Artie Vierkant

In conversation with http://artievierkant.com/

Still from Image Objects series, 2011

Issues of materiality, or more precisely the reification of digital entities, seem to run through your work (I’m thinking particularly of Untitled Videos, Monochrome Arc and perhaps even Cairns here). Do you think we learn more about the character of these digital entities through such translation into the physical world (and vice-versa), or is this aspect of your practice more of an attempt to transcend the virtual? How much is the relationship between the virtual and actual worlds a concern of yours?

Actually I often find the opposite — increasingly I feel we learn more about the character of physical entities through digital means. Or at least a huge amount of the things created in a digital environment (if such a designation is important) are quantifying or augmenting things that already exist. For instance, every tree in Paris is now equipped with an RFID chip. For the moment that mostly means we have some sort of efficient database / cataloguing system set up to help us maintain these trees, but as the technology gets more advanced that data will get further and further imbricated into how we conceive of “tree”. So suddenly not only is an object tagged with some unique identifier and a little package of metadata: it’s also sending and receiving signals, interacting with other objects moving around it, and in some way affecting how we interact with it.

I think this kind of virtual-physical relationship in particular interests me, the degree of augmentation or representation that succeeds in actually changing how we think about or interact with an object. This way we can concentrate on building layers of infrastructure that effectively create new spaces.

Within this, however, I sense also a certain fragility, highlighted by your use of styrofoam in your sculpture. What is it about this material that attracts you to it? 

I was initially attracted to styrofoam as a material after a lifetime of seeing formed styrofoam used in packaging. There’s something weird and interesting about those styrofoam shapes as negative space formed to compliment the shape of different products. In kind of a similar way, all of the cuts in my styrofoam sculptures are from brightness levels in frames of video, so you’re seeing a kind of shadow or complimentary form instead of watching the video.

Speaking of those styrofoam pieces for packaging, I remember seeing in my Google Reader images of a really interesting installation using a bunch of them stuck up against the wall. If anyone remembers seeing this too and has the link, my email is avierkant@gmail.com.

Are these ‘negative spaces’ the same ‘new spaces’ in your previous response?

I think the ‘complimentary form’ I mention is the same idea as the ‘new spaces’. When you add a bunch of digital information to objects that are already produced or exist somewhere in space, you create this other layer to them in much the same way that a digitized image is able to be analyzed quantitatively for all of these different facets—brightness, bit depth, resolution, three-dimensional structure. So, in the styrofoam sculptures for instance I can take a certain predetermined form (a video) and completely alter the method of display or playback to arrive at a new form that was always in some way there, but now is very well articulated in the structure of the image itself. I think this has the potential to expose certain things about the form underlying something relatively intangible like video. It doesn’t even really have to be rendered sculpturally, as I do. You can get the same experience by picking any one variable in an image’s overall makeup and charting how that changes frame by frame. A lot of people are doing this now to micro-analyze large chunks of cultural objects for research purposes, but I think there is also a lot of aesthetic or poetic potential to these ways of thinking about objects.

Though when talking about ‘new spaces,’ I was also referencing things like augmented reality (or some variant). Ways of using, let’s say architectural space, in a way where suddenly its uses are more flexible. So far these uses are often closer to following a museum audio tour or having a heads-up-display overlaying Yelp ratings. But as these things improve you can imagine entire public spaces that don’t have a lot of distinctive ornamentation, but instead display different things based on the subject moving through the space.

This is a bit sci-fi idealist, but well within the realm of possibility. What’s most recently fascinating to me is the number of free tools for essentially creating post-production augmented reality. I guess that’s just an overwrought way of saying “visual effects” like in films, but for instance this really caught my eye recently: 
 

Demo of tracking workflow in Blender from Sebastian König on Vimeo.

I think the last century has done much to highlight the extent to which science fiction informs our culture and society; virtual reality being just one example of a technology that has evolved as much through imagination as through science.
You have recently been involved in the * new jpegs * show in Sweden. To what extent does this show correlate / overlap with your ongoing theorising of the Image Object?

We went into * new jpegs * wanting to make a very object-based show. I think pretty early on we decided to then take the documentation of those objects from the show and alter them into a bunch of new images (which might end up not even looking anything like the originals) to essentially create new pieces that would have a life only as images. This part of the show hasn’t really surfaced yet, so if you look on the Johan Berggren Gallery website all of the images there are straight shots of the show.

The concept of the show pretty directly overlaps with what I’ve called the “image object.” A big part of the idea is to assert that there really isn’t that big of a difference between experiencing something through the image versus seeing a produced object in real life. So in this show, we get to play with that by making viewing the image documentation the more unique experience. You can equally see the gallery documentation as go to the show itself, but the altered versions of the same images that surface later are things that you just couldn’t make physically.

I do more or less the same thing in my series of the same name, Image Objects, (two pieces of which are in the show), except usually I try to actively suppress straight documentation of those pieces. The idea there is not just to make seeing the pieces “in person” distinctive from seeing them blogged around online, but also to assert that when you see how they look unaltered you can’t help but associate them with the various versions you’ve already seen.

What’s interesting is while all of us in the show — myself, Chris Coy, Parker Ito, Jon Rafman, Ben Schumacher — are all interested in image dissemination and alteration like this, we all go about it in really different ways. Ben creates these really interesting collaged layers over his install shots, and then documents everywhere they end up disseminated on the Internet. When Jon finishes a print-based project, before it’s even produced he’ll start disseminating an image of the print photoshopped onto a blank gallery wall. Parker’s Parked Domain Girl paintings involve him versioning the same jpeg over and over until his personal brand can overtake or become synonymous with one of the most widely-circulated images on the internet. And Chris is really deeply invested in post-production as a theoretical format — the sculpture he sent is holding one of his new Pseudochrome paintings, which are a chroma-key greenscreen color with white tracking markers in the corners. So they’re made with the specific purpose of overlaying other images or video on top of them in post, rather than holding a fixed image in the frame.

Running through all of this is an exploration of a post-medium condition. If your image object is post-medium, and therefore looking to surpass issues of materiality, what might it replace these issues with? For what reason the emphasis on the image as a central focus in a post-medium environment?

The “image” in this case is a stand in for any kind of mediation, really. So it’s not so much a focus on the still image as the forefront of cultural exchange post-medium, but moving images, audio, any kind of media that could readily be transformed into other media. You might say “it could just be ‘image’ instead of ‘image object’, then” but I think calling it “image object” actually ties these intangible / immaterial digital files to the fact that they are material.  

The biggest issue is that for certain things we’re going to need a different sense of materiality. I think this is already happening. People in Internet-saturated countries already have profoundly different senses of what it means to “own” an object than before. Now ownership means access, instead of dominion. This makes sense as a cultural object has profoundly less use in the form of, say, a DVD stashed in someone’s personal collection, than it does being widely and immediately disseminated.
One of my favorite images from the last century is this illustration by Harry Grant Dart that ran in Life Magazine in 1911:
 

 
I think this is kind of incredible as it really accurately captures the “media center” mentality that over time has gone from being a fixed “home entertainment system” to a culture of small portable devices. The man in that illustration is listening to the opera, a news service, has a stock ticker in hand, is projecting a moving image (which lets him have a live video feed of his son, golf matches, and what’s going on at “the office”), has ordered food, and even has something holding a book for him. As hokey and exaggerated as this is, it’s still a nice way of looking at what we take for granted now. The post-media condition, if anything, gives us a way to break away from the very confining realm of personal information ownership. Or at least have all of these various things compressed into such small and overlapping space that we don’t fetishize each piece of media individually with its own box and cover art &c.

Is there such thing as an image subject?

Maybe that could be one way to talk about artificial intelligence. Or “image subjectivity” would be what happens when you reiterate an opinion. I don’t know if that’s a road I would go down theoretically, but I would say that given enough time the interactions I was talking about earlier between objects in the “Internet of Things” — active RFID enabled objects — could be seen as a subjectivity. Maybe that’s an “object subject.”

All this ties in neatly with your citation of Lauren Christiansen in your Image Object Post-Internet essay - with this changed emphasis on the materiality of the object, it seems important to stress that ‘transmission becomes as important as creation’. Yet how are issues of transmission affected by the conceptual, minimalist aesthetic in your work as compared to the more obvious meme-friendly aesthetic perhaps more popularly associated with internet practice?

I think the distinction between my work and being meme- or Internet-friendly all depends on how you look at things. The kinds of traditions my work steals from (or “is aware of”) — minimalism, collage, conceptualism, structural film, &c. — are all pretty much just memes as well. If anything, because of what I take from it’s actually unintentionally internet-friendly. This kind of makes sense as, if you look at the big sites for Contemporary Art aggregation on the Internet (the VVORKs and Contemporary Art Dailys and Mousse Magazines) 90% of that stuff is really low-risk and easy to share around. Not that that’s necessarily a bad thing, that’s kind of what those sites are for.

Now that VVORK and Contemporary Art Daily got Google Alerts for this I wonder if they’ll never post me.

Conversely, maybe if we write really nice things about them here they’ll repost this? (Low-risk sentimemes.) The practices you refer to as memes here represent a moment of compromise, or balance, between formal simplicity and conceptual complexity. Maybe this is the intelligent use of memes on the net.

I like this term “sentimeme.”

Unnatural History have drawn the comparison between your essay and Benjamin’s Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. For me this is a highly politicised essay, or at least one that sketches a highly politicised role for the reproducible art object. To what extent do you see political issues within your own work, or in the wider practice of post-internet art? 

Politicised is a good way to put it. The problem I have with my essay The Image Object Post-Internet, and with much of art in general actually, is in how narrowly utopian it all is. This is encapsulated a little bit in one of the first footnotes, which is just a link to the wikipedia article on the global digital divide — in short, the massive disparities between developing and developed countries in terms of Internet availability, use, and the rate at which these countries can catch up. There’s a tremendous social and class problem here when I’m a young white male from the United States writing about the ubiquitous authorship the Internet affords and glossing over how completely uneven things still are.

That said, the essay is politicised in the sense that I’m writing towards something, and laying out in brief a set of ideas that I feel are very important in culture moving forward. I honestly believe that we are set on a path towards truly ubiquitous authorship. We just have to avoid catastrophe first.

Brad Troemel, a few years ago, really liked to cite this statistic that something like 98.9% of public libraries had Internet access. That’s just here in the United States and not globally, but if we really think about it at the moment that percentage doesn’t nearly extend to access to tools like Photoshop or video editing software, though this is really quickly changing. What that 98.9% figure gives us is the ability to fulfil something Benjamin talks about in The Work of Art — every image, every story, every idea has the ability to become “an object for simultaneous collective experience.”

An interesting aspect of the Image Object essay was its submission in itself as your jstchillin project. We have seen a clear trend in artists become critics alongside their practice in recent years, might this suggest a turn towards art as, simply, critical analysis? With art’s ‘expanded-field’ ever widening, this might represent the purest (not sure that’s the right word) form of art, at least conceptually. Further, what relationship do you perceive between your artistic practice and this more critical, evaluative work?

Part of why I wrote the essay was just to concretely state some of the ideas and concerns I was thinking about in art making today that I didn’t think I saw coming from other people. There’s a lot going on right now, and at least at the time of publishing the essay there wasn’t quite as much written dialogue happening among a critical subset of very young non-jaded artists. I wouldn’t say that the essay itself was a piece of art. I swapped it in deliberately instead of publishing a web-based artwork so that a community might see it and talk about it. Otherwise I’d just be posting it to Facebook or my own website, which doesn’t volunteer itself to being read as much as releasing a piece of writing as part of an exhibition series.

I think sometimes people can forget that with tools like their computers they have the ability not just to make any kind of image or video or whatever, but also to share a profound amount of ideas. This is probably why the essay covers a lot of ground, just to highlight some issues and promote debate.

I don’t tend to think of my work as solely critique-based, but most of what I do tends to stem from being preoccupied with the ideas we’ve been talking about. Sometimes the correlation between the ideas and the artwork is more direct than other times.

Avatar in 3D poses crucial questions about the intrusion of representation into physical space. Do you see this inside/outside dialectic as working on a strictly formal level, or do you think three-dimensionality has wider discursive implications? 

I think things like 3D digital presentation (I don’t even mean in a glasses-movie-theatre kind of way) has serious implications on the future of image making and our everyday lived environments. But at the same time it’s kind of interesting because there is absolutely nothing 3D about the vast majority of what I make.

Even the Image Objects series, which are these sort of sculpture / print hybrids are built to be photographed and flattened. My video AVATAR IN 3D, too, is in no way 3D. I think in large part a lot of my generation are so used to dealing with flattened images of real objects that the actual dimensionally doesn’t matter so much, it’s more about how the image suggests space or dimensionally. Like Jon Rafman’s Brand New Paint Jobs, this is all 3D rendering software being used to allude to space.

Someone once offered to help me make and screen a 3D-glasses required 4K resolution version of that Avatar piece. I’d still be really interested in doing that, though AVATAR IN 3D in 3D in 4K maybe doesn’t have the same ring to it.

I think the emphasis on everyday lived environments in significant, and goes back to your concerns over post-production augmented realities. Even alluding to these conceptually begins to shape them as our lived reality (again, the cultural role of science fiction).

To focus of the past as much as the future, you have work on ubuweb and your essay has been archived at both AAAARG.org & cont3xt.net. How important is digital archiving to you?

Archiving in general is very important to me, and I think digital archives online just happen to be the most amazing way to do it. I have tremendous respect for those institutions, especially UbuWeb and AAAARG as they’re entirely pirate archives that jumped in to fill massive voids in our ability to access some amazingly important pieces of culture.  If you haven’t read it, Kenneth Goldsmith’s (founder of UbuWeb) open letter to a group of hackers who were targeting their archive provides a really interesting glimpse into the workings and ethics of Ubu.

I’ve been reading a lot of Mark Fisher recently. Through Eliot, he comes up with this great sentence: ‘The new defines itself in response to what is already established; at the same time, the established has to reconfigure itself in response to the new.’ I think this is a neat way in which to marry this concern over archiving with this exploration of future (cultural) landscapes; Fisher locates it within the the relevant political dimensions.

To change focus to language, you use a great deal of forward slashes in on your website, a structural and textual device that has always intrigued me. Aside from the aesthetic quality of ///////////////, what do you think is it that appeals to you?

To be honest it’s just something I started doing. I have a bunch of drawings I’ve never released that are pretty much just huge pieces of paper with repetitions of that form.

I do, however, remember being more drawn to the form once I heard about how Tim Berners-Lee, who created the world wide web system, publicly apologized for including the “//” in the “http://” formatting because of how many extra keystrokes it’s caused everyone.

On a less elevated note, but something that has been at the back of my mind since becoming aware of jazz a few years ago (Art Pepper, Art Tatum, Art Blakey, Art Farmer), do you think there is a link between having a name such as Artie and becoming an artist, or is it just a happy coincidence?

I would hope it’s pure coincidence. But then my last name is also Vierkant, which means “square” in Dutch, and that kind of fits my aesthetic. So maybe that set up my destiny.

!! +1. Have you come across any good sites lately? 

A little while back a former student of mine shared some of her new work with me and I’ve been so into it. Her name is Adriana Ramic and her portfolio is here: http://69.12.181.95/

Also:
 
Tahrir Documents - http://www.tahrirdocuments.org/about/
 
The Small Crowd Gathers to Watch Me Cry production blog - http://smallcrowdgathers.com/
 
This video, in which the teenage creator of the “51 things in my room” meme expresses the pressure of having subscribers -

Still from Image Objects series, 2011

http://artievierkant.com/