Laughter* 391 00:21:24,450 --> 00:21:30,370 You know, I think once we, like, culturally decided that 392 00:21:30,370 --> 00:21:33,009 someone could read our emails and advertise us to our inbox, 393 00:21:33,009 --> 00:21:36,029 I really think people at Google were just like, holy shit, like, 394 00:21:36,029 --> 00:21:38,509 'They bought it.' Like, from that point on it was just really 395 00:21:38,509 --> 00:21:39,299 over. 396 00:21:39,299 --> 00:21:43,380 And so now it's been of course condensing into fewer and fewer servers, 397 00:21:43,380 --> 00:21:46,159 and.. anyway, we all know this stuff, right. 398 00:21:46,159 --> 00:21:50,470 And so this kind of like, this condensation of the internet down to one point 399 00:21:50,470 --> 00:21:52,950 feels like it's happening. 400 00:21:52,950 --> 00:21:55,460 The kind of targeted marketing that just was annoying at one point 401 00:21:55,460 --> 00:21:59,090 now feels really more sinister, like, I mean, it was kind of ok 402 00:21:59,090 --> 00:22:00,769 to read our email and advertise to us, 403 00:22:00,769 --> 00:22:03,399 but then when you start, like, kind of snitching on us, 404 00:22:03,399 --> 00:22:06,230 that was just.. that was hard for me. 405 00:22:06,230 --> 00:22:09,049 Like, we don't even need to talk about this, 'cause I know it gets addressed all the time 406 00:22:09,049 --> 00:22:09,299 here. 407 00:22:09,299 --> 00:22:13,100 But for me, as someone who is making art that was engaged in the internet, 408 00:22:13,100 --> 00:22:17,240 and a lot of the inspirations that I was taking for, from the kind of free culture movement 409 00:22:17,240 --> 00:22:20,740 and free software movement, engaged with the internet, and like, 410 00:22:20,740 --> 00:22:24,039 the convolution of these 3 things, of like, monetization of the web, 411 00:22:24,039 --> 00:22:27,000 the centralization of the web, and then this kind of spying scandal. 412 00:22:27,000 --> 00:22:30,850 They really left me in kind of like staggering for ways to get back to making art 413 00:22:30,850 --> 00:22:34,630 about an internet that didn't feel funny to me any more, right, like, 414 00:22:34,630 --> 00:22:36,820 the internet was .. this is how I felt like. 415 00:22:36,820 --> 00:22:40,330 I felt like the lolcats were just this Trojan horse, you know, 416 00:22:40,330 --> 00:22:44,340 and, and I.. after all this was sort of happening I couldn't even see the cats 417 00:22:44,340 --> 00:22:45,090 on the internet any more. 418 00:22:45,090 --> 00:22:48,419 Like, I thought, the internet was the land of the cats and unicorns, 419 00:22:48,419 --> 00:22:53,159 and now, the fur has kind of been removed and you see the terminator's shiny skull 420 00:22:53,159 --> 00:22:55,679 and the red beady eye. 421 00:22:55,679 --> 00:22:58,710 And so if.. and just like from a personal standpoint it got hard 422 00:22:58,710 --> 00:23:03,159 to get interested in making art in that medium again. 423 00:23:03,159 --> 00:23:06,600 And so, that was like all leading up to this talk, 424 00:23:06,600 --> 00:23:09,950 which maybe a lot of you have seen either at transmediale last year, 425 00:23:09,950 --> 00:23:12,960 or here, or, I mean, around the internet. 426 00:23:12,960 --> 00:23:15,190 I thought it was in the internet for a second there. 427 00:23:15,190 --> 00:23:19,019 This was Peter's talk at transmediale, where he gets on stage 428 00:23:19,019 --> 00:23:21,200 and he basically says 'We've lost, and it's over.' 429 00:23:21,200 --> 00:23:26,519 which is something I know that we've heard here from Frank and Rop 430 00:23:26,519 --> 00:23:27,549 10 years ago, right. 431 00:23:27,549 --> 00:23:29,350 I know this isn't a new narrative. 432 00:23:29,350 --> 00:23:33,169 But for me, Peter's talk came along kind of at the right time, 433 00:23:33,169 --> 00:23:37,149 where.. like, the Pirate Bay, for me, and the work that Piratbyran had been 434 00:23:37,149 --> 00:23:37,669 doing, 435 00:23:37,669 --> 00:23:42,220 has been really one of my main, like, heroes, one of the main reasons 436 00:23:42,220 --> 00:23:43,379 I started making art. 437 00:23:43,379 --> 00:23:46,779 Like, the Pirate Bay for me is still, I think, one of the most amazing things made 438 00:23:46,779 --> 00:23:47,519 during my lifetime. 439 00:23:47,519 --> 00:23:51,799 And it was what really turned me, kind of, from architecture to thinking about 440 00:23:51,799 --> 00:23:53,990 how entertainment and activism could overlap, 441 00:23:53,990 --> 00:23:55,659 and how people could really change things 442 00:23:55,659 --> 00:23:59,570 and have kind of powerstructure-altering things that we could contribute 443 00:23:59,570 --> 00:24:00,559 to culture. 444 00:24:00,559 --> 00:24:03,379 And when you have these kind of personal heroes get on stage 445 00:24:03,379 --> 00:24:06,019 and tell you that that's over.. 446 00:24:06,019 --> 00:24:08,899 When I happy to hear that I had this kind of moment where I was like, 447 00:24:08,899 --> 00:24:11,649 why am I feeling happy about hearing that, you know? 448 00:24:11,649 --> 00:24:13,490 And I realized that that was kind of how I was feeling, 449 00:24:13,490 --> 00:24:18,159 and have somebody else say that.. it felt really.. good's the wrong word, 450 00:24:18,159 --> 00:24:22,299 but it felt.. strangely empowering to sort of start to admit to myself 451 00:24:22,299 --> 00:24:25,659 that maybe the kind of ship was sinking, right? 452 00:24:25,659 --> 00:24:30,879 And so, shortly after that we were also having conversations within the F.A.T. Lab internally, 453 00:24:30,879 --> 00:24:34,279 and, not by unanimous decision but by majority we decided 454 00:24:34,279 --> 00:24:36,919 that we were gonna shut the doors at F.A.T. Lab. 455 00:24:36,919 --> 00:24:39,960 And I won't speak for the group, but my.. my personal thoughts on why 456 00:24:39,960 --> 00:24:44,110 we.. they shut down, which maybe isn't important in the greater sense, 457 00:24:44,110 --> 00:24:47,269 but just, kind of again, like as a.. kind of my personal take 458 00:24:47,269 --> 00:24:50,960 on how I'm working through this stuff was like.. I felt like F.A.T. Lab.. 459 00:24:50,960 --> 00:24:53,259 like the internet had sort of outpaced us, like, 460 00:24:53,259 --> 00:24:56,830 that idea of radical entertainment had a moment when there was 461 00:24:56,830 --> 00:25:00,710 a loophole in the media where kind of companies and capitalism 462 00:25:00,710 --> 00:25:02,460 hadn't really figured out viral marketing yet, 463 00:25:02,460 --> 00:25:06,129 and we had this.. this like big opening where we could really speak to people 464 00:25:06,129 --> 00:25:08,769 on a larger platform because there weren't whole divisions 465 00:25:08,769 --> 00:25:11,649 at Wieden+Kennedy that were just trying to do this for the largest companies. 466 00:25:11,649 --> 00:25:15,309 Like, it was.. we figured that out first, and so we had this kind of weakness 467 00:25:15,309 --> 00:25:16,809 that we could exploit. 468 00:25:16,809 --> 00:25:20,059 But as that changed we kind of failed as a group, I think, to keep up 469 00:25:20,059 --> 00:25:23,009 with new modes of activism. 470 00:25:23,009 --> 00:25:25,129 And the other thing that I was sort of feeling was that we were kind of 471 00:25:25,129 --> 00:25:30,190 providing this David and Goliath narrative to people. 472 00:25:30,190 --> 00:25:33,759 Both within the group, they were getting closer to sort of Silicon Valley, 473 00:25:33,759 --> 00:25:37,279 and our audience, which I felt like was getting closer and closer to Silicon Valley, 474 00:25:37,279 --> 00:25:40,159 that like... people that were getting entrenched more into that way of thinking 475 00:25:40,159 --> 00:25:44,049 were looking and enjoying our content in a way that sort of felt uncomfortable in 476 00:25:44,049 --> 00:25:45,279 a way. 477 00:25:45,279 --> 00:25:49,500 And it felt like the kind of humorous pranks that we were pulling was helping them cope, 478 00:25:49,500 --> 00:25:54,350 in a way, with the fact that they were supporting that system. 479 00:25:54,350 --> 00:25:57,090 And... it kind of felt like we were the comedian on the Titanic, 480 00:25:57,090 --> 00:25:58,730 like telling jokes as it was sinking. 481 00:25:58,730 --> 00:26:01,279 Or, it felt to me that way. 482 00:26:01,279 --> 00:26:04,860 And so at some point it felt more powerful to kind of just say 483 00:26:04,860 --> 00:26:08,169 'Goodbye' and maybe put a message in a bottle and jump off the ship 484 00:26:08,169 --> 00:26:12,389 rather than sit there and keep bailing out the ship, right? 485 00:26:12,389 --> 00:26:16,080 And so that's where I was at the beginning of this year. 486 00:26:16,080 --> 00:26:17,850 And so the work that I'm gonna show from this point on, 487 00:26:17,850 --> 00:26:21,789 which I think I still have.. yeah, ok, 25 minutes or so, 488 00:26:21,789 --> 00:26:24,500 is kind of the work I've been doing to try to get back to that point 489 00:26:24,500 --> 00:26:29,259 that I had when I first saw FETCH and FTP and kind of understood, 490 00:26:29,259 --> 00:26:31,250 in a very rudimentary way, how the internet functions, 491 00:26:31,250 --> 00:26:33,279 and what that empowering moment felt like, 492 00:26:33,279 --> 00:26:35,700 and trying to struggle to get back to a point where I could make art 493 00:26:35,700 --> 00:26:38,039 that was engaged in the internet again. 494 00:26:38,039 --> 00:26:41,409 And so, one way.. one way I started that search was to sort of start 495 00:26:41,409 --> 00:26:44,789 from the beginning, and thinking about, like, what is our cultural conception 496 00:26:44,789 --> 00:26:46,450 of what the internet is, what it looks like. 497 00:26:46,450 --> 00:26:50,049 And we have generally a kind of very poor visual metaphor 498 00:26:50,049 --> 00:26:51,159 for what the internet is, right? 499 00:26:51,159 --> 00:26:53,389 So this is just a google image search for the word 'internet' 500 00:26:53,389 --> 00:26:55,919 which doesn't, to me, feel very representative 501 00:26:55,919 --> 00:26:58,919 of what the network is or what it feels like. 502 00:26:58,919 --> 00:27:02,169 And so I started to get more into thinking about 503 00:27:02,169 --> 00:27:04,970 what it was, like, it can't just be, you know, 504 00:27:04,970 --> 00:27:08,230 blue-glowing logos in clouds, it has to be something physical. 505 00:27:08,230 --> 00:27:12,070 And so I started reading Andrew Blum's book 'Tubes'. 506 00:27:12,070 --> 00:27:15,820 I started reading Neal Stephenson's 'Mother Earth Mother Board', 507 00:27:15,820 --> 00:27:18,809 which, if there is any sort of internet infrastructure nerds, 508 00:27:18,809 --> 00:27:20,450 is like an amazing primer, 509 00:27:20,450 --> 00:27:23,440 kind of the first maybe seminal texts about following internet cables 510 00:27:23,440 --> 00:27:26,149 around the globe, which is kind of understanding 511 00:27:26,149 --> 00:27:29,570 what it looks like in these moments of transition, when it sort of 512 00:27:29,570 --> 00:27:33,499 enters the water and reaches the land. 513 00:27:33,499 --> 00:27:36,440 And one thing that Andrew Blum talks about in his book is this idea 514 00:27:36,440 --> 00:27:40,629 of these kind of like.. there's no monuments for this thing that's really 515 00:27:40,629 --> 00:27:42,999 a major part of our sort of time here on Earth, 516 00:27:42,999 --> 00:27:44,929 and maybe our part of culture. 517 00:27:44,929 --> 00:27:47,070 It seems like there's not these places that we can kind of 518 00:27:47,070 --> 00:27:49,309 go visit and commune with in the same way there are other 519 00:27:49,309 --> 00:27:50,179 architectural landmarks. 520 00:27:50,179 --> 00:27:54,490 And so you get these kind of like lonely manhole covers 521 00:27:54,490 --> 00:27:58,549 on these very desolate beaches in Nova Scotia. 522 00:27:58,549 --> 00:28:03,230 And so, at the same time that I was sort of doing that research, 523 00:28:03,230 --> 00:28:07,049 and this is gonna sound like a big left turn, but I'm gonna pull it back, 524 00:28:07,049 --> 00:28:08,870 at the same time I was doing that research I was also working 525 00:28:08,870 --> 00:28:12,620 on another project that required the use of an infra-red camera. 526 00:28:12,620 --> 00:28:15,259 And so I was kind of spending my time doing this research and looking 527 00:28:15,259 --> 00:28:17,809 around the internet trying to find really cheap infra-red cameras, 528 00:28:17,809 --> 00:28:20,090 'cause of course I'm an artist and I'm broke, 529 00:28:20,090 --> 00:28:24,289 and I kept finding myself on these websites of people selling technology 530 00:28:24,289 --> 00:28:27,669 to ghost hunters, which is a community that I had no interactions with, 531 00:28:27,669 --> 00:28:32,620 no experience of, but they just had really good cheap infra-red cameras. 532 00:28:32,620 --> 00:28:34,289 *laughter* 533 00:28:34,289 --> 00:28:37,220 And I was like, I was sitting there in these online ghost hunting shops, 534 00:28:37,220 --> 00:28:38,269 and they were amazing. 535 00:28:38,269 --> 00:28:41,409 Like, I felt myself having one of those moments with technology, 536 00:28:41,409 --> 00:28:44,710 where.. that I hadn't felt in a long time, it was just like a kid. 537 00:28:44,710 --> 00:28:47,499 Like, looking at this technology, I mean, like 'What the fuck is this, 538 00:28:47,499 --> 00:28:50,749 like, why, I don't understand!' and they.. 539 00:28:50,749 --> 00:28:53,649 But then I started to get interested in it more on 540 00:28:53,649 --> 00:28:55,570 kind of like a metaphorical or conceptual level, 541 00:28:55,570 --> 00:28:58,340 'cause what the ghost hunter.. ghost hunting community was.. 542 00:28:58,340 --> 00:29:01,899 is kind of interested in doing is, they're.. they talk about disembodied human energy 543 00:29:01,899 --> 00:29:02,159 a lot, 544 00:29:02,159 --> 00:29:06,399 and so they're making tech to try to visualize disembodied human energy. 545 00:29:06,399 --> 00:29:09,100 And in a sense this felt like what I was trying to do with a lot of the work 546 00:29:09,100 --> 00:29:12,639 that I was doing, which was trying to take all this kind of invisible momentum 547 00:29:12,639 --> 00:29:15,340 that's getting stored in servers and going through the fibre-optic cables 548 00:29:15,340 --> 00:29:19,200 and thinking about ways to kind of visualize that work to come to some understanding 549 00:29:19,200 --> 00:29:19,799 of it. 550 00:29:19,799 --> 00:29:23,299 And the ghost hunting community had this amazing tech to do that with. 551 00:29:23,299 --> 00:29:26,669 And so then I started to go really deep down this ghost hunting rabbit hole, 552 00:29:26,669 --> 00:29:30,480 which was another fun way to spend three months on the internet. *laughing* 553 00:29:30,480 --> 00:29:34,549 I'll show just one clip.. 'cause I'd never seen any of this, 554 00:29:34,549 --> 00:29:36,370 so people that are familiar with these communities, this is 555 00:29:36,370 --> 00:29:39,179 maybe old hat, but to me this was like just fascinating. 556 00:29:39,179 --> 00:29:42,399 So this is.. they also come from where I come from, so this is like, 557 00:29:42,399 --> 00:29:46,139 the Mid-West Spirit Organisation, like they're all from the midwest 558 00:29:46,139 --> 00:29:46,720 in the US, right? 559 00:29:46,720 --> 00:29:50,139 'Cause it's super boring there and so apparently like.. *laughing* 560 00:29:50,139 --> 00:29:53,480 you either do drugs or you hunt for ghosts, and.. *laughing* 561 00:29:53,480 --> 00:29:56,070 so this is one from the Mid-West Spirit Group, and this is one of 562 00:29:56,070 --> 00:29:57,529 many many clips on youtube. 563 00:29:57,529 --> 00:30:01,539 So this is a video shot in full-spectrum camera, which is just a camera 564 00:30:01,539 --> 00:30:04,419 that has been modified you see a little bit more of the ultra-violet spectrum 565 00:30:04,419 --> 00:30:07,299 and a little bit more of the infrared spectrum, and the audio you're gonna hear 566 00:30:07,299 --> 00:30:11,159 is from what they call a spirit box, which is essentially a hacked radio, 567 00:30:11,159 --> 00:30:11,950 that just keeps scanning, 568 00:30:11,950 --> 00:30:14,129 and I'll talk more about that in a bit. 569 00:30:14,129 --> 00:30:21,860 Guy: This is a device that you guys can come forward any spirits and speak with 570 00:30:21,860 --> 00:30:22,350 me. (??) 571 00:30:22,350 --> 00:30:49,070 Ah, so, if you have a message, please come forward and speak to me into this device. 572 00:30:49,070 --> 00:30:49,570 *noise* Female voice: Hi. Guy: Hi, tell me your name. *noise* *noise**boop* *noiseboopnoise* 573 00:30:49,570 --> 00:30:52,009 Evan: Ok, I'll let you do your own youtube searching for that. 574 00:30:52,009 --> 00:30:55,309 But even that idea, like, if you have a message for me, come speak into this device, 575 00:30:55,309 --> 00:30:57,220 like, I wanna use that for like the title of 576 00:30:57,220 --> 00:30:58,869 my next solo show, to me it's like sooo... 577 00:30:58,869 --> 00:31:01,509 there is like something happening there that seems like a statement that 578 00:31:01,509 --> 00:31:03,440 is greater than the ghost hunting community. 579 00:31:03,440 --> 00:31:07,119 And also their relationship with technology kind of feels very.. I mean it's strange to 580 00:31:07,119 --> 00:31:07,419 say this 581 00:31:07,419 --> 00:31:13,480 'cause for me as a sort of non-believer in ghosts I find the technology maybe 582 00:31:13,480 --> 00:31:17,659 inherently flawed, but I.. the approach seems so honest to me in a way. 583 00:31:17,659 --> 00:31:22,169 Like they're really setting out to make tools in a very honest way, very little commercial 584 00:31:22,169 --> 00:31:22,259 interest, 585 00:31:22,259 --> 00:31:25,590 to try to satisfy this niche community. 586 00:31:25,590 --> 00:31:27,580 So anyway, this is like a... it was really getting 587 00:31:27,580 --> 00:31:29,509 back to sort of, like, DIY culture 588 00:31:29,509 --> 00:31:33,570 of people making technology for their own needs. 589 00:31:33,570 --> 00:31:36,059 And it's a relatively self-aware community too, 590 00:31:36,059 --> 00:31:37,309 like they talk about this idea 591 00:31:37,309 --> 00:31:40,129 of matrixing a lot, which is the same as apophenia, right. 592 00:31:40,129 --> 00:31:45,340 It's this idea that our brains are kind of hardwired to find patterns in randomness. 593 00:31:45,340 --> 00:31:48,919 Like, they're aware of this. And so scepticism is like a big badge, 594 00:31:48,919 --> 00:31:53,049 that people, if you wanna rise the ranks in the paranormal community, 595 00:31:53,049 --> 00:31:57,529 you have to kind of debunk more ghosts than you find, right? 596 00:31:57,529 --> 00:31:59,149 And this to me is something that's really interesting too, 597 00:31:59,149 --> 00:32:02,320 'cause I think that they might actually be more critical of the investigations 598 00:32:02,320 --> 00:32:04,340 they're doing than we're doing, right? 599 00:32:04,340 --> 00:32:08,700 And so then when we look and see that we've got 5807 friend requests 600 00:32:08,700 --> 00:32:12,190 it feels like this might be a matrixing that we're doing with our own technology, 601 00:32:12,190 --> 00:32:14,139 with social media rather than the ghost hunting. 602 00:32:14,139 --> 00:32:17,570 Or whether.. like, the kind of like popular idea 603 00:32:17,570 --> 00:32:19,389 that technology can solve our problems, 604 00:32:19,389 --> 00:32:22,629 that we can explain all these complicated problems in 13 minutes or less, 605 00:32:22,629 --> 00:32:26,629 and 120 characters or less, it seems like maybe our relationship technology 606 00:32:26,629 --> 00:32:31,639 maybe isn't any more flawed than their relationship with technology. 607 00:32:31,639 --> 00:32:37,879 And so I decided to sort of set out on my own kind of... pilgrimage 608 00:32:37,879 --> 00:32:38,029 to the internet, right? 609 00:32:38,029 --> 00:32:40,580 In the same way the ghost hunters.. this isn't something that ghost hunters do 610 00:32:40,580 --> 00:32:42,769 kind of around the kitchen table over coffee, right, 611 00:32:42,769 --> 00:32:46,899 they go to what they call 'areas of activity', which are actually not graveyards, 612 00:32:46,899 --> 00:32:47,149 right. 613 00:32:47,149 --> 00:32:51,460 This would be an area of inactivity. It's more, like, abandoned hospitals, 614 00:32:51,460 --> 00:32:55,470 or insane asylums, like areas where activity happened. 615 00:32:55,470 --> 00:32:58,749 And so the.. because I wasn't looking for ghosts, I'm looking for more 616 00:32:58,749 --> 00:33:04,309 of this, like, reforged relationship with a.. an innocence lost of the internet. 617 00:33:04,309 --> 00:33:07,289 The area that I decided to go to, which is talked about a lot by 618 00:33:07,289 --> 00:33:12,119 Stephenson's 'Mother Earth Mother Board' article, is this Porthcurno beach, 619 00:33:12,119 --> 00:33:15,330 which is.. if you're in the UK and you just keep driving west as far as you can 620 00:33:15,330 --> 00:33:19,899 until.. literally when the land ends there's a hotel called Land's End, 621 00:33:19,899 --> 00:33:25,450 and when you're there, you're within, like, 3 km of really cool stuff. 622 00:33:25,450 --> 00:33:31,669 So you're in.. you're where 15% of the global internet flows through fibre-optic cables. 623 00:33:31,669 --> 00:33:34,919 It's historically where the pirate ships would hide in the coves. 624 00:33:34,919 --> 00:33:38,350 2000 BC it was where all the standing-stone circles.. 625 00:33:38,350 --> 00:33:41,119 there's all these standing stones in this area. 626 00:33:41,119 --> 00:33:44,919 It's where in 1870 the first telegraph came out 627 00:33:44,919 --> 00:33:46,440 of the ocean, the exact same beach 628 00:33:46,440 --> 00:33:48,379 that the fibre-optic cables are at now. 629 00:33:48,379 --> 00:33:53,480 2 km up the beach is where Marconi was building these amazing structures 630 00:33:53,480 --> 00:33:56,179 to send the first wireless transmissions over the Atlantic, 631 00:33:56,179 --> 00:34:01,360 all within this super-remote area way out at the west of the UK. 632 00:34:01,360 --> 00:34:06,249 And so, I made my map and I had my little destinations I wanted to go to, 633 00:34:06,249 --> 00:34:10,800 I rented a car, I got my gear. I had a mix of, like, ghost-hunting gear 634 00:34:10,800 --> 00:34:14,310 that I bought and some that I'd made, and some just other devices that I'd thought 635 00:34:14,310 --> 00:34:17,060 might come in handy. 636 00:34:17,060 --> 00:34:20,550 And I started by doing something that Neal Stephenson suggested to do 637 00:34:20,550 --> 00:34:23,500 if you're hunting for the internet, which is to follow the manholes. 638 00:34:23,500 --> 00:34:26,150 And so I started just following the manholes. 639 00:34:26,150 --> 00:34:29,730 And.. it really.. it's.. so when you're on these like surfer beaches, 640 00:34:29,730 --> 00:34:33,420 where nobody is and you see like 30 manholes in the parking lot 641 00:34:33,420 --> 00:34:35,949 that's meant just to get to the beach to go surfing, 642 00:34:35,949 --> 00:34:38,719 you're probably getting close. 643 00:34:38,719 --> 00:34:41,170 On these little farmroads that were just out in the middle of nowhere 644 00:34:41,170 --> 00:34:45,210 with just sheep kind of grazing, every once in a while there'd be a driveway 645 00:34:45,210 --> 00:34:49,290 that had these really large sort of access covers, 646 00:34:49,290 --> 00:34:52,460 and when you looked, they're designed to look like these typical british country 647 00:34:52,460 --> 00:34:53,000 houses, 648 00:34:53,000 --> 00:34:56,880 but on closer inspection you can see that there's all these extra security measures 649 00:34:56,880 --> 00:35:02,690 and blacked-out windows, and so this is a internet landing location. 650 00:35:02,690 --> 00:35:06,810 Farms that have way more airconditioning than they need for the .. *laughing* .. sheep. 651 00:35:06,810 --> 00:35:09,860 That's probably a good sign you're getting close. 652 00:35:09,860 --> 00:35:15,130 But I wasn't.. I wasn't really interested in.. as a sort of journalistic endeavour, 653 00:35:15,130 --> 00:35:18,320 like, it was really more.. I wanted to sort of step away from the computer 654 00:35:18,320 --> 00:35:21,630 for a moment, I wanted to get out into nature 655 00:35:21,630 --> 00:35:24,600 and I wanted to sort of just see what it felt like to stand on top of that 656 00:35:24,600 --> 00:35:24,760 cable, 657 00:35:24,760 --> 00:35:28,470 you know, what would it feel like to stand on top of this cable where 25% of the traffic 658 00:35:28,470 --> 00:35:30,720 was flowing through. 659 00:35:30,720 --> 00:35:34,970 And so I started taking this series of landscapes, like just landscape photography. 660 00:35:34,970 --> 00:35:39,300 Sometimes.. sometimes the cable was within the frame. 661 00:35:39,300 --> 00:35:42,170 When I took this photo I actually didn't know exactly what I was shooting, 662 00:35:42,170 --> 00:35:46,040 but in this frame is both the cable and the GCHQ-tapped cable, 663 00:35:46,040 --> 00:35:50,490 which you can kind of see the dishes up there in the background. 664 00:35:50,490 --> 00:35:55,570 But it's.. it was less for me about, like, those actual recording the cables, the dishes. 665 00:35:55,570 --> 00:35:58,880 It was more about something that I read about in Andrew Blum's book, 666 00:35:58,880 --> 00:36:02,830 was there's this really interesting phenomena that happens when you go hunting for the internet, 667 00:36:02,830 --> 00:36:05,090 which is like you end up in these super-remote locations, 668 00:36:05,090 --> 00:36:08,330 like you're trying to go have this research and 669 00:36:08,330 --> 00:36:09,110 experience with telecommunications, 670 00:36:09,110 --> 00:36:12,640 but you end up like on these really lonely beaches which is by design 671 00:36:12,640 --> 00:36:15,930 'cause they don't want cables and nets around them. 672 00:36:15,930 --> 00:36:19,460 Many times you don't have 3G or cellphone service, and it's kind of just you and like, 673 00:36:19,460 --> 00:36:19,610 you know, 674 00:36:19,610 --> 00:36:22,760 this lonely beach. It's.. this.. sort of interesting, 675 00:36:22,760 --> 00:36:27,620 for me it was really beautiful, like, It really felt.. it felt good. 676 00:36:27,620 --> 00:36:30,470 So.. this is something I've been doing more and more lately, and I just.. 677 00:36:30,470 --> 00:36:33,850 I go to these places as a way, not to necessarily document 678 00:36:33,850 --> 00:36:36,750 physical artifacts of the internet but more just putting myself 679 00:36:36,750 --> 00:36:41,330 in sort of a place where I wanna make art about the internet. 680 00:36:41,330 --> 00:36:44,090 And the internet manifests itself in different ways in different countries. 681 00:36:44,090 --> 00:36:48,850 In the UK, it's just these wooden signs, this is.. it's just a yellow wooden sign 682 00:36:48,850 --> 00:36:52,600 that says 'telephone cable' on it, which is like the most beautiful 683 00:36:52,600 --> 00:36:57,410 kind of, like, anticlimactic understated monument you could have, right? 684 00:36:57,410 --> 00:37:02,370 So this is one of the biggest global internet connection points in the world 685 00:37:02,370 --> 00:37:05,150 and it's just this little tiny sign, you know? 686 00:37:05,150 --> 00:37:08,670 And to me that was really perfect in a way, like, I was.. I was really.. 687 00:37:08,670 --> 00:37:11,100 it felt good that it was that, and that something else. 688 00:37:11,100 --> 00:37:15,560 And.. so at the same time I was taking that photography, I was also taking readings 689 00:37:15,560 --> 00:37:18,440 with this series of ghost-hunting devices. 690 00:37:18,440 --> 00:37:22,060 This is probably my favourite one, this is called the Ovilus 3. 691 00:37:22,060 --> 00:37:25,560 This is by a company called 'Digital Dowsing', which is a really great name for 692 00:37:25,560 --> 00:37:31,550 a ghost-hunting tech company, made by Bill Chappell. 693 00:37:31,550 --> 00:37:35,300 And so the Ovilus 3 has this kind of like old.. it's called visual draw 694 00:37:35,300 --> 00:37:36,790 mode. 695 00:37:36,790 --> 00:37:40,900 And based on kind of EMF and temperature readings, it has this drawing system, 696 00:37:40,900 --> 00:37:42,560 that it spits out. 697 00:37:42,560 --> 00:37:46,020 And so at every place that I was taking a photograph I was also taking this reading 698 00:37:46,020 --> 00:37:48,860 with this ghost-hunting device. 699 00:37:48,860 --> 00:37:53,150 And so, this manifested in different ways. When I showed in the gallery one way was 700 00:37:53,150 --> 00:37:58,730 in this series of essentially paired landscape photography where on the top is just a photograph 701 00:37:58,730 --> 00:38:01,790 from these various places and then on the bottom 702 00:38:01,790 --> 00:38:03,970 sort of laser-etched into the surface of the print 703 00:38:03,970 --> 00:38:07,490 are these readouts from the ghost-hunting device. 704 00:38:07,490 --> 00:38:10,510 Which is kind of.. even.. even if you didn't know 705 00:38:10,510 --> 00:38:12,170 that came to the piece and didn't know the background 706 00:38:12,170 --> 00:38:16,110 there's meant to be this kind of play between analogue and digital and this play between 707 00:38:16,110 --> 00:38:21,880 kind of the spiritual and the real, and when you view these prints, 708 00:38:21,880 --> 00:38:23,960 you kind of have the same interaction with the print 709 00:38:23,960 --> 00:38:25,640 that I was having when I was documenting them, 710 00:38:25,640 --> 00:38:29,150 which was you.. you had this kind of natural position when you're kind of viewing 711 00:38:29,150 --> 00:38:29,910 the horizon line, 712 00:38:29,910 --> 00:38:31,330 and then when we kind of check our phones, right, 713 00:38:31,330 --> 00:38:33,140 and it's kind of like this all day long. 714 00:38:33,140 --> 00:38:35,030 And so the pieces are meant to have that as well, 715 00:38:35,030 --> 00:38:37,040 where you.. you kind of look at the horizon line 716 00:38:37,040 --> 00:38:40,950 on the photo and then you kind of bend down to look at the little digital read-out. 717 00:38:40,950 --> 00:38:46,350 So this was.. this was one of the series from an exhibition I did in London last year. 718 00:38:46,350 --> 00:38:52,720 6 months ago - no, 3 months ago I got an invitation to come to New Zealand 719 00:38:52,720 --> 00:38:58,090 which is a place that was on my kind of like bucket list for internet exploratory research 720 00:38:58,090 --> 00:38:58,560 purposes, 721 00:38:58,560 --> 00:39:01,170 because New Zealand has this.. this.. they have 722 00:39:01,170 --> 00:39:02,970 more than 2 cables, but there is 1 cable 723 00:39:02,970 --> 00:39:06,280 called the Southern Cross Network, which is essentially its main connection 724 00:39:06,280 --> 00:39:09,510 to the globe, and it comes in on the West Coast and then 725 00:39:09,510 --> 00:39:15,490 crosses, like, I don't... like 30 km maybe, and then exits on the right. 726 00:39:15,490 --> 00:39:18,240 So it comes over from Australia, goes underground for a very short 727 00:39:18,240 --> 00:39:22,270 amount of time, then bounces off for essentially California. 728 00:39:22,270 --> 00:39:28,120 And that's its main connection to the world, these 2 very actually unguarded 729 00:39:28,120 --> 00:39:31,500 connection points. I.. maybe in the Q&A I can talk about more.. 730 00:39:31,500 --> 00:39:31,960 about that. 731 00:39:31,960 --> 00:39:36,760 But basically, on this trip I got.. I mean I got there and they were doing 732 00:39:36,760 --> 00:39:37,210 construction work 733 00:39:37,210 --> 00:39:41,510 and the cable was just really there, like, it was dug up and in a puddle 734 00:39:41,510 --> 00:39:43,790 and just sitting there next to this military compound 735 00:39:43,790 --> 00:39:45,750 with like this military airstrip 736 00:39:45,750 --> 00:39:48,040 with like planes taking off. 737 00:39:48,040 --> 00:39:51,100 And I was there for 2 hours with a ghost-hunting device just kind of touching the cable 738 00:39:51,100 --> 00:39:54,960 and nobody said anything. It was amazing. *laughing* 739 00:39:54,960 --> 00:39:58,770 And.. prior to this trip though I was doing more kind of research to try and understand 740 00:39:58,770 --> 00:40:03,210 what the internet really really was, and.. there's a lot of people in the room 741 00:40:03,210 --> 00:40:06,510 who are more, who have more technical knowledge than I do, so if I'm.. 742 00:40:06,510 --> 00:40:10,050 if I'm misquoting things please tell me afterwards so I can update this. 743 00:40:10,050 --> 00:40:13,670 But my.. my current understanding is that what's going through the fibre-optic 744 00:40:13,670 --> 00:40:20,550 is essentially infrared.. infrared laser light that's being modulated at different frequencies 745 00:40:20,550 --> 00:40:25,350 that kind of centre around this 1550 nm mark, right. 746 00:40:25,350 --> 00:40:34,010 And so give or take a few nm, the internet happens generally in this near-infrared spectrum. 747 00:40:34,010 --> 00:40:40,470 Which is interesting to me as kind of an artmaker, because most of our digital devices can sense 748 00:40:40,470 --> 00:40:45,320 in that near-infrared spectrum, in that same 1550 nm range. 749 00:40:45,320 --> 00:40:48,210 So most.. most digital cameras you can open up 750 00:40:48,210 --> 00:40:50,170 and .. if you go all the way down to the CCD 751 00:40:50,170 --> 00:40:54,110 you can take off the infrared-blocking chip and you get left with a camera that senses 752 00:40:54,110 --> 00:40:55,930 that light, and you can put another lens on top 753 00:40:55,930 --> 00:40:58,140 that blocks everything but the infrared light, 754 00:40:58,140 --> 00:40:59,730 and then you're left with a device that's kind of 755 00:40:59,730 --> 00:41:01,390 in my head anyway, 756 00:41:01,390 --> 00:41:06,720 sensing the world in the same sort of spectrum that's going through the fibre-optic cable. 757 00:41:06,720 --> 00:41:10,180 So these tutorials are. have.. this presentation I'm gonna have a link to at the end, 758 00:41:10,180 --> 00:41:14,450 so the links are here but this is from a website called Life Pixel which has really amazing 759 00:41:14,450 --> 00:41:19,370 like screw-by-screw tutorials for how to do this with most consumer and like prosumer 760 00:41:19,370 --> 00:41:21,870 digital cameras. 761 00:41:21,870 --> 00:41:24,710 And so then I started shooting these.. these are photographs from 762 00:41:25,230 --> 00:41:32,590 this is from the West Coast of New Zealand, shot with this modified Lumix GF1 camera. 763 00:41:32,590 --> 00:41:36,400 And so it started like.. I had this feeling where 764 00:41:36,400 --> 00:41:38,670 the visuals that these cameras were giving, 765 00:41:38,670 --> 00:41:42,040 like.. in.. there's like a technical connection to the internet, but for me there was also 766 00:41:42,040 --> 00:41:46,410 sort of a visual connection where the photos had the sort of feeling 767 00:41:46,410 --> 00:41:49,450 that I was having, they were sort of these dark strange glimpses of the internet, 768 00:41:49,450 --> 00:41:54,060 that wasn't Nyan cats and unicorns, right, it was this kind of, like, darker stranger 769 00:41:54,060 --> 00:41:54,510 view 770 00:41:54,510 --> 00:41:57,910 of what the internet landscape looked like, and the more I was taking photos 771 00:41:57,910 --> 00:42:02,040 the sort of less and less interested I got in actually shooting a cable 772 00:42:02,040 --> 00:42:05,780 and the more and more interested I got in just what these landscapes looked like. 773 00:42:05,780 --> 00:42:10,060 And so in this example you can kind of see the dirt that's kind of slowly growing over 774 00:42:10,060 --> 00:42:15,700 from where the trench was dug, or in this one.. from this distance 775 00:42:15,700 --> 00:42:18,230 you can't see anything. There's a small moment where like 776 00:42:18,230 --> 00:42:21,030 an old coaxial cable kind of comes out of that cliff. 777 00:42:21,030 --> 00:42:24,810 But for me it's more about really thinking about like an old-school artform, 778 00:42:24,810 --> 00:42:26,810 of like the landscape, and trying to think about 779 00:42:26,810 --> 00:42:29,400 how I can make these landscape images 780 00:42:29,400 --> 00:42:33,400 that are sort of reflective both of the physical landscape and of our kind of like 781 00:42:33,400 --> 00:42:35,690 network landscape and cultural landscape. 782 00:42:35,690 --> 00:42:39,480 So these are just some of the kind of images I was taking on this New Zealand trip. 783 00:42:39,480 --> 00:42:43,240 And yeah, again, sometimes there is like no visual evidence, 784 00:42:43,240 --> 00:42:48,160 sometimes it's just.. just a tree that happens to be growing on top of the internet. 785 00:42:48,160 --> 00:42:50,340 And so I'm still.. this is stuff I'm still going 786 00:42:50,340 --> 00:42:51,840 through at the moment. 787 00:42:51,840 --> 00:42:54,820 Now I'm kinda drifting into works in progress, 788 00:42:54,820 --> 00:43:00,450 but where I'm thinking this is going in one way is a series of new websites 789 00:43:00,450 --> 00:43:05,110 that I'm gonna be making that are really boring. 790 00:43:05,110 --> 00:43:07,370 I think there's like a really big market in boring in the arts 791 00:43:07,370 --> 00:43:08,140 that's coming up. 792 00:43:08,140 --> 00:43:10,500 Like I think we've had enough of this like really quick stuff, 793 00:43:10,500 --> 00:43:13,780 so now I'm gonna take it back, and so I'm making pieces that are.. 794 00:43:13,780 --> 00:43:16,170 I had these experiences.. so these are tripod shots. 795 00:43:16,170 --> 00:43:19,170 I'm shooting usually like 10-15 minute tripod shots at these 796 00:43:19,170 --> 00:43:24,100 different locations, and... so these are really quiet moments, 797 00:43:24,100 --> 00:43:28,390 essentially just video streaming into a browser, 798 00:43:28,390 --> 00:43:31,870 and part of the idea is like giving.. forcing people to have the experience 799 00:43:31,870 --> 00:43:35,240 that I was having, so it's.. I would find myself in these amazing locations 800 00:43:35,240 --> 00:43:38,400 and sometimes there'd even be like whales breaching in the background 801 00:43:38,400 --> 00:43:41,750 and like 7 minutes into the shot I'd catch myself, like, you know, 802 00:43:41,750 --> 00:43:45,770 bending down to the phone again, and like, even in this like amazing environment 803 00:43:45,770 --> 00:43:49,190 like I was having a hard time breaking out of that really like rapid-phased 804 00:43:49,190 --> 00:43:52,440 sort of click-bait mentality that I'm starting to fall into as well, 805 00:43:52,440 --> 00:43:55,590 and so I want these websites to be super super boring, 806 00:43:55,590 --> 00:43:59,520 like, more contemplative, more on the timeline of what viewing nature is 807 00:43:59,520 --> 00:43:59,570 like 808 00:43:59,570 --> 00:44:02,760 rather than what viewing the web is like. 809 00:44:02,760 --> 00:44:05,290 So this is.. this is the triangular sign here is 810 00:44:05,290 --> 00:44:07,610 what the cable signs look like in New Zealand, 811 00:44:07,610 --> 00:44:11,230 which is, if there's any copy-me fans, like, when I got out there and found 812 00:44:11,230 --> 00:44:13,530 that there's this like beautiful triangle, like, standing over the internet, 813 00:44:13,530 --> 00:44:15,650 was like an amazing moment for me. 814 00:44:15,650 --> 00:44:20,000 But the.. so these websites are gonna be different websites.. each website will 815 00:44:20,000 --> 00:44:26,240 just have one video flowing through it, slow, infrared video shots with this sort 816 00:44:26,240 --> 00:44:27,140 of audio 817 00:44:27,140 --> 00:44:32,410 in the background. The audio is made from my own ghost-hunting tech, 818 00:44:32,410 --> 00:44:34,610 which I'll be releasing when I get finished with all the stuff. 819 00:44:34,610 --> 00:44:36,790 So this is my own version of the spirit box, 820 00:44:36,790 --> 00:44:39,280 where, instead of just scanning through the radio, I have it hooked up 821 00:44:39,280 --> 00:44:42,700 to a pulse sensor, so it's skipping through the radio stations 822 00:44:42,700 --> 00:44:43,760 based on my heart beat. 823 00:44:43,760 --> 00:44:47,260 So every time my pulse goes it switches radio stations. 824 00:44:47,260 --> 00:44:52,140 And.. so the audio is like.. yah, it looked.. I looked rather strange like just kind of 825 00:44:52,140 --> 00:44:52,410 sitting there 826 00:44:52,410 --> 00:44:54,930 trying to commune with the internet, like, hooked put to this heart monitor 827 00:44:54,930 --> 00:44:57,090 and this infrared camera. 828 00:44:57,090 --> 00:44:59,580 But the pieces are sort of meant to kind of hopefully give 829 00:44:59,580 --> 00:45:02,150 some of those feelings I was having when I was there. 830 00:45:02,150 --> 00:45:07,420 And the other idea is that these videos are all gonna be located in servers 831 00:45:07,420 --> 00:45:10,660 that are as close as possible to where I shot them, so 832 00:45:10,660 --> 00:45:13,990 I'm actually thinking of them less as websites as kind of like network-specific videos. 833 00:45:13,990 --> 00:45:18,980 And so, in the New Zealand example, I have server space in New Zealand now, 834 00:45:18,980 --> 00:45:22,850 where these videos are hosted, so that when you view the video, 835 00:45:22,850 --> 00:45:26,940 it loads into the browser and it's streaming.. you know, chances are, 836 00:45:26,940 --> 00:45:29,730 you have like kind of like a 50-50 chance depending on what country you are in, 837 00:45:29,730 --> 00:45:34,110 that the video, as it's being converted into the same spectrum that it's shot in, 838 00:45:34,110 --> 00:45:39,450 is also streaming kind of like just underneath the frame there. 839 00:45:39,450 --> 00:45:42,160 And so even though you can't kind of witness this visually, the idea is like 840 00:45:42,160 --> 00:45:45,410 trying to.. kind of like I was doing with the 841 00:45:45,410 --> 00:45:47,240 wikipedia series.. like trying to come up 842 00:45:47,240 --> 00:45:50,440 with not just a piece that's kind of a visual aesthetic of the internet, 843 00:45:50,440 --> 00:45:54,540 but something that's really kind of about an experience of the network. 844 00:45:54,540 --> 00:45:57,310 And then the last sort of thing I'm playing with is the.. 845 00:45:57,310 --> 00:46:01,610 they're gonna be all hosted at these URLs, that when you copy and paste the URL 846 00:46:01,610 --> 00:46:07,550 into a mapping application, the URL is actually a GPS coordinate, 847 00:46:07,550 --> 00:46:11,720 so if you paste the URL into Google Maps, it'll take you to the exact location 848 00:46:11,720 --> 00:46:12,940 where the camera was housed (?). 849 00:46:12,940 --> 00:46:16,500 And so, in Google Earth you can kind of see the triangular sign and the tree 850 00:46:16,500 --> 00:46:22,480 that is the same sign and tree from the image. 851 00:46:22,480 --> 00:46:24,920 And so, I'm kind of playing with the idea of the URL as being both 852 00:46:24,920 --> 00:46:32,710 an address on the globe and the network, and trying to tie again together these 2 things. 853 00:46:32,710 --> 00:46:37,230 And part of this for me is again, like, without being too nostalgic for the internet 854 00:46:37,230 --> 00:46:37,900 of old, 855 00:46:37,900 --> 00:46:43,470 allow the influences that I'm drawing from, from the kind of earlier net art scene 856 00:46:43,470 --> 00:46:49,150 was characterized with this kind of classic net art diagram, where.. the art happens here, 857 00:46:49,150 --> 00:46:49,360 right, 858 00:46:49,360 --> 00:46:53,700 like it's not.. there was this big push in the earlier net art wave that wasn't about 859 00:46:53,700 --> 00:46:58,690 having kind of imagery that was sort of quasi-antithetic(?) of the internet 860 00:46:58,690 --> 00:47:01,830 coming on tumbler and being printed in 3D printing into objects (?) 861 00:47:01,830 --> 00:47:03,730 and showing up in a gallery, but it was really thinking 862 00:47:03,730 --> 00:47:07,470 more fundamentally about the internet as a platform and a vehicle 863 00:47:07,470 --> 00:47:13,460 for viewing art and art that can only happen within that medium. 864 00:47:13,460 --> 00:47:16,640 And so I'm kind of trying to take that idea that's an old one, 865 00:47:16,640 --> 00:47:19,950 and overlay that diagram on top of something that's like one step removed 866 00:47:19,950 --> 00:47:24,280 in terms of the metaphor, and thinking about art that happens in a physical location 867 00:47:24,280 --> 00:47:26,360 and in the network at the same time. 868 00:47:26,360 --> 00:47:30,130 I could do one more project or we could do Q&A, 869 00:47:30,130 --> 00:47:33,560 how much time do we have now, 5 more minutes? 870 00:47:33,560 --> 00:47:35,930 Maybe I'll wrap it up there. Angel: ... 10-15 minutes... 871 00:47:35,930 --> 00:47:38,380 Evan: Ok, ok, I'll do one more project. Ok. 872 00:47:38,380 --> 00:47:42,790 So that was.. that's going up to like yah, 3.. this is now 2 months ago.. 873 00:47:42,790 --> 00:47:46,430 3 months ago. I got invited to do a piece in Paraguay 874 00:47:46,430 --> 00:47:50,030 which is not one of the main internet hubs, globally. 875 00:47:50,030 --> 00:47:53,190 But I decided to kind of wrestle with a different piece of the infrastructure of the 876 00:47:53,190 --> 00:47:53,270 internet, 877 00:47:53,270 --> 00:47:56,020 which is kind of the surface, right, the place that we have this 878 00:47:56,020 --> 00:47:58,930 more immediate contact with the network. 879 00:47:58,930 --> 00:48:02,670 And.. 'cause I noticed when we.. when you film 880 00:48:02,670 --> 00:48:05,420 devices in infrared it has this interesting scenario 881 00:48:05,420 --> 00:48:10,310 where the visual spectrum is kind of inverted in a way where.. the LEDs don't really 882 00:48:10,310 --> 00:48:13,790 emit much infrared light at all, and so the screen, to the viewer, 883 00:48:13,790 --> 00:48:18,510 you see everything, but to the infrared camera it's almost completely black. 884 00:48:18,510 --> 00:48:21,040 And similarly the kind of infrared lights that sort of shine from the top 885 00:48:21,040 --> 00:48:23,540 of all of our iPhones at our faces all the time, 886 00:48:23,540 --> 00:48:26,400 which we can't see with the naked eye, become more and more apparent 887 00:48:26,400 --> 00:48:27,550 when you're shooting with the infrared. 888 00:48:27,550 --> 00:48:32,340 And so, I started.. built this kind of contraption that I set up in my hotel room 889 00:48:32,340 --> 00:48:35,900 which looked really strange, and then invited people to come up to the hotel room 890 00:48:35,900 --> 00:48:40,430 and kind of put their device on top of this camera rig, and then 891 00:48:40,430 --> 00:48:43,550 the invitation was just to waste time, like, again, trying to get back to this idea 892 00:48:43,550 --> 00:48:46,600 of casual computing, like, what do you do when you're in line 893 00:48:46,600 --> 00:48:49,820 at the grocery store, waiting at the doctor's office, like, what's your bag, 894 00:48:49,820 --> 00:48:51,890 is it Angry Birds, is it checking facebook? 895 00:48:51,890 --> 00:48:56,690 And I just said, 'here, waste 5 or 10 minutes' and I would record them with this 896 00:48:56,690 --> 00:49:01,610 infrared camera and it's kind of.. in a way it's connected 897 00:49:01,610 --> 00:49:03,990 to the paranormal research, but maybe it's more connected 898 00:49:03,990 --> 00:49:06,150 to the multi-touch series that has to do with sort of 899 00:49:06,150 --> 00:49:09,690 backgrounding, the digital backgrounding, the interface design and foreground 900 00:49:09,690 --> 00:49:11,420 in the human movement. 901 00:49:11,420 --> 00:49:15,510 And so, what you get left with is.. you see the way people are kind of moving 902 00:49:15,510 --> 00:49:21,890 over these different devices without seeing these designs that the.. 903 00:49:21,890 --> 00:49:23,530 that Apple and Google are designing for us. 904 00:49:23,530 --> 00:49:24,030 So I'll play just a minute what that looks like. 905 00:49:24,030 --> 00:49:48,020 *electronic noises like birds and bass* 906 00:49:48,020 --> 00:50:13,670 Evan: A little boring, right? 907 00:50:13,670 --> 00:50:19,920 No, but that piece is meant to be this.. have this kind of.. 908 00:50:19,920 --> 00:50:22,240 these things that kind of feel so natural and we get so into it, 909 00:50:22,240 --> 00:50:24,330 and when you kind of remove what's actually happening, 910 00:50:24,330 --> 00:50:27,390 it kind of ends up looking and sounding so alien, right? 911 00:50:27,390 --> 00:50:30,780 The audio is actually just from a contact mic that's placed in the back, 912 00:50:30,780 --> 00:50:37,400 so it's not.. it's just an analog microphone picking up the kind of soft fingertaps on 913 00:50:37,400 --> 00:50:37,500 the screen. 914 00:50:37,500 --> 00:50:39,540 And so the.. it became just this series of people 915 00:50:39,540 --> 00:50:41,460 that sort of agreed to meet with me 916 00:50:41,460 --> 00:50:45,680 and give me 5 or 10 minutes of their computing time, shown in the gallery 917 00:50:45,680 --> 00:50:49,900 of this kind of series of again of like portraits through technology. 918 00:50:49,900 --> 00:50:53,540 It's called 'Dances for Mobile Phones'. It's meant to be idea 919 00:50:53,540 --> 00:50:55,020 that we're kind of dancing for them. 920 00:50:55,020 --> 00:50:59,620 Anyway, so I'll leave it there. So this is me, kind of struggling through, 921 00:50:59,620 --> 00:51:03,820 trying again to make work and trying to find these sort of optimistic paths 922 00:51:03,820 --> 00:51:07,450 through a kind of increasingly dark internet landscape 923 00:51:07,450 --> 00:51:11,100 and get back to this kind of more magical moment I first had 924 00:51:11,100 --> 00:51:14,750 when we first kind of understood what technological empowerment felt like. 925 00:51:14,750 --> 00:51:17,050 So thank you so much for spending the hour with me, 926 00:51:17,050 --> 00:51:22,760 and if there's any Q&A, I think we have a couple of minutes now. 927 00:51:22,760 --> 00:51:29,920 Thank you. 928 00:51:29,920 --> 00:51:33,500 *applause* 929 00:51:33,500 --> 00:51:37,080 *applause* 930 00:51:37,080 --> 00:51:42,780 Angel: Thank you so much for your phenomenal talk, Evan, 931 00:51:42,780 --> 00:51:46,220 I think you can tell by the applause that the people really really liked it. 932 00:51:46,220 --> 00:51:47,770 Evan: Thank you. Angel: It was really awesome. 933 00:51:47,770 --> 00:51:51,130 Angel: So we have another 5-10 minutes for questions and answers. 934 00:51:51,130 --> 00:51:54,120 If you ask questions, please move to the microphones. 935 00:51:54,120 --> 00:51:58,780 We have 4 microphones here in the hall. Do we have any question from the internet? 936 00:51:58,780 --> 00:52:02,890 Internet? No? Alrighty. So we'll start with this question from over there. 937 00:52:02,890 --> 00:52:09,390 Question: I really liked your term 'disembodied human energy'. I'm gonna start using that 938 00:52:09,390 --> 00:52:09,850 "DHE". 939 00:52:09,850 --> 00:52:12,580 Evan: It's not my term, but I like it too. 940 00:52:12,580 --> 00:52:17,070 Q: I've been writing about that as well from the dark side of how the internet 941 00:52:17,070 --> 00:52:23,070 and digital culture is affecting our behaviours and society, and was 942 00:52:23,070 --> 00:52:28,010 kind of putting that into terms of disembodying experience.. disembody.. 943 00:52:28,010 --> 00:52:35,240 disembodied information, and I'm really going after that a lot in terms of 944 00:52:35,240 --> 00:52:42,580 analyzing digital culture, and just wondering what you think we might do 945 00:52:42,580 --> 00:52:48,690 in order to reembody our culture more and not get so lost in these 946 00:52:48,690 --> 00:52:53,780 technological things that we can do, but to, like, I just was covering 947 00:52:53,780 --> 00:53:01,440 the failed Paris climate summit, and I feel like the corporate agenda 948 00:53:01,440 --> 00:53:05,810 is liking that we are going more and more into a disembodied place, 949 00:53:05,810 --> 00:53:10,540 because it can capture our energy more. So I'd just like to ask you 950 00:53:10,540 --> 00:53:15,440 if you have any ideas, what we can do to be more reembodying our experiences. 951 00:53:15,440 --> 00:53:21,450 Answer: Yah.. no, good question. I mean, I can only talk about what I'm.. 952 00:53:21,450 --> 00:53:27,060 how I'm kind of wrestling with it. In.. one sort of decision I made as an artist, 953 00:53:27,060 --> 00:53:29,910 kind of, is like I feel like I make better work when I'm optimistic 954 00:53:29,910 --> 00:53:33,370 rather than pessimistic. Like, I think, anyone who suffered 955 00:53:33,370 --> 00:53:36,400 through depression, like, you know, or had people around you with depression, 956 00:53:36,400 --> 00:53:39,640 it's not a good place to be in when you wanna make thin.. produce things, right? 957 00:53:39,640 --> 00:53:43,050 And so, part of it is like just finding ways to fall in love with it again. 958 00:53:43,050 --> 00:53:45,950 And so, for me that was part of it, it was just trying to find ways 959 00:53:45,950 --> 00:53:49,840 to kind of fall in love with things again, to the point where I really want to make them. 960 00:53:49,840 --> 00:53:54,190 And the other one, for me, too, I mean I know there's whole movements of people 961 00:53:54,190 --> 00:53:56,470 who are doing these kind of digital retreat things which is something I hadn't 962 00:53:56,470 --> 00:54:01,710 participated in in a formal setting, but for me just getting away for a moment 963 00:54:01,710 --> 00:54:04,860 and having these excuses, even for just a few days or a week, to sort of 964 00:54:04,860 --> 00:54:09,740 exist by myself without connection.. I know it's nothing new, I know 965 00:54:09,740 --> 00:54:12,320 that people are talking about this, but it had a real effect on me. 966 00:54:12,320 --> 00:54:15,340 I mean, one thing that i noticed was, I was much more present, like, 967 00:54:15,340 --> 00:54:18,320 especially on the UK trip, where.. these are like really cliffy regions, 968 00:54:18,320 --> 00:54:21,340 you know, so a lot of the hiking trails that I was shooting on were like 969 00:54:21,340 --> 00:54:24,820 really steep drop-off on the other side of this path, and so I couldn't even do 970 00:54:24,820 --> 00:54:27,860 what I normally do, even when I'm away from email, but I'm walking around the city 971 00:54:27,860 --> 00:54:30,830 and I'm still thinking about.. 'Oh, I gotta email this person, I gotta do that..' 972 00:54:30,830 --> 00:54:34,560 I'm not really present, right. And I noticed that I had to, like, 973 00:54:34,560 --> 00:54:37,570 stop doing that because I kept slipping and falling and, like, 974 00:54:37,570 --> 00:54:40,110 I didn't wanna die. And so I had this moment 975 00:54:40,110 --> 00:54:43,290 being out in nature again, where, not only was I away from the tech, 976 00:54:43,290 --> 00:54:46,660 but mentally I had to step away from it too, just to be really thinking about 977 00:54:46,660 --> 00:54:50,900 'Left foot, right foot, left foot, right foot'. And being able to do that for a few days, 978 00:54:50,900 --> 00:54:53,550 like, now, I'm lining up my schedule throughout the year 979 00:54:53,550 --> 00:54:56,360 where I'm setting up these moments, where I have that time to do it. 980 00:54:56,360 --> 00:54:58,560 And, I don't know if that's the answer or not, 981 00:54:58,560 --> 00:55:00,340 but for me it's been one way to deal with it. 982 00:55:00,340 --> 00:55:03,420 Angel: Thank you very much. Next question from this microphone please. 983 00:55:03,420 --> 00:55:06,360 Q: Thank you very much.I don't know, is it on? 984 00:55:06,360 --> 00:55:08,710 Angel: Yeah, it's on. Just speak into it. 985 00:55:08,710 --> 00:55:11,810 Q: Thank you very much for your talk. I'd actually, for me personally, 986 00:55:11,810 --> 00:55:18,290 I've been also struggling a lot with the thought about the dark sides of the internet 987 00:55:18,290 --> 00:55:18,720 recently, 988 00:55:18,720 --> 00:55:21,590 and your talk actually gave me back a lot of 989 00:55:21,590 --> 00:55:23,710 positive attitude about it, so 990 00:55:23,710 --> 00:55:27,870 that you very much for that. But one question that I have: 991 00:55:27,870 --> 00:55:32,770 What is your 10-second definition of what is art, for you? 992 00:55:32,770 --> 00:55:35,460 Evan: Oh my god. *laughing* 993 00:55:35,460 --> 00:55:36,000 *laughing* 994 00:55:36,000 --> 00:55:38,830 Evan: Alright, here's a short one I came up with, 995 00:55:38,830 --> 00:55:41,560 'cause the long one's hard, right? 996 00:55:41,560 --> 00:55:46,830 I think design is creative work that is influenced directly by money and art is creative work 997 00:55:46,830 --> 00:55:51,510 that is influenced indirectly by money. And that's kind of the only difference. 998 00:55:51,510 --> 00:55:53,050 *laughing* *applause* 999 00:55:53,050 --> 00:55:55,360 Q: Thank you. 1000 00:55:55,360 --> 00:55:59,220 Angel: Thank you. Next question from that microphone over there. 1001 00:55:59,220 --> 00:56:02,770 Q: Hi. So I wasn't familiar with your work.. I'm over here. 1002 00:56:02,770 --> 00:56:05,930 I'm not familiar with your work, and I really like it. 1003 00:56:05,930 --> 00:56:09,620 And what I liked most about it is really that sense of excitement and wonder 1004 00:56:09,620 --> 00:56:15,630 that you first had when you discovered.. what was it? SCP? No, it was.. 1005 00:56:15,630 --> 00:56:18,080 Evan: Yeah, FETCH. Q: Yeah, FETCH, right. 1006 00:56:18,080 --> 00:56:20,640 That's sort of.. that's still there in many ways, 1007 00:56:20,640 --> 00:56:22,620 it's different, but it's still there. 1008 00:56:22,620 --> 00:56:26,800 So, you know, I.. I recently discovered physics, and I've had sort of 1009 00:56:26,800 --> 00:56:30,040 the same thing where I am like, wow, we're able to understand things 1010 00:56:30,040 --> 00:56:33,210 in a way that I didn't think it was possible, because I hated physics 1011 00:56:33,210 --> 00:56:36,230 in school, and realized that this way it was taught 1012 00:56:36,230 --> 00:56:39,620 that was really boring. And so I'm thinking, ok, 1013 00:56:39,620 --> 00:56:43,570 if I were to do something like that, it requires you to 1014 00:56:43,570 --> 00:56:46,280 sort of take that step away from the technicality of it 1015 00:56:46,280 --> 00:56:49,240 to see the technicality of it. And how do you, with the internet, 1016 00:56:49,240 --> 00:56:52,750 how are you able to keep that distance and has that been a problem for you? 1017 00:56:52,750 --> 00:56:57,110 Evan: I mean, maybe it's easier for me because I'm not all that smart technically. 1018 00:56:57,110 --> 00:57:00,910 I mean, it's not like I was ever so close, like most of the code.. I had some 1019 00:57:00,910 --> 00:57:04,440 formal training when I got to graduate school, but I was never.. 1020 00:57:04,440 --> 00:57:06,400 I'm not a very happy programmer. 1021 00:57:06,400 --> 00:57:09,010 You know, it was never my kind of native realm anyway, 1022 00:57:09,010 --> 00:57:11,650 like, I came more from the design field. 1023 00:57:11,650 --> 00:57:15,430 So it didn't feel like anything I was having to turn off so much 1024 00:57:15,430 --> 00:57:19,190 'cause maybe I wasn't ever all that close to it, in a sense. 1025 00:57:19,190 --> 00:57:22,570 I don't.. that's maybe a bad answer, but it's probably the truth. 1026 00:57:22,570 --> 00:57:24,440 I've been trying to get closer to physics too. 1027 00:57:24,440 --> 00:57:25,230 Q: Yeah? 1028 00:57:25,230 --> 00:57:28,510 Evan: Like for me, like, I'm super fascinated by the electromagnetic spectrum right now. 1029 00:57:28,510 --> 00:57:31,680 Like the answer's in there, somewhere, I feel like, you know? *laughing* 1030 00:57:31,680 --> 00:57:35,130 Q: Alright, thanks! Angel: Awesome. Next question from here. 1031 00:57:35,130 --> 00:57:41,050 Q: Ok, thanks. I just.. I mean, the idea of understanding what's happening 1032 00:57:41,050 --> 00:57:44,280 in the internet is quite important, and I think we're a bit biased here 1033 00:57:44,280 --> 00:57:50,470 because we all have that visualization of the internet, and 1034 00:57:50,470 --> 00:57:54,200 my question now is: Your visualization is of course very 1035 00:57:54,200 --> 00:57:59,570 very valid and very vivid, but all those people that.. that do those 1036 00:57:59,570 --> 00:58:04,490 movements and they scroll facebook, how can we make this visualization, 1037 00:58:04,490 --> 00:58:08,830 because your.. yours is quite complicated, actually, and not as fast. 1038 00:58:08,830 --> 00:58:13,920 How could we.. how could we manage to give.. give them some sort of visualization, 1039 00:58:13,920 --> 00:58:17,570 because what.. what they see is only the apps, and they don't really 1040 00:58:17,570 --> 00:58:19,380 get to think about it more. 1041 00:58:19,380 --> 00:58:23,960 Evan: Yah. I don't know the answer to that. I mean, it's.. for me, part of the reason 1042 00:58:23,960 --> 00:58:27,880 that the infrastructure side is so interesting, is that I think that there's something 1043 00:58:27,880 --> 00:58:31,780 empowering about seeing what it is and knowing how it works. 1044 00:58:31,780 --> 00:58:34,620 Like, when it seems less mystical and magical, like the cloud, of course, 1045 00:58:34,620 --> 00:58:38,880 is this terrible metaphor that we all hate, and I think once.. even when I'm explaining 1046 00:58:38,880 --> 00:58:43,510 my work to non-technical people, the conversations I get into are actually 1047 00:58:43,510 --> 00:58:46,050 kind of interesting, 'cause they're interested in knowing that too, 'cause people 1048 00:58:46,050 --> 00:58:48,510 don't really talk about it. The media doesn't talk about it. 1049 00:58:48,510 --> 00:58:51,040 The companies that are trying to sell them services don't talk that way 1050 00:58:51,040 --> 00:58:55,190 'cause it doesn't benefit them, right, it's like... Apple, when your phone fills 1051 00:58:55,190 --> 00:58:55,350 up, 1052 00:58:55,350 --> 00:58:58,070 they just want you to click here to get more cloud storage space, and 1053 00:58:58,070 --> 00:59:01,630 they don't want you to know how to plug in a cable and get it off. 1054 00:59:01,630 --> 00:59:05,710 And so I think it's.. the question that you're asking is one that I'm asking myself, 1055 00:59:05,710 --> 00:59:09,580 like, how do you communicate some of these ideas to people that are.. 1056 00:59:09,580 --> 00:59:12,870 I mean, I'm interested in both sides, I'm interested in people that are 1057 00:59:12,870 --> 00:59:16,050 technically adapt, having interesting ideas and conversations around this, 1058 00:59:16,050 --> 00:59:19,200 but then, how do you also communicate to people that this is a new conversation 1059 00:59:19,200 --> 00:59:21,760 to? 1060 00:59:21,760 --> 00:59:24,320 I don't know the answer to that, that's what I'm trying to kind of wrestle 1061 00:59:24,320 --> 00:59:24,410 with 1062 00:59:24,410 --> 00:59:25,230 in a sense. 1063 00:59:25,230 --> 00:59:32,160 But I have.. I recently did a show in Florida at a university, and the docents there, 1064 00:59:32,160 --> 00:59:35,010 like the people that introduce people to the work, were all like senior citizens 1065 00:59:35,010 --> 00:59:38,610 that were volunteering time to the museum, and they were one of the most engaged 1066 00:59:38,610 --> 00:59:43,040 group of people I've ever had surrounding my work, 'cause they.. they knew.. 1067 00:59:43,040 --> 00:59:46,380 it's not like they never heard of this stuff before, but they had a relationship with 1068 00:59:46,380 --> 00:59:49,850 technology, but they were more willing to ask questions about it, 1069 00:59:49,850 --> 00:59:52,670 like they weren't.. they didn't.. they didn't care if it sounded stupid, 1070 00:59:52,670 --> 00:59:56,220 and they were asking all those really interesting questions, and 1071 00:59:56,220 --> 00:59:58,840 seeing that happen to a community of people who were maybe 1072 00:59:58,840 --> 01:00:03,450 a further step removed from technology than I even am, that.. 1073 01:00:03,450 --> 01:00:05,960 it's not that it was successful, but it felt to me that.. that they could 1074 01:00:05,960 --> 01:00:09,930 understand and have a relationship to it as art pieces, meant that there 1075 01:00:09,930 --> 01:00:14,200 was something there that was consumable by people that weren't.. aren't in this room, 1076 01:00:14,200 --> 01:00:15,060 you know? 1077 01:00:15,060 --> 01:00:18,810 Angel: Alright, thank you. As time is almost up, guy in orange, 1078 01:00:18,810 --> 01:00:21,590 you got the honour of the last question. 1079 01:00:21,590 --> 01:00:26,600 Q: With your browser cache thing, I did something similar with my computer. 1080 01:00:26,600 --> 01:00:30,650 I wrote a little script that runs in the background and makes a screenshot 1081 01:00:30,650 --> 01:00:32,710 every.. random seconds, Evan: Ok. 1082 01:00:32,710 --> 01:00:36,690 Q: And I had hoped about.. forgetting about it, but actually the... 1083 01:00:36,690 --> 01:00:44,670 the counterpart happened, that I checked the screenshots for every moment 1084 01:00:44,670 --> 01:00:47,620 I didn't have anything to do. And my behaviour was extremely 1085 01:00:47,620 --> 01:00:51,330 affected by it. Was.. did you have the same feeling about your browser cache? 1086 01:00:51,330 --> 01:00:53,000 Evan: Yeah. Q: Ehm, work? 1087 01:00:53,000 --> 01:00:56,760 Evan: Maybe later we can trade notes, I'd like to see your work. 1088 01:00:56,760 --> 01:01:00,020 Exactly, like one of the main things about that piece was like, it's like 1089 01:01:00,020 --> 01:01:03,020 living with a security camera, right, and you always know it's there, 1090 01:01:03,020 --> 01:01:07,690 like, I've gotten better and better about forgetting, but I still know it's there, 1091 01:01:07,690 --> 01:01:11,050 I still think about it, and I tried to do portraits of other people, like, 1092 01:01:11,050 --> 01:01:15,380 friends, like who else you're gonna ask to give your internet cache browsing data 1093 01:01:15,380 --> 01:01:15,830 to, 1094 01:01:15,830 --> 01:01:18,180 right? And it's..I recognized it was like a really 1095 01:01:18,180 --> 01:01:20,540 invasive question to ask people, you know? 1096 01:01:20,540 --> 01:01:23,490 You're really asking people.. I mean, usually the cache people give me 1097 01:01:23,490 --> 01:01:27,440 when I was making portraits of other people, I would tell them and then they would surf 1098 01:01:27,440 --> 01:01:30,070 and give it to me. Like, to just tell them, give me the cache 1099 01:01:30,070 --> 01:01:30,260 that 1100 01:01:30,260 --> 01:01:33,410 you didn't know I was gonna.. you didn't know I was monitoring, is like a really 1101 01:01:33,410 --> 01:01:36,050 invasive question to ask. But yeah, it's like essentially learning to 1102 01:01:36,050 --> 01:01:39,860 live with a security camera. But that's meant to be kind of built into 1103 01:01:39,860 --> 01:01:43,170 the piece, too, 'cause maybe, getting back to the last question, like, 1104 01:01:43,170 --> 01:01:46,320 one of the reactions I get from when people see that work in the gallery is 1105 01:01:46,320 --> 01:01:51,110 like.. they're like, oh wow, that's a really.. maybe giving is the wrong word, but 1106 01:01:51,110 --> 01:01:55,040 that's a lot of.. it's a lot of.. you're sharing a lot, right, is the common reaction 1107 01:01:55,040 --> 01:01:56,400 I get from people. 1108 01:01:56,400 --> 01:02:00,240 And.. but part of the idea is then.. we're all kind of sharing this 1109 01:02:00,240 --> 01:02:03,000 in different ways, right, this print, just because I put it in the gallery 1110 01:02:03,000 --> 01:02:05,780 doesn't mean there's any more or less eyeballs on that set of data 1111 01:02:05,780 --> 01:02:08,940 than your data, or your friend's data. 1112 01:02:08,940 --> 01:02:12,550 But yeah, of course, when you know the camera is there, it definitely 1113 01:02:12,550 --> 01:02:19,310 affects behaviour.