The latest in a series of interviews with artists who make work that responds to network culture and digital technologies.
Jason Isolini: Comp USA Live was a live desktop performance and livestream series that disregarded various physical and digital boundaries, including browser windows, green screens, and private and public space. Both live and virtual audiences often participated in its shenanigans, becoming artifacts of failed facial recognition and haphazard operations. In a lineage of cyberperformance that includes web-based theater in Second Life, Upstage, and notably Wirefire, Comp USA Live functions more like a cyber-variety show. I can’t help but reminisce on the actual Comp USA retailer and web2’s early shift to the digital storefront, which visually became an ad-based agglomeration of the browser. Can you speak about what led up to this mixture of comedy and live programming; what did Comp USA Live look like in the pre-pandemic days? Is there a term you’d use to describe this work?
Still, Mark Fingerhut, CompUSA Live, 2017-2020, Episode 8: Too Much Tech. Live Performance, 1:01:54. Courtesy Mark Fingerhut.
Mark Fingerhut: The terms I would use to describe Comp USA Live are "digital slapstick," the "aesthetic of failure," or "a comedy of digital errors." I like "digital slapstick" because it's the inherent comedy of using a computer to get a task done. We glaze over the physical comedy of misclicking, or opening the wrong window; clicking the wrong button, and then a cable gets wrapped around your mouse, and something falls on your keyboard and hits a key wrong, or the speakers get unplugged, et cetera. Just the total mire, the digital muck, the complete disaster that is using a physical desktop computer. As much as we want to pretend that we've been "uploaded" and we're all cybernetic, digital, people who exist only online, it's not the case. It couldn't be farther from the case; we're still sitting at these computers and, fucking clicking around trying to get shit working. I mean, the antagonist of the show was the "Graphic Designer," someone who does it all "correctly."So, that was kind of the impetus of CompUSA Live. We wanted to stage this chaos real-time, in front of a live audience, because everyone relates to the experience of having "technical difficulties;" it resonates and works as theater. It's a nightmare, but it's really funny, is the thing.
In the pre-pandemic days, livestreaming was not as ubiquitous as it is now. Today, it's a totally codified and fully named activity. But pre-pandemic, the idea of streaming what was on your computer live for an audience was novel. It was a new idea to have a performance that takes place simultaneously in the real and digital desktop world, so that was our point of exploration. Content-wise, with CompUSA Live, it was about a team of people trying to do CompUSA, live. So it was self-referential in that way, and we had a lot of room to play around with that story.
Still, Mark Fingerhut, CompUSA Live, 2017-2020. Live Performance. Courtesy Mark Fingerhut.
JI: These performances transposed into an “anything goes” attitude towards social media. Your instagram account Gentle_Virus amassed a cult-like following adjacent to what some might identify as a meme renaissance between 2019 and 2020. Although unconfirmed, I imagine you may have been behind some of the multi-user accounts like Incellectuals and Meaningful_Images_Only that flooded feeds and functioned like an algorithmic hack. I remember at the height of all of this you deleted your Instagram, leaving some 20K followers to scroll without you. Was there a pinnacle of social media for you, or an event you felt to be most memorable? I bring this up because your work GOBLIN.exe, a malicious software that arrests a user's PC, has a poetic, but stark tone. The software deletes itself after the Goblin wreaks hallucinatory-havoc on a user's machine. It’s quite fantastical, but viewers are brought back to reality with the presence of familiar Windows error messages that are integrated throughout its performance. Does this relate to a death of platform autonomy?
MF: Posting used to be way more fun. And those 20K followers were mostly bots. It was funny at the time. With incellectuals and meaningful images only, we were in the halcyon days (no pun intended) of posting. Posting was genuinely fun and it was transgressive to post a stream of consciousness to our meme page. It really took off, and developed a life of its own. We were doing something genuinely new, and the guiding principle we gave ourselves was simply: "post anything." There were no rules, post any image you have access to. Just post it. Who cares? Just post. And it was cathartic. It was truly fun. I think the best day on Instagram was the day of the long posts, which was a moment of unfettered joy when people could post long images; when Instagram itself broke and people were posting images that you had to scroll past for like 20 seconds. It was the best day. I was laughing the entire day. It felt like a dream, and watching a platform like that break was an absolute joy, and social media has not been fun since that day. With GOBLIN.exe, it was created in the midst of that super highly digital place I was in, probably the only piece of malware I'll ever actually "need" to make, because of how much the medium and the story are one in the same. That is THE hack story.
Still, Mark Fingerhut, GOBLIN.exe, 2020. Custom Software. Courtesy Mark Fingerhut.
JI:Halcyon.exe The Ride is a computer virus turned physical installation that incorporates exposed wiring, timed lighting, scented mist, and rumbling seating—think a Rube Goldberg-esque experiment in immersion. Like GOBLIN.exe, the malware arrests a PC for a 20-minute long desktop performance. Both works are poetic; however, for me the syntax of programming in Halcyon.exe is more apparent as a kind of choreography. In the work, a container ship that “waits” in line is a symbolic word play for the “weight” of code in a command line interface. The malware commences in a romanticism of the “channel”—both a seemingly imperfect network in which communication transpires, and a metaphorical pathway likening the viewer’s life to a container ship’s route. What is so effective about these works is a technique you often use which is adressing the viewer as the protagonist in second-person. As a throughline of your practice, I’m curious where that voice comes from? In a section of Halcyon.exe titled “Riddle Road” you pose the question: “Who am I?” Is this a fluid persona that emerges in various areas of your work? Is this the Goblin? Or is it just another verse, or coda of programming as dance?
MF: I use second person a lot because I want to do VR without doing VR. I see my storytelling positioned in a future-facing context, where, in the future, art is a drug you inject that takes you on a hallucinatory journey that happens to you. The concept of "simstim" In Neuromancer by William Gibson is something I'm influenced by. So second person narration is my way of doing VR without all of the absolute horrid bullshit that comes with actually physically doing VR. With Halcyon.exe, I was composing scenes that felt meaningful. And the overarching story is that Halcyon.exe was composed of individual scenes that I just knew I had to make. It wasn't until probably a year later that I realized I was actually working on one giant piece and not a bunch of smaller pieces.
Spray bottle and fan that are suspended from the cieling in Halycon.Exe the Ride, 2023. Photo: Jason Isolini. Courtesy of Mark Fingerhut.
The “Ride” element was my attempt at making something truly about physical sensation. Water spraying on you, the wind, the hurricane, the physical bang of thunder, the seat shaking—It's very much to get you back to that point where you're thinking about your body, and the way you exist physically. I'm interested in bringing it back to this offline, very real experience that everybody has, but tries to ignore because it's not vogue to talk about: walking to the bank, or waiting for the train—all of the "nothing" times of our lives which actually constitute, like 95% of our experience. So with Riddle Road, those riddles have answers. I think they are only answers that I would ever know. But I am talking about four very specific ideas in riddle road, which have answers. They're not nonsense riddles—I feel like people know the answers when they watch riddle road. So, I would say not all of my pieces have the same voice, It's very much dependent on the work. In Goblin.exe, it's the hacker; in Halcyon.exe, it's this omniscient narrator.
JI: I once asked you where you get your music from, and your response was “bars.” The soundtracks to your works feel like they're yours, and maybe that’s because some of them are references to online subculture and memes like Halcyon's nod to the Epic Sax Guy. In all of your works you have an acute sense of tempo that’s related to cinematic structure. Can you talk about some of your inspirations in cinema and music?
MF: With Halcyon.exe, I intentionally brought in the Epic Sax Guy in the beginning to notate that this piece is coming from a place of acknowledgement of the meme world and of digital culture. However, it departs from that world pretty drastically. As I mentioned before, the entire piece is very much not about computers or digital life—It's about physical sensation. It's about patience, mindfulness, life, living unplugged or staring at an empty corner of your house and all of the time that's "in-between" the times that we actually remember, all of the nothing times. Starting with a meme song, and then departing from that into more psychedelic prog rock instrumental pieces from the 70s, was a very intentional transition.
With music, when it hits, it hits. And when I know, I know. I gravitate towards using music that I hear in bars because this kind of music is meant to evoke a certain feeling, or it's from a certain time. Music is the start of everything that I do. I'm a choreographer, really, at the end of the day; a choreographer and a writer. So when the music hits, it hits, and you know it. And I have a vision for the song, and I will see it literally as a vision that clouds everything. I will see what needs to happen, and then I will make it. And it's been happening to me since I was a child, and it's how I've conceptualized all of my videos, and 90% of my art is choreography, choreographed to music. The curation is also a major artistic gesture, as well, because the songs will carry with them all of the weight of their context and meaning, and I intentionally use that "baggage" in my work.
Installation view, Halycon.exe The Ride at Public Works Administration, 2023. Courtesy of Courtney Kennare.
Age (if you’d like to share): 31
Location: NYC
How/when did you begin working creatively with technology?
Probably around 8 years old, I made many many movies with LEGO Studios, a LEGO camera that allowed you to easily make stop motion videos.
What did you study at school or elsewhere?
Interactive Art, Pratt Institute, 2015
What do you do for a living or what occupations have you held previously?
I have a regular software job now, but in the past I did some console cowboy work writing code for all of your favorite artists. I had a brief tenure as a stage manager for theater, a landscaper, a pizza chef, and some food service odd jobs.
What does your desktop or workspace look like? (Pics or screenshots please!)
