Y Combinator Startup Podcast - #41 - Experiments in Art and Technology with Artforum Editor Michelle Kuo

Episode Date: October 18, 2017

Michelle Kuo is Editor in Chief of Artforum.Kat Mañalac is a Partner at YC.Michelle came in to chat with us about art and technology and, in particular, a group called Experiments in Art and Technology.

Hey, this is Craig Cannon, and you're listening to Y Combinators podcast. Today's guests are Michelle Kuo, editor-in-chief of art forum, and Katman Yalick, a partner, YC. Michelle came in to chat with us about art and technology, and in particular, a group called Experiments in Art and Technology. As always, if you want to read the transcript or watch the video, those are both at blog.w.waicombinator.com. All right, here we go. So I'll just start by saying experiments in art and technology was a group that was founded in 1966 by the artist Robert Rauschenberg, by an engineer named Billy Clover, who was a research

scientist at Bell Labs. At that time, literally the heyday, or basically it was the heyday of Bell Labs, which was the ground zero for sort of everything as we know it. None of what we're doing right now would be possible without the invention of the transistor, for example. All of these breakthrough inventions happened at Bell Labs, and it was really the center of the telecommunications revolution. So this engineer at Bell gets together with these artists, some of whom are really, you know, prominent at the time. And they are, they've, they've sort of met each other through some just really almost chance social circles, but also through some art world friends in common. And, you know, So Jasper Johns needed a neon, wanted a neon light in the shape of a letter, the letter R, for one of his

paintings. And he didn't want a cord running from the painting to an electrical socket. So somehow he got hooked up with Clover, this engineer from Bell, and said, can you do this? Well, it turns out it was kind of a complicated problem at the time. How do you make a battery-powered neon light that's small enough to fit behind a painting, etc., etc., etc. Well, he did it.

So they had these various collaborations. But then Rauschenberg and Kluver, the artists and the engineers, thought, why can't we bring this to everyone? Why can't every artist who's curious about making something float have access to an engineer who works on pneumatic technology?

So how could you create these collaborations and then how could you even scale them or grow them so that this becomes a mass sort of phenomenon. So they said about trying to basically start to get the word out to get artists and engineers together. The first real project they did that they undertook was probably, you know, one of the largest endeavors at the time. It involved over 40 engineers and artists. And it was this performance series that took place in New York in, at the Armory, which was a huge cavernous space.

And basically to get to make the performance, what became the performance pieces, they paired artists, choreographers, musicians, composers, with engineers, most of them from Bell, just because that's... What was that process of pairing them like? Well, it was very tumultuous. So they had meetings. And again, it was very ad hoc. In other words, it was really a word of mouth thing. So Clover would bring in friends from Bell, Rauschenberg, and Robert Whitman and other artists would bring in friends from their circle. This happened to include John Cage, David Tudor, Yvonne Rainer, really people that would become extremely well-known afterward. But we're already prominent. the time. So they had freewheeling meetings. They actually held them at a high school in Berkeley Heights, New Jersey, which was near the Cleaver's house. They would go up. There were people who lived sort of more upstate, so they would go there. And they were just really trying to literally

brainstorm to bounce ideas off one another. And, you know, of course the artists wanted things like, you know, I want a missile that floats. I want, you know, a light bulb that will explode. I want walkie-talkies. I want remote control. I want sound that will respond to the viewer as they're walking through space in real time. And like any tech person knows, non-tech people think technology can do everything all at once already. So they were really just pie in the sky.

And I think the engineers were really shocked, but also really enthusiastic because they hadn't had experiences like that in large measure before. So this really created a lot of excitement. It created a lot of tension. There were a lot of fights, a lot of conflict as well, just a lot of pressure because in the end, they, I think they signed up for creating a, you know, a very, let's say, ambitious set of performances on a large scale in New York. And at the end of the day, you know, very little was tested or tried out. And there were long delays, nearly 10,000 visitors over the course of these essentially 20 nights. Yeah. So, like, just so I understand the time frame, they decide, like, there's just one project with a neon behind the painting with a battery.

They're like, okay, this is cool. We should have more of this. They then book the armory like nine months in advance. Well, I'm fast forwarding. But basically they had proposed, they got together, let's say maybe 10 of them. Okay. But really spearheaded by Rauschenberg and Kluver. And then it kind of built a bit.

And again, this is just this really almost contingent aspect to it. Kluver is Swedish. There is a Swedish performance festival in Stockholm. And they thought, well, let's apply to do something for that. That fell through. They, EAT claimed later that it was because the performance festival didn't want to give, they didn't like the idea that the artist would give so much agency to the engineers and that they would kind of be this freewheeling thing.

Regardless, that fell through. So then they just thought, okay, how can we produce these performances that we already started brainstorming about and everyone's really excited about? And, you know, again, Rauschenberg and some of these other artists were quite prominent at the time. So, you know, the armory was suggested as a venue because they wanted to test out literally physical scale. And in the armory, there are echo times of up to five seconds. So people interested in sound, in remote control, in video, or basically in projection, were interested in this very large, physical scale already.

So they booked it. But again, I guess part of it is that some of these artists were already quite prominent. And so on opening night for this performance series, you have Senator Jacob Javits and his wife, his wife was a prominent arts patron. You have the sort of who's who of the New York art world, but also of the avant-garde Demi-Mond, and they're all there en masse. And they're all really mad because they're waiting. It's like breaking, right?

It's not, yeah. And things aren't working. And so eventually, when things did start to work, you know, really extraordinary and interesting things happen. For example, in Rauschenberg's performance piece, to make a long story short, one of the technologies they got and used was infrared. And at the time, infrared was a classified military technology. They ended up getting infrared cameras from a Japanese supplier. And so at one part of the performance was turning all the lights off. and in the dark then training these infrared cameras on hundreds of performers that assembled

on the floor of the armory. And so you got these very ghostly spectral images of these people for the audience at large. And again, you know, that was an extraordinary thing that happened. It's like as if today you would have an artist that had access to the Pentagon and was spending time, you know, toying around there. So that was really unprecedented. And from there, they got momentum even more. They grew to a few hundred people.

And then anyone could really become a member. You just signed, you filled out a form and you sent it in. And so at their peak, by around 1970, they had nearly 5,000 members. What did it mean to be a member? So basically to be a member, you could. get access to this network. In other words, you could fill out what you're interested in, whether you're on whatever field you're in.

If you're an artist, you could say, I'm interested in new plastics and holograms and also cybernetics. And then if you were an engineer, you could say, well, this is my disciplinary expertise. I'm also really fascinated by, you know, kinetic sculpture, or I really like, you know, dropping acid. How are people discovering this? This is like pre-internet.

They're just like, okay, yeah, I'm into acid. I guess I know how that makes it to your town. So part of the whole thing was outreach, and they're very, they made a concerted effort, obviously not only to reach out to artists, but then to go to I-Triple-E, which was the engineering society. Hans Haka had a booth,

was manning a booth there and handing out flyers. So again, it's like, let's take this to the trade fair, to conferences. They gave talks. They did almost like not really publicity, but let's say tours of schools. The university was, of course, a whole other connector. And what you see as well is this network of what becomes or was a kind of academic, military, industrial complex.

All these people are really in communication. and so EAT is basically saying, well, how can we get the word out? So can you explain the actual Rationberg like piece at the armory? Because I thought that was particularly cool. Yeah. So Rauschenberg had decided to, he was very interested again in, first of all, remote control, what he kind of thought of as action at a distance. you know, how can you make something else happen but not be physically tethered to it?

He's also interested in sound effects, in sonic, sort of in noise as well as, you know, experiments basically in acoustics. And the other part of it is really almost creating something, let's say, poetic, out of people's movements. And he was also interested in games. And at the time, a number of artists had already or were already exploring the sort of structure of the game. And it was also very much a conscious reference to game theory even. And so all of these layers are definitely, you know, there. Rauschenberg's piece basically set up in this huge cavernous expanse of the armory a tennis match.

but it wasn't a regular tennis match. He set up a tennis court. He had the artist Frank Stella, who at the time was actually taking tennis lessons from a tennis instructor named Mimi Karnarik. So the tennis instructor and Frank Stella are on the tennis court and they play a game of tennis. But it so happens that the racquets, the tennis rackets, are actually hotwired. So each time you hit the ball, a resounding amplified, a microphone would pick up an amplified sound that would resonate throughout the armory, and it triggered a huge bank of lights to be turned off. So with every volley, a successive set of lights would be turned off.

So by the end of the game, which has no winner or loser, the armory is in complete darkness. And then that's when these infrared cameras were turned on. And a mass of sort of, they're not really performers. There were people that Rauschenberg sent out sort of vague instructions to, but they were just supposed to gather on the floor and do maybe make a motion, like pull your ear or touch the person next to you, just these sort of very vague instructions. So that's what they were doing, assembled on the floor,

and the image of them via infrared is then projected above on these huge screens. And then at the end of that, they turned one spotlight on, and the choreographer Simone Forte came out and was being carried and was singing a sort of Italian folk song. So, again, this is all, you know, it's not a regular narrative. It doesn't really make any sense, but what it did was really push, it investigated some questions around performance, play. sound, imaging technology, and also the idea that you could have, a performance didn't have to be about a climactic spectacle. It was about some other kind of experience and a kind of experience that the artist hoped you wouldn't have had before. And that, you know, really, that was the case. Of course, the first night, the rackets didn't work. So they were, or the light,

the trigger for the lights didn't work. So they were actually manually turned off the light. You know, sort of jerry rigging or, you know, retroactively, you know, making the piece happen. Later it did. But so, you know, again, it was, it was really a test and an experiment in every sense of the word. And at the time, you know, people didn't really, they didn't really sort of understand that that's what it was. So. I've been wondering this the whole time, right? Because it like, so much of this technology. was so new, like, to the extent that you had never even seen an infrared camera, right? How are people talking about this art and technology overlap? Because I know, or I think I imagine how people talk about it now, but how are people talking about it at the time? Well, you have a couple different attitudes. One is, you know, wonder and astonishment. This is amazing. Isn't this so incredible and exciting?

And part of that is a very futurist strain of language, which is, you know, people basically trying to predict what's going to happen and having fun doing so, just like the artists were in a way as well. But you have a lot of people theorizing about the future of communication, the future of images, the future of human perception. and so there's a lot of literature around that from, you know, at every sort of end of the spectrum. And then there are people who are extremely critical and wary. And at the time, you know, this is the height of the anti-Vietnam protests. This is a moment when, you know, well, 10 years or so after the military industrial complex is coined as a term, it is a concept that begins to really take root. and particularly among the avant-garde, among the counterculture, among the very artists and some of the engineers that are part of EAT.

So they actually came under a lot of flack. I mean, there are articles actually written in Art Forum as well as elsewhere that essentially accused EAT of being complicit with, you know, the military and taking that as far as you might even go. So that was also part of why I think EAT had a very conflicted reception at the time and why maybe people haven't heard so much about it since then as well. And it really crystallizes both the utopian and the dystopian attitudes toward technology at the time. And what arts role was to either explore that or, in fact, critique and negate that. Okay. And so this led to the automation house, which like I have so, what was it exact? Did you see that part of the video? No, I didn't. It's crazy. Okay. So what is it actually called? Oh, Automation House. It's called Automation House. Okay. I wrote that down frankly. So this is like their, the collaboration between, I think I got this right, American Foundation on Automation and Employment. So basically this argument that they were having at the time, which is exactly like the same thing as today. the robots are going to take your job. Yes.

And so it's Clover and he and the people and I forget the guy's name who is the organizer of that. Oh, Theodore Keel. Theodore Keel. Yeah. The labor lawyer. They like create this building together, right? Yes. Yeah.

Which is the like future of life house. Like what I don't really understand what it's supposed to be. Well, basically what, this is around in 1968, 1969. EAT had been moving around. They had a loft. They had various places to sort of meet. And they viewed the physical space as actually an important part of what they were doing. Because as much as they were actually building what would become a real network that was sprawled globally,

they also wanted what they called a place to try things out, you know, a testing ground. And so they thought various physical spaces like a loft could be that place. then they got into, again, through Rauschenberg in large part, talks with this group, the American Foundation on Automation and Employment. And Theodore Kiel was the guy who had started this, was the head of this organization, and he was a labor lawyer. It actually become well known for mediating a massive, I think was a newspaper workers strike in the early 60s. So suddenly all of these concerns about collective action, about technology and labor come to the fore. And everyone is really worried that automation is robots will take our jobs. John F. Kennedy had said, you know, automation is the greatest threat facing humanity today.

And so there was alarm. At the time it was, they didn't even know about artificial intelligence. So, you know, it was really a widespread fear. And so this group that the labor lawyer was sort of running was actually trying to literally mediate these concerns. And they thought that they could find solutions to not only accept but embrace technology and recognize that it was a reality, that it wasn't going away, but also then somehow. how change the sphere of labor. So that labor that people could still be employed, it's just that what they did would change.

And again, this is obviously incredibly. So it's a very positive utopian view of. In some ways, yes. It's almost very practical. Yeah. They really wanted to try and solve this problem. But then it dovetailed very nicely with what EAT was trying to do, which was to say, you know, how can we pragmatically understand the force of

technology in a way that, you know, I think people were really almost willfully blind to. In other words, you reject it and you don't even want to understand it. You can't really understand it, and therefore you're just, you know, going to condemn it. So they really wanted to bring people from different knowledge domains, fields of expertise, together and try and solve some of these problems. So they decided to build or renovate a townhouse in New York. to create a center for job training, for workshops about automation and technology, for art exhibitions, for EAT to have their kind of headquarters there as well, for classes.

And they got two young architects to essentially retrofit the building with closed circuit television cameras, video monitors. They had a video workstation there where one of the projects they, did was actually convert a bunch of really experimental film pieces to video and then do the first cable broadcast of artists, television, programming, pretty much of all time. And this was in 1970, 71. Where was it broadcast? It was broadcast on local access, cable access in New York on two channels. And they published the schedule in the village voice and like, I think a few other newspaper. You'll see it's like Andy Warhol's, you know, dot, dot, dot, it's being screened at 8 p.m.

on Tuesday, you know. So that was really quite amazing. And so they were trying to create some kind of studio slash laboratory where all these things could happen. But it started to, it again really highlighted how despite all of the tensions and conflicts surrounding their relationships to technology, EAT really did have a social mission and was extremely political and wanted to, you know, change both social and political aspects of life. But it just, let's say from a different vantage point than maybe other artists did at the time. Yeah, because it seems very practical. It was.

Yeah. It was. Yeah. Because what ended up happening with the house, which is my concern the whole time? Then it was basically became, it eventually became a gallery. Oh, yeah, great. So, you know, again, it was both practical and really impractical because, you know, many of their ideas, again, or many of the plans sort of petered out.

And I would say one of the most amazing and fantastic, but then also cataclysmic events for them was when EAT was commissioned to construct and realize the Pepsi Pavilion. at the World's Fair in Osaka in 1970. And I think I talked about this. You did. Yeah. But basically, that was the biggest single collaborative project they took on, and it was truly global.

I mean, they worked with Japanese artists, engineers, European artists, engineers, obviously American artists engineers. They tested it in L.A., but they created a 180-degree hemispherical mirror dome that was inflated, made out of inflated mylar, essentially, which is the same technology that was being used for the first telecommunication satellites. It's like they would launch a reflective balloon into space and you're literally bouncing waves. But instead, they used that technology or essentially through much trial and error, Jerry rigged it so that they could create an inflated mirror dome. And then when you walked inside, there were all of these sound effects.

different textures, different projections, and performances. But the mirror dome itself created essentially three-dimensional, near-holographic, inverted reflections. And you could capture this in photographs. So there are incredible photographs of this as well. But basically, they took on this massive project, and it, you know, by all rights, was actually really created, unprecedented experiences that were literally giving you both real and virtual images, as they called them. But Pepsi, to make a long story short, when the pavilion opened to the public, they basically thought, this is too weird.

Oh, no. And there were also huge, there were also huge budget cost overruns. There was also a fog surrounding the whole, a fog sculpture surrounding the entire pavilion. And I can't even get into all of these things. People thought the fog was a fire. So they sent the first day, they sent, you know, fire trucks screaming. Anyway, Pepsi kind of thought, well, actually, this is really weird. And so there was a breakdown.

Actually, there was essentially a legal dispute. And at the end of the day, EAT sort of got kicked out of the pavilion. They were literally smuggling their tapes, like their sort of, you know, eight-track tapes for programs out of the pavilion and the end result is that Pepsi replaced all of these experimental sort of John Cage slash David Tudor composed soundtracks with It's a Small World. Oh. And that was effectively enough to like burn everyone out where they're- It was traumatic, I think, for everyone.

And I think the whole thing was traumatic. I mean, they still went on for, you know, a number of years, but after, let's say, that really, I think, was tough. And yet, you know, again, I would say it was the, it really demonstrated how global they could be, actually, and how they could construct a global team that would create something of a very ambitious scale. And it just, it also just became an object lesson in all of the difficult. of course, surrounding. Well, because what I had been wondering was that the first thing that got me into this was I was reading the conversations with Robert Irwin book, which was amazing. I love that book.

And it's like, just like one sentence. It talks about him hanging out with Richard Feynman. Do you know much about this? Like, I want to watch that movie. I want to. And it's like so, such little information online. I don't know if there's footage. of it.

There's a photo of Robert Irwin and Richard Serra. I always must pronounce his name in like an anechoic chamber. Yes, exactly. But that's a famous sort of interaction where Robert Irwin was experimenting with, basically would shape his work where he's really interested in shutting out all sensation. And then he goes on to create works that explore the Gonsfeld or this perceptual limit in the same way that an anechoic chamber does. But yeah, Richard Feynman was a member of.

EAT. So was Robert Irwin. So we're a lot of physicists, you know, again, was part of this kind of crazy network of people. And what was great was that there were a lot of, not a lot, but there were definitely a number of analogous collaboration programs that were like EAT, often modeled after it. One was this program where Irwin was sort of meeting a lot of these people through. It was for an exhibition at LACMA, the L.A. County Museum of Art. And it was called art and technology. It was all very confusing. But it was basically for an exhibition. So they were very much inspired by EAT, but this exhibition was sort of like the endpoint. So in other words, you would commission all these collaborations. They paired. But it was just a very

corporate thing, right? Like there are all these companies. Yes. But EAT was also embroiled with all of these companies as well, like Lockheed Martin, you know, basically the aerospace industry. in Southern California, like the jet propulsion laboratory. That's where Irwin went. So they did the same thing. They paired artists with engineers, but it was ultimately to end up back in the museum. That's why I find really fascinating. And then to me, the difference is that EAT, it took the opposite trajectory. It tried to explode in scale and could not be confined by the museum. It did not fit into any of the traditional institutions. Did everything they build? Was it all site specific? Not necessarily.

I mean, you know, part of what they wanted to do and what they did create was almost even a set of equipment. So, for example, you could go check out the weird hybrid control panel that had been invented essentially or engineered for this other performance. Now it just exists there. You can go take it and it's like a library. You can check it out and use it for something else. And yet the other thing is that often what they created does not conform to traditional genres of sculpture or painting or drawings. And so a lot of what they made was either lost or some of it sitting in disrepair in like an engineer's garage somewhere or an artist studio. And so the paper trail, so to speak, well, they left a voluminous paper trail, but not a trail of, let's say,

traditional art objects. Huh. And that's, I think, also part of why it's been hard for people to wrap their heads around what this was or what they did. But this is like an ongoing issue in the art world, right? Like maintaining all this stuff. Yes. I mean, even, I don't know the history of it nearly like you do, but like all the

Tang Lee stuff, the things that break themselves, which are amazing. Yes. But the museum kind of takes a fun out of it because there'll be like a red button that you can hit like once an hour. And then all like this thing will just dance and so they fall apart. If, yeah, and there are many, it's funny. There are a lot of exhibitions even nowadays where those things still aren't working or like the technicians, the conservators have to come and, you know, sort of they're always panicked.

But Tang Lee actually was really one of the first works that Cluver, the EAT engineer. They collaborated on a piece that was basically a kinetic sculpture that destroyed itself in the Museum of Modern Art Sculpture Garden in 1960. And of course, it didn't really, it's sort of just short. circuited, so it was, again, supposed to be, I think, kind of spectacular, and in the end, it just kind of fizzled out. But that was one of Kluver's first collaborations with an artist. But yes, so the idea of incorporating new technologies and new materials, or even unorthodox materials and unorthodox technologies, you know, that is a really interesting problem for

the production of art, especially starting around the 1950s, 60s, 70s, and even more so now, of course with, you know, God knows what, you know, an artist is using Bitcoin. I have no idea what they're going to do in the future. You wouldn't believe the questions you got on Twitter, by the way. Like, people are sending in stuff. It's very, it's like tech. There's definitely a blockchain related questions. Oh, no. I'm going to have to frantically Wikipedia that again. But just to sort of finish that thought, I think what was really amazing specifically about some of what EAT made. And this is present in, for example, a number, a lot of Rauschenberg's own collaborative artworks from the time that he made with Kluver under the auspices of EAT,

is that Rauschenberg said, look, I'm making this thing with a transistor radio right now. And, you know, they've done all these complex things to it to make, you know, sort of the effects they want. At the time, in the 60s, transistor radio was not a mass technology. It had just come onto the market. It was a very new thing. Fast forward to the 90s, this piece, which is a sort of sculpture that has these radios embedded in it, is acquired by the Saint-Ampuodou in Paris. Well, Santra-Pompidou is a very funny building. Again, to make a long story short, it's a very weird piece of architecture, but it acts

like a Faraday cage. So it was blocking all signal. Also, at the time that they had constructed the piece in the 60s, in the mid-60s, AM was like FM, and FM was like AM in terms of programming. So AM had more pop music, et cetera. FN had more sort of news, blah, blah, blah. Rauschenberg wanted to, I think at the time, it was FM, and then so they wanted to switch it to AM as well.

Anyway, let's just say that in the 90s, they had to do this whole retrofitting and then successively update the radios and receivers in this piece over time to the point where now there are digital radios and receivers in the sculpture, in this metal sculpture from 1965. And Rauschenberg said, that's great. do whatever you want to do.

And in a way, he's taking this idea of the ready-made, which is this revolutionary 20th century idea. And he's saying the ready-made itself can be updated. It can sort of change and adapt to technological obsolescence. And that is really fascinating and groundbreaking. Well, it's particularly interesting when you take the modern eye and bring it into these exhibits where things that are supposed to represent the future. now look like this kits retro.

Like there's the, I forget what it's called, but it's at the Tate, that big tower of TVs. Yes, the Nam June Pike. Yeah, yeah. And you look at it and you're like, oh, this is like cool, like, oh, in very 1984-esque, but I don't think it's intended or was intended that way. It wasn't, but some, so many artists,

again, it's a sliding scale. Many artists at the time are actually interested in obsolete technologies and in exploring those. At the same time, there are other artists who are interested in the, you know, the newest, latest thing, and that's what they want. A question I often ask artists that are alive still is, you know, if you could do it all over again, would you use a different technology to achieve the effect that you wanted back then? And some say, yes. I even heard an artist say, yes, I actually want to take back my works that are in the museum and change them and put them back, which museums really don't want. No takebacks.

But again, it points up this crazy contradiction or this conundrum that people are facing. Some artists say, no, I wouldn't change a thing. I want it to reflect that medium, that sort of form of the time. And that's something I want to preserve. So it just depends on what you were trying to do and what questions you were trying to ask. Okay. Do you have thoughts then? So Kat and I both went to Venice this year.

We never, yeah. It's like, it's very weird. I'll be clear. Like, it was the first one of those I'd ever been to. It's a big, yeah, you know. It only happens every two years. So, yeah. And so you went, right?

Because you wrote a review. Yeah, we had a whole, yeah, series of pieces. And there's a distinct lack of technology at this one, right? That's an interesting question. I wouldn't, you know, that, again, I think points to what maybe has changed. changed between, let's say, the mid-60s and now, which is that, of course, consumer technology has expanded to the extent that everyone has a computer in their pocket. So it's so ubiquitous that in a way, I wouldn't say that the Biennale, for example, was devoid of technology. I think

it was everywhere in a lot of different ways. But this exhibition in particular was focusing on, let's say an investigation of ideas about primitivism, about indigenous cultures, about nature, about spirituality. And those are definitely things that, you know, in a way that explains why you saw a lot of, let's say, more traditional craft or form in the show. So you're totally right. It's just that I would say, A, we often don't notice it. as much because it's not foregrounded as the raison d'et of an artwork.

It's just there. Right. And on the flip side, yes, it might, I would say that people are interested right now in exploring the flip side of the acceleration of technology and its omnipresence. They're interested in also slowing things down in other kinds of perception or in even countering some of the kinds of media saturation. I did love sharpening a MacBook Air. Like that guy, that guy's amazing.

Yeah, that's so great. What is it, does snow monkeys remember snow too? Exactly. I just was thinking of that. Actually, it was one of my favorite pieces or two pieces in the show. And yeah, exactly. So again, such a simple idea with the snow monkeys, but of course that's video. But then with the sharpening the MacBook Air, again, a very simple idea, but very

extremely sharp. No pun intended. In thinking about the legacy of EAT, who do you think is doing some of the most interesting work in that intersection of art and technology? You know, again, I would say what's exciting, in a sense, is that so many artists have so much more access to advanced technologies simply because of the proliferation

of these advanced technologies in everyday life. On the flip side, you know, I would say the cloisters in which technology is actually being sort of produced or created now are still in many ways as walled off to, you know, the guy on the street as they were before. So some of the artists that I think are really either a pushing the boundaries of what art and technology can do together, but also of really. looking at technologies or making it a point to try and engage technologies that most ordinary people or artists wouldn't really have access to. One of them is Trevor Paglin, who, for example, he, well, he's kind of a crazy guy. He has a series of incredible photographs that are basically taken from remote sites and with very special camera technology of drone planes. So there are these beautiful photographs, often of an incredibly

brilliant night sky, and then there's a tiny speck and it's a drone. So he has to do all of these things to get that sort of picture. And what he's doing in many different ways, in lots of other projects as well, is to try and render visible or sensible to us, things that are absolutely not visible to us normally or even physically. So for example, he is really interested in all of these automated technologies that are post-vision, so to speak, literally things that we cannot visualize because they don't take place in an optical realm. So how do you start to even talk about it or engage it or make someone somehow perceive, get some sense? of what those processes are.

And he's really someone who I think has done that. Yeah, I was just about to jump into some of these questions from Twitter. This is definitely a new experience for me. I love it. I mean, this is a, it's a new experience for us, too. I should retype some of these questions because it makes me sound like I can't read, although I have like a fourth grade reading level probably. I'm not.

Okay, so there, this Anna, Sophia Almagro, I also butcher everyone's name. She asked a question about blockchain. Are you at it? Yeah, I don't mean to be patronizing. Like, what's your level of in the know? We actually published a piece about Bitcoin and the blockchain. It was a media study. It was by a media studies person. And I will say I relied on a lot of help because my, as I mentioned, literally just by coincidence, my partner is. technologist and actually the rest of my family are all scientists and engineers as well, which is explain something, I guess. But we had to do a lot of research to make sure we were accurately characterizing the technology.

And yeah, I learned a lot, obviously, when we worked on that piece. Okay, so you're on board. Then I have a question for you. Yes, yeah. Although, you know, this is like a year and a two years ago. So you can test my recall. It's a, well, Kat and I can jump in. at any point.

So is blockchain being used to track authenticity in art? So meaning digital art. Wow. Not to my knowledge yet. Not to my knowledge yet. I don't think I've heard. I've heard of one. Really?

One project. Yeah, because you get the idea, right? So it's tracking authenticity. And that is my interpretation is that it's incredibly difficult to create valuable digital art if it's a like, you know, falling apart because like, you know, your browser is no longer compatible. But also, you know, if you like Photoshop paint something, you can just duplicate it infinitely. Right.

So you have the signature on this, the original. Okay. So maybe, maybe not. I mean, to me, I, not to my knowledge yet, but I haven't really looked into it in this way. And I guess, again, what I would say is that it's an incredibly, well, it's a very intuitive, but it's also a perverse idea because I think a lot of artists, right now who are exploring something like the blockchain are interested in disrupting, well, that's a terrible word to you, so scratch that in going against sort of orthodox valuation

in the first place. So, but yeah, I mean. So they might not care as much about authenticity or like this original piece or, yeah. They actively want to subvert authenticity. Yeah. And that's been something that, again, actually, you could say almost the entire history of modern art is about challenging authenticity and authorship. And so we've been through, in the art sort of realm, many different iterations of people trying to test this in different ways. And technology is one of them, right? It's like saying that it's removing, to use a technological system is often to remove you as a human, single individual and your whatever imprimodial.

tour that may be on something, it's to replace that with a system that's determined in advance or might use a chance operation. So these are all legacies in art that, again, are really informing, I think, people's attitudes towards even the newest technology. Oh, okay. So I'm sure people are, you know, everyone's always interested in evaluation outside of the artists themselves. But, well, it's tricky, right? But it's all made up. Yeah. I mean, I don't know. Oh, okay. I don't know. Are you allowed to, Damien Hurst found objects hot or not? Are you allowed to comment on this? I think I'm going to pass on that. All right. Next question. Is it still art if a machine creates it? Yes. And for the reasons that I just enumerated, I think that this becomes a

philosophical question, but at the end of the day, in most cases up to now, at our point in history, someone, a human still has to trigger that process, let's say go, even if then everything else is determined by an algorithm or by a, you know, program. And yet artists were interested in challenging, they were interested in using machines precisely to challenge this traditional notion of authorship, which they associated with an outmoded model of being, basically, and to challenge. systems really of not only of capitalism, but also of basically Western philosophy that is often privileging the author and it's the author as a white male. So these are all things that get challenged at different periods in history. And people are using machines to do that. The weird thing now is, and it, again, I would point to the work of someone like Trevor Paglan or another artist, Harun Faraki, where, as Paglin himself has kind of characterized, these artists are confronting

the both amazing and terrifying prospect of totally automated, completely automated systems that don't need the human to set off that go button and that are, you know, acting or using deep learning or using all of these different processes that do not entail humans. And again, yeah, I think, you know, artists and art viewers will still be interested in someone who somehow finds a way to investigate that as art. Well, so this is the, so we had Doug Eck for. Oh, yeah. Oh, you do.

Oh, dude. You're like way more into this than I. I don't know him personally. I just, I know about him, but actually, again, this isn't even the video,

but like my partner, because he's in music technology, uh, he again was like, oh, dog, and I was like, oh,

so I was reading up about him as well, but yeah. So he was on the podcast. Yeah, which is great. Okay, yeah. So he's awesome.

And, um, his whole thing is, right, like this is just a tool. And he often, uh, he cited a Brian,

you know, quote, which is basically saying like, the style is defined by the glitch of it. You know, like the electric guitar with Jimmy Hendricks was the distortion, you know, like vinyl or tapes or whatever. And he had been talking about how when photography came out, people were criticizing. It's like, this isn't art.

Like, this is just a reproduction. Yeah. Do you think the same thing is just going to be happening with as like machine learning comes into art creation or 3D printing or basically my question is, is this a constant in the art world. Yes, I'll probably never live to see the day when someone doesn't say my kid could do that. So that is a question.

But again, it's, you know, to me, the real question is, what does it mean to introduce a glitch into something? What does it mean to explore the perfection of a mechanical or a computational system? What does it mean to try and basically challenge the legacy of virtuosic skill? In other words, the reason photography created a crisis for art was that it said, you know, if one of the stated aims of painting was to somehow reproduce the world in the most wonderful way possible, now you have a machine that just doesn't.

does it automatically. And so what, how do you, how can you possibly, um, try to understand a different way of creating that is, uh, not memetic? That is not about reproduction. And how can you try and understand, um, a mode of construction that might even challenge or critique those systems of reproduction? And that's when you get into the 20th century and, um, you know, Steve Reich, you know, saying, I have the simplest pattern, but then in realization, or in its realization, you get an incredibly singular, you know, amazing sonic experience. But, you know, people are playing precisely with pulling the subject out completely, the author out completely, but then also, you know, the realization that you can never quite fully do that. Yeah. So there's always

these, you know, this tension between sort of total chance, total system, and total control. Got you. Okay. So we just have a couple questions left. This is a, yeah, this has been great. It's so cool. This is getting, I mean, it's a big topic, but it's, I would say also the funny thing is, regardless of the tool, a lot of bad art has been made as well. So, you know, look, it's, that's what I mean about, it's not just, of course, about the tool. It's about, it's about, what you do with the tool, but also maybe you're creating a new tool in the first place. And that's when I think artists have really pushed the limits of what, you know, what sensation is, what perception is, what materials are.

Artists will always adapt. Yeah. Yeah. And so when you're... Or even predict, I mean, they might be the forecasters in a way of what comes to pass as well. Seems like it. In some cases. Yeah, in some cases.

To their great chagrines. What are that? Oh, yeah. What happened in like automation house that didn't come to life or that did come to life that they called? That, well, so one project was, they had a series of projects they called projects outside art, which again gives you some idea of what they were trying to do. And one of the things that's really very funny is a project that was called Children and Communication. So the artist Robert Whitman kind of spearheaded this project. And again, part of this is about we have these new tools of communication. How can we explore democratizing communication and networks of communication? So they had this idea to set up multiple stations around the city where different school

children of different socioeconomic brackets, like in different places, could go and have access to teletype machines, basically primitive facts and telex machines. And so they could then, there are sessions just like, go. And why don't you communicate with these other children? Just like AIM with each other. Yeah. Yes. I know.

Instant messaging. Sort of. People are. And it went off the rails immediately. This led to AOL chat and Match.com. Yeah, and chat relet. Yeah, exactly. You know, but anyway, so the children wrote to each other.

And of course, there are all these funny jokes that then weirdly kind of went off the rails and kids were using profanity to each other. Like, it was just a very interesting, funny sort of experiment. And even, I would say, as a testament to how architectural and formal experience was still really important to these artists and engineers, the sites in which the children were playing with these machines were specifically devised as these kind of low-light, tense that for whatever reason they thought this would be an interesting environment and intimate environment.

I don't know. But it was really, you know, something where then they explored telex communication with, they set up telex stations for adults on the occasion of another project in Ahmedabad, India, in Stockholm, in Tokyo, in New York, in L.A., and they were having people ask questions about what they thought the future would be like. So again, it's this very, you know, in a way, idealistic vision of how people might exchange information across a global network, but also with questions that were very much geared toward, you know,

fear of what the future might bring as well. Will you make a future prediction about like how these art and technology communities can work together, because I agree with you that both of them seem kind of in the same way, like accessible and completely inaccessible if you're not like part of the club or whatever. What's your future prediction on their relationship? Well, they're both highly specialized, and that's part of why I think you see this isolation. And that's precisely, those were precisely the terms that EAT was using back in the 60s as well. How can we bring these fields together that are developing an isolation?

in a dangerous, potentially dangerous way. But again, I think part of it is, on the one hand, art actually has a track record of creating public institutions or that there are public institutions that have been created for viewing and experiencing art. Theoretically, one wishes they were even more public or more accessible, but they're there. And I think the same thing I would hope might be created. created or really be augmented for technology, which is to say really creating a public institution or a public sphere for technological knowledge and experience in the same way that a museum is,

in an ideal scenario, a civic institution that's really for an audience of anyone who wants to go. In reality, of course, we know that's not always the case, but that's the aim. And I guess I would say that the effort to make a public institution has to exist because everyone thought the internet was going to be that democratizing final utopia. And instead, we've seen the flip side of that, which is the development of ever specialized, ever atomized, ever more esoteric and inward-looking conversations, or even, I don't know if you'd call it a conversation, but just nodes. So how do we start to really invert that and instill a sense of what a public sphere could be for both art and technology? And only then, I think, would those, I think, domains really be able

to talk to each other. You got to take down your paywall. Well, then I wouldn't have a job. But I agree. If someone would pay me, I would take down the pay wall. Pay us all to make this great content. I would definitely take on the paywall. I agree with you. No, it's, you know, that's the conundrum of. of creating content today. And I would say that it is, you know, again, the conundrum of copyright, copy left, all of these things, which is, I firmly believe that information wants to be free to quote another, you know, utopian guide. But right now, it's the information, there wouldn't be any information in many ways if the people weren't there who could have a livelihood to sort of create it. And that's the tough sort of paradox of our

situation now. Totally. But then, yeah. No, I, yes, I get it. My only, my last question, do you have any more questions? I might. I'll see what you. Okay. Yeah. Well, I always liked it, you know, recommended reading. I gave that to you as like a pre-question, so I didn't want to waste it. Well, one book that is, I think, you know, a very great and general sort of argument about some of the historical shifts we've been talking about from the 1960s to the present is a book by Fred Turner called From Counterculture to Cyberculture. And he really traces the transformation of the ideals of the counterculture, which were to, you know, fight the system, bring it down into the system of Silicon Valley, and how those aspirations and even styles really got incorporated into, you know, the most successful sort of wing of capitalism today. I think that's a really strong book for anyone who wants to understand some of these

dynamics. Another book I'll say is more esoteric, but again, I think, it's good to just plug this because that's part of my own perverse desire to do this, but the book by this art historian named Maria Goff, and it's called The Artist as Producer. And that's actually about Russian Revolutionary Art. And it's about a moment in time when in one of the instances that it covers is what's called productivism. And it's when artists as part of wanting to create a new society, which, you know, again, failed for all different kinds of reasons.

But they wanted to and they successfully actually went into infiltrated the factory, the laboratory. They basically became organizers. So they were, artists were devising new ways of organizing labor and sort of subverting the whole conventional wisdom about Fordist, you know, assembly line production. And so it became a social experiment. and a technological one and an organizational one. And the artists were literally driving that. So again, it's a weird, crazy moment in history, but I think it's also really interesting.

It's absolutely applicable. And I think it's, you know, part of what this is is a history of things that people thought of but never came to pass. And I think, you know, in our culture, we're often taught, if it wasn't successful, then you shouldn't pay attention to it. But actually, I think the opposite is true, because then you'll never know what still might be possible in the future. And so you have to explore all of these basically paths not taken. And this was one of them, which I happened to find, you know, really, really fascinating.

I would also put in a plug for trying to read, you know, A, for going to see art, which still exists. IRL and... Well, that's why you're here. We should plug it. No, seriously. Plug the show. And... Oh, sorry.

Yes. Well, there are a number of really interesting shows on right now. There's a show at CCA Wattis here in San Francisco that's exploring art and technology. Even... Well, there's a lot of shows, you know, that are going up in the near future. One show at the Museum of Monter in New York was the Rauschenberg exhibition and that covered some of this material. I would also put in a plea, or not a plea,

but just I think it would be exciting for people to try and read art criticism as well, writing about art now. And as I said, I think the best art criticism can really speak to multiple audiences and that people from really different backgrounds or people who aren't specialists can take something away from good writing about art,

someone else might take something else away from it. But at its best, it can offer that. Where would you start? Well, with Art Forum. Well, obviously, I knew that was coming. I mean, I strive to, you know, we strive to create the best art criticism. Is there like, okay, so do you know who Gay Talese is?

Yes. Like the guy who does all these profiles. Is there like, you know, someone who could go into the past, like just pick a writer. I was like, oh, man, this is like iconic art criticism. As I can start here. Oh, yeah, definitely. I would say Clement Greenberg.

He is, he was wrong about a lot of things, but A, he's an amazing writer. And B, he, reading that criticism will tell you a lot about the entire, edifice of what art is today, all the battles that were being fought, the kinds of art that were being made that basically are still the kind of, let's say, foundation against which artists are responding in some degree or trying to, you know, obviously push beyond still. The other thing is he was often writing for journals, even newspapers, and it's very clear and very, it's very much a polemic, it's very much an argument. And that was from a time when the stakes seemed, really high in a way that almost seems ridiculous or impossible today. At the time, critics in the

50s and then in the 60s were battling it out. And as one critic put it, they were literally fighting for the soul of Western civilization. So then you get a sense of what people held, what they were holding art accountable for and culture accountable for. And I think that's really important. All right. Thanks for. So if you have some time, please leave us a rating and review. And if you want to watch the video or read the transcript, those are both at blog. .ycommodator.com. See you next time.