SFAQ_issue_sixteen

LINDSAY HOWARD & CECI MOSS
In conversation with ANDREW MCCLINTOCK
Andrew McClintock: Can each of you start by giving a brief background on how
you became involved with curating digital art, or exploring technology in and around
art?
Lindsay Howard: I started using the Internet in the late ‘90s at first to meet
strangers in AOL chat rooms and later to download music and hang out on LiveJournal.
In 2004, I saw a net art piece by John Michael Boling and it blew my mind— that’s when
I first experienced the web as an artistic platform. When I graduated college, I started
a Tumblr where I posted my writing on net art, images, animations, and audio, either
sourced from friend’s studios or from an international group of young artists I started
to identify who were making and sharing work online. As a result of my Tumblr, I was
invited to curate exhibitions in gallery spaces and my first was a group show called
DUMP.FM IRL at 319 Scholes, where I subsequently became the Curatorial Director.
319 Scholes is a physical meeting place for an international community of artists
working online. We hosted the JstChillin.org retrospective after their two-year run as a
browser-based gallery and commissioning platform, and worked with a number of guest
curators, including Brian Droitcour, Francesca Gavin, Gene McHugh, Nicholas O’Brien,
Christina Latina, Daniel Leyva, and Domenico Quaranta, who explored topics such as
the relationship between landscape and screen-based practices, artists as archivists,
fantasy and play in networked culture, and the influence of rave and electronic music
on contemporary art. In three years, we exhibited over three hundred artists working
at the intersection of art and technology. Since then, I’ve become interested in helping
artists develop long-term, sustainable practices by exploring alternative monetization
models for digital art.
Ceci Moss: I graduated UC Berkeley in 2005 and during my last year there I took
a media theory course with Dr. Todd Presner, who has done a lot of work with media
theory and European intellectual history. Up to that point I was mainly interested in
intellectual history and the 20 th century, especially in France, but through that class I
got into media theory and that progressed into an interest in media art. I graduated
and I moved to New York and the first job I got out there was the position of Special
Projects Manager at the New Museum and Rhizome, which is a non-profit affiliated
with the New Museum that supports emerging art practices engaged with technology
through the new media art archive Artbase, commissions, publications, public programs,
and more. I was a catch-all person for all these different things that they were doing,
primarily fundraisers for the New Museum and for Rhizome. The project I was
working on for the New Museum was a box set of video art called Point of View, so I
spent about a year and a half working on that, then I was also involved in developing
the membership program at Rhizome. Through this role, I got even deeper into not
only new media art but video art as well. I fully immersed myself. I started writing
for Rhizome at this time, and when Marisa Olson left her role, I applied and I was
hired as the senior editor of Rhizome. That was really fun and rewarding, Rhizome has
such an incredible history and there are so many wonderful, smart people involved
in the organization. I had the opportunity to write about and work with a number
of incredibly talented artists as well. I learned a lot through that, and I was heavily
involved with the media art community in New York. In 2008, I started a Ph.D program
at NYU in comparative literature while working at Rhizome, and my research project
examined Internet art practices in the last ten years. In 2012, I taught for a year at
NYU and in fall 2013, I decided I wanted to move back to the Bay Area and I got a
job here as a the Assistant Curator of Visual Arts at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.
I’m continuing my interest in art and technology through this new exhibition series
Control, which explores the role of technology in culture through solo exhibitions by
emerging and established artists interested in thinking critically about technology’s
influence on our contemporary world. For the first Control exhibition, I’m working with
Jacqueline Kiyomi Gordon, who is interested in the technological design of sound and
architecture, especially how it relates to the body and perception.
AM: Let’s go back to when artists started using the Internet as a medium—about
twenty years ago.
CM: Artists were also using BBS services in the ‘80s, so it’s a pretty long history. In
the ‘90s The Thing was a major hub for people who were interested in experimenting
with art online. Rhizome, which began as an email list in 1996, was a way for people to
share information and experiment with the web. I think what’s interesting about that
history is that a lot of those artists weren’t necessarily coming from the mainstream
contemporary art world, nor were they coming from the mainstream technology
world, so you have a community that is really vibrant, critical, experimental—it was a
fertile time for a lot of artists who were working outside a lot of the larger structures
between them; there’s a lot of great work that was produced at that moment.
LH: There’s also Eyebeam, a New York-based non-profit that was founded in 1997.
Originally, they paired established and emerging artists in an R&D style environment to
co-produce major works—early alumni include Tony Oursler, Mariko Mori, Alexander
Galloway, Cory Arcangel, Golan Levin, and Zach Lieberman—and then it developed
into more of an artist residency program.
AM: You were the Curatorial Fellow at Eyebeam in 2012 and 2013, correct?
LH: Yeah, it was an incredible experience. I spent the first few months going through
their archives, reviewing nearly two decades worth of media art history. I became
fascinated by the period of time around 2005/2006 when Jonah Peretti (who went on
to cofound Huffington Post and Buzzfeed) was the Director of the R&D Open Lab,
working with senior fellows Evan Roth and James Powderly. It was around this time
that they started the Free Art & Technology (F.A.T.) Lab and Graffiti Research Lab. This
crew was, and still is, a powerhouse. They produce groundbreaking work related to
social communication, viral media, and creative technologies for the public domain. I
pitched Eyebeam to curate a five-year retrospective of F.A.T. Lab’s work. The exhibition
opened in April 2013, and brought together F.A.T. Lab’s network of artists, hackers,
musicians, lawyers, and graffiti writers, to showcase past work, collaborate on new
projects, and host a series of workshops and discussions.
AM: I remember you saying that F.A.T. Lab were artists operating as hackers. What
did you mean by that?
LH: There are many ways to define a “hack” but it’s typically used to describe a
clever, maybe playful, intervention into an existing system. So, for example, one of the
pieces in the F.A.T. Lab retrospective was Evan Roth’s Ideas Worth Spreading, a full-scale
replica of a TED stage. The installation was equipped so that anyone could go on set,
record herself giving a talk, and quickly upload it online. It was about opening up a
closed system—one that’s usually reserved for people who have a certain degree of
recognition, influence, or wealth—and welcoming anyone with an idea to participate.
AM: So would you say then that art in this medium is inherently political just because
it’s going out of the system to create a voice? As I’ve been learning more about this it
seems close to conceptual art, perhaps a way of looking at art.
CM: There are a lot of people who have made that connection, for sure. For one, I
think of the Sol LeWitt quote where he says, “the idea is the machine that makes the
art.” His statement reveals how conceptual art adopted systems theory in various
ways. When you read that work and the writing coming out of that period in the 1960s,
there is some shared territory in terms of trying to rethink what an artwork is and
where and how it functions. One aspect of conceptual art that parallels Internet art is
that it doesn’t have a medium the way painting has a medium, the way sculpture has a
medium. In the 20 th century you see especially with Clement Greenberg and Rosalind
Krauss, this focus on medium specificity and that being a lens with which one would
read and interpret a piece of work. A really compelling aspect of artists working
with digital technology, especially working with the Internet in particular, is that they
are doing something that isn’t easily interpreted under that kind of structure. And so,
especially in the last ten years, you see a lot of critics writing about the post-media
condition or post-media. The conversation around post-Internet is very much related
to that, where people are just trying to think through where this art work is occurring,
what it is.
LH: It’s been interesting to see post-Internet art through the eyes of the contemporary
art market. People don’t even know what it is. Gallerists know they want post-Internet
art in their galleries. Collectors know they need post-Internet art in their collection.
Artists are trying to make work that fits with the post-Internet art aesthetic. But,
honestly, even the people who invented the term struggle to define it. My theory is
that Post-Internet Art is the result of a persistent fear of technology. It’s an excuse
to ignore Internet Art and go back to talking about and thinking about objects. post-
Internet art ends up resembling pre-Internet art, in its mode of production, materials,
and the conversation around it.
CM: Why do we need pre and post? I would love to see more conversation exactly
about what you’re talking about, people really deeply reflecting on network culture and
what that means. In David Joselit’s book After Art, he says that in the last ten years we’ve
seen this move away from medium, and he asks that we consider how we qualify art
within the 21 st century. He suggests that we look at images as creating these intensities,
as entities that can spark something within our culture. He also understands the art
Jamie Zigelbaum, Pixel, 2013. Courtesy of the artist.