Accelerating Brainwaves

Devices promising to manage stress, sleep disorders and give relief from “exhausting” daily life are nothing new. Pinhole glasses with black perforated lenses, also known as stenopeic glasses, have been sold since the 1950s with claims to improve eyesight and “relax tired eyes.” More advanced devices entered the market following the growing amount of data and digitalization. Gadgets retailers Brookstone, Sharper Image, and SkyMall sell automated head massagers, sleep masks emitting photoluminous glows and air pressure-based tools that “rejuvenate” muscles and joints of hands that have performed too many repetitive motions on a mouse.

Relax Tired Eyes, Sunset Glare Guard Corp., Palm Spring, California – ad, circa 1950s

One by one these companies declared bankruptcy, and now lie in the hands of global firms investing in the development and distribution of more sophisticated machines sold online or through third party retailers. Brookstone and Sharper Image started as catalog businesses; the former, in 1965, was selling hard-to-find tools to hobbyists; the latter, in 1977, was selling jogging watches. Their stores became permanent presences in American malls in the 1980s and 1990s and then in airports and neuralgic urban crossroads. They were distinctive for allowing customers to play with any product before making a purchase.

SkyMall, which filed for bankruptcy in January 2015, never had a physical storefront. Founded in 1990 in Arizona, it was known for publishing 20 million copies of a self-titled catalog distributed in airplane seat pockets seen by approximately 88% of US domestic air passengers. The company cited in-flight Wi-Fi as reason of failure, but maybe it was also because most passengers, assaulted by post-economic crisis awareness, stopped feeling that “irresistible” need to buy life-sized Bigfoot garden sculptures, LED fireplaces, and toys for their pets. However, the same can’t be said for relaxation machines, whose market and history show signs of growth.

Paradigmatic of this renewed interest is The Sound Oasis® Glo to Sleep mask, sold by Brookstone. A black hypoallergenic foam-covered mask with photoluminescent lenses, its description promises to “clear your mind of worries that keep you awake and help improve the quality of your sleep.” “Glo to Sleep™ combines ancient wisdom with modern technology.” One simply charges the mask under a light source for 30 seconds, then watches the blue lights dim. “During this process, the brain quickly goes from a busy Beta brainwave state to a relaxed Alpha brainwave state, thus starting your journey into sleep.”¹

Breo iDream 3 Eye and Head Massager

“Sleep issues are often the result of an overactive mind in bed time,” a promotional video suggests. But tools like these don’t belong exclusively to the realm of gadgetry. There is, in fact, a parallel history of devices designed to “relieve” overactive minds, a history made less of products than dystopian design projects, sound compositions, and multimedia environments conceived since the 1960s by artists and designers speculating on the lysergic properties of technology. Interestingly, these “proposals” fit in the contemporary discourse about “accelerationism” in opposition to the “machinic” nature of gadgets that induce consensus towards capitalism like the mask mentioned above.

Loosely associated with “Speculative Realism”, “Accelerationism” is one of today’s most debated terms in political theory, media studies, philosophy, and art circles. It is used to interpret those forms of resistance to capitalism that “accelerate” the language and aesthetics of capitalism itself, with exclusive attention paid to technology employed as both medium and content of intellectual and visual speculations. One of the effects of accelerationist thought has been a renewed role given to science fiction, based on its intrinsic ability to reflect on the technocratic present and our interdependence with machines, through the imagination of the future or concurrent otherworldly realities.

“Science fictions become the new currency of an ever-expanding future,” wrote J.G. Ballard in 1971. “SF is the subject matter of everyday life: the gleam on refrigerator cabinets, the contours of a wife’s or husband’s thighs passing the newsreel images on a color TV set, the conjuncture of musculature and chromium artifact within an automobile interior, the unique postures of passengers on an airport escalator.”² In other words, science fiction – in literary but also visual terms – is a tactic of hyper-realistic simulation and “acceleration” of aspects of reality to such a degree that it becomes alienating.

Dream Machines and Mind Expanders

An instructive start in tracing the history of alternative relaxation devices for overactive minds is Brion Gysin’s Dream Machine (1960), a stroboscopic flicker that produces visual stimuli. Its aim is apparently similar to that of sleep-inducing gadgets mentioned above: to accelerate the brainwave frequency of the user towards an alpha state, at which point it begins to “dream.” What differs is the purpose: whereas gadgetry like the Glo to Sleep™ mask help an overactive mind to find relief in order to be ready for another day of overactivity, the Dream Machine fosters an escape from everyday life.

Brion Gysin, Dream Machine, 1960

The exposure to light interruptions at a rate of 8-13 flashes per second synchronizes with the brain’s alpha rhythms, making visible colors, abstract figures and landscapes before one’s eyes. Co-developed with electronic technician Ian Sommerville – and registered in 1961 with patent number P.V.868,281 – Gysin tried unsuccessfully to market it his whole life. Despite the support of influential arts patrons Helena Rubinstein and Peggy Guggenheim, and later underground icon Genesis Breyer P–Orridge, the Dream Machine never became a commercial product, although one can purchase a version of it online or download the instructions to assemble one.

Born in England in 1916 from Canadian parents, Gysin moved to Paris in 1934 to study at the Sorbonne. There he joined the Surrealist Group, to be soon expelled by André Breton, leader of the movement. Ironically enough, however, the Dream Machine has become a posteriori the quintessential incarnation of surrealism, concretizing ideas about dreaming at the core of the avant-garde. “The Dream Machine,” observed Gysin, “may bring about a change of consciousness inasmuch as it throws back the limits of the visible world and may, indeed, prove that there are no limits.”³

Surrealist painting “represented” dreams either figuratively or through abstract composition techniques based on randomness and chance (i.e. frottage, automatic writing), whereas the Dream Machine broke with the two-dimensional tradition of painting and allowed any potential user of the flicker to see things that until then were exclusive domain of artists and visionaries. In doing so, Gysin not only speculated on the concrete and democratic application of surrealism to the everyday, but proposed a lifestyle where technology could be also a tool of liberation against the power structures that control bodies and minds.

Haus Rucker Co., Flyhead, Environment Transformer, 1968

Throughout the 1960s, other technological experiments in art and design likewise carried social and political implications. Austrian architecture collective Haus Rucker Co. invented machines that similarly aimed to bring the user into an alternative reality. Flyhead, Environment Transformer (1968), for instance, is a sci-fi-looking helmet that modifies visual and acoustic senses. Isolated by the translucent green double hemispherical mask, the user perceives reality through prismatic eyepieces that are supposed to facilitate the perspective of a fly. Audio-visual filters alter the surrounding reality and forces the user to rely on different sensorial properties.

The idea behind Haus Rucker Co.’s projects at that time was to suggest the need for expanding perception as a way to react to the increasingly overwhelming technological environment. Like Flyhead, the Mind Expander (1968) is a series of futuristic plastic armchairs that isolate the sitter, propelling the search for advanced phases of self-awareness via sensory-deprivation. Topped with double-space helmets, made of transparent plastic visors and inflatable elements, these structures do not merely employ technology as much as they exploit the popular appeal of science fiction, offering a playful experience that is also a critical response to consensual reality controlled by technology.

Contemporary gadgets like the Glo to Sleep™ mask adopt the same isolationist approach, offering an individual the experience of self-removal from the surrounding environment. Watching blue glows dimming, however, is a sort of hypnotizing activity where one is completely isolated and somehow suspended, while entering a journey towards the Alpha state. Gysin’s and Haus Rucker Co.’s devices, instead, bring the user to a state in which one is supposed to “reopen” the eyes. The real difference, then, lies in the idea of the “dream,” proposed as a revolutionary activity of both resistance and experimentation with alternatives by surrealists artists.

Haus Rucker Co., Flyhead, Environment Transformer, 1968

The Collective Unconscious

Similar ideas inform the coeval psychedelic culture, which rose in concert with the diffusion of LSD for both transcendental and therapeutic use. Within psychedelia, however, artists did not experiment with isolationist devices like Gysin’s and Haus Rucker Co.’s, but instead constructed environments— or relational spaces—to be shared. Light shows, for example, popular accompaniments to psychedelic rock concerts, transformed ballrooms and music halls into liquid galaxies that gave the illusion of absence of gravity. With spectacles like The Joshua Light Show to surround concerts of bands like Jefferson Airplane, known Cartesian dimensions lose consistency, generating the perception of an “unlimited” and networked mental space.

Despite anticipating later forms of installation and new media art, light shows have thus far remained countercultural phenomena alongside with coeval multimedia environments by New York collective USCO and the activities conducted by Californian group Merry Pranksters inside their legendary Magic Bus. Whether it is a liquid light show or the décor of a school bus touring to initiate the US to LSD, the environments of 1960s psychedelia were meant to induce relaxation and an escape from everyday reality, through diverting the purpose of advanced technical inventions (from mainstream entertainment to light shows) and scientific discoveries (from anxiety treatments to psychotropic drugs).

USCO, cover of LIFE Magazine, September 9, 1966

To more clearly understand these experiments, we should take into account the changes in postwar cities brought by new infrastructures like highways and airports, or what Marc Augé in the 1990s famously called non-places.⁴ The transparent, symmetrical, and “infographic” nature of the architecture of non-places was echoed in soporific yet functional electronic sounds broadcast by hidden speakers in offices, elevators, airports, and later, shopping malls. Muzak, also known as Elevator Music, was set to very simple melodies and played in loop with the aim of slowing down movements and inducing relaxation.

Electronic musicians, on the other hand, began to experiment with compositions that resembled anonymous and generic Elevator Music, developing what today we generically call Ambient. Over the past fifty years, synthesizer music has become a vehicle to comment on the technological infrastructures of the contemporary city: autobahns, trains, and pocket calculators for Kraftwerk; airports for Brian Eno; suburban decay for Aphex Twin; software for Carsten Nicolai; retrofuturistic media for Oneohtrix Point Never; and mirages of consumerist culture for early 2010s Vaporwave.

Carsten Nicolai, Syn Chron, 2005

What these all have in common is the way the musicians divert the purpose of strategic sounds originally conceived as soundtrack of the status quo, and in the process reveal and critique their silent—yet coercive—mechanisms. The use of sound to comment on technology is even more efficient in multimedia installations. Representative is Nicolai’s Syn Chron (2004), a crystal-shaped apparatus synchronizing light and sound through its external surface and its internal acoustic chamber. A synaesthetic experience which echoes USCO’s environments and psychedelic light shows, Syn Chron stands halfway between a calming habitat and a machine of aversion therapy like the infamous one used to rehabilitate Alex in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971).

A psychedelic meditative component characterizes Mariko Mori’s Wave UFO (1999-2002), an architectural structure that speculates on a philosophy of the cosmos tracing trajectories between ancient and alien civilizations. Past the oval-shaped bubble door, three users lay down on ergonomic beds and through sensors they experience watching their brainwaves projected on the doomed ceiling above. This real-time biofeedback animation is followed by a video that links the individual experience to an ethereal universe where all the elements are cosmically connected to each other. A survey on the users’ brainwave status shows different degrees of consciousness from Beta to Alpha to Theta Waves.

Mariko Mori, Wave UFO, 1999-2002

Mariko Mori, Wave UFO, 1999-2002

Some of the elements described above have recently taken a peculiar direction for the thesis supported so far. Biofeedback devices are the core of the quantified self movement; goggles are often employed by artists and designers to experiment with VR and augmented reality. In both cases, the agents are seduced by technological promises of hyperrealism and mapping such that the distinction between endorsement and critique of reality is never quite clear. Within the current accelerationist discourse, instead, the brief evolution of alternative relaxing apparatuses traced above demonstrate how forms of critique could be achieved through metalinguistic tools that offer relaxation from technology through technology; relief from data overdoses through data stimulation — prefiguring, like Gysin suggested, a world in which technology can bring a change in consciousness that transcends the limits of the visible.

Francesco Spampinato is a New York-based contemporary art historian, writer, and artist. He is Adjunct Professor at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), Providence, and Ph.D. candidate in Arts et Média at Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris. He is the author of Come Together: The Rise of Cooperative Art and Design, Princeton Architectural Press, New York (2015).

1 Glo to Sleep – Sleep Therapy Mask, Brookstone.com, accessed February 8, 2015, http://www.brookstone.com/glo-to-sleep-sleep-therapy-mask

2 J.G. Ballard, Fictions of All Kinds, 1971 in Robin Mackay + Armen Avanessian, eds., #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader, Urbanomic Media LTD, Falmouth, UK 2014

3 Brion Gysin, interviewed by Jon Savage, date unknown. Transcript included in RE/Search Issue 4/5, 1982

4 Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, Verso, London 1995

secret.service

Video by Fabian Bechtle

In conversation with Marvin Jordan

Dorothy Howard (User : OR drohowa) is a Wikipedian-in-Residence at the Metropolitan New York Library Council and archivist at the Jean-Noël Herlin Archive Project. She is an organizer of the Art+Feminism Wikipedia campaign, the Wikimedia LGBT group, and a Program Officer responsible for session curation at WikiConference USA 2014.

In a time which has been referred to as postmodern, the grand ideological narratives of the past cease to exist, or are at least reshaped or replaced by meta-narratives¹. Idealism and the modernist idea of ‘constant progression’ dominated the 19th and 20th century, nourishing the fabrication of countless Utopias in culture – that is, fantastical ‘nowheres’ of the mind, ‘ideal, imaginary societies.’² However, in the self-referencing, ironic, cynical, pastiche-ridden climate of contemporary art and fashion, imagined Utopias are rarely conceived. Still, their resonance, impulses of Utopia, remains.

Idealism and ‘images of perfection’ have to a large extent been occupied by the world of advertising, constantly generating, and by that, exhausting the idea of a Utopia³. Advertising transforms the avant-garde, the projected dream of Utopia, into a late-capitalist commodity fetishism widely available for mass-consumption.

The term ‘avant-garde’ has in art as well as in fashion been ephemeral, frivolously applied to many different artists, designers and artistic collectives, connected only through their position as ‘ahead of (their) times’. Now, the ‘avant-garde’ term is arguably mainly associated with the historical avant-garde of the 20th century; the impressionists, the cubists and the surrealists were all considered avant-garde in their formal and aesthetic experimentation, culminating with the Dadaists.

Extending its art-historical definition, ‘avant-garde fashion’ has usually been characterised by having either an association to artistic practice (dating back to Emilie Flöege of the Wiener 1903 Werkstätte) or a particularly conceptual approach to the design process, comparable to that of an artist (the deconstructionism of Maison Martin Margiela and the Antwerp Six⁴ , or the genderless conceptuality of Comme des Garçons, for example).

In that sense, menswear designer Telfar Clemens, who was born in 1985 in Queens, NY and grew up in Liberia⁵, and his eponymous label Telfar, is perfectly avant-garde; situated within a particular artistic or creative community in New York, he works and collaborates extensively with prominent artists (video artists Ryan Trecartin and Lizzie Fitch, for example), and presents his collections at gallery and museum spaces (including MoMA PS1 in 2010, and recently at the New Museum in collaboration with the art collective Shanzhai Biennial). Telfar designs and performs conceptually through what he describes as his “design philosophy of simplexity™”⁵ in which he explores the fashion system’s dichotomic understanding of a brand being either simple (i.e. commercial) or complex (i.e. avant-garde). Through what is perhaps better described as ‘practice’ rather than ‘design process,’ Telfar proposes a kind of Utopia in the perhaps most avant-garde theme of all: the normal.

For several seasons, and particularly embodied in his A/W 2014 lookbook, which took shape as a highly-produced TV commercial entitled TCTV, Telfar has utilised the concept of ‘basic’ or mainstream clothing as a source for his conceptual design practice. Entitling it Extremely Normal™, with the added trademark symbol simulating a corporate or mass-cultured branding-strategy, he fetishises not only accessible or ‘easy’ fashion styles (earth- and pastel-coloured, basic lounge- and sportswear), but the brightly-lit commercialism that surrounds that particular market. “I want to take American basics to the next level, and show people what they can be,” he stated half a year later in an interview at the showcase of his S/S 15 collection. Here, the normal is idealised, reimagined and ‘made-avant-garde’, transforming it into a subject of aesthetic and philosophical contemplation – exemplified, coincidentally, by the performative trend-forecasting agency K-Hole with their articulation of normcore as concept or trend⁶.

It is exactly through the celebration of the hyper-normal that Telfar exhibits Utopian impulses – that is, imagining an ideal world, or glimpses of it.

In her analysis of Utopian dress as depicted primarily in literature, scholar Aileen Ribeiro distinguishes between imagining Utopian dress as being either luxurious and meant for self-adornment and splendour (as seen early on in Samuel Gott’s Nova Solyma of 1648 and Francis Bacon’s orientalist New Atlantis) or conversely as utilitarian and cleansed from the ‘reckless extravagance’ and materialism of consumer-driven fashion⁷. Seen in a contemporary context, particularly the latter is applicable to Telfar. By idealising the mainstream, the most accessible and hence democratic kind of fashion, he legitimates normality and uniformity as culturally desirable. He has called his work ‘utilitarian’ and expressed how he wants to ‘dress the American masses.’⁸ In fact, the idea of ‘dressing the masses’ in comfortable lounge- and sportswear bears an interesting resemblance to the uniformity of the very first Utopia, Thomas Moore’s Utopia of 1516, in which ‘everyone wears roughly the same sort of clothes… [Clothes that are] pleasant on the eye, and allow free movement of the limbs.’⁹ Telfar’s emphasis on gender-neutral, unisex clothing (using always a few female models in his menswear runway show¹⁰) aligns him with the Utopian tradition of uniformity of clothing across genders, as seen for example in Tommaso Camapnella’s City of the Sun (1602) or more recently, the Dystopian-Utopian city of Zion in The Wachowskis’s sci-fi franchise The Matrix (1999-2003). Through the Utopian dream of utilitarian uniformity, Telfar rejects the conspicuous consumption and perceived elitism of the fashion world, providing what Style.com phrased as ‘a necessary cleansing of sorts… inviting the models and showgoers alike to just be.’¹¹

Even the cultural-historical utilitarian dream is echoed in his collection, all the way through to the choice of materials – exemplified in his latest F/W 15 collection, where the designer reflects back on his long-standing devotion to the most utilitarian of materials: denim. As an homage to his own aesthetic, his 10th year anniversary show featured a range of amalgamated deconstructed ‘worker-silhouettes’, referencing simultaneously the utilitarianism of 20th century industrial America and 21st century high-school sportswear, a post-gender binary contemporariness he describes as ‘the 20-teens, our actual reality.’¹²

Yet, behind the glossy veneer of Telfar’s utilitarian commercialism lays a satirical or subversive discourse, a characteristic that, to many, define his actual design concept. In much of his visual identity and marketing (partly conceived by his creative director, artist Babak Radboy), there is something quite overtly uncanny and disturbing about what appears to be a complete devotion to the aggressive hypercapitalist language of advertising; ‘highly polished, eminently accessible, yet stranger than any underground production,’¹³ as he explains it himself. It is an almost surreal image of what Frederic Jameson would call ‘the triumph of capitalism.’¹⁴ In TCTV, the viewer is presented with an empty, highly glossed, white-washed, semi-virtual location reminiscent of an online shop or a sci-fi movie. A series of models appear: bizarrely smiling, resting in a variety of positions – rotating and on display; clean, commodified and available for purchase, in a whirlwind of luxury logos and trademark symbols. Telfar’s own grinning face emblazoned on virtual credit cards, hovering silently, but in the background, the tune of distorted, commercial elevator-Muzak, interrupted only by the models’ repeated hollow, almost ritualistic echoing of one single word: Telfar. In Baudrillardan terms, a simulacral world¹⁵, copying nothing original but everything commercial, an amalgamation of late-capitalist rhetorics and imagery. Suddenly, the film’s dirt- and care-free imagery is interrupted half-way by an intermezzo of paranoid surveillance footage and a sudden anxiety in the Telfar-chanting voiceover; Telfar’s Utopian fantasy of a low-brow, democratic commercial consumerism reveals itself as a dystopia of hypercapitalism.

Through his clothing and his campaign, Telfar and his art director Babak Radboy, appropriate, reinterpret and subvert the aesthetic iconography as well as the methodology of fashion communication. As journalist Jean Kay argues, Radboy, described as a ‘fake capitalist,’¹⁶ ”critiques and subverts the capitalist system through his apparent collusion but actual subversion of it.”¹⁷ Yet Telfar never admits to a serious condemnation of this system, on the contrary he is inspired and is even celebratory in his understanding. “To me, Macy’s commercials are crazy – we were totally inspired by retail for A/W 14¹⁸,” he stated in an interview with Dazed &; Confused, explaining elsewhere:

‘I’m about levelling the playing field between what’s fashion and what’s normal, what’s taste and what’s classic. I like mixing high-end and lowbrow and equalising them. Not that one is good and one is bad. It just is what it is.’¹⁹

From this perspective, the utopian impulses in Telfar and postmodern fashion generally are limited, if they are not in fact dystopian – what Wilson refers to as ‘the aestheticisation of dystopia.’²⁰

Telfar is inherently dystopian, triggering the question of whether the idea of Utopia is a modernist construct of the past, a wholly impossible concept in a postmodern context. But as fashion theorist Elizabeth Wilson emphasises, the main (or only) characteristic of postmodernism (and ‘postmodernist fashion’) is a mood of ambivalence²¹; Postmodernism at once celebrates and criticises commercial culture; it glamorises it and aestheticizes it, yet never makes it respectable; it appropriates political standpoints without ever being politicised. Telfar’s design philosophy is unmistakably utopian, or at least, houses a series of utopian impulses – despite his critique of capitalist utopian iconography, he is never cynical. Telfar’s Utopia is remarkable in that it appears through an image of a capitalist dystopia – rising from the ashes of an imagined total collapse of capitalist signifiers, coexisting with capitalism’s mutated, aestheticised descendant.

Writing about Dior’s ‘New Look’ in the 1950’s, scholar Angela Partington argues that newly available commodities contributed to ‘the development of a more complex “language” of clothes which could be used by consumers in the articulation of class identity.’²² In light of postmodernism’s destruction of class and late-capitalism’s continued fabrication of commodities (now including bodies, visions, dreams), this idea can be used to explain the complex ambivalence manifested in the world of Telfar, which we in search of an accurate term can call ‘mainstream surrealism’, meta-fashion, or simply, simplexity™. The constant self-mutations of capitalist iconography, including the neuroticism and surrealism of the mainstream, enables the postmodern or avant-garde designer to develop an increasingly complex, ever-mutating ‘language of clothing,’²³ and enables the consumer to ‘read’ or decode it.

Zachary Kaplan: Perhaps oddly for this Data issue of DIS, I wanted to start “offline” at Occupy Wall Street. (As an Angeleno at the time, however, I felt it as a very networked experience.) That moment is starting to feel under-historicized, as if it’s floating away. I know that you were very involved; you edited the print Occupy Gazette. And the way you use the word “people” in your book, The People’s Platform, seems to be mining that history in response to networks effects: unequal distribution of profits, the plight of the artist among “disruptive” markets. You’re talking about “people” in a public sense, in a “how do you constitute the people?” sense, in an Occupy sense. How do you see your book and Occupy bumping up against each other?

Astra Taylor: I wouldn’t have thought of the title without Occupy—I don’t think it would have resonated with me unless I’d been immersed in this subculture obsessed with the “people,” the “people’s microphone,” etc. Reviewers asked: Is this aspirational? Ironic? But, it’s homage to that experience.

But let’s note that it’s amazing we’re even talking about Occupy in February 2015. I assumed that in the pattern of history it would flower, burn out, and be scorned. I think you’re right that the history is kind of drifting away, but at the same time, it’s not regarded as a joke. It’s regarded as a serious intervention. And it’s looked at much more sympathetically than I expected, especially given some of its foibles and shortcomings and ridiculousness.

Occupy and the writing of the book coincided, but the seeds were planted a bit after my movie Examined Life, the politics of which were total George W. Bush hangover. As a political person, I was thinking about what was next, and I gravitated to the conversation about the internet. People were putting all this optimism, all their political ambitions, into this space—this was the moment of Iran’s “Twitter Revolution” hype. I had a bit more skepticism than most at the conferences I was going to. I was shaped by the 1999 dot-com bust. I had read my Baffler, Tom Franks’s One Market Under God. I was surprised how so much of the language from that last internet bubble was back, along with the very same old white male pundits, but now it was rebranded as “Web 2.0.”

So I was already working on the book when Occupy happened, which intensified my own sense that inequality had to be front and center in political thought. But I actually put the book on hold, becoming the passionate editor of the Gazette, and a passionate spectator and actor in the movement.

ZK: Another Occupy word you often use in the book is “democracy,” though you never explicitly define it, instead delineating its boundaries through specific ideas of representation, opportunity, and so forth. It’s a term that’s been utterly problematized. In the art world, it’s museums that have become “democratized,” as Hito Steyerl has explained, by indiscriminately dragging populations into the museum for the sake of it. In tech, it’s emptied of all meaning as gatekeeperlessness. (This is leaving aside the entire anti-democratic neoreactionary position.)

AT: Yeah, it’s a complicated word. I’d go to a tech conference and guys like Clay Shirkey and Yochai Benkler would invoke “democracy” over and over without any critical sense, as though it was self-evident. They disconnected the term from cultural, political, and economic spheres. But then with Occupy the word was also invoked as though it was self-evident. “This is what democracy looks like.” “Democracy” was us in our General Assembly making decisions together with, supposedly, no mediation. In both cases, there were, of course, very undemocratic effects. There is the tyranny of structurelessness: who can dominate, who can be left out, who can participate, who can be heard?

I tried to do exactly what you say: address democracy without totally defining it. After the book, I realized that this is a question I’m interested in dealing with next, and so I’ve begun a new documentary project explicitly about its challenges, called What is Democracy? In a way, it asks how can Obama, Erdoğan, Occupy, Shirkey, Bush, and so on all invoke this term with equal claim.

Of course the tech pundits and Occupy were both right that our political structures are totally corrupted and sold-out and anti-democratic. At Occupy, I’m not sure that we necessarily knew how to do democracy any better, or that this “beloved community of the heart” really was the example of the society we would want to build. Those pontificating commentators were right that the traditional pre-internet media landscape was horrible, that the gatekeepers and record labels and old-media giants were oppressive. But their vision of what those institutions would be replaced with—this networked, Silicon Valley, peer production, and thoroughly commercialized advertiser-driven culture—was also really anti-democratic in ways that they were likely to ignore.

ZK: One word you don’t use is “neoliberal.” Evgeny Morozov, in particular, faulted you for that, suggesting that you use a variety of buzzwords in its stead, inadvertently reproducing, in his words, “extremely depoliticized, neoliberal agendas.”

In general I like Morozov’s work. But I wasn’t a fan of the review, and my response to his point is that I wanted to write a Marxist political economy without ever framing it directly as such. As for “neoliberalism,” the signaling that that language makes is so specific and insider and academic that I didn’t want to use it. This was a very conscious effort on my part because I wanted the book to be adopted at various levels—by schools, by activists, by all sorts of people—and partly because I think these stock phrases sometimes aren’t as useful as we think. “Neoliberalism,” in particular, has problems because it’s not a word anyone invokes positively. No one says: “As a neoliberal…” It’s a concept only critics use, which means it never pierces the target, because you’re not attacking an identity anyone credibly holds.

I also worry it opens the door for nostalgia for liberalism. I am as nostalgic as anyone for “Big Society” programs, high union density, and so on, but the term neoliberalism risks letting capitalism off the hook. And capitalism is the deeper problem. Why would I use “neoliberalism” as a shortcut in my writing when I can take the time to describe actual social conditions and how they are experienced? Why not identify the precarity people feel in a world where public goods like education and retirement are individually debt-financed, the pressure to embrace a kind of entrepreneurialism and self-branding is so high, and we act as speculators looking for a return on self-investment (in our education, in our social networks, in our creativity) in order survive? The book is very much about neoliberalism, even if I never use the word.

I’ve noticed that the writers on tech that I like the most happen to be women, and they don’t write the generalist, over-the-top, techno-utopian/techno-skeptic rants where you might find words like “democracy” or “neoliberalism” or “revolution” a lot. They tend to be subtler and have a field of expertise through which they understand questions of how technology is changing things and what’s at stake. Gabriella Coleman, Rebecca MacKinnon, Danielle Citron, Joanne McNeil, Zeynep Tufekci, there are so many who bring expertise, subtlety, useful data, and, crucially, history, and weave this into their books.

ZK: In contrast to Morozov, I would characterize the conclusions of People’s Platform as managerial. You offer a sense of regulatory possibility, modeled after, for instance, France’s Lang Law, which fixes pricing for books, protecting authors and shopkeepers. These are notoriously tricky, we should note. You also advocate for this idea of sustainability by individual choice, which could be easily co-opted as consumerist choice. But you see opportunity in both approaches.

AT: My editors told me again and again that I needn’t be prescriptive, but I wanted to put forth some concrete ideas because part of the main argument of the book is that we’re not at such a revolutionary moment, and continuity is as important as change. “New Media” and “Old Media” are interconnected landscapes. People are watching more mainstream “TV” than ever. We may get our news via Facebook, but so much is still from the New York Times. (I swear I read far, far less New York Times before Twitter.) New technologies amplify old media hierarchies. So if continuity is what we are dealing with, then some of the old solutions—if we want to call them that—to media consolidation, commercialism, centralization could still work, too. These are regulatory ideas, public investment in media, and so forth.

Why are we throwing these away? It’s because the current ideology suggests that technology and the market shouldn’t be encumbered in any way. So you’re hearing phrases like “permission-less culture,” or even “participatory culture” and “free culture,” and those are Trojan Horses for the market, which is something “to be left alone” to do its magic. So I think a little public subsidy for journalism and the arts, for instance, would go a long way. At the end of the book, I quote Mariana Mazzucato, who wrote a long, intensive study on the role of state investment in technological innovation: how state support is responsible for touchscreens, the microchip, and, of course, the internet. The private sector appropriates the credit and takes the money. The state can be more innovative with regard to technology because it has a longer view. Failure is an option. Long-term investment is the thing.

As someone smartly pointed out to me recently, no one has done a similarly rigorous analysis of the public sector’s role in culture, though there are reasons to believe the results would be similarly revelatory. The market is very risk-averse where culture is concerned; it tries, as much as possible, to secure a return on investment (which is why there are so many film prequels and sequels, for example). Properly implemented, state subsidy can create much-needed space for experimentation, and for expressive forms and diverse voices the market won’t support. But right now we have this idea that culture under the market is edgier and more pleasurable, while state-supported media is Stalinist, gray, dull. I think we flatter the market too much and need to push back.

ZK: But there is tension there because one of the reasons that that long-term view can be taken with tech is because a lot of tech has, for instance, military applications. And while government support for the arts has declined, the private sector has been valorizing the “artist”—see the rise in artist residencies at tech companies.

AT: I think that the framework that tech companies are using to justify that investment in culture is really interesting. The private sector is definitely making these assumptions—a friend of mine has a yearlong fellowship from a software company to stay home to be “creative.” Under what grounds are they rationalizing this? The point about the military applications is true, and I totally understand the way the cultural sphere is so complicated, and how it feels safer and more pure to have this independence from the state, even if it’s still within the market. But I don’t think that that’s enough.

But this is where I get into uncomfortable territory, because in some ways my argument is a defense of institutions, it’s a defense of formalized structures that support people to take time, to be able to survive as artists, and to live comfortably as subjects who have bodies. Because of my upbringing as an anarchist unschooler and as someone involved in Occupy—which is all about denouncing the state, non-profits, and NGOs as all corrupt—that is a subtle dance for me. We need these big cultural institutions, political institutions, political associations, but how do we make them better? Asking that question reflected a kind of honesty I needed to have in the book, instead of defaulting to this idea of individuality at the margins, because we can’t just bow out of larger systems. Especially the way things are set up now, there’s no opting out.

ZK: On that, I wanted to ask you about your debt work with Rolling Jubilee because it seems to be fully engaged with a kind of institution-building. You describe it as “a network of debtors who liberate debtors through mutual aid,” buying debt for pennies on the dollar to abolish it.

AT: Both the book and Occupy dealt with how do you resist, where can you find power? Rolling Jubilee is a project that buys and abolishes debt on the secondary market. To date, we have abolished $33,000,000 of predatory health and education debt. Nobody should have to go into debt because they want an education or because they get ill.

This was a public education campaign to challenge the morality of the economy—the idea you have to pay your debts no matter what, even when the debts are stacked and the 1% get bailed out. It’s a continuation from Occupy, an attempt to demonstrate to people viscerally that their debts are for sale and that people are profiting off their misfortune. But the bigger goal was to try to transition to an association of debtors, because we can’t buy and abolish all the debt that’s out there, which runs into the trillions, without this coalition. So the idea is that while it’s so nice to send these beautiful letters that say, “you no longer owe debt,” this is not something we have the capacity to do effectively forever. You need to build a larger coalition. You need to organize and build power.

ZK: The organization of debt is just inscrutable—as an individual owing money for a mortgage, for a student loan, you just come into contact with these enormous, faceless entities that seemingly operate beyond description.

AT: The pressure on the individual right now is immense. You need to self-speculate—so education is an investment to get a job to pay off the loans for that education, instead of a space to explore interests, to participate in self-rule, to be a citizen. The way it is for artists—to be on your own, to build your brand—has become paradigmatic for everyone else. Everyone’s told to do it.

Now you’re this isolated figure, and yet underneath you are all these systems—some new, some old—still extracting profit. So let’s say you’re an individual musician. The problem is all the capital is flowing to areas of distribution. All the risk is on the artist, who is doing the hard and costly work of production, while companies like Spotify or Google Music or iTunes occupy the lucrative and safe position of distribution where profits are guaranteed. How do you as a musician, or creative person, respond to that position, when there is no one to really protest, no record executive anymore, just the faraway people at Spotify or Google who don’t answer your phone call because they are not really answerable to you?

Debt is similar. Wages have stagnated since the 60s, so people are going into debt for basic necessities. If we go back to mid-20th century, you would have joined a union to negotiate with your boss. Now, you’re a freelancer. Now, you’re between jobs. Now, you’re highly indebted. (We are always updating our statistics. Average student debt was something like $27,000 when we started, and now it’s like $33,000.) Who do you protest? You’re in this weird network where the people profiting are so distant from you. How do you even build solidarity among all these isolated individuals, get them to see how their life is shaped by class and financial exploitation?

This is not new. I went to graduate school when I was 19 in 1999, and there was a lot of conversation about “neoliberalism” and labor, the rise of precarity, and this critique would be made again and again. We’re entrepreneurs of the self, etc. But there were never examples of the people constituting themselves in relation to this new alignment. Now, I think there are some interesting examples of people banding together and finding weaknesses in the systems.

ZK: So where are people being constituted, and what leverages are they finding?

AT: On the cultural workers front, as an example, there is the Content Creators Coalition. What they are trying to do is reframe the entire argument around those digital music platforms. Internet commentators have long focused on the evil record labels, the evil RIAA, and copyright as an oppressive structure. So the CCC say, “No. The problem is actually the platforms that are taking 30% just for distributing bits. And for all of their talk about transparency, they’re completely opaque.” To be involved with Spotify and Google’s Music Key is to sign nondisclosure agreements, to not be able to communicate with fellow musicians. Also, the CCC is revealing the ways the old structures like the “Big 3” record labels were actually cooperating with these new digital platforms to carry over their exploitative practices. For example, creating revenue streams among Google and Spotify and the major record labels that are not technically royalties and so don’t have to be shared with artists.

And then with our debt work we are transitioning from Rolling Jubilee to a new organization called the Debt Collective: the 21st Century Debtors Union. We’re trying to get people to aggregate their debt and recognize that debt might be so out of control it has become a form of financial power. If the 1% has wealth, the 99% has debt. We’re trying to get people to come together and figure out who are these entities that they’re paying month after month. Maybe it’s Sallie Mae, maybe Wells Fargo, but we want to name this distant actor and fight them. We’re doing that now with the Debt Collective’s first campaign against the predatory for-profit school Corinthian Colleges and the fraudulent debts students incurred to attend.

Perhaps it’s that I’m involved with both the music issue and the debt issue, but I see them as analogous in that they are both fighting back in the network. And the thing about this network moment is that power relations can be distributed in new ways, but are still intensely asymmetrical. It’s just more abstract and distanced, and you need to do more conceptual work to figure out and to make real those potential levers of transformation. It’s not as simple as “I won’t go to work today.” You have to be more creative. This is the political challenge of our moment.

ZP: I think you’re right that we are dealing with abstraction after abstraction. Every time we use a device were engaging with this piece of material technology, linked to others globally via an information network, that is then layered with all of these apps, which then reproduce their worldviews. Parsing areas of weakness and transformation feels like this impossible task.

AT: I was a teenage Deleuzian, which for a while I was embarrassed of, but I was very interested in Deleuze and Guattari, and the best experience I had was reading A Thousand Plateaus with this professor Ronald Bogue in Athens, GA. And then I kind of did a backwards loop into Marxism. I was basically taught the ideas of postmodernism before modernism. But I now really like Deleuze’s “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” He does this brilliant job of describing, or rather anticipating, a networked society shaped by these powerful mediators—Facebook, Google, the ad brokers, the infrastructure owners—that we don’t see, but find ourselves controlled by and implicated within. This fits in, again, with the financial issue: the networks of financial companies—these non-employers, non-identifiable bodies—who unseen collect money with every swipe of the credit card, every monthly debt payment. So I’m getting interested in the network as a society of control. And wondering how we take power within that web.

ZK: I would think that a good Silicon Valleyer, a good Shirkeyite, would tell you that the key to power is in collecting big data.

AT: Yeah, I do think big data holds some possibilities here. So look, again, at the musician example—on these platforms which are built on the rhetoric of artist empowerment, the artists are given no access to any of their data. You have minimal or no knowledge of your metrics no idea what percentage of their income flows to you, what the percentage of their gross revenue versus profit. Little things leak: Facebook might make public its emotional contagion experiment, but it has no duty to report on any other experiments or way it’s marshaling data to its own advantage or the advantage of those paying for special treatment. So, that’s why I think the nonprofits like CASH Music and others trying to make and distribute tools that put that information into artists and activists hands are so important. Though we also must be wary of the Silicon Valley idea that if you have all your data, you can be this empowered entrepreneur or engineer in charge of your destiny, because it’s not that simple.

So we need to be aware of this information asymmetry. With debt, we need to crack the nut of not knowing where or to what entities money is owed, and with whom to negotiate. So we are playing with the idea of platforms to aggregate data and analytics related to people’s financial circumstances to collectivize people’s debt to help solve this burden. When you ask for a loan, creditors have access to your data — they see your credit score or your social history, as in “oh, you bought those shoes, or you are friends with this person, you only deserve this money at a high interest rate.” To counter this we need data in the hands of debtors, which could be used in a completely different way, to be leveraged for fairer treatment.

Morozov has written about socializing data for public benefit, which I like, but I’m more thinking of data as a resource that needs to be collected, collectivized, and used to form a class identity, to be marshaled as a tool of economic justice. But, you know, when would you hear that at a tech conference? That’s just not within their frame of conversation. Instead you would see a power lecture on microfinance, or peer-to-peer lending, or Bitcoin. Nothing that means empowerment of the many over the some. Nothing that uses big data, not just for the warm and fuzzy public good, but to fight the 1% who are waging full on class war against everyone else.

ZK: Distrusting our political situation, I would assume that regulations have been drawn against this kind of collectivizing collection of big data?

AT: Probably. “Data for the People” is going to be difficult because rebellion under post-Fordist conditions has been effectively outlawed. This is partly because the commentators have no idea about the history of labor, and how legally difficult it is to unite and fight back. For example, they don’t think about things like United States Anti-Trust law. Here, the law is concerned with collusion and price gouging, not labor. Some lawyers I know warn that Anti-Trust limits, for instance, the ability of artists to organize against the Spotifys of the world. It does not distinguish between big and small. If you’re an “entrepreneur”—which many freelancers are, as people have LLC or S-Corp status, even if it’s just a girl and her guitar—you cannot get together in private and talk to other musicians (who are also LLCs or S-Corps) to compare checks from these various distributors, to try to share information, to try to advocate for yourselves as a group. You’re colluding. You are at risk of Anti-Trust problems. The whole system is set up so the value of data and information is controlled. The fact that Anti-Trust could be a hurdle in organizing for people is bizarre.

These are the considerations when you leave the theoretical realm and actually think about constituting a people and take collective action means under the current legal conditions. In what way does the state prevent us from using digital data for more radical purposes? How do corporations protect their power by claiming what should be our data as proprietary? We haven’t really begun to account for all these obstacles. To me, these are just some of the issues we need to pay attention to.

Contra-Internet engages the emerging militancies and subversions of “the Internet,” such as the global proliferation of autonomous mesh networks, encryption tactics, and darknets. Contra-Internet aims to function as a conceptual, practical, and experimental framework for refusing the neoliberal logic of “the Internet” while building alternatives to its infrastructure.

Comprised of multiple series, Contra-Internet 1) critiques the Internet as both a hegemonic descriptor for digital networking and premier arena of political control, and 2) documents and speculates upon network alternatives that social movements and activists are developing globally.

Inspired by queer/feminist/transgender theorist Beatriz Preciado’s Manifiesto contrasexual, Contra-Internet is oriented from a feminist and queer perspective, in an effort to unite such political positions with a hacker ethos.

The “Inversion Practices” series is comprised of short, performative videos that utilize various conceptual-technical tactics to abandon and subvert the Internet.

Contra-Internet Inversion Practice #1: Constituting an Outside (Utopian Plagiarism)

Contra-Internet Inversion Practice #2: Social Media Exodus (Response)

 Machine Vision

In his forthcoming book, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty, Benjamin Bratton deepens his investigation into the fundamental problems facing design today: obstacles presented by planetary scale computation, or a software-hardware monolith that he calls “the stack”, comprised of “so many different genres of machines, spinning out on their own…” This new schema or “accidental megastructure” foreshadows a disciplinary frontier that forms a core feature of Bratton’s research: the political geography of cloud computing. Data Issue editors Mike Pepi and Marvin Jordan interviewed Benjamin Bratton over email, discussing various conceptions and misconceptions of “the digital”, the limits of cloud-based sovereignty and territory, and contemporary art.

Zach Krall, Inside Cyber Command, 2014

Could we start with the metaphor of “digital space”? There are some who use it as a facile reference to networked capitalism or fictitious “worlds” conveniently placed beyond considerations of class, race, or gender. Yet you’ve discussed the potential of “digital space” in another way, namely, you’ve considered the possibility of ubiquity of “network time” or a world flattened by digital images that map a cosmogram (after Virilio), or Craig Hogan’s theory that the fabric of space is digital (binary) and your theory of the black stack points to the complexities of jurisdiction suggested by planetary scale (digital) computing. How do we chart this conceptual metaphor from acceptable use to abuse? Simply put, how do we responsibly define “the digital”?

Benjamin Bratton: I think the most common abuses of the concept “the digital” are those that start from an idea that computation and algorithmic reason are recent inventions and that their geologic profile amounts to spreading some artificial glassy film over the surfaces of analog nature. This is the basis of a still persistent ‘virtual is to physical as digital is to analog’ misconception. I would argue that humans discovered “computation” more than we invented it, and have as yet built only weak little appliances for harnessing it. Unfortunately, I don’t think there is no single definition of “the digital” that would untangle the popular confusion of computation-as-such with today’s computing technologies or computing culture.

In Art, the digital/ analog division become a Culture War, with bizarre patriotisms on both sides, each developing parallel theoretical discourses, conference circuits, journals, relations with or hostilities toward other disciplines within the academy, etc. There was real cultural capital at stake for the cultivation and weaponization of both Analog Pastoralism and Digital Millenarianism and/or Successionism. It would seem that an earlier generation of curators and gallerists were as befuddled by “New Media Art” as the record industry was by MP3’s and could not figure out how to monetize something that was by definition not a scarce object or gesture. All this is well known, but it does seem to be far less the case than it was. It’s probably too early to say which side really won. Perhaps one won Art and the other won everything else?

When comparing the current stack to the impending “Black Stack”, you place considerable emphasis on a kind of historical necessity underpinning the latter’s relation to the former, going so far as to call the Black Stack “the computational totality-to-come” that is defined by “its dire inevitability”, and which amounts to “an escape from the present.” I can’t help but get a sense of determinism when reading these lines. What makes you so sure that the stack-to-come isn’t already here, or that it will be any different than the current stack’s capabilities?

BB: Understanding The Stack as a model of and for “totality” should not be confused with immutability or even with a closed-system. What is determined is that The Stack-we-have is not historically or technological inevitable and that the modular structural logic of stack architectures makes the displacement and replacement of whatever occupies a given layer if not inevitable then at least foreseeable. The “Black Stack” is simply a name for the “not-blank slate” of whatever composition The Stack will turn into. It is a composition that we know is coming, know that we will have a hand in fashioning, but don’t know how to recognize in advance (or cannot possibly recognize in advance because we cannot possibly ever witness it for whatever reason.) Some ante-verberations of “this-totality-to-come” are surely already here and now. In the Conclusion chapter of The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty (published later this year by MIT Press), I outline some current, apparent dispositions of each layer of The Stack-we-have (Earth, Cloud, City, Address, Interface, User) and suggest possible developments, some optimistic and not at all.

Perhaps your question suggests some discomfort with the not entirely “critical” posture of this Black Stack figure? The book describes itself as a “design brief”. If it lives up to that, it would motivate not just more analysis and critique but projects of designation, making and programming that are, I would hope, better-tuned to the opportunities at hand. I recognize that some readers may be possessed by a philosophical spirit of “infinite refusal”, especially with regards to global-scale technologies, but hopefully they will also find some good ideas and projects to engage with. I would hope that technical and theoretical practice and pedagogy can combine more effectively.

On that point, it should not be so hard to recognize that perpetual spontaneous negation of power is simply not a good master strategy to effect durable accumulative transformation in material power relations (for example) and that a future worth winning needs a Futurism worthy of the name. Perhaps some people have other goals for which that master strategy actually suits them quite well? If so, fine. But it still obscures the fact that it is by the large-scale imposition of fixed, generic protocols of inclusion and interaction, such as the city, that any platform is able to sustain the weird, richly nuanced divisions of labor and life that allow people to pursue the joys of their most marginal idiosyncrasies. This is only paradoxical if you begin with an axiomatic negation of power and form, real or imagined. In other words, “Governmentality” is a technology for the care of the social; it is not an obscenity.

That reminds me of what Natalie Kane wrote recently, inspired by Transmediale, but easily applied to other examples of this type of inquiry. She lamented the loose invocation of “algorithms”, namely that some perpetuated the “idea that we don’t know what they do, we can’t control them, and that they go on to invent themselves like an ever replicating organism”, which “removes the humans that created them entirely.” It seems like the marriage of leftist jargon and theories of and for digital technology have actually increased in a memelike nature as these intellectual communities coalesce, echo, and build off one another online. Meanwhile some have called for a more technically-specific research on these questions, something perhaps viewed unkindly by theorists who would then need to trade in their Jameson for Python.

BB: I would definitely read “Jameson for Python” but I would be more interested in “Python for Jameson.” The Jamesonian reading of high-level general purpose scripting languages is good, the Jamesonian plan and program for what to make with Python is better.

Zach Krall, Inside Cyber Command, 2014

Turning to art, ”Post-internet” is another overextended term that now appears to have been a poorly-conceived set of loose principles. After having a brief rise, those ideas about art seem to be in various stages of backlash or re-organization. In one sense, post-internet work increasingly appears as an art of user subjectification.

BB: An art of/on/for user subjectifcation would actually be quite interesting if it were to take its own provocations seriously. The problem with much Post-Internet Art, perhaps, is that for varying reasons it seems obligated to not complicate its effects nearly enough. To start, it’s not possible to make sturdy generalizations about the quite different artistic practices that get categorized by this term. For example, both Artie Vierkant and Zach Blas were students in Art programs where I have taught, and it would not occur to me to say that their goals or programs are of a kind.

With that caveat, it might, however, be worth first exorcizing what we think we see when we look at Post-Internet Art (which is so clearly about being looked at). One may think that one sees something like a sociopathic Pokemon-inspired smirking in-joke easily downloadable for the Koonsian after-party, one that leveraged an uncertain ratio of ketamine and juice-boxes to circumvent Clare Bishop’s “Digital Divide” by acceding to the White Cube economy’s most transactional 2D wall-friendly file formats. One may think that one sees the inevitable reaction to transposing museum holdings into Big Data image archives in the preeminence of .JPG as a universal visual culture protocol, now extruded and fabricated twelve feet tall for shits and giggles. But maybe that’s not all there is.

First, the user as ocular subject is what a lot of this art either problematizes or resists problematizing. In deciding between the two, it is important to insist that is not really post-internet art. It is, as others have said, more accurately art of WWW, social media profiles, banner ads, MMOG, and stock photography psychodramas, etc. It is about what the web looks like on screens for people who look at screens, as well as the figural contradictions of a screen-based aesthetic that is staged in relation to screens that are at once in and on our physical world. Yes, “hyperreality” and all that, but also making the optical physics and cognitive science of clickbait into an anthropological scenario requiring mimetic reflection. Good, but that is still not the Internet. The Internet is mostly logistical & scan-search morlock algos keeping things running for the binocular-visioned hominids aboveground who look at images on screens.

One of the chapters in the book I am writing now is on machine vision. Depending on how you count, weigh or measure them, there are already far more “images” made by machines and for machines than by humans and for humans. Machine vision is arguably the ascendant ‘ocular user subject’, not the human. At the very least, the human visual subject—especially that user subject construed for mainstream social media—should be situated adjacent to machinic user subjects, instead of above them or before them. This is not part of some OOO wordgame maneuver but a simple fact.

Given that, who/what is the user/viewer of the Post-Internet Art’s combined ‘.JPG-Object‘ format? On the one hand, the oscillation between image-as-object and object-as-image is a way to mimic the movement between virtual and physical screen spaces, and so could be seen as a return to conceptual and perceptual importance by certain Modern “techniques of the observer” that we thought were already well into retirement.

On the other hand, one may conclude that in the conflation of social media screen aesthetics with “the Internet” as a whole, Post-Internet Art feeds on a conservative art world’s validation of collective technical ignorance about the actual workings of an occluded infrastructure—and so guaranteeing its appeal for certain curators and collectors for whom the occlusion of morlocks is core to their business model or personal psychological make-up. This may also easily include the collaborative alibi offered by the individual artist’s claim that the work’s re-performance of that occlusion constitutes a “critique of capitalism,” which is all the better for everyone.

On the other other hand (there is always a third hand), perhaps even while Post-Internet’s observer may impersonate a stupid postmodern blank stare, couldn’t it also be read instead as a pantomime of the machinic visual subject with whom we already co-inhabit the wider subject position the user? Maybe, maybe not. For example, Blas’ anti-facial recognition masks —which I think are great— may be understood as a gesture of refusal to engage with machinic visual subjects, maintaining the human privilege to remain unrecognized by the subaltern machine’s gaze. Or instead it may be taken as a way of exploring how that machine does see, who we are through its “eyes”, and how its gaze can be a site of reflection (literally and conceptually) for the recomposition of our own vision in relation to theirs. Clearly the latter is the more interesting project (and not the only one to derive from Blas’ work). The limited range—from dumb stare to “refusing the panopticon”—is a bad spectrum on which to be stuck, and I wouldn’t wish it on these practices. If they choose to adhere to it, however, that’s their problem.

Could you say more about machine vision?

BB: Yes, I am fascinated right now by its abilities and limitations. I suppose my line of thought would contradict somewhat Bruce Sterling’s essay on The New Aesthetic in which he takes time to dissuade us from reading too much machine intelligence into what we see as an emergent aesthetic pattern. He says that the machines that have produced these images do not and cannot have a sense of “aesthetics” and this is certainly true so far as it goes. He recently made a similar point about A.I. in an interview. Now, it’s true that one can also suppose that allegory, inference and emotion are things that humans do not understand well enough to render algorithmically. Perhaps it’s not the machine’s fault. (Remember Turing’s line from the “Computing Intelligence” essay in which he wonders if a sonnet written by a computer would be best appreciated by another computer?)

However, what I mean by the machinic visual subject is not something that possesses humanlike or human-level perceptual and aesthetic capacities, but rather something that is uncanny and interesting because it does not possess those things and yet can see us, recognize us and know us regardless. That’s weird and interesting enough. It’s also not true that image processing cannot see “genre” (as Lev Manovich’s recent work shows) but it sees it differently precisely because it cannot have any real emotional connection to it.

For now what is sufficiently interesting about New Aesthetic and related kinds of machine aesthetics, as they exist and proliferate in the world, and perhaps about post-internet art as it is simulated within the gallery, is that they (can) stage a encounter with our own estranged reflections. There is the question of how the world looks as a screen, and another, more important I think, is how we look as objects of perception from the position of the machines with which we co-occupy that world.

Seeing ourselves through the “eyes” of this machinic Other who does not and cannot have an affective sense of aesthetics is a kind of disenchantment. We are just stuff in the world for “distributed machine cognition” to look at and to make sense of. Our own sapience is real and unique, but as we are things-to-observe-that-just-happen-to be-sapient, this doesn’t really matter to machine vision. This disenchantment is more than just like hearing the recorded sound of your own voice (“that’s not me”) it is potentially the clearing away of a closely guarded illusion. This uncomfortable recognition in the machine’s mirror is a kind of “reverse uncanny valley.” Instead being creeped out at how slightly inhuman the creature in the image appears, we are creeped out at how un-human we ourselves look through the creature’s eyes. This is something to continue to research further, but in and out of “art”.

Zach Krall, Inside Cyber Command, 2014

Whenever we come across critical or politicized art today that sets itself the task of confronting systems of surveillance or “the digital panopticon”, we’re typically greeted by an old tradition of “demystification.” That is, the assumption that there is a “hidden” agent — be it capital, algorithms, the NSA, etc. — which “secretly” harbors the “real” cause of social oppression. The goal then becomes to “expose the truth”, which will presumably produce a critical epiphany in the heart of the public, leading to righteous social action. Do you see any shortcomings to this theoretical tendency of “pulling back the curtain” from one’s eyes, so to speak — and if so, what alternative methods would you offer for analyzing platform surveillance?

BB: Yes, definitely, but first let me say that it is clear the abuse of power made possible by global surveillance capabilities is not theoretical, it is plainly very real and poses a real danger to retard the full development of the societies and the technologies it purports to protect. Encryption technology will have a big role to play, for good and bad. But, as I have written, the geopolitics of the “User” simply cannot scale from the atomic individual’s counter-weaponization of personal data flows. The fixation on this as both means and ends can also retard the full development of those same societies and technologies.

As for Political Art and Design, there are important differences between types of projects working on this issues, but in general the “forensic” seeks to disclose, reveal, bear witness to a hidden evil and then present them before some ‘public’, whose scrutiny of the illuminated scandal allows them to adjudicate it. The principle is that by revealing and seeing all the bad and serving it up to an authority who can sort it and judge it and punish it, then the work of sovereign justice is done.

One problem is that this spectacle of truth is based on principles similar if not the same as those of systemic panopticism itself, which seeks to automate that disclosure, revelation and administrative accounting of evil/badness. Panopticism is also a forensic impulse, albeit one for which the revelation is itself not revealed. ‘Critical’ works that are content to pull back the curtain and demonstrate before a public the truth of surveillance mechanisms, demonstrating it, bearing-witness and staging encounters are, in some ways, not so much challenging the principle epistemology of panopticism than they are fetishizing it, repeating it in miniature. In the context of politicized digital art, the forensic project can also be a variation on what Wendy Chun calls ‘code fetish’: if we can get to the source and to the source code, and make it viewable, then all the complex social, cultural, economic ramifications and reverberations will be held to account.

There are important and reasonable voices evangelizing the wide-adoption of encryption tools and the protection of Turing-completeness of our personal computers, and I make use of their ideas in The Stack. Others argue for radical transparency and “sousveillance” (as opposed to “surveillance”), but agreement is impossible on who or what is “over” or “under” at any given moment, and so also impossible on who or what should be absolutely transparent and what should be absolutely opaque. Furthermore, the absence of a theory of social form and architecture in this context, without which over and under is so hard to map, is itself perhaps also the result of an automatic impulse to negate, refuse or deterritorialize systems of mutual governance and to disqualify deliberate and explicit prescriptive norms that possess enforceable authority. For the anarcho-libertarian impulse, “power” is always-already a scandal requiring vigilance. Counter-weaponization against governance —by data encryption, guns, encrypted 3D printable guns, etc.—is both ends and a means in its own right. Full stop. This impulse has influenced too much of the discussion, I believe. It’s time to bring more tools to the mix.

Alternatives must start with an understanding that there is not one “Panopticon” but multiple platforms and interfacial regimes competing for line-of-sight advantages over one another. Some technologies of panoptic information are public-facing and largely out in the open, while others hide their existence, and each provides a different but “compete” view of the world. Others are proprietary to financial and military Users. For State vs. State cyberwarfare that competition for line of sight is sometimes even below the level of software, “closer to the metal”, into the hardware itself.

Each platform fights over the ability to identify the “shape of the space” they are fighting over in the first place, which I call the geoscape. Some regimes are State-based and others are non-State based, but for both “governmentality” evolves in relation to what it can see, and the advent of planetary-scale computing allows governance (not just governments) to see and extract value from new flows, namely data. That in itself is not unexpected. It’s simply not possible to understand this overlapping of multiple “panoptic” platforms through a zero-sum heuristic of States and Platforms vs. the Individual. Structural disparities of power in relation to information regimes are structural and need to be addressed as such, not one encrypted individual at a time (even as encryption is itself infrastructural).

Obviously the European and American contexts have different political cultures, and in the USA, the paranoid style is persistent and reactionary, but it is not exclusive to the Right. I once had to correct a student of mine who got very upset during a lecture in which I explained the history of NASA’s Earth Monitoring satellite system. He thought NASA and NSA were the same agency and that the secret police had no business monitoring us with satellites (before I corrected him, he went on to claim that Snowden proved that Climate Change is a hoax perpetuated by elites). He was a smart person, actually, but deeply confused. Clearly for him, and for many others, the very premise of governance observing and tracing events, which is a normal precondition of enforcement, has become itself so illegitimate that it is possible for him to imagine its wholesale refusal as having no costs. His sense of powerlessness about the weirdness of the world is directed at all forms of governance rolled into one omniscient entity. Another student in the same class wrote a paper about the lack of useful reliable environmental data in poor and under-served communities, and the need for more consistent, usable and up-to-date monitoring and reporting systems in those areas. To me, a critical conundrum about the legitimacy of algorithmic governance is made clear. On the one hand, the disadvantaged are themselves rendered into governable data-objects but do not have sufficient facility with media of algorithmic governance, and on the other, the structural violence of living in “Lo-Res” neighborhoods perpetuates the gross inequity by making certain lived realities invisible that need to be seen and need to count.

Back to The Stack and your own work, generally speaking, you categorically demarcate the state, the market and the cloud platform from one another, while obviously recognizing how each interfaces with the others in interwoven ways. Specifically, you write that the “Cloud Polis [i.e., platforms] draws revenue from the cognitive capital of its Users, who trade attention and microeconomic compliance in exchange for global infrastructural services…” To what extent is this “Cloud Polis” really not just a corporation — Google, Facebook, etc. — and platforms are not just markets, new and improved? Don’t these platforms require a certain background of governmental policy in order for them to thrive — as it is with markets? From research and development initiatives to neoliberal legislation, isn’t the state the prime enabler of the cloud polis?

BB: I make a typological distinction between States, Markets and Platforms as institutional and technical forms. I argue that each can and does build on the other but also constructs its own territory in historically and procedurally specific ways. This includes how each of these draws individual actors into their dramas. States have citizens, Markets have homo economicus, and Platforms have users. Sometimes these interpolations align and sometimes they are at odds. When they are at odds that friction can engender accidental forms of provisional sovereignty.

For example, as far as The Stack infrastructure is concerned any agent that can initiate a “column” up and down its layers is a “user” —animal, vegetable, or mineral— and so is in principle just as sovereign as any other user. The potential for a radically agnostic technical-political subject implied by this may also, in practice, undermine how a State segregates citizen from non-citizen and how Markets segregate producers from non-producers. The operative word is “may”. This potential is not a program. The point is not that Platforms are intrinsically better or more egalitarian, rather that their politics are not reducible to those of States and Markets and the terms of our participation requires a different geopolitical design imaginary. The sooner we take them seriously and stop trying to interpret them as quasi-States or quasi-Markets the sooner that design imaginary can mature.

In the book, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty, I outline how planetary-scale computation foregrounds the geographic and political logics of platforms and discuss in some detail how some Cloud Platforms (such as Google or Apple) come to take on many of the traditional functions and services of modern states. Given the contemporary preeminence of Platforms as institutional and technical forms, this is not unexpected. At the same time, I also show how States are evolving in relation to what planetary-scale computation allows them to see. States are evolving into Cloud Platforms just as Cloud Platforms come to take on traditional functions of States. These are not contradictory developments, but in practice they do are quite often clash over which mode of sovereign geography and interaction has final priority over which, and for whom.

As for the extractive logic of Platforms that you mention, I argue that this is a generic principle of Platform logics, whether they are State-based Cloud platforms, or Google, or what have you. Platforms do not usually have constitutions and enumerated rights, nor do they usually charge for individual transactions. Participation is more elective, at least in principle, and they sustain themselves by the self-reinforcing logics of network effects, generative entrenchment, and monetizing the optimization of point-to-point information flows.

Users derive value from their participation and from their use of low-marginal cost infrastructure, but in the long run, the aggregate value that the Platform derives from the coordination of interactions is greater. We can easily observe that Platform logics are transforming corporations in their own image at least as much as the other way around. While this political economy of Platforms is clearly compatible with the contemporary corporate entity, it is also compatible with many other kinds organizational strategies that we have not invented yet.

So to your specific question about the enabling promiscuities of State, Market and Platforms: yes, that is quite so. At the same time, however, I will repeat that Platforms are not reducible to States and Markets, nor vice versa, and yet the key geopolitical intrigue of the coming decades is how each formulates the structures of global society with and in spite of the institutional mechanics of the other. As for the central command of Neoliberalism in this unfolding, things are not so cut and dry. Don’t forget that the largest Internet market in the world is China’s. That is where State Cloud Platforms may be most starkly drawn, but to characterize their development as essentially “Neoliberal” would be a mistake. The term would have no specific meaning outside of “big new fast things done with money and computers.”

Your writing on the stack is directed towards a problem of geopolitics – i.e., what happens to sovereignty when it extends to developments unaccounted for in Westphalian modes of political geography. You say that these are the “design problems for the next century.” But I also wonder if this predicament is applicable to a fundamental remodeling of certain aesthetic disciplines, or, if you will, the very “iconologies” that would inform visual art in the near future. How might artistic practices become implicated in the stack-to-come?

BB: The short answer is that art’s capacity to materialize abstraction (and literature’s, and cinema’s) should make it a core and indispensable sub-discipline of Geoengineering, which should itself be a core sub-discipline of Geopolitical Philosophy, which should itself be a core sub-discipline of a combined Synthetic Astrobiology and Computer Science.

Benjamin H Bratton is a theorist whose work spans philosophy, art and design. He is associate professor of visual arts and director of the Center for Design and Geopolitics at the University of California, San Diego. His book The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty, is forthcoming. See www.bratton.info and on twitter @bratton

 Monegraph and the Status of the Art Object

On Monday February 10, 2015, just as The Data Issue launched, Morgan Sutherland gathered six artists, writers, and entrepreneurs positioned at the intersection of the art market and the tech industry to discuss the potential of Monegraph, the fledgling platform that emerged from Rhizome’s Seven on Seven in 2014. The brainchild of Anil Dash and Kevin McCoy, it promises to harness the distributed potential of the blockchain (the technology behind Bitcoin) in service of digital artists. Organized around questions of the role of new platforms and their impact on the circulation of the art object, the spirited discussion ran for several hours, tackling the nature of the digital art object, its market, and its status as a locus of cultural inquiry.

Below is a series of edited excerpts from the recorded conversation.

Adriana Ramić, The Return Trip is Never the Same (After Trajets de Fourmis et Retours au Nid, Victor Cornetz, 1910), 2014

Steven Sacks: I’m founder and director of bitforms gallery. bitforms started about 13 years with a specific focus on new media, more experimental based work, a lot of it of course connected to technology, new processes in creative development. It was important for us to cover a range of how new media is defined, a larger umbrella than just one generation.

We’ve worked hard at having different generations who, in my opinion, interpret a variety of what new media can be. We were in Chelsea for 13 years and we recently moved to the Lower East Side, which is very exciting.

Kevin McCoy: I’m an artist. My artwork is produced in collaboration with my wife Jennifer. For a long time we’ve been doing work that intersects with technology, broadly speaking. I’m also a professor in the art department at NYU. I oversee the digital practices in the art department. In May of last year I presented a concept called Monegraph at Rhizome Seven on Seven at the New Museum and since that time, I have slowly been working to develop it as a platform.

Zoë Salditch: I’m cofounder and director of artist relations at Electric Objects, a startup based in New York City. We’ve created an integrated computer and screen that you hang on your wall so you can display art from the iInternet in your home. Before that, I worked at Rhizome for many years. I’ve worked with artists at the intersection of art and technology from a non-profit perspective for a while, and now I’m doing business.

Adriana Ramić: I’m an artist. I live and work in New York City. Most recently I’ve participated in exhibitions at the Kunsthalle Wien and Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris, and will be giving a lecture next month at the University of the Arts Helsinki. My last project was a digital document drawing from century-old ant pathways, predictive text, and machine translation.

Saul Ostrow: I’m a critic and curator. I founded Critical Practices Inc. We have 4 core programs. One is that every 5 weeks we invite artists install work here, in this space. Every 5 weeks we also invite 30 people for a different conversation on different topics. We publish a broadsheet called LEF(t), and we’re now launching a CPInPrint where we’ll be publishing small books. None of the materials we produce get posted on the web.

Zoë: What’s the motivation behind that?

Saul: For one, not to contribute to the glut of content. Also in terms of the publication, while the texts can be published on the web, the artists’ projects in LEF(t) can’t because they’re 22 x 28 inches and not everyone has that format screen. In terms of the round table discussions, they are about being present, although we do transcripts when we can afford to and audio recordings of them. These get distributed to the people who participate. In terms of the artists’ works, what gets posted to the web is whatever the artist wants.

Mike Pepi: I’m an art writer interested in the intersections of all of the above. I’m editing, along with Marvin Jordan, the DIS Data Issue. This discussion is a core part of the themes at work in the Data Issue—when Morgan and I were talking about possible contribution, we began by discussing the “first wave” of these digital arts tech startups, (art.sy, Paddle 8, artspace.com) which are obviously private and mostly for-profit . These basically are attempting to introduce efficiencies into the market by organizing information, to cut out the asymmetrical structure that fuels the art market, and yet they are still wary of going “all in” and replacing the primary organs of the art system.

There is also a kind of a second wave of arts/tech platforms, which I think Monegraph and Electric Objects fit into. I’m glad to have the blockchain be the focus throughout this conversation. I think that’s potentially one of the more transformative ways of approaching “provenance” in the traditional sense. This directly addresses something that many of the other online platforms are “beating around the bush”, so to speak. Monegraph, in theory, becomes an interesting point of departure for this conversation—it’s quite new, technically, and yet it raises all of these questions that have been with us forever .

Prompt

Morgan Sutherland: The digital object called a “file,” and in fact the entire desktop operating system, is based on a metaphor of how traditional paper-based offices operated. The objects within this metaphor are designed and designated as representations of real objects. Forty-five years after the birth of this metaphor, we’re more likely to think of a digital print as a representation of a digital file, when the digital file was originally conceived of a as a representation of the printed document. Art, however, has doggedly maintained the primacy of an auratic power of the original object and it seems we find ourselves only now trying to represent certain aspects of art objects and their relations digitally within the expanded space of the networked desktop. Given the arbitrary space of possibilities afforded by computation, is it not somewhat absurd to uncritically reproduce the conditions of physical objects rather than attempting to imagine new logics of thingness, ownership, exchange, etc. more faithful to the affordances of the medium? What does it mean to establish notions of provenance for objects that elude exclusive possession? Is this a contradiction, a natural progression, or a step along the way to unforeseen future states of affairs?

Bitcoin is based on a physically distributed ledger, or database, which nobody owns or controls, that records monetary transactions. The underlying technology that enables this is a blockchain. So fundamentally, it avoids the problem of a single owner, or a single actor having control. One project, Ethereum, takes this concept to the next level. They’re producing, and will release shortly, a platform that allows you not only to create a currency based on this technology, but to create any kind of program which operates in a distributed space.

Meanwhile, beyond Bitcoin, which was the first widely-adopted blockchain implementation, there are numerous projects implementing their own blockchains or repurposing the Bitcoin blockchain to various monetary and nonmonetary ends. Monegraph I believe uses the Bitcoin or the Namecoin blockchain?

Kevin: It’s officially blockchain agnostic, but the initial prototype used the Namecoin blockchain.

Morgan: I mention Ethereum to point to the possibility of distributed applications beyond the sort of distributed storage offered by Bitcoin and other blockchains. Ethereum refers to these distributed applications as “contracts.” A common example they use is escrow: a certain quantity of digital currency is held by a “contract” and is released upon certain conditions being met, i.e. two people agreeing that a transaction has gone according to plan.

There’s an interesting history of contracts pertaining to the ownership and transfer of artworks, from Seth Sieglaub and Bob Projansky’s “The Artist’s Reserved Rights Transfer and Sale Agreement” to Rafaël Rozendaal’s “Art Website Sales Contract”, but the possibility for distributed, programmatic contracts could expand this space dramatically.

Discussion

Morgan: With that said, Kevin, do you want to give a short description of Monegraph?

Kevin: Monegraph, as it was presented in May at Seven On Seven, has a story leading up to it: I had been interested in and exploring Bitcoin for a long time, beginning in 2010, and had moved on, but in 2012 Brad Troemel was doing his MFA thesis at NYU, all about Bitcoin and The Silk Road. He was taking my seminar “Anarchy and Imagination” also at that time and our conversations about Bitcoin was an occasion for re-entry into that scene.

Diving back into this next wave of it in the end of 2012/2013 and seeing it in an in-depth way was really interesting. The technology and information theory component of it was really interesting, the culture, the community, the online manifestations. Especially then. It was incredible, and bizarre, and amazing, and odd … a recreation of the larger financial world in these weird micro-niches, with economic models proliferating beyond any regulation: stock markets, people issuing bonds using Google Docs to track ownership, homemade derivatives. Money was going around all over the world, it was really wild.

It’s a very political and ideological community. Very anarchistic and libertarian, various ideologies were coming together. I kept coming back to the idea of the blockchain, of the public ledger as kind of data commons, as a database that nobody controlled in a direct sense. That was unique. It wasn’t just a database, but it was a transaction mechanism that had a conception of value. There was scarcity to it. It meant this weird contradictory possibility of ubiquity and scarcity at the same time through these cryptographic techniques of public/private key encryption. There was a public component and a private component and, because of that, there’s data that is scarce and unique and transferrable. The fact that it’s scarce and transferrable is the underlying aspect of the value proposition that Bitcoin makes – that it has value because of those functions.

I was thinking of the different uses and what kinds of public records would be useful to put there. I started talking to people about the idea of using the blockchain as a digital asset registry, allowing artists to register ownership of their work. But the Bitcoin community had really no interest at all. So I began telling people in the art world about it, eventually talking to Heather & Michael at Rhizome. In February 2014, they invited me to Seven on Seven with Anil Dash, who had also been talking to them about the blockchain. In May, when we got together in the same room for the first time, I said “let’s make a digital art asset registry.” We came up with a way in which it could happen and on stage at the public presentation, we enacted the steps of registering and transferring ownership for an animated GIF that I had made. The system involves taking a certain kind of metadata, putting that information on the blockchain, and then transferring it from my control to his control. This was the initial conception and it got a lot of interest and attention. The people in attendance that were part of the Bitcoin scene felt that it was doing something significant.

Ryoichi Kurokawa, still from syn_mod.1 (featured on Sedition)

So, a mini avalanche of attention started, and we were invited to TechCrunch Disrupt where we pitched it to incredulous TechCrunch people. Since then it has been morphing into a functional platform. We have chosen to work in a startup format, which is the contemporary form de jour. And I don’t mean that in a cynical way, it’s a way to structure and develop an idea, to bring stakeholders into the project.

We hope to have something up that people can sign up with and start using soon. Right now there’s a lot of interesting software at the API level, which just isn’t attached to anything yet.

Working with a small team of people, the process of turning it into a platform has gotten bigger in many regards, in terms of the kinds of possibilities we want to enable. We’re working on trying to figure out the larger ecosystem and the range of things that can happen if individual creative people are registering their media works as soon as they hit the Internet. If we have these tokens that represent ownership of those artworks, we’re asking “what kinds of things we can do with that?”

I want to see what kinds of possibilities the system will enable. The project responds to the frustration of the current status quo of handing over creative works to online platforms that monetize the value through advertising, which is 99.9% of the internet. It seems like there have got to be other alternatives.

Saul: But how does Monegraph not monetize it?

Kevin: Well, it monetizes it for the creators.

Saul: If it monetizes it for the creators, it monetizes it for the consumer. There’s obviously a secondary platform where there’s another level of exchange. i.e. I now own, or this has been transferred to me, and I can now monetize my ownership of that transfer.

Kevin: But you can also give it away.

Saul: One can do that with any work of art.

Kevin: Right, but in digital form, you’re always dealing with a third party and the third party’s ability to maintain –

Saul: I can give it to a museum, I can give it to my friend, I can give it anyone I want. The value transfers with the object. How is this not just another object?

Kevin: You can make it a kind of object.

Saul: How does this not just replicate the object in an immaterial manner? It’s exactly the same system that we already have. For example, Sweden will be the first cashless economy. There’s literally no paper currency exchange going on. It basically lives on direct deposit. How is this not just a credit system?

Kevin: It’s not. These aren’t monetary units.

Saul: Well, the dollar bill wasn’t a monetary unit until it was introduced as a monetary unit. Paper money wasn’t a monetary unit, it was introduced and, by convention it became a monetary unit. How does this prevent that?

Kevin: It doesn’t prevent anything. People will exchange value however they want to exchange value

Saul: So it’s capital’s wet dream.

Kevin: I could take the offline printed magazines and trade those. How is that not capitalism’s wet dream?

Saul: Because there the exchange is actually for a material object that has limited access and what capital would love at this point is to profit from something that is immaterial.

Kevin: So things that are immaterial can’t participate in any type of virtuous value exchange?

Saul: The question is: do we want that which is immaterial, which seemingly would escape commodification, to be turned into a commodity (except for the fact that artists need to make a living)?

Kevin: So, in your view, the current online world is a utopia of non-alienated usage because there is no use value to these digital things, so everything online is by definition escaping capitalism?

Saul: Right. And that’s the reason capitalists are constantly trying to figure out systems by which to produce exchange value for everything that’s online.

Kevin: They’re doing a pretty good job if you look at the stock prices of Google and Facebook!

Mike: MAny of the champions of blockchain technologies in the non-art world have vaguely libertarian aspirations, or at least they dream of creating something that can exist outside of institutions like the Federal Reserve. What I find so interesting about Monegraph is that it seems to empower just the opposite. Perhaps it is actually something that Sotheby’s or Christie’s might want to use to authenticate a work. In the piece on Medium, Anil Dash talked about how the problem always lay in authentication, a central component of trading art. So is there an inversion here. You could make the argument that Monegraph, in taking blockchain and applying it to digital art, actually empowers institutions the traditional market.

Kevin: Well, some of this goes back to when I was into the New York net art scene in the 90s at thing.net. There was a project that was based out of there by an artist named Paul Garrin, who was the long time studio manager of Nam June Paik’s studio. The project was called name.space and it was an alternative DNS system. He identified DNS (the Domain Name System) as this choke point of control and censorship in the Internet and was advocating for a decentralized version of domain names.

Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, Shore Leave, 2014

The other idea in the back of my mind, going back to the Bitcoin community, is Alex Galloway’s book Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization. He sees protocol as a site of political contestation. For me it was interesting that Bitcoin emerged in 2009/2010. It matured, and then in 2011 it reached its ideological golden age where the currency didn’t really have much monetary value; people were just thinking about it in obscure forums. One of the first spin-offs of it was Namecoin—the blockchain that we ultimately used. It was about alternative DNS, making these pairings with a name, using “.bit” or whatever; or IP addresses, and storing those in the blockchain. All the while I’m thinking that’s what Paul Garrin was trying to do ten years ago.

I think that the gesture of autonomous control of naming in a public space is an important power. We can call that authentication or we can call that provenance, but the original thing is an author claiming something, drawing a line around something and saying ¨this thing, right here: I made that.¨

It’s been very difficult to do that in a networked digital world. Once that name is there, and especially if it’s transferrable, somebody could sell it off. And somebody could use that name to track—it’s coming back to the idea of an artist’s signature. The artist signs the work and suddenly that signature becomes valuable later on, and a market is created around it. You don’t have to use this approach. You can have unsigned or anonymous work, but the idea of empowering an artist to claim an artwork and have it be tradeable is useful.

Morgan: Can you talk a little bit about Monegraph the platform?

Kevin: The site as we presented it to the New Museum, where we walk through the steps of producing the metadata record, is still online at classic.monegraph.com. That site never did have any way to integrate with actual blockchains and to handle the virtual tokens that it takes to write data to the blockchain. It never dealt with the management of the public keys that represent the ownership of those values. In the Bitcoin world, that’s all called ‘wallet software’. Trying to add that kind of feature into a platform, that’s at the core of making it easy for people to use, getting that data onto the blockchain, making it easy for people to manage private keys, which represent the ownership of those tokens, it’s all very difficult work.

We’re also trying to develop contracts for different possible use cases. If you think about artworks and the kind of exchange, the equivalent of a painting or an object. I made an object, it’s mine, I give it to you, I don’t have it anymore. Now you do. That kind of oneway hand-off is just one kind of use case. We’re trying to think about other possible use cases that represent activities of the broader Internet that aren’t just about fine art. It could be about commercial art, licensing, or whatever.

Morgan: Zoë, the EO1 is partly a device for displaying art, but it’s also an art market. Can you talk a little bit about how that market is structured, and the design of it? Is it trying to solve some of the same problems as Kevin spoke about above? It seems perhaps that EO embodies the same strategy of imbuing digital art with some of the characteristics of physical art objects.

Zoë: Electric Objects is trying to solve this problem of how you, in the words of one of our beta testers, Alexis Madrigal, give objecthood to digital art. First, we’ve created this frame that art that’s made for screens can live within, but the second part is the marketplace, and that’s where our community of artists and art fans, or collectors, come together and support one another. Right now, we have about 30 artists that we’re working with who have agreed to experiment with the device.

We’re going to promote a collection of works made by some of these artists. It will live in two places, both offline and online. Offline, it will be at the Ace Hotel for a month, on display in real life, because Electric Objects is an experiential product. You have to see it to understand it. Showing the device with the art living inside of it really sells the whole experience. One can’t exist without the other.

Nicolas Sassoon, Grey #2

Morgan: How do you handle licensing, pricing?

Zoë: We have a more “Internet” approach to pricing than a fine art one. We’re looking to iTunes and the App Store, for example, for inspiration on how to build this marketplace. We want to create a simple buying process, with one consistent price across all works so that a buyer doesn’t have to question why one animated gif is worth 10 dollars and another is worth 50 dollars. We have a big challenge ahead of us, which is convincing people to buy digital art and digital art files. Not a lot of people have experienced the value in that, so we want to make the process as simple as possible.

We’re also exploring the possibility of a subscription model. You can subscribe to an artist or curator who would effectively curate your EO1 for you. We’ve heard a lot of feedback from people who say ¨I don’t know a lot about art, but I love this technology. I trust you guys to tell me what would look cool on my screen. I would pay you a monthly fee to do that for me.¨ It’s almost like Songza. It’s a curated channel of art rather than music, which is what Songza does.

Mike: I actually didn’t know that you’re doing a flat price which is an interesting way to structure the exchange of art. It makes me think of CDs—a Beyoncé CD used to cost the same amount as an indie band that just happened to be Tower records. That is obviously flipping the art world on its head, because we all like Gerhard Richter, but none of us can afford it. If you want to induce a wide array of consumption of art, flat pricing is a bold strategy for achieving that.

Some of the early utopian discourse around net art emphasized the immateriality of it as a way to circumvent the art system. Here it’s basically finding a middle ground and saying, there’s some exchange value, but we’re going to make it accessible in a way that prevents the “star system” model of pricing. For me this also calls into question how art capitalizes on authenticity.

Saul: Except flat pricing here is, for access, not for ownership.

Zoë: It is for ownership. It is in perpetuity.

Saul: But there’s not one.

Zoë: Right. There’s not one.

Saul: Or, in terms of Monegraph, it’s not exchangeable.

Zoë: Right, so there’s not anything in place that could support a secondary market.

Steven: Sedition does that.

Zoë: Indeed, you can buy a work on Sedition and store it in your account afterwards on their platform. I’ve never personally – have you ever done an exchange?

Steven: I’ve purchased, I haven’t sold.

Morgan: Do you want to explain what Sedition is?

Kevin: Sedition is based in London and it’s the first effort to create a digital art marketplace. They’ve been running for 5 years, and they essentially have art world names at really inexpensive prices.

Casey Reas, still from 100% Gray Coverage, 2013 (featured on Sedition)

Steven: I thought Sedition went the wrong direction in the early stages. To me, they were exploiting well-known contemporary artists, presenting their screen-based works as new media experiences. It was related to what Bill Gates did many years back, he thought he was being progressive at the time when he was taking the digital rights to say, Mona Lisa, and putting the image on a screen. It was interesting to a degree, but it wasn’t interesting as new art. It was interesting as a potential platform. Sedition is actually mixing it up now, they are moving toward artists who have a foundation in the new media world.

I also think the whole concept of Sedition being a collectable model of trading is misguided. Once they decided to go with low price, super high edition, they broke the whole system. It’s not about value anymore, it’s about exposure. And that’s a good thing.

It’s about, and what you’re doing (Zoë), is about how these artists gain exposure. Then, the flip side potentially can happen when the Sedition artist’s works are presented in an art gallery and all of a sudden and there is an offering of unique works or small editions where there could be a potential market made, which then comes down to how you authenticate it, and that’s where Monegraph can play a major role.

Saul: It’s very much like Hundertmark in the 70’s. Basically, they produced editions for 100 marks, unlimited, and you could own something by a name artist. At a certain point, they’d stop producing, the demand was no longer there, and all of a sudden the thing would accrue value.

Zoë: So that’s always the case with a secondary market, right? When you act as a collector, the dream is … for example, my father is a collector of robots. His house is full of them. I know that some of them are really precious and are worth money, and those are the ones he won’t let me touch. Then there are many other robots that are never going to be worth anything. But your dream is that you’ll come across a five dollar robot, but then 20 years later, it’s a 500 dollar robot. I think that’s what drives a collector.

Steven: These models aren’t for collectors, it’s for experiencing interesting art.

Saul: But that’s the vein that produced the collectible market: pet rocks, Garbage Pail Kids stickers, Beanie Babies …

Steven: The difference here is this unlimited potential of distribution. That changes everything. For the pet rock, the guy goes out of business. It’s a little harder to stop that software distribution.

Jon Rafman, New Age Demanded Microfiche Archive, 2013

Saul: As this is being built on a certain platform, what happens as technology changes?

Steven: Cloud based distribution responds to that a little better in terms of how things will evolve.

Kevin: You could say, I mean, this was an old fashioned idea from 90’s net art, that there was a medium specificity and that you couldn’t translate from one mode to another without loss or without an unwanted context shift. You (Mike) were saying about this utopian moment of net art, where it was perceived to have no value. I definitely would have an early generation and later generation divide, but for me, I wouldn’t put it around a question of perceived value. In my experience, with this first wave and where you cut it off, people were concerned about looking closely at these platform and protocol questions and critiquing them trying to come up with alternative systems or critical engagements. And then there was a shift to just using platforms: Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, blogging software, whatever.

Saul: Right, the artist becomes a content provider.

Kevin: Absolutely. To a certain extent, that feeds into Monegraph. I’m part of that earlier generation and always kind of incredulous of the ease of use of these mass platforms. Especially in the face of them having massive valuations and the content providers having nothing. They’re stripped of all value, even though it’s clear that there’s a lot of direct value in those works. Obviously, there’s people who figure out how to use that in an expressive way, and drive their projects and their careers, and the kinds of economies that do happen in these platforms. But it is very different…

Zoë: Nothing is free. If you’re an artist and you’re publishing your art on Tumblr, for example, be weary that the stuff you’re making is viewed as content to them and that they use that content for marketing and advertising purposes. When you use their services, you agree that they can do just that.

One of the first rules we made at Electric Objects was banning the word ‘content’. I don’t believe that I’m working with artists who create “content” for Electric Objects and I would never approach an artist to do that.

Saul: What are they producing?

Zoë: They’re producing artwork.

Saul: Yeah, but what is artwork in this context of a content? I’m an author, I write a catalog essay, I’m supplying content. It doesn’t matter how you qualify it.

Steven: Well, c’mon…

Saul: It doesn’t matter how you qualify it—

Mike: Right, but even though you’re providing “content” for a book, it’s the combination of the content and the form that constitutes writing, which in this case has its own history.

Saul: The only difference between me and somebody else, another type of author, is that I get two dollars a word and the other author gets royalties.

Seth Price, Redistribution, 2007

Mike: A certain genre of art has been dealing with simply putting food on the table for a really long time. You have 60s conceptual artists dealing with immaterial practices, and then there’s Seth Siegelaub and Bob Projanky’s “The Artist Reserved Rights Transfer and Sale Agreement,” which sought to include artists on subsequent increases in the value of their work, among other things. Then there’s also performance artists …

Kevin: We used that contract in our investor decks!

Mike: Ah, well, likewise in the past there have been artists whose practice make it extremely hard for them to make a living. I think everyone at this table wants artists to be able to have a sustainable practice. It’s interesting that there are a lot of different approaches to it. I see maybe three approaches at this table.

1. One being, if your piece goes viral on Tumblr, one of the four million people that sees that piece, now they can (potentially) verify the digital signature then look it up later to find out who that person is, and find the original image. As such, you can support the artist who makes that.

2. On the other hand, you have a flat subscription model via a platform like EO that artists may be drawn to.

3. And then you have Bitforms, where you meet halfway and take art that has new media forms, but presented in a traditional gallery format.

So it’s really about what artists face with these new platforms. What are the concerns that they have when they are creating pieces that are digitally native? Obviously Monegraph is a new case: for example when you put something on Tumblr, and it’s not only just out there. There may be a place to trace it back, to not just be a content provider.

Kevin: Even though Tumblr in their licensing says you own the work and we have a license to it, effectively it’s gone.

Mike: But if one were to pull down the image from a Tumblr and use it again. For example, if I saw an interesting image from tumblr that has been reblogged 4,000 times and I downloaded it and then I put it on my website. Will it have uniquely identifying information?

Kevin: There’s a lot of details … Monegraph is not some magical anti-piracy technology that stops usage illicit usage of media. It creates some opt-in ecosystem that works as an incentive

Saul: Given the recent conversations in terms of guaranteeing artist rights in terms of resale, royalties, so on and so forth, is it much more of a platform for that?

Kevin: It can be.

Saul: Does it become like ASCAP?

Kevin: I think so … and this gets into the smart contractual language as programmatic code.

Steven: What happened to Creative Commons?

Kevin: We see Creative Commons as a big, early effort, and we see ourselves as trying to move further. It deals with an attribution issue, which is great, and it also has noncommercial uses that have real limitations. So, for us, Monegraph, with its transactional nature, allows for commercial possibilities.

Saul: Creative Commons didn’t allow for any way to track intellectual property. It had a good will policy. Monegraph seems like it could be a way to track.

Kevin: Well, we’ll see. [As originally conceived, tracking is voluntary, but it could be built as a feature.]

Mike: I wanted to say that monetization isn’t necessarily a dirty word, because it also is a way for artists to actually make a living.

Saul: The question is, on the part of the artist or on the part of the collector, or the consumer, if it establishes a royalty agreement in which every time the artwork exchanges hands, the artist gets a percentage of that exchange value, that’s in service to the artist. If it was merely a system that authenticates that this is the product of that artist, and therefore, any exchange of it goes to the collector or the current owner, it would be less interesting because it’s a replication of the existing market. Right now, there’s no way to track those exchanges (of art objects.)

Kevin: I’m well aware of that distinction that you’re talking about and more progressive possibilities and more status quo possibilities. I don’t want to over promise, but our goal is to facilitate that type of transaction. There’s tons of digital media being sold online, and there are all kinds of existing marketplaces. There are systems in place and those systems have winners and losers. We’re coming from an artist-centric perspective as a kind of syndicate model and we think that we can change those dynamics in a bunch of different ways.

Eric Hu, 2014

Morgan: Zoë, I’m curious, when you’re designing a market for art, how do you think about how that might help artists build a sustainable business? I also mention this because Steven is obviously operating on a very different model and he expressed that there’s something crucial about the structures of value in the current art market, where art objects are scarce and they accrue value over time.

Zoë: One way to look at it is as an experiential model, like a show. We like to describe a lot of these collections of work that we’re putting together with artists as shows. It’s time based, it lives in this device in your home. Some of the artists we’re working with are creating projects that are durational. They take a month to execute from beginning to end, or they go on forever, etc.

In terms of generating a stable income for artists, it’s really about getting the numbers right. Right now we have about 30 artists and we’re about to have over 100 users. So if 100 users spend ten dollars each, spread across 30 artists, that’s not going to look like a lot. We realized that pretty early on. Our strategy is about growing at the right speed. I’ve been trying to do a careful job with how quickly we introduce work for sale. I should also say that none of this has happened yet, so I don’t have data for how much money people are going to take home. We’re starting with a grouping of three artists within this 100 person system and grow steadily from there. From this test, I’ll have data on how much money is going to come in and how that money gets distributed across these three artists. We’re going to learn a lot in the coming months.

It’s really a numbers game, and learning more about this audience too I don’t personally know all these people. They found us on Kickstarter. Who is this person exactly? What art do they like? I’ll learn as we go, and I’m hoping there’s a slow education for them too. This is maybe my personal curatorial mission, to promote artists that have this foundation in art and technology and share them with people who are really invested in hardware and technology. That’s the type of person who backs projects like us on Kickstarter. So, bridging these two worlds together through this device by creating that right balance in the ecosystem is the goal.

Morgan: Steven, I imagine you sell digital artworks in editions – what do you think about the possibility for digital artworks [files] to operate within the traditional gallery system while also being released into the wild online?

Steven: The Electric Object model and other models like that are only going to work if millions of people have a cultural shift saying, “I’m putting a screen in my house devoted to art.” Once that happens, everything related to screen-based arts will change. My business will change, your business will change. So there’s hundred’s of thousands or millions of homes with these devoted screen-art experiences. Just like when you’re hanging physical art objects on your wall, when you buy or are decorating a home, the question will be where can I place my “art screen”. It’s not a system that has TV content such as sports, reality shows or movies, etc. We’re not that far from this being a reality. Many of my existing collectors have already embraced this idea.

My collector base is also tiny compared to the rest of the world. Also my collectors, who are spending $10,000 to $50,000 on screen works, are an even smaller audience right now. These small numbers aren’t going to create the cultural shift which is needed to sustain a more substantial market for this kind of artwork. Again, I have different opinions on this whole $10- $20 for each artwork versus what I’m doing. I think they can co-exist because I do believe that these very large editions become public art forms based on how the web distributes images and content. Very different from the commercial art gallery model based on scarcity, like I deal with. There is a different monetary model.

Just like in music, there will be your art stars that may sell a million things for $25, and that’s a lot of money. It will be just like a pop star, in any industry you’re going to get your stars who are going to blow up, but in terms of my world, I’m still dealing with scarcity. I’m still dealing with an audience that can spend $30,000 to $40,000 dollars or more on a screen-based artwork, whether it’s unique or an edition of six. At this point, there is an odd trust involved with my collectors with art that is obviously reproducible very easily. The success of video art and photography have had a big impact on me supporting this concept because those are all reproducible and have a proven track record of success in the art world.

Ryoji Ikeda, A Single Number That Has 124,761,600 Digits (featured on Sedition)

Morgan: You said “odd trust.”

Steven: It’s a trust because it’s a lot of money in some cases and it is …

Morgan: We’re talking about selling a digital file, but …

Steven: If it was a software-based piece or a QuickTime movie yeah it’s fine so there’s … it’s grown quite a bit since I started the gallery, this trust, and the market. It’s still small but it’s growing and I think that if there is a more credible way to track, to authenticate [i.e. with Monegraph], it will make my job a lot easier in terms of distributing this kind of work, especially when you hit the high numbers. I think the auction market is all about that trust and credibility and it’s …

Zoë: I’m sorry. Those are the questions that I wind up having when I think about a system like Monegraph, is that I need to trust this decentralized group of people not to authenticate something as their own and lie about it, whereas institutions like Christie’s or Sotheby’s have a track record of selling mostly authenticated art, right? We all know there have been some forgeries that have gone through, some auctions here and there, but for the most part they come to the table saying, “look, we have these art historians. They looked at this thing. They put their certificate of authenticity on it,” and you’re trusting the auction house.

With the absence of that what happens when those files start … I guess it’s less scary when it’s coming directly from the artist, but when it’s going through a number of hands like if I’m getting this from someone who bought it from someone else who bought it from the artist, that’s when I would still … I don’t know. I think I would still worry.

Kevin: Sure. The Bitcoin community loves this phrase, in Latin it’s ‘truth in numbers.‘ For them, it’s the math. It’s mathematically sound. Within the functioning of the protocol, that’s all good, and the creation of these virtual tokens, the exchange of these virtual tokens, all that makes perfect sense. But, as soon as you deal with, “I wanted to sell my bitcoins for dollars or for euros,” once you exit the system and those edge conditions, then all of a sudden it’s another story.

Zoë: Right.

Kevin: Using the blockchain as some sort of ledger of assets is going to be all about how does that data hit the blockchain? What’s the way that it hits? In the case of Monegraph, with us as a registrar, then we need to be transparent and provide mechanisms of verification to allow you to double-check what we say is true.

That’s part of our protocol definition that will say, “here is how we identify the artists,” and you can double-check all those steps. “Here’s how we verify the artwork.” This is the data that’s on the blockchain. You can re-verify that with the data on the blockchain and the artwork, and if it matches, it’s all good. If it doesn’t match then …

Zoë: Then you know it’s false.

Kevin: Right. Then you know it’s false.

Lars Holdus, 6 D2 2A 58 82 0A

Morgan: Adriana, I was just curious about how you think about your own work in relation to these systems?

Adriana: It’s always interesting being in a room with people thinking about how to sell work when you’re this person that’s thinking to yourself “how do I sell work? Where do I fit in with all of these different existing or speculative scenarios?”

With Monegraph, I am imagining it would have implications on art objects in general regardless of digitality by providing an additional layer of verification and tracking.

Authentication and provenance, as we have discussed, are certainly important. Why is it not enough, for example, for one to simply claim that they are the creator or owner of an artwork, with the secondary verification or the artist or gallery or whomever, and allow it to reproduce as much as it wants, in accordance with the digital medium? It’s clear that this is still far from as lucrative as the market for physical works, but puzzling given how abstractly and symbolically physical works are treated (like stowed away to accrue value). And, if a public ledger of verification is to develop as in Monegraph, would physical works also have to be a part? What would happen to relatively old fashioned titles of ownership?

Coming to mind is one of the most recent pieces (of many!) I’ve seen thinking about the financial circulation of an artwork, Real Flow’s Art is the Sublime Asset™. It presents ‘tailor-made financial solutions’ for ownership and investment in artwork in which the owner benefits from the increased circulation of the piece by the investors.

I also feel wary of a subscription-based or very low flat pricing model that was described in relation to EO. Does the EO have exclusive rights? How is the money split? Or generally how would it work from an artist’s perspective? What incentive would an artist have?

Zoë: Our licensing agreement is that you retain the full license to the work but you’re giving us an exclusive license to sell and distribute the work via the EO1. The revenue split from either the subscription or the per-piece sale of the work is 70/30, 70 percent to the artist and 30 percent to Electric Objects. We believe that when artists are making money we’ll make money, so we want to make sure that the system that we create is always benefitting the artists. Because we’re selling this hardware device on top of the art sale, our job is to create the audience for the artist.

The opportunity here is access to the audience, the context of being in people’s homes, tof working in a durational practice or even working with the Internet, since it’s an Internet-connect device. It’s connected over WiFi 24/7 – what could you do with a website? We’re hoping the hardware and the platform creates an interesting artistic opportunity and that the licensing model is fair, and that will attract artists to the platform.

Real Flow, Art is the Sublime Asset™, 2015

Morgan: I’d like to quote something from Jennifer Chan’s From Browser to Gallery (and Back):

“Inquiring into the concept of aura in relation to traditional and digital forms, Gene McHugh noted that Benjamin had never provided a concrete definition. However, he proposes that—

Kevin: —But, he did provide a concise definition of aura! It’s the material traces of the object through time and space.

He gets a definition of the aura that’s a material history of the object through time and space. The marks and—

Saul: —As it traces on the surface of the work.

Kevin: Exactly. It’s a totally materialist conception of the artwork …

Saul: That is only available when you’re in front of it.

Kevin: It’s very clear.

Saul: Aura is patina.

Kevin: He uses a loaded, spiritual term to describe what’s entirely a material record.

Morgan: (continuing) … he proposes that the “ornamental halo” Benjamin described of viewing an original artwork stemmed not from an artworks ahistorical, timeless beauty, but from an underlying notion of a linear social history to an artwork. This includes ideas of where it has been exhibited and who has owned, bought, sold, and handled it. Regardless of size and quality, the existence of art documentation on the internet testifies to an original idea of an artwork having been installed somewhere in physical space, thus lending the art objects authority and validity in distribution.”

I’ll read one more quote:

“Net artists often gauge community responses to web-based art through the liking and sharing of a project’s URL within and beyond an online community. In a networked environment, attention and peer approval is currency for freely accessible media. In reconsideration of the Benjaminian aura of net art, McHugh observed that artwork gained authority not only through its provenance, reproduction and social transactions, but its dispersion through smaller niche communities.”

I thought it was interesting in relation to what Monegraph models. Monegraph is modeled on provenance, which in a way is an attempt to import Benjamin’s notion of aura into the digital world, or make that a concrete reality for digital objects, whereas this is suggesting that actually the mechanism by which digital art objects accrue value is fundamentally different.

Kevin: Two key words that she uses: currency and dispersion. Regarding currency, there’s absolutely no question that within major social media platforms, you’re dealing with a currency of attention that’s manifested through likes and shares and re-blogs and that kind of thing. That’s the currency that you are given as a creator. In the platform it’s getting a different kind of currency from that. You’re getting dollar currency through the ad sales and through their stock prices, so there is a currency arbitrage that’s happening there. It’s an attention-based economy versus … it’s supported by a dollar-based economy on the level of the operational platform.

Monegraph which is … before it’s a system of provenance, it’s a system of virtual currency because it is built on top of a distributed virtual currency directly. It is an attempt to create an alternative, that an artist could choose to opt into, that would allow for them to explore different economic participation than the attention economy. I don’t know whether it replaces it. It might just be superimposed on top of it, and it could eventually be that the Monegraph economy is openly more viable to them than the attention economy, so it’s really just about proposing, or establishing the possibility for the creation of an alternative, I think.

Saul: Or there’s a collapse of the two.

Kevin: It could. That’s a very interesting question. You could say Monegraph as a platform is trying to be flexible enough to accommodate both of us.

Saul: Right.

Kevin: It could be like a straight-up sale model that’s like … even I have an offline monitor after that went offline in many ways, but it’s just an online verification of the data, that the data itself can stay offline so it doesn’t have to be online. It also can allow for the artist to directly participate in the attention economy in a quasi-advertising way.

Saul: It’s about circulation.

Kevin: Exactly. If you can track … if there’s ways in which you can essentially track that circulation, then there can be ways in which you can … all kinds of visual possibilities are there.

Sabrina Ratté, Littoral Zones, 2014

Mike: When you said these could exist offline my ears perked up. I start to think about the idea of the blockchain and the currency that is distributed (i.e. no one owns it) and yet when we think of the broadly Leftist critique of big data it revolves around the idea that once we’ve stored data we can’t escape issues of control of that information. What would that mean—that this data would exist offline? For example, you have this trove of information that has authenticated all of these digital artworks that have existed in the past x years, but then you take it off a network so no one can access it. In our case, would it be like Sotheby’s, Christie’s, or the network of academics, all of whom are an extremely closed group that essentially control the ability to bless something?

Kevin: There’s two things. There’s the identity of the artist and the artist wanting to prove their identity, and that’s a profile question. The artist has to create a believable profile that shows that the statements that they make, that they publish, are their true intent and not somebody else’s, so there’s a threshold of believability for that, a procedure you can go through. Then there’s the work itself. How do I know that this is the artist’s work and this work hasn’t changed in any way? The belief that the artist is who they say that they are probably is going to involve some online social component because that’s widely distributed data or whatever …

We all have social profiles. We could say, “Okay I’m going to just simplify that problem by piggybacking on top of social networks and creating a meta-identity across all these social networks, I am who that I say that I am.” A lot of people do it. Then there’s me so I have an authorized channel, so then if I say, “here is this artwork,” and I describe the artwork not in terms of a URL, but in terms of other kinds of metadata, data that’s intrinsic to that file itself, I don’t have to show that file right now. Then I say, “okay I’m going to sell this to you,” and you’re going to say, “okay, how do you want this file?” and I can show it to you on my phone or offline like, “here it is. Check this out. Here’s the files,” and you go, “okay, cool. How do I know that that’s really the file that I’m buying?”

We could run those checks on the file and compare the information. It’s like here is the information that is published. Here’s how we identify it. We’ll run these tests offline. It checks out. That’s the file. The data has never hit the Internet. The registration, the authorship of the provenance, is online, broadly distributed in the blockchain, but the data itself doesn’t have to be online. That’s an example of social practices that I’m really interested in seeing unfold when Monegraph is a platform, because people will use it in all kinds of different ways that I don’t really know about or can think about. Another thing that we can do is make a physical object that’s specially laminated, and inside of that object is the password to access this online blockchain address. It’s hidden and you have to crack it open, and once you crack it open and the security is blown, you know that it’s been accessed so the data is available online.

Brad Troemel, 1 Casascius Gold 1 Bitcoin Piece / 1 Confederate currency note / 1 Counterfeit AOCS Live Free or Die Coin, 2014

There’s a company that took, and this happened first in the Bitcoin world with Cassius Coins, where they take … it’s all called a paper wallet in the Bitcoin world and this is a paper wallet of it where you have the public address and you have the private key for that address together in the same place, and you just hide the private key so no one can see it, or it’s self-evident when it’s tampered with to reveal what that code is.

Morgan: Can we imagine a digital art world that works for artists distributing work online, and if we look at …

Steven: It’s going to be awesome.

Morgan: …It could be. I don’t know if this is really at stake here, but I think Adriana is part of the generation of artists that were online and largely in the last six, seven years or so transitioned over and over again from making online work to making physical works in order to participate in the standard art market and …

Adriana: Not to cut in, but I’m not sure the relationship is so perfectly linear. Though it’s undeniable, it’s not one I identify closely with myself. Just to say that just because someone that works digitally makes something physical, it doesn’t mean I have to participate in the market and now let’s all make something physical. Perhaps there is also that impulse as well.

Saul: Obviously there’s two different things here, one where the digital is merely a medium and one that produces anything using that medium, and those who are committed to the digital as a mode of output. Those are obviously two different things.

Kevin: How would you describe your decision to work physically or digitally?

Adriana: I think it would be like what he said — the former camp, that is. I work with what makes sense for the idea.

Saul: Within the notion of the medium there’s a preservation of the object of art. This thing where in the other situation, the output is limited to those forms of the medium. We know that there are people who make digital paintings and literally paintings are the output. That’s what is available, and then we know that there are other people who literally produce files. Those are literally two different objects or two … not even two different objects but two different things. We don’t even need to call them objects. They’re things. We have to ask of each of them, “what is it?”

Morgan: Yeah. I think what’s at stake here is things that are natively digital objects or things. Is Monegraph a system that can graft the system of value based on provenance onto completely digital objects, or things that …

Kevin: We’ll see if it’s the answer. To me it’s important to recognize that the question of the management of information in and of itself is not a new thing. We have copyrights written into the United States constitution and licensing agreements structuring human behavior around the sharing of information has been around forever: non-disclosure, etc. We’re surrounded by ways of managing flows of information.

I see Monegraph, rather than being some brand new concept, as just a way of using currently available techniques, and maybe a certain kind of insight about putting the technologies together, to shuffle up the status quo and rearrange the balances.

Morgan: What’s interesting though is that it makes visible provenance, which was previously invisible. It registers it in a public way. You could find an image on Tumblr and say, “Did someone buy this?”

Kevin: Before someone bought that in the Monegraph universe somebody had to make that, and you would know who made it. Then you would know its transactional history inside of the Monegraph universe.

Steven: Once again to go back, this only makes sense in an exchange economy because if somebody wants it basically they want it.

Kevin: Yes.

Kevin: It is so interesting how efforts to just map traditional practices in the art world – with institutions, collectors, loans, exchanges – how difficult that is to model digitally even at the most basic level. It’s very difficult. It’s very challenging.

Zoe: It’s never trivial, because we’ve been so used to this abstracted desktop world where we put files and folders in our hard drives we assume that we can equally map the real world into this, but it’s never that sample.

Saul: The nature of the digital, or networked medium is antithetical to these uses.

Morgan: I’m not sure if it’s strictly antithetical though. I started by saying that even the notion of a file is based … I mean, it’s called a file! That’s a physical object, so it’s actually entirely … the concept of the file was invented, it’s fictitious, so it’s not that it’s antithetical, but it’s not necessary. In some ways it seems strange to try to model the art world in a digital world because you don’t have to.

Mike: It reminds me of Lev Manovich’s work in general where he says that we’re always dealing with a series of numbers and all of the things we metaphorically graft onto it i.e. cut, paste, lighten, darken, trace … you’re not actually tracing anything. You’re simply accessing an algorithm in the software that model something that we used to do in lithographs.

Kevin: That’s a great component of it. The interface has this retrograde metaphor.

Mike: Yeah, part of his media theory is that we always had to use these metaphors or these terms when really all we’re doing is, in an ever-so minute way, is just altering the underlying information.

Saul: It’s the difference between the original PC and then Microsoft and Apple producing an interface that was graphical as opposed to command-driven.

Zoë: It made it usable to a wider audience. It was really difficult for someone who wasn’t computer literate to access this. I think that is the challenge we’re all facing here. It’s how we educate people on this mode of production, on this mode of artistic practice, and how do you buy, sell, and eventually trade this work? Yeah I think you’re right. We do have a choice. If we don’t have to model the art world then we’re left to go like, “Then what do we do?” and I think that’s how projects like Monegraph crop up and we’re like, “How do I apply technology to this problem that we have in the market to help people track provenance and sell their work?” Yeah you need to hold on to a vestige of something familiar for people to not scratch their heads and go, “I’m never going to use this.”

Mike: I think I just brought up my point because a mathematical solution is probably worthy of a mathematical problem, right? We can use all these different terms and we can use all these different transitions in and out of symbolic ideas about how we do these things. We can call it provenance, but at the end it does come down to treating a medium for what it is, which is zeros and ones to be simplified. I don’t know so it’s just …

Saul: Long strings of zeros and ones….

Simon Denny, Berlin Startup Case Mod: SoundCloud, 2014

Morgan: Steven, when people are buying a digital file they’re participating in a simulation of a previous kind of economic relationship. I feel like in a way it’s always fictional, that there’s a certain conceit that when you’re buying a physical artwork, you’re paying to have this thing whereas when you’re buying a digital object, it’s not actually, so to speak, that thing, so there’s a certain leap of the imagination. It’s sort of like, okay, this is the same thing as a painting, even though what you’re really buying is maybe rights to reproduce it or just a string of digits. I wonder what is going through a collector’s mind when they do this.

Steven: Well, first of all, the point when they are buying work like that is purely, again digital software, video based, I make it very clear they’re not buying something physical. And that’s the enjoyment of it, that’s the intrigue. That’s a main reason they’re doing it.

Morgan: What interests me about Monegraph though is the possibility to extend that logic further. So it seems to me probably it would be hard to do that sell if that original file was freely available on the internet? Do you ever sell a digital file which is actually publicly available?

Steven: No. That’s difficult. Although I do believe there’s value in this public art system, this net-based art being public and experienced, but in terms of selling that, I think it comes back to what’s currently happening, which is the domain name. Ownership of domain name and how that potentially could be monetized. I don’t know how, whether it’s a sponsorship situation or viewership fee, maybe they pay five cents to view this experience. But I believe that will become something. I mean, Rafael Rozendaal obviously sells rights to his URLs.

Kevin: And New Hive has sold a URL.

Steven: That’s right. NewHive is a totally different kind of model, which is also interesting. They commission artworks from artists on the platform and also organize exhibitions.

Saul: I don’t know your work [Adriana]. Do issues come up in terms of difference? Are they different?

Zoë: Yeah, versioning of work, like if you were to make – that’s a term that Lauren Cornell uses a lot – a software piece into a video, and then sell the video versus selling the software piece.

Adriana: They do. For example, in the case of one work, some things I am looking at are variances and vagaries in statistical machine translation and crowdsourced predictive text libraries. Each unique generated edition, specific to its moment, would create a chronology that shows these discrepancies and also changes over time.

Steven: Unique versus editioning for software has been interesting. I’ve really enjoyed that change over time, because a lot of the artists now are doing unique. I mean, the algorithm can change with one piece of code, and it’s unique.

Kevin: It’s a strategy I’ve used as well, too, like the series, you can do series, variations, that kind of thing.

Steven: Yeah, which goes back to painting and sculpture. But again, from a market perspective, the unique, the word unique has more value instantly.

Morgan: I think we’re getting at something crucial which is where does the value comes from in art objects and digital art objects? Steven for instance, when you sell a piece of digital art, it’s sold as if it’s a physical art object. Then maybe a piece of software, it sounds like there’s an added dimension there. So you’re not really selling an object but a system for creating many potential experiences. Which is hard to translate into other forms.

I wonder if Monegraph produces a new way of valuing digital objects that can perpetuate the aspect of the basic economic condition of the art market, which is I think unique in supporting individuals to create things with very little concern for their popularity or use value. The problem of digital art is that it affords economic systems that don’t have that property of supporting an artist in doing whatever they want to do. Maybe that’s the central issue that EO faces: can this do the same thing the art market does, or have the same property of being able to support people? I think the question I have for you [Steven] is whether you can use this idea of tracking provenance publicly to create an opportunity for a collector to support an artist.

Steven: Yeah, I’m a big supporter … I still don’t … I want to see it. I think this concept of the file and this feeling of retro recognizability, being comfortable, has to apply to what you’re doing. Absolutely. I know sometimes you want to go up against that, but in the art world, there’s enough traditional people out there who need to feel comfortable and confident. And they don’t want all this new lingo, and blockchain is going to freak them the fuck out, because they will not have any idea what that means.

Saul: Outside the that, there’s value at least in terms of artworks, there’s four or five different conditions of value. Some artworks take on value because their affect, i.e., they’re influential in terms of other things. There’s, so the notion of influence. There’s speculative value. There’s novelty value, we’ve all seen stuff.

Zoë: Pet rocks.

Saul: Pet rocks. And we’ve seen the art world version of pet rocks. There’s sustainable value, works fluctuate in price over time. And then there’s historical value.

Adriana Ramić, Unicode Power Stones, 2013

Mike: The art world’s “cloud” issue is that, I think a lot of these places misrecognize the fundamental thing that drives the market, and it is the very subjective and individual passion, it is the collector’s hunt, it is the collectors who like to feel some agency… not that it’s an illusion, but once you remove all of these accoutrements, once you optimize these things into this perfect smooth outline, it does sort of take away the raison d’etre of why this all exists.

So I think a lot of these places, like Artsy, who may have underestimated the extent to which someone doesn’t want the perfect NetFlixed recommendation. They actually want to think for themselves. They’ll consult a dealer, they’ll consult a gallery, they’ll read an article. But ultimately the way you get the ten thousand dollar premium on the piece is actually grows out of situation from which I don’t simply want to just get an alert notification— actually want to think about it. That’s why I was attracted to this particular discussion, because both of these platforms we’re discussing don’t totally remove that.

I just think that a lot of places, the first wave of these arts tech start-ups, chasing the sixty billion dollar industry are misrecognizing the space that they are trying to “disrupt.”

Steven: The “sixty billion dollar industry” that really can’t be grabbed in the way the start-ups are imagining …

Mike: Right, if you actually deploy really good software, if you actually deploy machine learning, if you actually deploy algorithmic matching of buyers and sellers, then it’s not a sixty billion dollar industry anymore.

Photo: Philippe Gerlach, 2013, New York

Marvin Jordan: From your experience as an internet-based artist, how do you feel that the traditional role of the artist — understood as some kind of solitary genius working alone or at the margins of society — how has that role changed in the contemporary context of digital networks?

Rafaël Rozendaal: I think it’s even more solitary than before, because in the past it was the artist making work alone but still needing someone to give him or her permission to show the work. That middleman is now gone.

I think the internet is a place for individuals to connect directly, and I’ve noticed that with internet artists there’s a lot of people who are not that good with social skills — and yet that’s why they excel; it’s for the shy people and the introverts. Because the art world today is — and maybe it has always been this way — it’s very social, it’s about who you know. Meanwhile, the internet is not about who you know, it’s just about what you want to make. So that whole thing of going to get an MFA and being with the right tutor and speaking to the right people, being friends with the critic, getting drunk together, all that stuff is not needed in the context of digital networks.

MJ: Right, but wouldn’t you say there’s an irony there? Due to the dissolution of this middleman — whether it’s your art advisor, your MFA mentor or teacher, etc. — when that disappears, a kind of redoubled responsibility emerges on the shoulders of the shy or “solitary artist”, because then you have to be your own manager or play the role of one’s own liaison—

RR: I don’t want to compare the traditional artist from the 1500s because that’s a bit too far of a reference. But let’s say you compare to the artists of the 60s, who were doing conceptual art. Conceptual art completely needs “art context” in order to be readable: if you put a urinal on the street, you don’t recognize it as a work of art, but if you put it in a gallery… etc. So it’s very much a matter of the artwork becoming more readable. And if it’s in a powerful institution, then the more it becomes art. The art world is a bit like a video game — you get to know people, you get some coins and then you get to go to the next level and then you get into the slightly bigger room with less furniture. At first you’re in the side room, then you’re in the main room, then you get in the magazine, etc. The rules are very set, you talk to this person, a biennale, then you get a gold star, then you get upgraded and get to speak to better curators – but then also the critics are harsher… So really it’s just like Super Mario.

MJ: That’s funny—

RR: So if you compare that to people who are actively going to dinners, hanging out with people, having a studio visit — which is a sort of religious ritual — and all the language involved in this, it’s like a secret society with a lot of secret handshakes. I think if you treat the web as a promotion tool, then it’s a chore; but if you treat it as a platform, if you say, “I’m not using Instagram to promote, I’m using it just to show what I’m doing, I’m just showing my sketches and I’m opening my studio to you.” That’s not really promotion — you’re just flipping the idea of a studio visit inside-out.

Seoul Square, Seoul, Korea, 2012

MJ: Right, so that’s where things get paradoxical but also very interesting — the question then becomes, to what extent can we separate the notion of the internet as “platform” or internet as tool for self-promotion…

RR: And then the self-promotion becomes the art…

MJ: Exactly, these things blur into each other. But once again it goes back to this age old question, the difference between medium and message and how they’re really inseparable, you know? There’s a contradiction at play where – exactly like you said – you have the sociology of the art world based on the kind of ‘Super Mario’ economy of getting coins and distinction, associating with the right people, etc. — that’s still very much at work today. But on the other hand, the internet has been – you guessed it – a disruptive force, all across different fields. So there is this network of exclusivity on the one hand, but on the other a kind of progressive disruption of this network and its accessibility.

RR: I think the question gets really complex when you have no definition of what art is. If you go by the definition of art that says art is whatever is shown in the institutions, in galleries and museums… for example, art critics don’t review websites, they review exhibitions. Things that happen outside of exhibition spaces are not considered art. But if you do consider things that happen outside of exhibition spaces art, and if you think that Super Mario (the game) is a work of art, or certain magazines, or if you think certain things happening on Tumblr are art…

MJ: Tumblr is a good example.

MJ: Yes, and that begs the question: to what extent do these disciplines — such as History with a capital H, or Art History, and the notion of “the canon,” etc. — actually depend fundamentally on gatekeepers, on authority, whether its academic authority, “expertise,” etc. The notion of an artist being legitimized by an authority (and to some extent depending on it) creates interesting questions for art that seeks primarily to “provoke.”

RR: It’s an interesting thing for me if you think of art as just units of information. Traditionally those units were tied to a physical object and were guided by gatekeepers and they restricted access so they would make the decisions – in this sense the gatekeepers guide people. But now you can have a unit of information that anyone might put online and might even get copied and mutated by others and it lives a life of its own – and that’s very different. The interesting thing for me is that on the internet you will encounter things that you’re not sure where they came from, you’re not even sure if it was intended as art in the first place.

MJ: Right, this touches on a question that we can get to later or now but, the notion of the art object as an irreducibly physical thing.

RR: That’s a very Western idea.

MJ: How so?

RR: The Japanese had a tradition of woodblock print by which they were sold for very little money — for the price of a bowl of noodles — so that everybody could have a copy of the print, and the originals were eventually lost, so they didn’t even care about them; just like we wouldn’t care about owning the master tape of a movie, we just want to see the movie. It’s all about non-physical images in a similar way. I think ceramics were more high end and they were more precious, so they sent ceramics to Europe at some point when they started mutually trading, and they wrapped them in the woodblock prints. They used that as wrapping paper; and when the Europeans opened the box, they found the wrapping paper more interesting than the ceramics, and started saying calling it art. The Japanese hadn’t thought of it that way. That’s what I mean it’s a very Western thing to say.

MJ: So following from this Western-centric fixation on the original “master copy” of the artwork, we’re touching on a critical question at the heart of the net art economy — the question of scarcity, or the production of artificial scarcity. How do you create value in a post-scarcity market?

RR: Let’s take the example of movies. I think children are growing up today with way more moving images than previous generations. So maybe in the beginning of cinema, people were used to seeing five movies in their whole lifetime, whereas now you’re used to everything being in animated form – even an emoji can be animated. So the simple act of saying hello to someone can be an animated, moving image. The idea of the moving image has become much broader now, to the point where we see it altogether separate from narrative, and this eludes the limits of scarcity too. The moving images are seen isolated on their own, and what happens there is that they cease to be objects.

The ironic thing is that all scarcity today seems unofficial — there is way more food than we can eat, for example. It just isn’t distributed evenly. So it’s not like we’re really running out of bread or whatever. It’s more like people create the scarcity, where… I don’t know if it’s true for everything.

MJ: There are definitely exceptions, but I think here we come to an interesting crossroads where there are companies, startups like Monegraph, for example, that are trying to create artificial scarcity in the net art economy by creating exactly this kind of “master copy”, purely out of a certificate of ownership – i.e. out of virtual thin air. This model of an “original” that comes after the copyable, of scarcity as an effect of ownership (and not the reverse) — this is being applied to an art form that has existed perfectly well in post-scarce environments, reproducing itself freely across hundreds of blogs. You yourself have designed and experimented with internet art contracts in the past, so what’s your take on all this?

Download Rozendaal’s Art Website Sales Contract here

RR: Well for me, just creating scarcity was not enough, so my approach focuses primarily on domain names — which serve many purposes — and it’s not just a financial thing. When it comes to the domain name, for me, the main thing is that you can create a lot of variations with digital files. So while you’re working, your photoshop file will exist in lots of iterations — version 7a, version 7b, version 93 — and it just never feels finished. I like the idea of the domain name because it’s fixed, it’s done, and it will exist there forever, rather than it being a file on someone else’s server, on a tumblr or somewhere – no, this is a finished thing. It’s a bit like a frame around a painting, whereby you say: “this is done, it’s not a sketch, I’m really hanging this.” And the other thing is that it makes its location permanent so you’ll always find it there. Most people’s computers are a huge mess and full of unfinished things, so I like the idea of the domain name as a finished and fixed product. Those were the most important reasons. Then, I also like the idea that it’s a language thing but it’s also an IP address, so it’s almost like a magic spell whereby you can say this one sentence, “dot com”, and the artwork suddenly appears in front of you. These things have nothing to do with money. In the end it’s also cool that domain names are scarce and that makes them sellable. It’s important to me that that’s at the end because if it makes things more complicated — rather than more fun — then it’s not going to work. In my case, a domain name adds to the work, it’s first and foremost a part of the work. Then the fact that you can monetize it is a secondary matter, and it does make it interesting, but that’s not the point. Scarcity in and of itself is not interesting.

MJ: It’s not enough.

RR: Also I didn’t create the scarcity of domain names – that’s a real thing. I didn’t create artificial scarcity. The reason domains are scarce is because we only have so many words we can remember. I had discussion with internet artists who were operating more so in a blog form, either Twitter or Instagram, and they thought that the domain name is convoluted and makes things complicated, that it goes against the nature of the web, because the web is more about temporality. But I think a lot of things exist meaningfully on the internet for a long time: there are many iconic webpages like the End of the Internet page or—

MJ: I remember that!

RR: Or the hampster dance meme. They will be on the same server forever, and that’s cool. The internet persists as a giant archive, preserving things for a long time.

MJ: Moving forward, do you think internet artists should also be trained as web developers?

RR: Well that’s per individual, I don’t know much code, which means I have more time to think of ideas.

MJ: So you have more of a conceptual approach?

RR: Well no, it’s literally a time issue, so if I were coding on top of solving these problems… but there’s another argument, that if you do code yourself, then you’ll run into coding accidents and ideas happen there, so that’s also an approach. But I just remember in art school when I started animating and I played around a bit with code, and at some point I just lost interest. Then I met someone who was really good at it who could do it a bajillion times faster – I would never get to his level. I would have to give up everything else and focus on coding, and then I thought, “Well if I work with him then I’ll move a lot faster.”

MJ: Yeah, it calls into question the primacy of technique in art, the role of skill as guarantor of artistic composition, or “process purists”, etc.

RR: If you believe that art should be made by one person from start to finish, and you’re a fan of that, then you should follow that. Or if you like art that is produced by huge teams on a city scale, then you’re going to be interested in a different approach. If you’re interested in films which are produced by several people, that’s also different… So it’s up to the viewer.

MJ: I think this is a good segue into specific conditions of the internet landscape in which you and others operate — namely, how multipurpose it is and navigating so many multimedia possibilities. Digital platforms are multipurpose by design. Do you think it’s beneficial for internet artists to diversify and expand their practices to be increasingly versatile? For example, Rafaël Rozendaal is not only a visual artist: he also writes haikus, he tweets about food, he might also produce some videos, etc. Basically, broadening and generalizing the artistic template into what is now called “online presence.”

Lenticular print based on Rozendaal’s www.intotime.com

RR: It’s funny when you look at art history. There are examples of people who went very broad and it worked out well, and it’s interesting; then there’s people who were extremely narrow, and that’s interesting too. So there’s no rule. I go by the rule: whatever interests me, I will do. That’s the only rule I have because I have no idea what’s more strategic or what will work out better – no one knows that. Sometimes I think that for the viewer it’s kind of nice when an artist is very extreme, like just making paintings all your life. But for me, I would get bored if I was just doing one thing all the time. So I prefer to do different things. But I think from a branding perspective—

MJ: Right that’s what I was trying to get to—

RR: If Warhol had only done soup can paintings, then that would have been okay, but because he started producing music and making films and magazines and making TV and doing performance, I think it’s really interesting. But in the case of Mondrian, it’s great that he really went far in his research of composition and that he spent his whole life making one painting a year. So for me there’s no clear answer as to which one is better.

MJ: Totally — it just seems today that the notion of online presence stands for a kind of artistic tabula rasa. I’m just trying to put pressure on this question and push it to a potential limit.

RR: Well it’s interesting with digital that you have this tool in front of you that can do anything. So if you’re in a painter’s studio and you have a lot of paint around, you’re going to think about paint. But in this case, a digital program is not like a painting studio; it’s also an editing room and it’s also a newspaper and it’s also a TV channel — it could be everything… which can also be overwhelming. Because you’re like “Wow, I can do things that Spielberg couldn’t because he didn’t have the tools when he was 25, and now they’re in my phone so I can make an even better film.” And then it’s really up to you; but you can lose your mind, because you can do everything and then you end up not doing anything. The only answer I can give is just do whatever is interesting.

Montage of 100 websites by Rozendaal

MJ: It’s funny you mention Spielberg because this touches on the question of celebrity or distinction, and along with distinction comes, more often than not, different kinds of elitism. The elitism that develops out of a closed off, opaque and exclusive art world raises questions here. The difference between elitism and accessibility is relevant to our conversation, mainly because we’ve already talked about widespread internet-based accessibility as a technological novelty, but then what happens to elitism?

RR: What’s interesting there is that as economic inequality increases, the art market also increases – because the middle class generally doesn’t buy art. The middle class, if they have extra money, they go to Hawaii. They won’t spend $5,000 on art. But if you take money from the middle class and give it to the rich, they can already buy a house in Hawaii, so they will also buy art. Then you get into this weird thing where the art world will give you the freedom to explore very weird interests which don’t appeal to the mass market, and at the same time it’s based on inequality. It’s weird that people can be that rich.

So there’s definitely this dark side to it. I think Jeff Koons is very interesting, and it’s obvious that he’s not hiding the fact that he’s making jewelry for rich people. So that’s a question that every artist has to face. If you decide to make art that’s accessible to everybody and that’s a bit more socially conscious, then you have to deal with the fact that it’s really hard to monetize. I have such a big online audience, but it’s way easier to sell one website to a collector — they go for around 7 and a half thousand dollars now. It’s much easier to get that rather than to get 1 dollar from 7 and a half thousand people.

MJ: That’s a great way to put it.

RR: And that’s the weird thing: on the internet, we’re used to everything being free. That’s a big challenge.

MJ: Are you optimistic about the way things are going? Do you think there’s any contradiction between supporting universal online accessibility on the one hand, while selling mostly to rich collectors on the other?

RR: That’s what I’m doing with the websites. What’s weird is what I didn’t know until now — I was quite naive because I really came from an internet background more so than an art market one. I knew about art but not so much about the art market. And I’ve started making objects now too. I’m making lenticulars, and I’m making tapestries now, because they’re interesting and also come from an internet mindset. But what’s fascinating is that a collector bought my work and I asked him where it would hang, and he said “Oh, I don’t have space to hang it because my house is really full, but it’s going in a warehouse and, that’s okay, it’s like baseball cards. You put them in a drawer.” But what’s interesting is that there’s this whole world of unseen artworks that travel from vault to vault, and they eventually become digital art, because the only way they’re seen is on people’s phones. To me, those objects are even more virtual than websites, because websites I can actually look at whenever I want. This is not a judgement saying one is better than the other. It’s just an observation that physical art objects will be seen less, in terms of time and amount of eyeballs. They will be less visible and therefore more virtual.