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Rhizome Presents: JODI at ON CANAL

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On Saturday, December 1, Rhizome will premiere a new installation by legendary Dutch duo JODI at 322A Canal. This project follows their recent work for And/Or Gallery in Pasadena (pictured above) and Upstream Gallery in Amsterdam. Like those it will invite users to explore a unique Cartesian IRL space as well as an invisible URL dataspace. Visitors will traverse a bay on Canal Street, engaging with a bespoke structure and altered WIFI network. 

At 12:30PM that day, JODI will discuss the project as part of a free public program at Anthology Film Archives. At 4PM, they will be at the space on Canal welcoming visitors. View the full schedule, along with access hours through December 7.

This project is presented as part of Screen Spaces, a multi-venue exhibition exploring the geography of moving image, organized by Vere van Gool for Rotterdam's Het Nieuwe Instituut. This program is made possible with support by the Consulate General of The Netherlands in New York. 322A Canal is part of ON CANAL by Wallplay. Rhizome's artistic program is directed by Michael Connor, with Aria Dean, assistant curator of net art. 

Recently, JODI's Automatic Rain (1995) was presented as part of our Net Art Anthology initiative. 

 


Rhizome would like to thank Vere van Gool, Het Nieuwe Instituut, Robert Kloos and the Consulate General of The Netherlands in New York, Wallplay, and Nick DeMarco.


Model Behavior: An Interview with Jonas Lund

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This article accompanies the inclusion of Jonas Lund's I'm Here and There (2011) in the online exhibition Net Art Anthology. 

Eileen Isagon Skyers: Tell me about how you got started with programming and net art.

Jonas Lund: I was completing a bachelor’s degree in photography at the Rietveld in Amsterdam, and started programming websites for friends and classmates, because everybody needs portfolio websites.  I realized photography as a medium in itself was very restrictive—like the apparatus of the camera is somehow the terminator for what the work should be.Then I discovered that you can make websites that are somehow works of art too.

I spent a lot of time in front of the computer, and it's a pretty lonely reality. You have social interactions, but it’s not really social if you don’t get to look anyone in the eyes, or get a reaction to what you say and do. So imhereandthere.com was a way to share that sense: I’m here, and you can be with me at the same time.

It was quite early on in the privacy discourse. That discourse continued when I created publicaccess.me, and Selfsurfing, which was an evolution of imhereandthere.com, except it was a Chrome extension. It cloned my router set-up so that you have all my tabs open and get a proper idea of what I am doing. That ran for a bit, and I decided to only activate it once it's exhibited, so it's been dormant.

In a way, it’s somehow the most accurate sensation that you should have while browsing.

EIS: Because everyone is being watched?

JL: Yeah. Our bodily response to the erosion of privacy should be as if someone is sitting on your shoulder or looking over your shoulder all the time. But you don’t feel it, so you don’t actually recognize that it’s horrendous.

EIS: Were there certain browsing behaviors you would avoid because of publicaccess.me?

JL: We all have different facets of ourselves that we want to expose or not. It's interesting to recognize that I didn’t think about the implications beforehand.

EIS: If this work was a criticism of data collection—a self-breaching of your own privacy—were there challenges to making art that critiques this kind of practice, using data itself?

JL: I think it's the only way to do it. Most of my work takes that position. Whether it’s the art world as a system, or an online system, it’s critiquing those power structures.

EIS: You use a lot of your work to bridge gaps between the author and the viewer, using dimensions like time and performance to allow them to sort of unfold in like a very participatory way. Can you talk about some of your motivations behind that?

JL: I think it comes down to agency and power, in some sense. It’s the fascination with, or the desire to understand, how systems function; how the systems are reached; how we form our beliefs. I can orchestrate certain scenarios and situations; not so much for being interested in the results, but rather, the act of participation itself. You can instill, or produce, this state of thinking about how systems function.

EIS: So putting yourself in that position allows you to become the orchestrator of sorts, and to question the system itself.

JL: Yeah something like that. I mean, I think one of the cleanest words in that regard is paintshop.biz. It was a shared canvas that everyone could paint on online. I design the system, set up all the rules. And within that framework there are lots of things performing. Part of the motivation behind a lot of my work is to remove myself from the scenario.

EIS:     What do you think our data reveals about us? And then secondly, what do you think we would do if we were able to visualize that data if it was physically manifest in some way?

JL:       In the end, it describes everything. That’s the sad nature of it. It takes the implicit and explicit traces you give off simply by participating online on social media. It’s the worst surveillance machinery ever created. Its ability to model your behavior is extremely precise, and it's terrifying.

 

Artist Profile: Jakob Kudsk Steensen

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Header Image: Jakob Kudsk Steensen, RE-ANIMATED, 2018. 

The latest in a series of interviews with artists who have a significant body of work that makes use of or responds to network culture and digital technologies.
 

Ben Vickers: Throughout your work there exists an implicit and explicit challenge to assumed notions of the “natural”; whether that be in the entire construction of an existent island from online material, in Primal Tourism or the hybrid synthesis of real-time data flows and photographic textures ported into a simulated environment, in the case of Pando Endo.

Haraway once stated in her now epochal A Cyborg Manifesto“Our best machines are made of sunshine; they are all light and clean because they are nothing but signals, electromagnetic waves, a section of a spectrum [..] Cyborgs are ether, quintessence.” Could you speak to these “natural” antagonisms in your artworks, both in subject matter and their physical presence as matter in the world?

Jakob Steensen: My primary interest as an artist is how we psychologically and emotionally relate to the climate.

Ether has historically been used to think about everything from radio waves to gods, clouds and chemistry. I like the word because it has a ghost-like ring to it, and it can refer to something that appears both material and immaterial. In comparison, my projects are based on real world organic material, which I digitize with 3D scanners, photogrammetry, satellite terrain data and photos of organic textures I take while immersing myself in environments—often for months at a time. In the studio, I reassemble the virtual source material into new worlds that people experience in my exhibitions.

I show my virtual environments within larger physical installations, which mimic the ambience and material of the digital worlds. I do not see my work as purely digital, but as installations of landscapes where organic materials from the past meet the present, in physical and virtual forms. I am interested in how organic materials and infrastructures weave into our lives, and imaginations of our relationship to the world.

In Pando Endo, for example, I photographed several aspen trees across a mountain in New Mexico. What we perceive as individual trees composing a forest is, from a biological perspective, a single unified organism: the oldest and largest in the world. Aspen trees are clonal, so every tree you see in a given colony has identical DNA, and every tree is connected to a single ancient root system. In my studio I built an algorithm that remixed a number of my photographs of roots, bark, and moss of many aspen trees together into a single new structure shown as video and in virtual reality.


Primal Tourism, the other work you mentioned, is a digital construction of the entire island of Bora Bora in French Polynesia. To make the virtual world I sourced hundreds of images by visitors to the island, and from that material I created sceneries and locations on the island that people can explore through VR. In a sense, I built a reality sourced from tourists’ images of an island. When I show the artwork, the audience enter a physical space with wood, lights, sand, and postcards I made from screenshots of the virtual landscape. I think contrasting the physical and virtual locations makes it more immersive. I also make sure not to hide the technology used to run the art works. I want to emphasize that our perception of ecology today is informed by data and technology.

Jakob Kudsk Steensen, Pando Endo, 2017. 

BV: This hybridization of technology and nature speaks very clearly of a type of synthesis in processes and materials that will only accelerate with the rise of biotechnologies and autonomous vehicles/entities intent on capturing, categorizing, and cataloging the world. I’d love to understand how this process evolved in your subsequent works?

JS:In Aquaphobia, which I made one year ago, I developed a virtual replica of Louis Valentino Park and Pier in Red Hook, Brooklyn. The digital reconstruction is inhabited by past plant and soil types, which were there before it was urbanized. In the piece, you follow a sentient water microbe reciting a poem around the landscape. The poem tells a story about how you, as the viewer in the VR headset, emotionally broke up with the landscape and the sentient water organism. To make the work I used satellite maps of the area, deep sea images of water microbes, and 3D scans of plants, soil, and rocks. As a result, the work appears fantastical and mystical, but it is de-facto composed of real-world digitized organic material.

The last time I exhibited Aquaphobia was in Trondheim for the Art and Technology Biennale. We had two tons of red clay, the same type that also existed historically in Brooklyn, dug up from an island near Trondheim and shipped to the exhibition space, RAKE. Visitors physically enter a space that mimics the virtual landscape of Aquaphobia, and the floor has the same materiality as Red Hook did in the past. It is interesting for me to work with this kind of geological, physical, and virtual displacement with enough room for the audience to feel that they are free to explore the real and digital landscapes.

When you take apart the concept of nature and reassemble it into something “cyborg” (to refer to your comment), then you open freedom to accept and explore new worlds and possibilities. To reference back to Haraway in your first question– I think Haraway gained popularity in contemporary art discourses after A Cyborg Manifesto because of how it abolishes classical dichotomies between nature/culture and technology/humans/emotions. When you move beyond the concept of natural, then you are free to rethink gender, ecology, technology, and these categories’ relationships with us. I’d like to think that I do this by literally collecting organic material, digitizing it, then rearranging it into new constellations. I think that we live in a time where technology and the climate transform at paces quicker than it is possible for the individual to truly perceive, and I hope that my work offers some form of new understanding of what it means to exist in a time where data and biology fluidly interconnect.

BV: In your early works there is a sense of isolation, at times desolation. In more recent work, this feeling seems to have transmuted into an exploration of loss or embodied grief. RE-ANIMATED,  your latest work, sets out to answer the question, “How will future generations use virtual worlds to remember and experience species which have ceased to exist?”

How did you come to explore these questions personally, and what do you believe is at stake in answering them? RE-ANIMATED suggests the potential of revitalizing life lost, a resurrection, rather than purely memorializing something lost.

JS:My work started with a wide infrastructural angle and point of view in A Cartography of Fantasia (2015), a project made with the residency AADK in a desert of Spain. I spent two months driving around documenting the plant and animal life of derelict tourist infrastructures. I slept in a tent in ruins of desert resorts, immersing myself in the landscape. The fantasy of the landscape is a tropical climate, but it is, in its ecological reality, a red desert that has more in common with Northern Africa than tourist postcard visions of a beach landscape with a pool.

I realize that I have spent a big part of my life in relative solitude, working digitally, communicating with friends through computers, exploring landscapes through online worlds and so forth. Terratic Animism is a work from 2016 that specifically explores themes of isolation within grander technological and natural histories. To make the work, I spent two months exploring derelict energy infrastructures. My aim was to oscillate between something associative, personal, and discursive modes. I also showed Terratic Animism on video screens in Times Square for “Midnight Moment”. Sometimes something special happens when your solitary self meets with a large public space.

My new work RE-ANIMATED stems from real audio recordings of a bird that became extinct during the late 1980s. As data, the bird’s mating call lives on in a ghost-like condition. I heard the Kauai’O’o’s song two years ago on YouTube, and it has haunted me ever since. In the comments section I read thousands of burial memorials dedicated to the bird. The comments section almost became a form of altar, and with half a million views on YouTube, I started to imagine people sitting––like myself––staring in solitude at their monitor, looking for some sense of connection to a fleeting media world. The bird song also brings forth memories and emotions connected to past natural conditions. I think technological advancements, digital media and the internet, have transformed how we socialize, work and identify our individual relationships with our surroundings. However, the transformations have happened quicker than we can adapt. I wrote an article for Engadgeton this theme back in May.

RE-ANIMATED is my artistic way of adapting to new ecological and technological realities. It explores a new form of existence, where species can live on as data. Memories of the past are digitized and transformed into archives, which are accessible online. Some future generations may only be able to access natural parks through virtual reality.

Jakob Kudsk Steensen, RE-ANIMATED, 2018. Installation View: Tranen Contemporary Art Center, 2018. Photo David Stjernholm.  

BV: What you describe and capture in this work is intense and illustrative of a process of grief that it feels many have disengaged from. I am myself deeply sceptical of the efforts of de-extinction projects, as an extension of the ethos of techno-solutionism, but I recognize that a process of thinking through and engaging actively with the issue of extinction is a fundamental call in this moment. I wondered in thinking through these subjects whether there are thinkers or theorists that have had a particular influence on your own thinking?

JS: Writer Britt Wray recently visited my studio. She published a well-known book titled Rise of the Necrofauna in which she interviewed many of the leading scientists, organizations, corporations and universities engaged with de-extinction. We circled around the subject of de-extinction ethics, and like you, I am critical of it. However, as an artist I am interested in underlying cultural histories, which motivate preservation and de-extinction both. It is the deeper psychological aspects that interest me. De-extinction is a theme that characterizes the present, I think. We are faced with future techno-utopian scenarios, and dreams, as well as tales of complete species extinction.

Sociologist Anthony Giddens gave a talk titled “Between Immortality and Armaggeddon: Living gin a High Opportunity, High Risk Society” a few years ago, and it has influenced my thinking greatly. Curator Toke Lykkeberg pointed me towards it, and we opened my first institutional solo show at Tranen Center for Contemporary art this November 8. Giddens says that we either face certain future ecological doom, or a new reality unbound by the biological limitations and infrastructures of the past. The catch is, he says, that we have no past historical situation to fully mirror ourselves in and thereby assess the risks of future actions. As a result, we are unable to project into the future, and we currently exist in a kind of hazy middle ground. It is this middle ground that I want to explore with RE-ANIMATED.

Anthropologist Stefan Helmreich is also of interest to me, because of the way he transforms biological studies of deep sea microbes into fresh ways of perceiving how our individual lives are connected to oceanic biomass transformations. Jeff Vandermeer, the author of the Southern ReachTrilogy is also inspiring, primarily for his highly imaginative and wild descriptions of individuals, infrastructures, and ecosystems intertwining.

BV: The scale and ambition of the projects you undertake in your work necessitate the need for a larger team, whilst many artists these days have large studios, these studios are predominantly understood as being composed of workers, rather than a team working together collaboratively to realize a vision. Could explain how your recent projects are realized as a team, and how this practice is informed by your previous experience?

JS: I have worked in creative industries before, as a producer and as a lead 3D developer. Many friends in my network work on AAA games or for agencies and brands. This is an amazing global and vibrant community of people that I love, but I have also seen it lead to burnout.

What sometimes happens is that a director walks in with an idea and a deadline. A producer is hired to execute it, and a team of developers are hired to execute the director’s idea on a tight budget and deadline. When I do commercial projects, I operate within these kinds of structures. But it is a model that limits true creative technological exploration, and you are, occasionally, feeding the ego and brand of someone else. As an artist I am interested in offering an alternative. 

When I work with people it is because of something they are already making, something they are experimenting with and would like to share. Right now, I am working with Michael Riesman, Musical Director for the Philip Glass Ensemble. With Philip he had created an algorithmic digital pipe organ that continually evolves. It sounds like classical music, but it is, in fact, never the same and the melody changes all the time. The feedback Michael got from a concert hall was that it was not “musical” enough. Having spoken with him for a few years, I invited him to further explore his technology and have it become part of RE-ANIMATED. As a result, we have a digital algorithmic pipe organ connected to virtual plants and moss which react to his music. He gets to freely unfold his creative vision for the technology, and he is entirely credited for his part.

I also worked with Andy Thomas, a very experiential developer in New Zealand. He travels the world on a small budget recording birds and converting them into stunning fluid simulations. I invited him to make one of the bird calls from the MP3 song of the extinct Kauai O’o. Another friend, Todd Bryant, is making voice and gaze reactive systems, so that in VR your breathing and eyes influence the virtual landscape. Todd is an amazing friendly person, who is a big part of the NYC VR community. Lykkeberg has been a major help to this project, and Jazia Hammoudi, my studio manager, who helps with everything from research to writing and project realization.

As an artist, I try not to be too tightly strapped into specific patterns of production to streamline my work, because I want to be able to develop worlds which appear fresh and imaginative each time. Rarely do I hire someone to simply solve a specific task for me or to execute my vision. I aim to let people who are doing experimental ecology-oriented media projects unfold their passion projects, as part of larger conversations and collaborations I organize through my practice.


For my solo exhibition at Tranen in Denmark, I worked with the Museum of Natural History in NYC and Harvestworks in Manhattan for audio development, as well as Unreal Engine, Houdini VFX, Max MSP and Bidule. I have established relationships with these companies, and my work is shared across developer forums and communities too. I have found an increased interest from commercial 3D companies to support artists. Lykkeberg and I got support from The Danish Arts Council, Bikuben Foundation and Mana Contemporary to realize the work. I was able to pay all involved and my own salary while making the project. I am interested in developing a structure that allows both myself and others to use technology to imagine, conceptualize, and share something that you cannot imagine until it comes into being. Like an infrastructure for radical imaginations expressed through immersive installations.

Jakob Kudsk Steensen, Terratic Animism (still), 2016.  

BV: You have said that a key aspect of your work is an experiential slowing down, the development of a slow media. Could you speak to this desire and why you consider it to be important in this moment?

JS: It is not easy to create room for contemplation and appreciation in a digital culture today that structurally (and financially) survives on clicks, likes, and spectacular effects. I have spent the past three years developing a model that allows me to realize large-scale projects, which are imaginative and emphasize intuitive uses of technology. 3D models are handcrafted and hand painted (I digitally paint on 3D models with my own photographs of organic materials), audio is recorded in the field and remixed digitally, and I work with friends to develop experiential technologies. I use sensory tools and methods from first-person computer game worldbuilding. I spend 3-6 months building each world, and every texture and virtual effect is included to evoke sensations of humidity, dryness, cold, warmth, muddyness, and so forth. The ability to evoke memories in your body of different elements is attractive to me, and I prefer to provoke sensory reactions, rather than discursive or interactive ones. Working in a way that is slow, thoughtful, and meticulous has become important to me.
There is something to be said about persistence and depth in our time of speed, hype, and commercialization of everything. When you read a book you enter a form of reflective solitude, where words appear within your own head, but the words are shared by another human. That to me is a beautiful intimate relationship. In many ways, I think literature is the most radical art form of the century. I hope my slow worlds feel intimate to people, and I hope they have sensory dimensions able evoke curiosity and corporal presence.

BONUS ROUND

Age:

31

Location:

NYC

How/when did you begin working creatively with technology?

 I started to modify a video game called Unreal Tournament as a teenager. It is essentially the same software I use in my work today (Unreal Engine) in a more updated version.

Where did you go to school? What did you study? I  studied fine arts at Central St. Martins in London and art history in Copenhagen for my MA. My undergraduate degree is in visual culture and anthropology.

What do you do for a living or what occupations have you held previously?

I am fortunate enough to make a living from my art. When I need to work on other things, I work as a level designer, environment artist, and art director for video games and virtual reality productions. Before that, I worked in phone sales and car parking, and I freelanced editing books, curating, and doing small cultural gigs. It is my aim to keep building an infrastructure as a studio, that allows me to collaborate and build imaginative worlds for people to experience.

What does your desktop or workspace look like? (Pics or screenshots please!)

National Film Board of Canada and Rhizome Collaborate to Enhance Emulated Browsers in Webrecorder

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Today, Rhizome and the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) are pleased to announce a growing technical collaboration on Webrecorder's remote browser system to ensure sustained access to important interactive digital films and web-based artworks in the NFB's collection. A federal cultural agency within the portfolio of the Canadian Heritage Department, the NFB is a public producer and distributor of Canadian content. Webrecorder, a project of Rhizome, is an open source web archiving platform used to collect, store and share interactive captures of web pages.

The result of this partnership will be significant enhancements to Webrecorder such that it becomes an ideal tool for meeting the NFB's needs as it works to preserve more than 100 interactive web-based productions in its collection. Through this project, Canada's audiovisual legacy will be better preserved and safeguarded for generations to come, even in the midst of major changes in web technology such as the discontinuation of support for Adobe Flash Player, scheduled to occur in 2020. All users of Webrecorder will be able to benefit from the enhancements made through this collaboration.

Webrecorder remains the only free-to-use, open source web archiving platform of its kind and is hosted online at webrecorder.io. Software development is core to Rhizome's multi-tiered support of born-digital art and culture. Through this partnership, software developers at the NFB and Rhizome will enhance Webrecorder’s capacity to share fully interactive, high-fidelity archival copies of contemporary and legacy websites through emulation of fixed versions of popular web browsers. The NFB's collection of interactive works for the web can be viewed at nfb.ca/interactive.

The NFB will also be integrating web archives created with Webrecorder in its innovative, state-of-the-art Media Asset Management (MAM) system. Custom built in partnership with Atempo Digital Archive, the MAM manages the NFB’s massive digital-assets collection, comprising six Petabytes of content. The NFB/Rhizome collaboration will demonstrate how free, open source tools can be greatly improved through cooperative work and implemented to meet complex institutional needs such as those of the NFB.

The challenge of preserving the experience of the NFB's wide variety of interactive web projects initiated the collaboration between the NFB and Rhizome. Finding a means of archiving and replaying the interactive experience of a project initially conceived for the web is instrumental in the NFB's ongoing quest to push the boundaries of new technologies. The NFB R&D team has been working with Rhizome's Webrecorder team for over a year to achieve its preservation objectives for its entire collection of interactive productions for the web.

We'll look forward to sharing technical updates on this work at the Webrecorder blog. We're excited to develop Webrecorder further, and enhance access to NFB's important collection of born-digital art. 

Read the full press release with NFB: English, French.

Image Above: Online and app artworks currently on view at nfb.ca

 

A Year of Bad Links

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Dean Kissick, New York editor for Spike Quarterly, joins Rhizome’s Aria Dean and Lauren Studebaker for episode 2 of Rhizome’s podcast. He opens the conversation with a quote from someone named Matt on his group DM, who seemed to capture the zeitgeist when he lamented, “This was the worst year for the internet yet. Almost all content produced was garbage. The general experience of being online was sheer agony and the downstream effects seemed to be universally negative with no discernible silver lining.”

Listen now to Aria, Dean, and Lauren as they recount the experience of being online in 2018 in harrowing detail.

Now on view at the New Museum: "The Art Happens Here"!

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Alexei Shulgin, 386DX, c. 1998. Computer graphics and sound. Performed hourly. Courtesy the artist.

"The Art Happens Here: Net Art's Archival Poetics" is now on view at the New Museum through May 26, 2019. In sixteen works from throughout net art history, this exhibition showcases a wide range of forms—websites, software, sculpture, graphics, books, and merchandise—while offering a space for considering the internet as social process, material infrastructure, and lived experience. The works on view have been selected from "Net Art Anthology," our major online exhibition featuring one hundred works that sketch a possible canon for net art.

Learn more about the exhibition and how to visit the New Museum.

"The Art Happens Here" is accompanied by a significant, 435-page catalogue detailing the full "Net Art Anthology," with new thematic essays by Michael Connor, Aria Dean, Ceci Moss, Josephine Bosma, and others. A limited number are available on pre-sale at our webstore

Books will be on-hand, and for sale, at a catalogue launch event at the New Museum on January 31, 2019. Info and tickets.


This exhibition is made possible by the generous support of the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Art Foundation.

Additional support provided by Greg & Yukari Pass, Mihail Lari & Scott Murray, Fred Benenson, Josh Wolfe, Raquel Cayre, and Lisa Schiff.

We gratefully acknowledge the following:

Norwegian Consulate General New York

Dutch Culture USA program by the Consulate General of the Netherlands in New York

Consulate General of the Federal Republic of Germany

Special thanks to the Producers Council of the New Museum.

Intel generously provided Intel® NUCs to present “The Art Happens Here.”

 

 

Rhizome’s Winter-Spring Public Programs at the New Museum

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As the days grow longer and winter turns to spring, Rhizome will present a series of public programs at the New Museum. Many accompany “The Art Happens Here: Net Art’s Archival Poetics,” our exhibition on view at the museum through May 26. We hope you will join for some, many, or all!


All Our Visited Links: The Art Happens Here Book Launch
Thursday, January 31, 7pm
This event will launch The Art Happens Here: Net Art Anthology, a new 400-page publication encapsulating our two-year endeavor to sketch a possible canon for net art. Hosted by book editors Michael Connor, Aria Dean, and Dragan Espenschied, the event will feature a lively series of presentations, readings, and performances, including a rare live appearance by artist Alexei Shulgin’s “cyberpunk rock band” 386 DX—a beige, worn-looking computer that “plays” rock hits by Nirvana and the Sex Pistols on a 40 MHz chip.

Physical Tactics for Digital Colonialism
Thursday, February 28, 7pm 
In the premiere of this performance-lecture, commissioned and presented by Rhizome, artist Morehshin Allahyari illuminates her concept of digital colonialism in relation to 3-D printing. Since 2016, Allahyari has advanced the concept of digital colonialism to characterize the tendency for information technologies to be deployed in ways that reproduce colonial power relations. This performance focuses on the 3-D scanner, which is widely used by archaeologists to capture detailed data about physical artifacts.

Let’s Talk Net Art: Art and the Network Before 1989
Thursday, March 21, 7pm 
This program will feature a talk by critic Josephine Bosma, and the presentation of video clips and other materials exploring several early artistic experiments with networks, illuminating their particular stakes, and addressing their relatively overlooked status in cultural memory.

Seven on Seven
Saturday, April 27
If you're reading this on rhizome.org, you likely know our flagship event. The twelfth edition will pairs artists and technologists to create new things. More soon! 

Arcangel Surfware @ Rhizome x New Museum
Saturday, May 18, 11am–6pm, talk at 3pm
The multinational “non-aspirational lifestyle brand” Arcangel Surfware returns to NYC for a pop up presented as part of the exhibition “The Art Happens Here.” This all-day celebration of surfing the web will include a retail environment and a presentation on Arcangel's work by critic/curator Ed Halter, presented by Electronic Arts Intermix.

Cover Image: Morehshin Allahyari, Lamassu, from the Material Speculation: ISIS series (2015–16). Courtesy the artist and Upfor Gallery. 

The Making of Net Art Anthology: New from Rhizome and Google Arts & Culture

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Over the coming weeks, Net Art Anthology will come to a close, and along with the launch of "The Art Happens Here" exhibition and publication, we're beginning the important task of documenting all the essential scholarly research and preservation work that comprised its making.

Digital preservation has been a core focus and necessity of this project. This work, ably led by Dragan Espenschied with Lyndsey Jane Moulds—and leveraging Rhizome's Webrecorder and the EaaS framework—has been accomplished, in large part, thanks to significant support for our preservation program from Google and Chief Internet Evangelist Vint Cerf and Google Arts & Culture. In 2017 and 2018, they've generously powered the presentation of many of the Net Art Anthology 100 through Google Cloud infrastructure, and supported much needed access to our tools and services for artists and other institutions.

Today, to recognize the coming close of Net Art Anthology and to mark our collaboration with our colleagues at Google, we're excited to release the following multi-platform documents narrating the making of this essential endeavor. These include:

You may also notice that the full list of Anthology works is now shared online at anthology.rhizome.org.

L: Vint Cerf exploring Starry Night in "The Art Happens Here"; R: Yael Kanarek discussing World of Awe

To share this new material with artists, members of the preservation community, and fellow Googlers, we hosted a launch at the New Museum on Friday, January 25.

At the event, Vint Cerf spoke about vernacular digital repositories like personal computers and email longs and the stories they could possibly tell about their moment. Dragan Espenschied discussed Rhizome's approach to digital preservation and the challenges of "blurry objects." Artists Yael Kanarek and Eva & Franco Mattess explored their Net Art Anthology works, respectively World of Awe and Life Sharing, followed by Lyndsey Moulds and Aria Dean discussing their preservation and curation of those projects. And Michael Connor gave gathered guests a tour of "The Art Happens Here." You can find images from this event at our Facebook page.

Rhizome's digital preservation program supports social memory for internet users and networked cultures through the creation of free, open-source, user-friendly software tools that foster decentralized and vernacular archives, while ensuring the growth of and continuing public access to the Rhizome Artbase. Software projects at Rhizome include Webrecorder, as well as our major contributions to Emulations as a Service and Wikibase. 

We're honored to contribute to Google and Google Arts & Culture's commitment to vastly expanding access to cultural heritage, and grateful for their partnership and collaboration.


386 DX: The World’s First Cyberpunk Band

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This essay by the late Armin Medosch was originally published in Telepolis on August 9, 1999 as “386 DX: Die erste Cyberpunk-Band der Welt.” Rhizome has republished it alongside a presentation of Alexei Shulgin's 386 DX in Net Art Anthology online and in the exhibition “The Art Happens Here: Net Art's Archival Poetics” at the New Museum. 

It’s the final evening of the Wizards of OS conference. Berlin’s WMF club offers a strange sight: the former photographer and net artist Alexei Shulgin is on the stage. A computer keyboard hangs down from his shoulders like an electric guitar. He strokes the keys with wide-ranging arm movements. Computer animations flicker on a projection surface, which are more closely related to early Amiga 512 or even Commodore 64 sprites aesthetically than to today’s standards of club visuals. Strange “sounds” are issuing forth from the club speakers. These are well-known rock hits, including songs by The Doors, Nirvana, and the Sex Pistols—but they are played by the actual star of the evening, a PC with a 386DX chip, clocked at 40 MHz.

Shulgin’s arm movements are actually just visual support for the live character of his gig, because the computer plays the music all by itself. By pressing the function keys of his keyboard, he alters parameters of the visual accompaniment. Sometimes patterns of lines with moiré effect (always good), then circles, color bars, flat shapes, and triangles. The musical part is done by a soundblaster card of an older model with an integrated MIDI sequencer and a text-to-speech module that can also sing. Thus, 386 DX can be called with good conscience “the first cyberpunk band.”

The story of 386 DX started just over a year ago. Shulgin was tired of net art (actually more precisely “net. art,” because that more precisely designates a certain grouping). In his opinion, the internet provides only a limited number of possibilities for artists, and these had already been explored by the net.artists. Although since then there had been a new hype among artists every few months, it was limited, in Shulgin’s view, to the spread of a new technology. “Last year, network radio was big,” he said, “now it’s video streaming or direct media.” At any rate, Shulgin wanted to do something completely different, and came up with the idea of using a computer to perform as a kind of street singer.

Hence the need to use the cheapest possible technology. The housing of the musically gifted DX looks like that of a worn-out ex-office computer, a slightly gray, dirty light beige, slots for hard disk and floppy disk drives, which have certainly been installed and removed several times. If the computer was just a tad slower, it could no longer handle the task, and even so it sometimes goes out of sync. The biggest problem was the synchronization of the MIDI files with the vocals from the text-to-speech module; it took a lot of fumbling until it worked out reasonably well. But even today, the live gigs of instrumental and vocal tracks go out of sync sometimes. This low-tech attitude combined with a DIY method is central to Shulgin’s message.

 

Alexei Shulgin, 386 DX (1998–2013), performing in the streets of Graz, Austria, 2000. Photograph: Lupo Wolf

Shulgin is now on an extended concert tour. He does not want his concept band to perform only within the media art scene. Thus, after Berlin, he performed in Bristol, and then three concerts in London: at an internet cafe, at a party in the “Foundry,” and most recently at the famous “Articultural Show” on the Southbank in front of the Royal Festival Hall. Other concerts will follow, because 386 DX will have to laboriously perform its way to the top, to rock fame, like any other young, unknown band. The London institution Artec wants to take the project under its wing, and a CD will be produced, but it is to be distributed by a “real” music label.

But there could be a problem: the music itself. At concerts, 386 DX is a highly amusing affair. The cover versions of well-known rock songs create a touch of euphoria, which is dampened by the fact that the sound profile is very much that of an integrated MIDI sequencer, which does not “rock the house.” This is also strengthened by the visuals, generating an interesting tension between euphoria and irony, being drawn in and then distanced again. As the evening progresses and may be enhanced by one or a few alcoholic drinks, it can lead to very emotional results, including cheerfulness, melancholy, and exuberance. Lovers of retro digital aesthetics will be especially happy.

But little of this will be reproduced by a CD in your home sound system.

 

The Future is Not What it Used to Be

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Image: K-HOLE and Box 1824, Youth Mode: A Report on Freedom, 2013. 

This article accompanies the inclusion of K-HOLE and Box 1824’s Youth Mode: A Report on Freedom (2013) in the online exhibition Net Art Anthology.

Living in times of social change and political upheaval, and beset by terrible and terrifying anxieties, the people of Ancient Rome—both the Patricians and the Plebeians, the aristocrats and the ordinary citizens—would lift their heads to the sky in hope of clarity and reassurance. Watching the birds, observing how they turned and swooped in the sky, the small group of “Augurs” would read into their movements and song the will of the Gods, and their feelings towards recent political decisions, votes, or military actions. Contrary to popular belief, the Augurate were not prophetic; through the divination of signs that indicated the will of the Gods, the population would be soothed in their worries.

Their presence suggests a universal human response to anxiety and change; what is important is not knowing the future, but interpreting the signs of the present. The same urge motivates many today, not least as economic and political upheaval shifts much of the west into novel forms of instability, and we fill our culture with attempts to read the birds. We look for patterns in human history, to see where we go next. We relentlessly analyze political polls, despite past experiences. We write science fiction, to understand the way our world works by contrasting it with other possible, and impossible, worlds. And we consult trend forecasts.

K-HOLE, the trend-forecasting collective who released five trend reports between 2010 and 2015, have always acknowledged the inability of the format to actually predict trends. Instead, their reports map out possible approaches to understanding the cultural chaos of the past decade. Where the regular trend forecast is usually an internal document, commissioned from branding agencies by firms that hoped to better understand the future demands and desires of their potential markets, K-HOLE produces a public form of consumer fiction. By utilizing the language and visual lexicon of the trend forecast, the group has turned it in on itself, critically examining not just the propensity of consumer capitalism towards constant obsolescence and reinvention, but also its complex, knotty relationship with the affects and emotional landscapes it both produces and feeds off. Rather than just analysing the content of trends, they begin to explore what this culture actually does to its producers, users and consumers. In doing so, what they produce isn’t the blunt tool of a political analysis that directly condemns that relationship between the consumer and the brand: it’s instead a response that acknowledges complicity, turns tools into critiques of themselves, allows itself the nuance of doubt, but also, fatally, opens itself up for recuperation by the targets of its critique.

From the very beginning of their practice it was clear that the nature of the experience of life under whatever-period capitalism was what at stake here. “K-HOLE believes that the hazy activity of aimless mall-walkers once known as shopping is over,” they announced in K-HOLE #1: FRAGMORETATION, which laid out a roadmap for clumsy luxury brands that “erect a megastore and think you’ve given your customers a shopping experience.” In it, the group advocate a move towards a sort of corporate and fashion diversification, pointing towards the idea that the first commandment of branding since the 1960s—the importance of a singular brand identity—was nearing the end of its natural life. In the report we see the first iterations of what would later become the centre of K-HOLE’s strategy: synthesising both ideas and new technology to create novel combinations that suggest either a breaking apart of old ways that consumers live, or the creation of new ways of living under capitalism, and the concomitant new mental states that might come with that. The clearest example of that was their examination of how the digital wallet Venmo was about to change our lives—a seemingly innocent way of paying back small amounts had the potential to totally destabilize all sorts of interpersonal dynamics, including the venerable history of the charming poor establishing a foothold in the creative industries through the noblesse oblige of the well-off friend paying for their dinner and not bothering to split the tab. How was Venmo going to revolutionise casual gay sexwork, or how we buy street drugs? It’s a sign of how naïve we were even then that K-HOLE wasn’t sure if it’d take off as a product, as “it’s a bit too earnest, too comfortable, as if a young consumer wants to bookkeep her personal life,” fatally underestimating the neurotic casual penny-pinching of the wealthy.

It was this analysis of how technology and branding was changing the future which became the driving energy behind the rest of the K-HOLE reports. In K-HOLE #2 the group focused on one of the defining habits of the millennial—procrastination. Procrastination, a frustrating habit of self-destruction combined with self-policing that has been massively exacerbated by a new ideology of work that increasingly makes the worker her own boss, and thus working discipline not a struggle between worker and manager but between worker and self, has birthed numerous technologies that feed off that anxiety. While K-HOLE #2 profiles two such products (Piracetam, an Alzheimer’s drug that is claimed to improve concentration and memory recall, and Jawbone Up, a fitness tracker that monitors sleep rate and diet, and quietly but determinedly pesters you into compliance), they exist within a wider analogy that suggests to brands to prioritise long-term customer engagement over quick, transient sales. Better to procrastinate, capitalism: it’s a state of being that completely consumers the consumer.

Anxiety, the affect sine qua non of the millennial condition, returned for their third edition, K-HOLE #3: Brand Anxiety Matrix, which posited four points of a matrix of modern consumer neurotics. Their case studies draw the anxiety directly back to the abject person, the person consumption desires to cover. Body odor, birth control technology, or a tiny, smartphone-compatible environmental sensor that monitors radioactivity, humidity or nitrates in food: the corporeal becomes a battleground between desire and fear, between chaos and order.

However, it was the fourth iteration of K-HOLE’s attempt to use the future to explain our present that was its most influential, synthesising the previous reports and demonstrating how a critique that wears the fashion of its subject can get pulled into the unstoppable cycle of reality production. Youth Mode attempted to address the libidinal urge that has underpinned capitalist popular culture since the post-war rebellions of the 1950s—that youth, freedom, and individuality are three sides of the same coin. “Youth isn’t freedom in any political sense,” it began, “It’s the fullness of potential, the ability to be the person you want to be.” Its matrix laid out three fundamental new types of person (read: consumer) that stood in contrast to being “Alternative”: “Mass Indie,” “Acting Basic,” and “Normcore.”

Like #3, Youth Mode recognised that, with the explosion of new forms of self-representation enabled by popular culture, anxiety over how one presented had exploded as part of the condition of youth, and the post-war model of culture and subculture could no longer stand as a model for understanding consumer life. The way of living that had structured #2—the constant awareness of the self as not only a consumer but a product itself—was part of a new world that had also rejected the idea of constant reinvention being the driving motor behind pop culture consumption, the very basis of the idea of being “Alternative.” While Mass Indie required making so many minor nudges to individualise your consumer personality you become another clone, and Acting Basic denied the reality that removing oneself from making decisions on identity doesn’t remove one’s identity, Normcore provides a solution to the challenge of the dissolving identity.

Image: K-HOLE and Box 1824, Youth Mode: A Report on Freedom, 2013. 

Normcore suggested an identity that is reflexive to its social context, and that choosing conflicting subject positions is not the same as being a hypocrite. “Consumption has never been a chance for absolute self-actualization,” it states, a fundamental rupture with the ideology of shopping. In being a contingent identity and not a unique creative, it realises that being “nothing special” is the key to escaping the omnipresent anxiety of self-presentation and representation that K-HOLE laid out and wrestled with in its early reports.

Shortly after Youth Mode was released, the term Normcore slipped its leash and exploded into the mainstream as a descriptor of a decidedly Mass Indie adoption of Acting Basic, with The Cut using it to describe the trend towards basic, unisex fashions. While K-HOLE can’t be held responsible for the term’s later abuse, it does demonstrate another trend, as old as post-war consumer boom itself, towards capitalism’s ability to constantly recuperate criticism into itself. K-HOLE’s reports help elucidate aspects of a contemporary neoliberal subjectivity where trends shift so fast old models of subculture can no longer meaningfully apply to them; instead, the affective conditions they arise from, and produce, is critiqued in commercial forms that otherwise fail to illuminate. Rather than trends being about what products we like, K-HOLE shows them as how we like—as ways of being. It is telling, then, that the subject of K-HOLE #5 was “doubt”. With the tagline “Seeing the future ≠ changing the future”—a wry nod to their own impotence over the idea of Normcore—the group used the language of the ongoing magical renaissance to ask whether brands use magic, and, more importantly, do K-HOLE use magic?        

Looking back over the out-of-control successes of the previous four iterations, #5 acknowledged that, whether it’s branding, forecasting or divination, it is in the exchange of shared belief that a collective can find meaning—trumping any truth-claim by the creative force. K-HOLE’s ability to “see the future” through forecasting meant little in comparison to the way their ideas were consumed by the plebeians, whose shared interpretation of the signs was so powerful as to trump any guidance offered by the augurs, leaving the artists wracked with doubt, unsure of the purpose or future direction of the project. 



An Ice Palace in Queens

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This article accompanies the inclusion of Sister Unn’s (2011–2012) by Bunny Rogers and Filip Olszewski in the online exhibition Net Art Anthology and the gallery exhibition “The Art Happens Here: Net Art’s Archival Poetics,” on view at the New Museum through May 26.

MICHAEL CONNOR
: How did this project begin? You’ve talked about the novel, but how important was the shop itself?

FILIP OLSZEWSKI
: Bunny and I have always loved work that can exist in public space without being designated as art. Walking around Forest Hills, Queens—

BUNNY ROGERS: Where we were living.

FO
: —we became very interested in all the abandoned shops among the upscale stores and restaurants. Austin Street is kinda the 5th Ave of Queens and the messy vacant spaces really stood out. Some were beautiful and came to be quite meaningful for us. They provided the initial vision for Sister Unn’s. The content of which ended up being inspired primarily by the novel Is-slottet (1963).

BR: 
Which is like a classic coming-of-age story, but what’s unique to the book is that it more or less begins with the characters’ death. So, it’s more about the process of dealing with loss and the stages of grief.

FO
: Similarly our shop “died” an untimely death. One piece that felt successful was that a good deal of those who walked by would describe feeling as if Sister Unn’s was a memorial. We overheard words like “mausoleum” and “grief.” Some even left candles and flowers in front.

MC: Was it possible to find more information if people Googled the name of the shop?

FO: Yes, Googling would bring up the sister-unns.com website which provided additional context and references to our inspirations. It would also bring up posts, tweets, and discussions on forums made by passersby trying to figure out what the store is.


Screenshot, 2018, Firefox 63 on Linux, http://www.sister-unns.com/rosegallery.html.

BR: That’s kind of what we were going off of, the curiosity of each person that encountered the storefront. Which mirrors how things used to work online when Filip and I made websites around the mid-1990s, early 2000s, where you really had to trust your curiosity and trust the clues that people left on their websites in order to find more information or new things.

MC
: As if this was a website in real space or something, in a sense, in terms of its affect?

BR
: The fact that people couldn’t enter made it a diorama, it flattened it. In a way, it was like a real life Neopets gallery.

Interview conducted by telephone and email, October 2018.

History is the Weapon

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This article accompanies the inclusion of Consciousness Engine 2: absentfatherbot by Bogosi Sekhukhuni in the online exhibition Net Art Anthology and the gallery exhibition “The Art Happens Here: Net Art’s Archival Poetics,” on view at the New Museum through May 26.

Hanna Girma: Can you tell me about Consciousness Engine 2: absentfatherbot? The piece is about four years old now and I’m wondering if, in revisiting the work, you’re thinking about it differently?

Bogosi Sekhukhuni: Yeah, definitely. It started with this residency that I was doing in Paris in 2014 as part of a 89 + project by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Simon Castets. absentfatherbot to be honest, was a very last-minute thing. It’s one of those projects that came together right at the end. The idea was to use my personal history to kill more than two birds with one stone such that I could speak on a number of ideas that I was interested in. In the field of AI: what was the implication of our understanding of human consciousness? Where does that originate from? It was also just to do a bit of self-healing at the same time by using myself as a test subject.

What else can I say? It’s quite a funny situation because it seems to be the thing that I’ve done that gets the most attention.

HG: Why do you think this piece is something that a lot of people tend to come back to?

BS: I think it’s funny; as people, we like drama. One of the things that I immediately realized, especially early on when I first exhibited it, was just that, “Oh, people really like drama.” I was telling a friend of mine actually the other day that I sometimes feel like I’m in that episode of Black Mirror, the “Black Museum” episode.

Except I’m mining my own trauma for the world to consume. It’s just, I guess, sort of doing its own thing.

HG: I think in a lot of ways this work illuminates how we have begun to process trauma in the digital age.

BS: There was a time when oversharing online was a powerful act, but now I just feel less and less like that ’s the case.

HG: Do you feel that you’ve been pulling away from sharing on social media?

BS: Yeah, definitely. My relationship to social media’s changed a lot in the past years. I’m just not interested in this accelerated, personal branding moment.

HG: I’m also thinking about how surveillance and data mining are sort of ways of stealing genetic material. I’m wondering whether your initial interest in biological commodification and DNA led you to work with AI.

BS: I think in hindsight yes! But it also came from an interest in asking questions about consciousness or conscious experience. Around that time, I was really into the whole singularity spiel. And these are important issues that we’re going to have to figure out... We don’t even really understand what conscious experience is.

The Consciousness Engine project was a series of sculptural expressions that tinker with ideas of human consciousness and where it originates from. The first idea was originally to obtain a copy of my DNA sequence and then print that out as an expression of consciousness creation.

This other direction considered consciousness as something that you accumulate from the outside. Consciousness then becomes more like a verb or an action.

The work itself drew a bit on a Cornell Creative Machines Lab experiment where they hooked up two chatbots and had them converse with each other. It was basically that idea, but then I decided to actually use real conversations and display that as a simulation. The idea is that interaction is an act of consciousness creation or a consciousness engine in a poetic, but also very real way.

HG: I know in your recent work you’re really dealing a lot with the intermingling of domestic space and cyberspace. What is the significance of black, aspirational aesthetics in homes and the aspirational geography of the web is in your work.

BS: That’s so tricky. That’s actually one thing I keep grappling with. I have an African American friend  who confronted me with regards to why I appear to draw a lot from African American visual languages. It wasn’t really something that I understood that way; I never really separated these different types of expressions. I mean, for sure there are regional things, and accents and all of that, but I guess it really is a question about what you consider black at the end of the day.

HG: Can you elaborate more on your relationship to these visual languagess, even South African aesthetics that have come through in your work.

BS: I came to an understanding that a lot of visuals, architecture, graphic advertising a lot of those things are inspired by a need to present one’s self in a light that speaks to having “made it” or having won at capitalism.

That’s just something that I see in black communities in most of the so-called developing world and developed world. This need to put your best game face on at all times. I don’t know. A part of it is a different manifestation of the culture of dressing up really well on a Sunday in black community which has a very different meaning from white religious communities. It comes from a very different place I think, a place of just having to create an agency for one’s self.

At the same time I want to start thinking about what happens after one does the work of reconnecting with a severed history—what kinds of spontaneous evolution of self identification will take place, and what visual cultures that will come with that.

HG: Would you say that’s what you are getting at when you’re placing these screens within bed frames and things like that?

BS: I’m interested in claiming the Africanity of Baroque furniture and interior styles that feature a lot in my practice. The characteristically ornate designs and finishes strike me as fractal and follow a design philosophy that isn’t incompatible with my experience of Afroic design sensibilities in southern and other parts of Africa.

Soul Contract Revocations; Dream Diary Season 2, Matilda, 2017. Stevenson Gallery.

I’ve switched some of my thinking from the “Dutch Wax is not truly African” perspective, which I’m afraid is part of an attitude that helps trap and reinforce the general perception of Africa as belonging to antiquity, by erasing contemporary african cultures that thrive, reflect and contribute to a globalised world.

I was also wanting to play with the limits of video. I was think about a way of framing video that was all-encompassing and compact. The totems are like mobile sacred sites or stations and are free from needing to be exhibited within a white cube. I envisioned them sitting in an open public space in some KWAAL WORLD city district.

HG: I know you’ve said in the past that you don’t really agree with ideas of Afro-futurism. However, I think that your work seems to—in ways that Afrofuturism describes—exist in the past, the future, the present, and also in alternate realities. Looking at pieces like KWAAL WORLD, how does your work draw from ancestral knowledge? How we can look towards ancestral knowledge to drive future technologies and the future at large? Finally, how do alternate, even revisionist, historical narratives drive your work?

Still from Simunye Systems Orientation, 2017

BS: Those are really important things for me actually, if not the most important parts of my practice. The idea of this need that we have to completely rewrite history because in a way it’s one of the last frontiers of the colonial and postcolonial project . In many ways, I think white power weaponises history in order to keep certain people in their place. If we can get beyond the accepted 5,000-year history of organised human societies and become more open to possibilities of what might’ve really happened in the past, game’s over from there. People’s self-identifications will really change.

I think most black students studying art or entering institutions come to a point where we become super disillusioned with curriculum. My way of thinking about history really came from being shocked that we weren’t learning anything about Afrocentric histories, histories of thinking, these things are just nonexistent in South African curricula. It’s still really an unbelievable factor for me. It’s like “Wow, this is really what we’re doing to ourselves.” We’re just going to learn all this shit about other people and know nothing about ourselves? How do you expect to get anything to go right? That began this process of discovery. There is an acknowledgement of a universe that is intersectionally multidimensional by nature, which is promoted in Bantu philosophy and traditional religion that validate some of my suspicions and interests in esoteric knowledge.

It’s also inspired how I choose to develop ideas. I find myself comfortably in a place of just accepting certain visions that come to my mind–- and acting on that, which is completely opposite to how I was studying. Everything comes first and then later I can come back and figure it out because I acknowledge that the concepts really aren’t mine actually. These are things that have been communicated to me by my guides and the information in my blood.

HG: You often push against this idea of spirituality and technology being a dichotomy, which I really love about your work. In your dream diaries, you integrate this nonsense language—like a very convoluted version of a user agreement, but with this more poetic, ancestral language—to highlight how the things that we are doing on the internet have very tangible, real world implications. Do you see your work as a guide to remedying the anxieties brought about by the internet, or do you see it more as highlighting the intersection between spirituality and the internet as a way for communal healing?

BS: It is putting it out there that I’ve been going through certain things and this is how I’m dealing with them. That’s really the case with my collective NTU work and these diary revocations for example.

The revocation videos are like spells or prayers. The idea is that every time that they run a part of me is repeating that spell.

The content of the prayers specifically responds to a period of psychic instability or vulnerabilities i was experiencing, and was sourced online when I was figuring out what was going on.

HG: Do you think in a way that you putting these out into cyberspace, it will manifest in a way?

BS: Yeah, cyberspace as well as real space. We also have to always remind ourselves, “What is cyberspace?” Cyberspace is real space. It’s light and it’s metal and it’s magnetism.

HG: I really love the work you do with NTU and I know that you’ve also worked with the CUSS Group and been active in 89plus and things like that. I’m wondering how your process or the way you think through ideas and work changes within working with each of these different groups and how your work has been affected by working with each of these as well.

Bogosi Sekhukhuni, Dream Diary Season 2, 2017. Still from single channel HD video with sound.

BS: I think when I started, I really had a super naïve approach to collaborative practice . Like “Yeah, no, we’re all just going to work together, blah, blah, blah, this and that, solidarity.” Right now, I’m in a place where, I’m trying to define my path and use my group experiences as resources I can draw from; when thinking about the conclusions and various problems we’ve tackled and continue to tackle. It’s not hard to disregard the self when working collaboratively, something in our working culture even encourages it. I’ve found it to be a problem and would like to think of ways to counter that feeling. My friend Ravi from CUSS Group has been talking about looking at the group as more of a network and I think that’s an interesting distinction. And while it tends to be difficult to quantify what ideas overlap but there are some ways I separate my individual practice from my collective work. For instance, with NTU, we have this project that’s looking at ideas in free energy, which is why we worked with Chikhumbutso (Thus Saith the Lord). It’s a theme that sits very close to me personally. And since then I have been developing projects that offshoot from that bigger work, interrogating more what we mean when we talk about free energy. Are we talking about electromagnetic energy? And how does that relates to what people describe as subtle energy in holistic integrative medicine circles?

What I’m finding a bit is just this difference in the language of explaining forces of nature, and how on the continent there’s a very particular way of imparting information or teaching. I’ve been following this engineer who had a few videos on YouTube; he has this hypothesis where he relates ancient Kemetic cosmology to atomic theory, where particles and sub-particles personify a particular deity.

HG: Would you say that in your work you are also playing with this idea of credibility, and who has the ability to validate sources or validate ideas?

BS: Yeah, 100%, 100%. I feel that’s also really another tool that white power uses to keep certain ideas at bay or prevent certain connections from being made. Also, it’s just being honest about what it is I actually find fascinating and worthwhile. For a while, I was really cautious about creating work around ideas and spirituality or what people see as new age philosophies. The challenge has been for me to just pull these elements together—and there’s a lot of people who have done that as well in the past, who I’m drawing from.

Featured image: installation view, “Simunye Summit 2010” at Stevenson Gallery, 2017.

Art + Code: Rhizome & NEW INC

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NEW INC is New Museum's incubator for people working at the intersection of art, design and technology. Each year, 100 members (individuals and small teams) occupy the 2nd floor of 231 Bowery in the context of a community and program designed to support creative practitioners as they pursue a sustainable practice or bring a new business to life. Since its founding in 2014, Rhizome has been an anchor tenant of NEW INC. 

For its sixth year, Rhizome and NEW INC are collaborating on a new track, or focus area, called "Art + Code." We invite artists, creative technologists, indie game designers, preservation researchers, interaction designers and others making and researching art that is born-digital to apply to be a part of this new track. Members will benefit from mentorship with Rhizome staff members, and participation in special events with the Rhizome community. Should be fun!

Learn more about the program and apply. 

Questions? Drop a line at info@rhizome.org.

Snowflake is a snowflake is a snowflake

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This article accompanies the inclusion of I’m that angel (2011–ongoing) by Tyler Coburn in the online exhibition Net Art Anthology.

I’m that angel revolves around the central figure of a lowly content farmer, whose job is to rapidly generate posts that perfectly reflect the interests of an online public—a machinic kind of production tending toward dissipation. How do you think that figure has aged?

The content farmer, as conceived when I wrote the book from 2010 to 2012, is definitely lowly. An aspirational author with an MFA in Creative Writing, he has to reconcile himself to the fact that, as his editor puts it, his “Great American something reads like short Internet nothings.” He’s “a highly skilled graduate of ambient attention and live[s] from one post to the next.”

Since writing the book, the nature of content farming has changed, partly owing to Google’s attempts to make its search engine less vulnerable to gamesmanship. Most content farmers, from what I can tell, no longer write just-in-time articles based on trending language but rather the anticipated answers to any question one might ask the internet. (Think: eHow.)

The content farmer of 2010 was an ostensible journalist, writing for an opaque, online-only news conglomerate. Even at that time, as HuffPost demonstrated the viability of operating on the razor’s edge of clickbait, papers like The Times of London were training reporters to generate online content in consideration of search-engine placement and viewing metrics. Based on what I’ve heard from friends working in the industry, the trend has only intensified. The news is looking more and more like the content farms of yore.

One last thought: While writing I’m that angel, I spent time in online forums and discussions with content farmers. Precarity (at least as I understood it at the time) seemed to describe an individual made to feel ever more isolated despite their networked, multitasking life. Interestingly, WeWork opened its first coworking space in SoHo in 2010, offering the semblance of sociality—greasing the wheels of IRL connectivity. Though most precariats I know work from home, it does seem like the rise of coworking marks a change in the spatial imaginary of Millennial labor. I mean, what could better incentivize a person to pay WeWork dues than the go-getter mantras carved on water cooler cucumbers?

In our 2013 interview, I remember having the impression that I’m that angel was somehow optimistic. In part, this was based on the simple gesture of portraying an inner life for the content farmer. When we spoke, you mentioned the idea of “the wig” from de Certeau, in which the worker uses their wage-earning hours to do personal projects. Yes, your content famer was beholden to these crushing demands of the attention economy that led him into “a deep semiotic crisis,” but he was still striving to leave behind an interesting data trail. He was incoherent, but so were the times; his text was nonsensical, but so interesting to read.

Actually, I don’t think I’m that angel was ever particularly optimistic, though it’s true that it draws some inspiration from “the wig.” As I mentioned in our previous interview, I find de Certeau’s theory to be overly romantic; I mean, his examples of personal projects done on the clock include writing love letters.

From a macro perspective, I used to see my project as an unflinching diagnosis of Millennials (myself included). There are so many excerpts from the book that I could offer up in support, but this may be the most condensed generational critique: “anything that looks like ideology makes us want to reach for DELETE. That’s the nice thing about being young. The battles have been fought so we can marvel at our capacity to type…! Eventually we’ll self-actualize as philanthropy and biology and meanwhile voice our right to have a voice in the haptic speech that says, with a click: Enjoy!

Tyler Coburn, I’m that angel, 2011–ongoing. Detail: Justin Sayre reading at the Google Building, New York, Readings: February 2013. Courtesy of the artist.

Beyond the withering navel gaze that was my writing process, I had been reading theories of clicktivism from that time by people like Jodi Dean which, on their face, dismissed such a practice as having no relation to actual political action and, implicitly, suggested a more systemic issue: that Millennials were a generation lacking in political engagement. If this is the superficial horizon of the book’s protagonist, it’s also a debilitating one; by the end of the second chapter, he trades his vague life in “the cloud” to work as a data server. Certainty is what he’s after. Concretized self-absorption. He proclaims: “I’m occupying myself (that’s not participating): dissensus raised to the power of one.” (That last line is a quote from this Mary Leclere text.)

I wrote I’m that angel as my MFA thesis at USC. Since then, I’ve been teaching undergraduates and graduates across five universities (trading up, but not out of, precarity). In short, I’ve logged a lot of time in discussion with younger Millennials, and by and large, I’m happy to say that my protagonist was wrong! The desire to avow sociocultural and political commitments—particularly in terms of identity—is stronger than I’ve seen in my adult life.

Maybe it’s because I’m an X-ennial who idealizes the experience of being part of a generation, but I’m much more sympathetic to this character than you are! But to me it seems like his distrust of ideology is less of a hindrance to his political engagement than his over-engagement with the network—to the point of merging with it. On some level, this entanglement means that his interests are aligned with those of the powers that be (like “Jeff,” the addressee of the letters in the second half of the book, who I take to be Jeff Bezos).

Is this more broadly symptomatic of Dean’s theory of communicative capitalism—the desire to be creative leads to participating in a system in which messages are reduced to commodity status?

It likely is. Whenever I lecture about the project, I always include the following quote from Dean’s 2009 book, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: “Messages are contributions to circulating content—not actions to elicit responses. The exchange value of messages overtakes their use value.” I take this to mean that, both in 2009 and 2019, the circulation of content often supersedes the generation of discourse.

That’s probably why I was so interested in content, which seems to have neither value nor utility when inert. It’s made to move. It lives for the “eyeballs,” to reference a marketer’s characterization of online users. And it needs users to spread it—users who see its circulation as enhancing their brand value.

This is well-trodden territory, so let me pivot. When I was writing the book, a friend referred me to “Homelessness Blues,” a 2011 song by Fleet Foxes that typified what I saw to be the problem of the time. Here’s a choice verse:

I was raised up believing I was somehow unique

Like a snowflake distinct among snowflakes, unique in each way you can see

And now after some thinking, I’d say I’d rather be

A functioning cog in some great machinery serving something beyond me

Whatever the singer meant by “great machinery,” it was hard not to hear it as nostalgia for some fabled industrial community which, in our day and age, might appeal even more to the free speech “snowflakes” on the right than the left. The yearn for the comfort of homogeneity, and the blindness to how online conventions of self-performance amount to homogeneity by another name! To paraphrase Gertrude Stein: “A snowflake is a snowflake is a snowflake.”

The last chapter of I’m that angel pushes back. The protagonist doesn’t leave “the cloud” for a coal factory, but there’s still a misguided yearning for real work and real materiality than informs his choice to become a data server. And yet, as he’ll come to learn, he’s merely trading one uncertain selfhood for another: the anxiety of cloudly boundlessness for that of storing the internet—of “not knowing whether any of these are my thoughts to think.” “Do I like shit and Robinson Crusoe and spring cleaning and data farms,” he wonders, “or am I that dubious distinction of a server storing the pertinent info on each?”

Underlying these questions—and the book as a whole—is an anxiety about selfhood under communicative capitalism. Are we the sum total of the data we generate and harvest? Will our consciousness be uploaded to the cloud in the next stages of communicative capitalism? Or is the book sort of a rejection of that fantasy?

Around the time I wrote I’m that angel, there was a wave of scholarship in the fields of literature and poetry—books like Marjorie Perloff’s 2010 Unoriginal Genius and Kenneth Goldsmith’s 2011 Uncreative Writing—that repurposed early postmodern theories of authorship. This is not to say that writers weren’t experimenting with appropriation, plagiarism, and citation before the 21st Century, but that such practices were finally getting thorough scholarly appraisal. I bring this up by way of answering your first question: We, as Barthes would say of a text, are a “tissue of quotations.” Our data is not us, nor do we have a privileged claim on it. If anything is uniquely ours, it’s how that data aggregates as the thing we call a self. My book’s protagonist is ambivalent about this argument, and hey, I feel him. Possessive individualism is a hard thing to shake.

I’m beginning to see what you meant about the work not being optimistic.

Seriously. In terms of your other questions, I’d refer you to the last chapter of the book, which is a retelling of Dante’s Inferno after a fashion. The protagonist (now working as a server) is periodically moved to different rows in the data center, and each is like a ring of Hell. Notable figures from the history of the Internet are here being punished for one thing or another: Tom MacMaster for pretending to be “A Gay Girl in Damascus,” Nicholas Felt(r)on for laying the groundwork for self-quantification. The ninth row contains transhumanist and futurist types, who fantasize about uploading consciousness and more: Kevin Warwick imagines a future of brain-to-brain communication, Hugo de Garis anticipates the human enslavement and “gigadeath” wrought by the god-like machines he’s currently making. (Why deprive the world of god-like machines, he argues?)

The protagonist is disturbed to learn that Donna Haraway also resides in this row, leading him to wonder: “Why is this cyborg strapped in with these boys, when their politics couldn’t be further? Who are the theorists, and who are the Sophists? Who the pessimists, and who the utopians?

The scientists seeding our planet with facts, and the scientists farming out fiction? Is each prophet as false as the next?” You can take this as a funhouse mirror of life as we live it: Even the demons running Hell can’t decide who has the most fucked up prognostication—who will get the future totally and unforgivably wrong—so they hedge their bets and punish all visionaries in equal measure.

Regardless of whether our consciousness can someday be uploaded, the protagonist of I’m that angel decides it’s better to lowball: “if everything devolves into a closed memetic feedback loop in which uncomprehending bots blindly retweet auto-generate content at each other at high speed [...] well, would it be too much to ask them to consider retweeting me?”

To any bots “reading” this interview at an unspecified future date: I humbly make the same request.

Visit the I’m that angel page on Net Art Anthology

BabyAllOnMyInsta—No‘Tution

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This article accompanies the inclusion of /INB4/ (2014–ongoing) in the online exhibition Net Art Anthology.

/INB4/ is a CollectiveVirtualDreamSpace birthed of the black imagination seeking to digest its sheddings and the layers of others. The FB Group originally served as an AutonomousAlternative 2 vapid magazine culture dominated by cishet white standards of beauty and worth, the group’s intent aimed 2 give All Power 2 the People, at times struggling 2 survive within the platform itself, constantly threatened by its own toxicity and the conservative hyper-surveillance of social media. The following is an interview exchange between a few former admins that took place in 2017.1

ISABELLE: I would like you to discuss social censoring online and, possibly, processes of healing in a group that is a free platform of creative expression.

LIZ: thru thisProject, iveLearned that AsAModerator wen censoring ExplicitContent online AsDetermined by the InconsistentStandards of YtMansLaw, it isnt necessarily advantageous 2 KeepVisible EvidenceofTrauma that re-traumatizes individuals n perpetuates SystemsofOppression&Violence thru its normalization. It’s Useful2GiveRoom2 theseNarratives wen there is grounds/resources 4 processing/healing thru it, like in the technique of ExposureTherapy, but this RequirestheConsent of the individuals who will be Subject2theExperience. AsAUser, U ShouldFeel ofRightJudgement 2 Determine WutUPost, Employing TriggerWarnings where needed IS CommunityCare.

LIZ: discuss Hari Nef’s tweet dissing inb4 + the following transphobic thread that ensued

ISABELLE: Hari’s tweet caused an uproar for a few reasons. Her visibility is bittersweet. Some saw it as if through her image high fashion mags were using transness as click-bait or framing it as a trend. Of course, visibility brings with it normalization, but at the same time, safety/care/attention/$$$ is still not given to those whose voices can’t or don’t want to be as loud as hers. Her image is monetary, and she was commenting on a group whose content relies on DIY fashion photos and selfies. So when she tweeted, “like who added me to that inb4 group on facebook,” group participants assumed that she was saying she was “too good” for “plebeians” like us. A post was made triggering over a hundred comments of petty insults (including misgendering) and very thoughtful defenses of Hari. Her viral popularity mirages as acceptance, so her comment pulled out the insecurities of some who are pretty regularly and violently cast out.

LIZ: Allowing manipulative abusers in2 inb4 compromised the group’s safety, wuts ur advice 4 asserting boundaries/ avoiding SaviorComplex as an EmpatheticAdmin?

MAYA: As an inb4 admin I handle conflicts by first recognizing that someone’s behavior is truly incompatible with the shared values of the group. This can be tricky because there are many sub-ingroups within the larger inb4 microculture. I try to be as objective as possible when responding to drama in the group, i.e. I don’t go blocking just anyone I personally have beef with.

Apathy is a big problem with conflict resolution; the mere presence of other people causes individuals to diffuse responsibility in favor of “letting someone else handle it.” My advice is to get in there and be the authority figure, don’t be indifferent. Understand that when conflicts intensify judgments and stereotypes become more rigid & people get a twisted boost to their sense of self by disparaging others, creating a cycle that can only be broken by removing the loudest negative voice. The trick is maintaining harmony between hundreds of different personalities.

Avoiding groupthink is critical! Varied perspectives enable rich dialogue, but conflict does not beget social advancement.

 

1 Parker Bright was unable to participate in this interview. Black bodies both on and offline exist in defiance and at war with time and I respect my dear friends decision to opt out. Parker Bright, Hamishi Farah, Hannah Black, and Aria Dean are among many in the black art community who have used their names, voices, and platforms to resist against the continued acts of white supremacist violence perpetuated in the art world by its investors, curators, institutions, and all those who benefit from othering black bodies as objects crafted for white consumption n speculation— in this case in protest of the Emitt Till portrait by white nationalist D*** S**** at the Whitney Biennial, 2017.


Announcing Seven on Seven 2019: Participants & Details

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We’re thrilled to announce the 2019 edition of the celebrated art and technology platform Seven on Seven. This annual event brings together leaders in art and technology for a one-day creative collaboration with a simple challenge: “Make something.” On Saturday, April 27, seven collaborative pairs will reveal their projects at the New Museum. Tickets to the conference are on sale today at Eventbrite.

Co-organized by Michael Connor, Artistic Director; Zachary Kaplan, Executive Director; and Aria Dean, Assistant Curator, this year’s Seven on Seven brings together a cohort of artists and technologists whose projects will explore a diverse array of topics across culture and technology: the aesthetics of high-frequency trading; how insects and robotics can echo one another; AI and the school-to-prison pipeline; languages of the deep future; and more.

Seven on Seven 2019 will feature:

Artist Rachel Rose & Kirstin Petersen, Founder, Collective Embodied Intelligence Lab, Cornell
Artist Matthew Angelo Harrison & Trevor McFedries, Cofounder, Brud
Artist Sarah Meyohas & Tarun Chitra, Founder, Gauntlet
Artist Hayal Pozanti & Laura Welcher, Linguist, Long Now Foundation
Artist American Artist & Rashida Richardson, Policy Research, AI Now
Artist Artie Vierkant & James La Marre, Developer & Activist
Artist Qiu Zhijie & He Xiaodong, Deputy Managing Director, JD AI

This year’s conference will premiere a new, lower conference ticket price of $99. A simulcast presentation of the event will be presented in the New Museum’s Sky Room, free for Museum visitors.

To further share Seven on Seven, we’re again collaborating with a team at Wieden+Kennedy, New York, led by Richard Turley, Executive Creative Director, to create a “distributed publication,” composed of pamphlets, posters, and other print ephemera. Deutsche Bank Americas Foundation will also support a youth outreach program that will bring an art-and-technology residency project to Queens this summer, renewing a program inaugurated in 2017.

 
 

SUPPORT

Seven on Seven is made possible by the generous support of Deutsche Bank Americas Foundation, founding partner Wieden+Kennedy, New York, and GIPHY.

Sister City is Seven on Seven's exclusive hotel and after party partner.

Empathy is Not Enough, part 1

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In this three part series originally published in German by WASD, Lana Polansky explores the history and use of “empathy” in games since 2008.

It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment when “empathy” became a popular buzzword in the videogame marketing arsenal, but the topic seems to have ripened around 2014. Take, for instance, “In Gaming, A Shift From Enemies To Emotions” by Travis Larchuk, which appeared in NPR in January of that year. The piece provides important context for the industry’s sudden interest in more, supposedly emotionally mature and “empathetic” games. Larchuk writes,

Sony’s Nick Suttner says he has noticed a broader change recently. As part of his job, he frequently hears pitches from independent designers hoping to get their games on the PlayStation.

‘There was a really interesting shift away from mechanics to storytelling,’ he says. More frequently he's hearing pitches where a game is not just about ‘shooting something; it's about an experience the developer had and wanted to communicate that idea in their game, or about this moment of beauty or sympathy.’

Some call these ‘empathy games.’ They focus on engaging with the player on an emotional level.

The piece describes three games as examples of “empathy games,” Fullbright’s Gone Home, Lucas Pope’s Papers, Please and Ryan Green’s That Dragon, Cancer. Each of these games aimed to emotionally involve the player with a character who faces difficult scenarios and choices, and allwere resounding critical and market successes relative to their scope and content. In many ways, they reshaped public perception of what games could look like and the ideas they could convey. They also helped mainstream a taste for more “alternative” approaches to game design that could be boiled down into identifiable genres and brands: indie games, serious games, empathy games, auteur games, and so on. “Empathy games” began to catch the attention of industrial elites, government agencies, universities, NGOs, non-profits, and even banks, and are by now a well established niche genre.

Still image from That Dragon, Cancer (Numinous Games, 2016)

To understand the trajectory of “empathy games” as a movement, it’s helpful to peel back their history to the time of the “indie boom” around 6 years earlier. The reasons why the indie market evolved in the ways that it did are dismally material: in the wake of the 2008 recession,a number of development studios shuttered or downsized (Microsoft, for example, would lay off 5,000 game studio employees in 2009). While the industry used the spiralling economy as an excuse to justify layoffs and closures, a 2009 Slate piece by N. Van Zelfden argues that they may have just been the consequence of runaway spending for which workers shouldered the burden. The fact that routine closures and layoffs persist as an industry practice to this day lends credence to this thesis.

While independent creators had already been making their own games for a long time, suddenly there was a market for it, as the major oligopolies in the industry—in search of cheaply produced content to gamble on in the hope some games would be windfall successes—began buying up indie games or providing a digital platform to them in exchange for things like distribution fees and IP licensing. In many ways this phenomenon did provide new opportunities for heretofore unknown artists, and suddenly plenty of fringe work that might have otherwise languished in obscurity saw the light of day. This was a positive step that broadened the horizon of what was popularly acknowledged to constitute a videogame (not without some struggle), and was materially beneficial to at least a few artists working in indie spaces.

But these positives were also largely incidental, and were hardly the conscious intention of major (and mid-tier) companies who were ultimately only interested in inexpensive, high-volume content produced by workers that they would owe far less to than a traditional employee. Creativity, diversity and expanded emotional range were not necessarily sought-after outcomes by companies like Valve, Microsoft, or Oculus, but they did make for very nifty marketing instruments, and permitted development into niche markets with specific demographics. In this context, “empathy games” seem to have emerged as the proof of concept the videogame industry needed to show that, after all, games had emotional and therefore artistic value. These companies, as well as individuals figures like Jane McGonigal, wasted no time marketing “empathy” to educators, governments and intergovernmental organizations, journalists, academics, and of course, to investors in Silicon Valley.

As empathy increasingly became a buzzword in the wake of this apparent new breed of emotionally mature, high-brow games, artists with newfound fame were summarily painted with the label. Along with Papers, Please, the NPR piece cites Zoe Quinn’s Depression Quest and Anna Anthropy’s Dys4ia as examples of “empathetic” games, or games designed to elicit feelings of kinship and understanding, usually with a marginalized or oppressed group (i.e. people suffering with severe depression, migrants, transwomen). But not everyone who got roped into this designation eagerly embraced it. A 2015 Motherboard piece entitled, “Why Video Games Can't Teach You Empathy” by Cecilia D’Anastasio strongly suggests that the proposition that games can imbue players with lasting, true understanding and compassion for another’s plight is a kind of magical thinking. The piece asks whether empathy games, “despite their hype, even exist at all?”

D’Anastasio quotes Anthropy on feeling discomfort with using games as a tool to “understand” the feelings of dysphoria associated with transitioning. Dys4ia is an autobiographical series of 8-bit vignettes exploring different experiences and emotions the creator went through at various points during her transition, but was never intended as a way for cis allies to empathize with trans people, or to persuade anybody of the worthiness of compassion for trans people. Nor does Anthropy believe it’s possible to monolithically convey “what it’s like” to be trans using games as a conduit.

“If you’ve played a 10-minute game about being a transwoman… don’t pat yourself on the back for feeling like you understand a marginalized experience,” she told D’Anastasio.

D’Anastasio goes on to describe two kinds of empathy: the intellectual variety, relating to an understanding of someone’s behaviour and ability to predict their actions that requires no emotional component, and the emotional variety, that describes being able to feel what someone else is feeling in a particular context. Most proponents of “empathy games” seem to want to induce the latter type, supposedly because this is the thing that demonstrates the humanity of the medium, and enshrines it as culturally important not just for artistic purposes, but for scientific, political and social purposes as well.

The desire for artistic prestige usually conferred on older media like film and literature, as well as the desire for a vindication of games as socially beneficial, are deeply connected to insecurity about the level of violent content in the most popular games. The lingering effects of Jack Thompson’s and Tipper Gore’s crusades against violent videogames manifested in a general anxiety about gaming’s capacity to inspire violence and aggression in young people. D’Anastasio cites a widely circulated study from 2011, entitled “This is your brain on violent video games: Neural desensitization to violence predicts increased aggression following violent video game exposure”, that gave scientific rigour to the idea that there was a link between consistently playing violent games and a blasé reaction to violence. (A recent study out of Germany showed no conclusive link between playing violent games and a “blunting” of empathic responses in players; it’s also not clear that the aggression spikes documented by fMRI while subjects played competitive games was long-term or categorically different from the spikes seen while playing sports.)

It’s fair to speculate that the ways in which violence is depicted in media, games included, have an effect on how people interpret violence. The discussion around the time “empathy games” hit the scene, however, was less about the nuances of violence and ideology in art and more a blanket condemnation (or defense) of violence in games. Those with a stake in the production of games were quick to pick up on the utility of studies that showed their potential benefits to young minds: if games were exceptional for their negative effects on players, all the better if they could be framed as exceptional for their positive effects. If emotions like empathy and compassion can accurately be measured, then “emotional maturity” becomes a special feature of videogames that can be sold as a product.

As far as legitimacy for the medium and the potential for money-making and power-brokering with political elites goes, it’s clear why “empathy” entered the popular lexicon in games by way of the indie boom. Digging even further into the past reveals a preoccupation with games and “empathy” in academia, particularly in fields like psychology and sociology. In 2011, before the rise of empathy games, the medium garnered special attention for its potential applications in therapy. In that year, game developer Jane McGonigal released her book Reality is Broken, a self-help style book that argues games can be used for therapeutic and educational purposes, to “boost happiness” and even maybe “change the world.” Together with her TED Talks (like 2010’s “Gaming can make a better world”), Reality is Broken solidified her as a leading evangelist for the healing potential of games. Around the same time, a slew of articles and studies began to delve into the question of gaming as a potentially “prosocial” educational and therapeutic tool, which if properly applied could help people deal with things like depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, relationship issues, and even broad socioeconomic problems like racism and sexism. A 2011 post on Psychology Today by Susan Krauss Whitbourne, Ph.D, specifically proposes that games can be useful for teaching people “empathy” and other “prosocial” behaviours.

The relationship between games, learning, and socialization is far from unheard of, and has precedent in the work of sociologist Roger Caillois and child psychologist Jean Piaget, as well as philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein and cultural theorist Johan Huizinga. For people versed in the academic underpinnings of games as cultural and social objects, this is all well-trod territory. Educators have also known for years of the value of play in learning, and educational games (both digital and analog) are a regular part of many teachers’ lesson plans. None of that inherently warrants suspicion. What does, however, warrant some suspicion are the potentially reckless claims made by evangelists like McGonigal, who posit that gaming can actually replace traditional forms of therapy.

Related trends from around this period, like the “gamification of learning” schtick popular among the Social and Emotional Learning (or “SEL”) crowd arguably formed part of the same pattern wherein valid inquiry about the nature and uses of play became sweeping declarations useful for branding and marketing strategies. New hustles, in the form of SEL gurus, self-help style programs and variousnon-profits started to crop up to capitalize on this conception of games as tools for learning and awareness-building. Even Trip Hawkins, the founder of EA, got in on the action, raising $6.5 million for his startup, If You Can. This venture went on to publish the game IF, a “social and emotional learning” game that promised to teach kids empathy through play—though this claim remains ambiguous.

Games really were no longer just the purview of the antisocial male loner—now they were prosocial, therapeutic, empathy-inducing, a cure-all for any problem be it psychological, moral, or even political. Instead of just rallying promotion around “fun”—escapism, competition, play aggression, frivolity—marketers could also present games as “empathetic”, and therefore respectable (a 2014 Forbes piece on the subject is literally entitled “Is there a market for empathy?”). These games, D’Anastasio writes, are “not meant to be fun.”

The period between 2011-2015 rapidly generated plenty of enthusiasm and opportunism—and a little bit of cautious criticism—for these empathetic, emotionally mature games. As of 2017, “empathy games” as a genre seems to have mostly faded from popular memory (with the exception of a couple of cutting-edge CBC posts from this past year, one of which remarks on UNESCO’s commissioning of a Toronto-based researcher to study games’ capacity to elicit compassion in players). But “empathy” as both a justification for playing games and a marketing gimmick with which to sell them seems to have stuck around, in slightly different form.

This shift in the marketing language around games was foreshadowed in Minority Media founder Vander Caballero’s 2014 GDC talk, Empathetic Games Are Here to Stay! What’s Next?—essentially a 20-minute promotional event for an anti-bullying game that was eventually released for iOS as Spirits of Spring—lays out the framework for the “empathy game” as a specific genre with its own stylistic and mechanical conventions and design approaches. He describes a process by which Minority Media developers would try to elicit particular emotional responses by matching them to different mechanics at different “beats” in a game, not dissimilar to how artists try to convey mood, tone or symbolic imagery in any other medium. But for games, and especially empathy games, this was contextualized as something novel and extraordinary. He confesses his desire to use game mechanics to convey metaphor, and to express a sense of dramatic closure rather than a strict win or loss condition by the end of the game.

It’s worth noting that nothing Caballero describes is especially new to artistic production, even within games. By 2014 there was already an enormous volume of art games, both published on major platforms and abundant in alternative DIY spaces, that engaged with digital space and play on consciously expressive and conceptual terms. (This isn’t even counting the systems-based art, computer art and participatory art that captured the interest of artists for over half of the 20th century.) But, at GDC, a multi-million dollar conference primarily predicated on networking and business talk, it’s not surprising that this history would be elided in the interest of promoting not just a particular empathy game, but empathy in general, as the hot new thing.

Caballero made another interesting statement during the Q&A session of the talk. At around the 18 minute mark, in response to a question asking Caballero to elaborate on his ideas about “closure,” Caballero criticizes the industry for providing “really good entertainment” that was nonetheless not helping people “grow.” He then claims that “we are not being politically active in...most of our games.” By “politically active” I assume Caballero meant “politically conscious”, in that while games are inevitably political and ideological, they may not always explicitly acknowledge this, and tend to encourage intellectually passive consumption. By contrast, empathetic games could address “real” issues, fundamentally challenging the ethics of people who play them.

This view of empathy games as inherently more political than other kinds of games is worth deconstructing, because proponents of “empathy” in games still generally avoid discussing things like ideology, history, or the fundamental underlying systems that support the existence of their work. The assumption here is that such games are inherently emotionally honest, or even comparable in their assessment of real-life events and experiences to hard-nosed journalism. To this day, nowhere is that notion more alive than in the virtual reality scene.

In Part 2 of this series, Polansky will interrogate the use of “empathy” in the VR industry more directly, looking at the documentary-style “VR experiences” enjoyed by wealthy elites at the World Economic Forum and other high-society functions, and the stated intentions of the major players in the VR industry.

Lana Polansky is a Montreal-based writer, artist, independent game-maker and dirtbag gamer communist. Her work has been featured in Vice, Rhizome, Kill Screen, Paste and elsewhere. You can find her on Twitter @mechapoetic and support her on Patreon.


Top: Promotional image from Spirits of the Spring (Minority Media, 2014).

Net Art Anthology in El Paquete Semanal

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Netart Latino Database (2004) by Brian Mackern is included in the online exhibition Net Art Anthology and the gallery exhibition “The Art Happens Here: Net Art’s Archival Poetics,” on view at the New Museum through May 26.

To coincide with the Havana Biennial, artist Nestor Siré invited Rhizome to present a work as part of El Paquete Semanal, an informal medium for circulating information, music, and video in Cuba. Siré and his sometimes collaborator Julia Weist describe El Paquete as

a one-terabyte media collection that is aggregated weekly in Cuba and circulated across the country via in-person file sharing. The package usually contains between 15,000 and 18,000 files, depending on the week and your distributor, and it covers a dizzying array of content including software, sports, soap operas, web shows, animation, manga, movies and TV, video games, music, magazines, and more. 

In practice, it serves as “an illicit economy for renting media outside of government control.” Since 2015, Siré has organized an ongoing program he calls !!!Sección A R T E, which circulates “art news, current and upcoming gallery openings, books, documentaries and open calls for artists.” It also includes a “F O L D E R =gallery=” for artworks specifically created to be displayed in the context of El Paquete.

For !!!Sección A R T E!!!Act[No.22], alongside projects by a range of other artists and writers, Rhizome presents materials from Brian Mackern’s project Netart Latino Database (1999–2004). The project, which is included in our ongoing online exhibition Net Art Anthology and in the related gallery exhibition “The Art Happens Here: Net Art’s Archival Poetics,” was an artistic effort to catalogue online artistic production by artists of Latin America, a vibrant network that can now only glimpsed in surviving fragments on the web and in Mackern’s documentation. Users in Cuba will be able to access a pdf of the Netart Latino Database book and a 2009 video walkthrough of some of the sites catalogued by Mackern. 

 

Watch the 7×7 2019 Livestream today!

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Beginning at 1PM EST, we'll be broadcasting 7×7 2019 live from the New Museum. Tune in here.

7×7 brings together leaders in art and technology for a one-day creative collaboration with a simple challenge: “Make something.” The seven collaborative pairs will reveal their projects today.

Today's program features:
Artist Rachel Rose & Kirstin Petersen, Founder, Collective Embodied Intelligence Lab, Cornell
Artist Matthew Angelo Harrison & Trevor McFedries, Cofounder, Brud
Artist Sarah Meyohas & Tarun Chitra, Founder, Gauntlet
Artist Hayal Pozanti & Laura Welcher, Linguist, Long Now Foundation
Artist American Artist & Rashida Richardson, Policy Research, AI Now
Artist Artie Vierkant & James La Marre, Developer & Activist
Artist Qiu Zhijie & He Xiaodong, Deputy Managing Director, JD AI


PARTNERS

Seven on Seven is made possible by the generous support of Deutsche Bank Americas Foundation, founding partner Wieden+Kennedy, New York, and GIPHY. Special thanks to Kickstarter, Phillips, and ArtJaws.

Sister City is Seven on Seven's exclusive hotel and after party partner.

May 3 in San José: Hayal Pozanti and Laura Welcher revisit their 7×7 2019 collaboration

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Rhizome is thrilled to be partnering with the San José Museum of Art to re-present artist Hayal Pozanti and linguist and Long Now Director of Operations Laura Welcher's collaboration from last weekend's 7×7 2019. This thought-provoking project sought to send a message deep into the future, entangling xenolinguistics, next generation 3D printing, and hope and fear in the context of global climate catastrophe. Pozanti and Welcher will be joined, as part of their extended presentation, by Sandy Curth from UC Berkeley's Emerging Objects Lab, with whom the pair worked to develop a terracotta glyph (pictured above).

This event is presented as part of SJMA's new Facebook First Fridays series. Learn more. Please join! 

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