Angel: Our speaker today is Evan Roth.
He's a multi-disciplinary American artist based in Paris.
He's working with sculptures, prints, videos and websites
and in the upcoming hour during his talk he'll take you on a journey about art,
politics, culture, the misuse of communication technologies
and how all of these are connected to each other.
Please give a warm round of applause for Evan Roth, our speaker today!
Thank you very much!
*Applause*
Evan: Hi everybody, thanks so much for coming, I'm really humbled and honoured to be here.
It's my first time on this side of the internet with you all, so thanks so much for joining.
Ya, my name is Evan. I'm an American, I'm living in Paris at the moment.
I'm an artist, and so I'm gonna talk a bit about the art I've been making the last few
years,
how it's changed as the internet's changed, and hopefully weave some threads through here.
The work I'm making primarily shows up in these three areas of the gallery,
public space and the internet.
The mediums I'm using are often quite different, but historically the work I've been making
has been connected by this relationship between misuse and empowerment,
and how misuse can kind of be this lens that we, as we all know, look at technologies
but lots of things in life around us is sort of see things that have other
sort of unintended uses, right. Female voice in bg: Introducing the iRobot
robot..
Evan: To make things, like consumer domestic products much more interesting, right,
so this is the doomba, this old old internet meme, right,
*laughter* but, so good, right,
such a wonderful gift that the internet gave us
with the doomba,
like I can't wait until.. I really feel like this
should be in the permanent collection
of the Museum of Modern Arts, this is one of my favourite sculptures
I've seen in the last few years.
But for me, I tried to have like doomba vision when I'm doing activism
or when I'm doing art and thinking about like
what else can I ducttape knifes onto to make it more interesting than it was
the way the manufacturer sort of er, advertised it to me, right?
Ahm, and so that's kind of a main inspiration for a lot of the art work that I look at,
that I'm a fan of and that I'm trying to make in my own practice.
And so two maybe more specific themes I'm gonna try to show through different projects
are 1) this idea of technological empowerment, which is part of the reason I became an artist,
and the other this idea of visualisation through misuse.
And my kind of .. my history with technological empowerment went back to the ..
when I was an architect. I was at university and I was..
I had one class about computers, that my dad sort of forced me to take,
and I didn't think it was that interesting.
This was back when I was literally still doing, like, graphite with a straight edge on vellum,
right?
This was like the first class where they're gonna
do things like 3D modelling on Autocad,
and there was one week about the internet. And I had like this really vivid memory
where the professor brought up this fetch window on an old Mac,
and like edited it in a little text document and dragged it in and the dog
ran it up to the internet and then he'd refresh on the browser
and it updated. And of course this is like small news now,
but for me this was huge. I couldn't believe it,
like I really just couldn't believe that for free I could say anything to anybody
and nobody could really censor it. It just seemed like it was too good to be
true.
And that was kind of the death knell on my architectural career.
Like I would go on to graduate and work for a couple of years,
but very quickly I was falling in love with the internet in the early kind-of-like
flash days,
remember, that time was really fun.
And so I was coming home from my architecture job and sort of trying to
learn code
and trying .. kind of had my first introduction to open source,
like reading Joshua Davis' praystation FLA files,
if anybody remembers that day.
But that was kind of my introduction to technology, and it was really empowering,
like, it was a feeling, that I still remember and try to, like, hone in on
when I'm getting more depressed these days.
And so, how this shows up in some of my work, I'm gonna start around, like, 2005
with some projects that I've been doing up to projects that I've been doing right
now.
Back in 2005/2006 I co-founded an organisation called Graffiti Reseach Lab
with a friend named James Powderly, while we were in residency at IBM in New York.
And the basic idea we had with Graffiti Research Lab was that
technologies were getting a lot cheaper to the point where they're almost getting
disposable,
like LEDs, digital projectors were getting really cheap, lasers were getting really cheap,
and we were interested in trying to make projects that would start to get graffiti writers and
activists
talking to the free software movement more.
Like have a common dialogue for these two very different groups of toolbuilders.
And so, with that as, like, a premise, we sort of thought of ourselves
as the Q branch for graffiti writers, right?
I'll just show one quick project. This was called 'Laser Tag'.
This was a in retrospect very simple computer vision project,
but we would basically go out with a digital projector
and we'd invite activists and we'd invite graffiti writers,
and we'd set up on this sort of biggest buildings that we could find in town.
And we would just have this kind of open system, like, the only rules that we had with the
project
was that there couldn't be a censor button. People had to be allowed to say
whatever they wanted. Most of the times we did it without permission,
which isn't saying much because at the time there wasn't a lot of people
projecting in public so there weren't a lot of
sort of laws in this sort of grey area.
So even when the police usually came it was more of a conversation than a ticket.
And so we were making, this is one example of lots of projects
we were making where it was kind of about amplifying free speech,
like trying to use technologies that were getting cheaper and cheaper and
cheaper
to level that playing field between people who live in cities and people who advertise
in cities,
and what kind of visual language and visual communication we have in both those
places.
So that was the work Graffiti Research Lab was doing.
At some point we realized with Graffiti Research Lab
that the sort of technical hacking we were doing
was much less interesting than the more social hacking we were doing.
And we also, we were getting much more press than we deserved,
and we were trying to figure out why that was happening,
and one thing we sorta came to was we were sorta fulfilling this narrative
that the media wants, which is that we are living in the future now, right?
Which is why everyone is reporting on hoverboards now, like, ???
we're here, you know? And graffiti writers with lasers
was one of those apparently, like, monumental future points that we'd hit,
and so the media was trying to write about our projects,
and we realized that this was sort of a social hack where we could start to
empower other people with maybe more marginalized voices
to get in the newspapers more often.
And so, our mission changed slightly, and so we kind of morphed the energy that
we had
with Graffiti Research Lab into this group called the Free Art and Technology Lab,
which didn't really have a sort of set code or manifesto,
but the basic idea was that we were gonna use what even Franco called radical entertainment,
This idea that you could make sort of engaging media on the internet
that people are gonna want to click on, not because they agree with the politics,
because they wanna see people acting a fool in the streets, right?
So I'll show, I'll show one project here.
This was from a suite of projects we did in Berlin, gosh, a few years ago now,
called 'Fuck Google', where we came together to make Fuck Google projects.
So this was one where we rented a.. actually, Aram Bartholl was over here,
you can see him seated there in the driver's seat,
rented this car for very cheap,
bought a roof rack off of ebay i think, for, like, 15 Euros,
and then everything above the roof was just cardboard, ducttape and wires.
There was nothing technical in this project, it was purely a social hack.
And this was probably my second greatest technological empowering moment.
Driving the google car is fucking amazing.
Here is what that looks like.
*music*
*laughter*
So once we had the car, we were just brainstorming,
like, what are the little skits we could play out, that would kind of put google
in a compromised position. And so, yeah, it was breaking down.
This is the drinking and driving. *Laughter*
*applause*
And if you wanna know how strong google's brand is, this is a staged carjacking,
where someone off the street risks their life to save a corporate automobile
engaged in spying practices. *Laughter*
And so the idea is that we were then leaking these on the internet and
this was a long time ago back when we were not sure if google was evil or not,
right?
So this discussion was happening.
It's happening more in Germany than in other places, actually.
But the idea was to get those conversations happening outside of places like this,
and outside of places like our gallery and art institutions and more in, like,
the mainstream press, and, like, people over coffee
picking up this story
and starting to talk about these issues.
That was kind of the idea behind F.A.T. Lab function.
I was also maintaining a solo practice at the same time as I was doing these
more collaborative projects.
This is one called 'Free Speech' I did in Vienna in 2000.. I don't know, like 3 or
4 years ago now?
This is again, like, a very simple technology, this is another rented car with vinyl letters
of a mobile phone number, mobile Viennese phone number,
and an arrow pointing to a loudspeaker on the roof.
And that's the only input you get as the viewer.
And we just drove this around Vienna for three days,
and people that were sort of curious enough to call that would have their phone
routed directly to the speaker, and there was noone on the other line,
so their first realisation that they were sort of in the system when they would just
hear themselves, like, 'Hello?' echoing throughout the streets.
I'll show a bit of that that looks like.
*noise* Female voice: Hallo? Hallo!
Ich bin der Champion!
Male voice: *Laughter*
*noise*
Children: Hallo! Fick dich!
Male voice: Laura! Ich liebe dich!
*Music*
Group voices: Hallo? Niiiiice!
So fresh, man. TschĂś.
Evan: And so, like, that guy was maybe my favourite,
or maybe that guy who picked up
and just started laughing, even though when confronted
with this sort of
louder voice in public, and they were.. maybe thought that were gonna have,
when they set out, commute to work or go to coffee,
even though maybe they didn't choose to say these more poignant points, you know?
Maybe just the laughter to me was this more pure feeling of what technological
empowerment feels like, right, like just laughing on the streets
because you kind of have this empowered voice.
Like, that, that's the feeling I wanna get as an artist and so,
some of the work I was doing was trying to sort of set up, set up these systems
that would allow other people to have these sort of experiences.
So again, like very simple tools for empowerment,
very low-tech tools for empowerment.
The other thread that I was doing throughout that period and maybe more so
in the last 3 years
has to do with sort of this idea of visualizing the invisible
which I think is something that artists wrestle with quite a bit.
And specifically thinking about visualizing the network,
thinking about visualizing the internet and how the internet is sort of touching us
and we have this new connection culturally to each other.
And so I did.. this was maybe 3 or 4 years ago,
I did this sort of homage to wikipedia.
I still love surfing wikipedia.
For me as someone who sort of maybe has a bit of nostalgia for the old days of the
internet,
I feel like wikipedia is one of these few holdouts on the internet
where there is semi-egoless uploads still happening.
You know?
It's not necessarily... people are making uploads not because
they're trying to craft their own avatar online, but they.. because they really want to explain
how a doroknot (?) functions, or they really want to explain
how a boxer engine works, right, it's content that if Konstant were here
he would call media with an alibi, right?
It's media that has reason for existing beyond just sort of supporting our own
online visions of who we are and who we aren't.
And so for this reason I really love wikipedia.
It feels like this really sort of free and honest place to surf sometimes.
And so, I made this series of eleven websites, kind of as a monument to wikipedia,
where I spent a summer just surfing for animated GIFs on wikipedia
which was a really awesome way to spend the summer.
And then, when I found ones that I would wanna kind of use as raw materials
I would just copy and paste it a couple of hundred times
and rename the files so that when the browser tries to load it in
it doesn't cache them all immediately. It thinks they're all separate files.
And so what ends up happening is..
And of course, it can't load them all at once, right,
so it just starts loading them in as the packets are sort of delivered
in this linear fashion, and.. so the pieces never quite look the same.
They're all... in a sense these kind of unique views
were depending on your process, your speed and what browser you're using
and how fast your internet connection is.
They're always gonna load in slightly different as the packets sort of traverse the network
in this linear fashion.
And so what you get is.. are these compositions that are very simple
but they're not, in this case, like a perfect circle, right?
You kind of see this visualization of the data kind of as it's going
through the network.
And if you view these same pieces in the TOR browser,
which I don't have to explain what it is in this audience,
which is really fun for the first time, *laughing*
you get get a sense of how... so this is the exact same website
just viewed through TOR. And you can see in the piece
how the composition is altered, right, because, as the pieces are moving around
and it's being rerouted to different nodes, they kind of come back together
in a way that's very different than the way it's happening
as a straight connection through Firefox, and so
the resulting composition is less fluid, it's more staggered and you can kind of..
There is some kind of visual clue of how that piece went through the network.
Another series I've been doing for several years now is..
I've been archiving my own browsing folder, my cache directory,
I've been basically archiving that every couple of weeks.
And then when I get invited to show a piece from that series I just basically..
I use a image packing algorithm, so just pack all these images
into the smallest amount of room possible, and I'll make these prints
that are just straight print-outs of my internet cache.
So this is what one month of my internet cache looks like.
That is what 3 months looks like.
They're relatively uncensored.
I go through it to look and make sure, 'cause sometimes my wife will use the computer,
I'll make sure there is nothing of hers she doesn't want on there,
and I check it for banking details, but besides that it's pretty..
pretty much uncensored.
And so, it's meant to be.. I kind of think of them as self portraits.
They're.. I think of them actually more like false self portraits,
'cause it's.. unless you truly think that you are your browsing data,
it's not.. it does.. it's.. these prints aren't who I feel like I am.
But in.. I think over the long term the idea is more they are meant
to be this sort of portrait of the internet at this one moment in time, right?
And as sort of screen size has changed and screens shift from our laps to our pockets,
and as browser resolutions and all these standards change,
and the kind of fabric of the web changes,
and these prints hopefully, when someone digs out of my basement,
like, 20 years from now, they'll have these sort of prints
of what the internet felt like in this one moment in time.
That's the idea anyway.
Another related series has to do again with this kind of shift from
the screen to the pocket.
Like, I'm really sort of fascinated with this idea of casual computing
which I feel.. I feel like that move when we started
having computers in our pockets every day was a really fundamental shift.
And so I had this series called 'Multi-touch Paintings',
that are created just from, basically just take a piece of tracing paper
and put it over my phone and then perform the sort of interface tasks
that it asked me to do.
So this one's called 'Slide to unlock'.
This is a.. this one's called 'Zoom in, zoom out'.
And they're literally just ink on paper.
So the capacitive touch still works through the paper
and it's.. I'm kind of like a, maybe a short term it's meant to be,
maybe purely a visualization in a sense.
But I think maybe.. I hope that there's more, there is also
like kind of an artistic side of these too, where they're also kind of commenting
on the way we're consuming media right now.
So this one's called 'Next next next', right?
So this is.. and 'next next next' is the way
probably this piece will be consumed in 99% of the time, right?
For the 10 people that see this hanging on a wall,
the rest are just gonna 'next' through this on instagram, right?
And so it's meant to sort of, kind of archive, like, the bug in amber
a little bit, these moments that we're going through right now,
where we're touching pixels for the first time,
and these things that kind of feel, sort of high-tech in a sense,
but quickly are feeling very blunt, like to me this feels like
a very blunt way to consume media, a very blunt way to have a relationship
with art.
So hopefully it's commenting on that a bit too.
This is a related piece from the series.
This is.. this piece is called 'Level Cleared'.
This is me playing Angry Birds from start to finish.
*Laughing* And so.. *Applause*
So the grid starts in the upper left corner with level 1-1.
Whoever else has a Angry.. or had at one point an Angry Birds addiction,
you know the level well.
And then I just played straight through.
It takes me full-time Angry Birds play, like 8-10 hours a day for 3 days
to get through.
And they keep adding levels, so when I have to remake the piece now
it's even more of a nightmare.
And it just marches straight through.
I have one sheet per level.. per attempted level,
and so again, this piece, like, I've been thinking a lot about
how the art.. how art and the internet relate in terms of the consumption of art
and how time is affected with our consumption of art.
And I was, actually, I was thinking about conversations we had earlier
on the F.A.T. days
where we were both kind of joking at one point about how we felt like the internet was
sort of.. we always had to load projects up, like, if we didn't release something in 2
weeks,
it was like we were dead on the internet, right?
And we felt this kind of like push from the internet
that we had to keep making and keep making and keep making.
And there was something interesting about participating in that culture,
but then more and more I've been thinking about
how can you maybe still contribute and participate in that kind of consumption
of media,
but then have the same piece mean something slightly different
for people that are gonna invest more amounts of time in it, right?
And how pieces, even if people consume it in a blog post title and have one reaction,
which might be a familiar reaction like laughter,
which I actually really like from this piece.
I'm trying to embed in these other kind of readings of the work,
where you come in and you sit on this bench, right,
and this is maybe my interpretation of the piece, right,
and you sit in front of these, like 1500 sheets of paper
and after the kind of wave of laughter leaves you and you realize
like, all the things I could have done at that time, right?
Like, I coulda learned French, I coulda lost ten pounds,
I coulda learned how to cook more, I could've read a whole bunch of books,
and instead I was like just flicking, like, birds at pigs
over and over and over and over again.
And so it's.. I like both readings.
Like, I like the reading that.. it can be consumed in Instagram quickly.
I like the reading.. I.. if people are able to sit with it
and maybe contemplate these larger issues I like it as well, but I think
in art-making right now there is this.. I'm trying to make work that isn't
just addressing the internet's drive to have things faster and quicker
and in blogpost titles, right?
'Cause I felt it sort of affected the art I was making.
And also the internet has like fundamentally changed, right,
like I think.. I think the times that we were at IBM and
we were doing F.A.T. Lab and the times that we were
sort of wrestling with that work - things really changed, like,
we all felt it.
And in this crowd I don't really have to talk about it, right?
But for a while, the internet to me felt like this, and shame on me, you know?
But as I've been making work and the work's been changing,
and my relationship to the internet has been changing,
and so I'm gonna into some things that I know you all know,
but this is kind of like my personal take on it, right?
My.. this is like how I came to think about the situation that we're in now.
I used to think the internet was the Big Bang, right?
That was how I was introduced to it.
Like, I thought, holy shit, this is gonna happen
and it's just gonna keep multiplying, getting bigger and bigger
and there'll be a server for every interest, and everybody'll be a publisher,
everyone's gonna be empowered.
And I thought it was this Big Bang model of what was gonna happen.
And I think more and more that, like, it's actually the Big Crunch model,
which is when the universe expands to a maximization point
and then at some point starts contracting down, right?
And I think, I think that that middle point.. I think that middle point was when
we accepted Gmail. *Laughter*
You know, I think once we, like, culturally decided that
someone could read our emails and advertise us to our inbox,
I really think people at Google were just like, holy shit, like,
'They bought it.' Like, from that point on it was just really
over.
And so now it's been of course condensing into fewer and fewer servers,
and.. anyway, we all know this stuff, right.
And so this kind of like, this condensation of the internet down to one point
feels like it's happening.
The kind of targeted marketing that just was annoying at one point
now feels really more sinister, like, I mean, it was kind of ok
to read our email and advertise to us,
but then when you start, like, kind of snitching on us,
that was just.. that was hard for me.
Like, we don't even need to talk about this, 'cause I know it gets addressed all the time
here.
But for me, as someone who is making art that was engaged in the internet,
and a lot of the inspirations that I was taking for, from the kind of free culture movement
and free software movement, engaged with the internet, and like,
the convolution of these 3 things, of like, monetization of the web,
the centralization of the web, and then this kind of spying scandal.
They really left me in kind of like staggering for ways to get back to making art
about an internet that didn't feel funny to me any more, right, like,
the internet was .. this is how I felt like.
I felt like the lolcats were just this Trojan horse, you know,
and, and I.. after all this was sort of happening I couldn't even see the cats
on the internet any more.
Like, I thought, the internet was the land of the cats and unicorns,
and now, the fur has kind of been removed and you see the terminator's shiny skull
and the red beady eye.
And so if.. and just like from a personal standpoint it got hard
to get interested in making art in that medium again.
And so, that was like all leading up to this talk,
which maybe a lot of you have seen either at transmediale last year,
or here, or, I mean, around the internet.
I thought it was in the internet for a second there.
This was Peter's talk at transmediale, where he gets on stage
and he basically says 'We've lost, and it's over.'
which is something I know that we've heard here from Frank and Rop
10 years ago, right.
I know this isn't a new narrative.
But for me, Peter's talk came along kind of at the right time,
where.. like, the Pirate Bay, for me, and the work that Piratbyran had been
doing,
has been really one of my main, like, heroes, one of the main reasons
I started making art.
Like, the Pirate Bay for me is still, I think, one of the most amazing things made
during my lifetime.
And it was what really turned me, kind of, from architecture to thinking about
how entertainment and activism could overlap,
and how people could really change things
and have kind of powerstructure-altering things that we could contribute
to culture.
And when you have these kind of personal heroes get on stage
and tell you that that's over..
When I happy to hear that I had this kind of moment where I was like,
why am I feeling happy about hearing that, you know?
And I realized that that was kind of how I was feeling,
and have somebody else say that.. it felt really.. good's the wrong word,
but it felt.. strangely empowering to sort of start to admit to myself
that maybe the kind of ship was sinking, right?
And so, shortly after that we were also having conversations within the F.A.T. Lab internally,
and, not by unanimous decision but by majority we decided
that we were gonna shut the doors at F.A.T. Lab.
And I won't speak for the group, but my.. my personal thoughts on why
we.. they shut down, which maybe isn't important in the greater sense,
but just, kind of again, like as a.. kind of my personal take
on how I'm working through this stuff was like.. I felt like F.A.T. Lab..
like the internet had sort of outpaced us, like,
that idea of radical entertainment had a moment when there was
a loophole in the media where kind of companies and capitalism
hadn't really figured out viral marketing yet,
and we had this.. this like big opening where we could really speak to people
on a larger platform because there weren't whole divisions
at Wieden+Kennedy that were just trying to do this for the largest companies.
Like, it was.. we figured that out first, and so we had this kind of weakness
that we could exploit.
But as that changed we kind of failed as a group, I think, to keep up
with new modes of activism.
And the other thing that I was sort of feeling was that we were kind of
providing this David and Goliath narrative to people.
Both within the group, they were getting closer to sort of Silicon Valley,
and our audience, which I felt like was getting closer and closer to Silicon Valley,
that like... people that were getting entrenched more into that way of thinking
were looking and enjoying our content in a way that sort of felt uncomfortable in
a way.
And it felt like the kind of humorous pranks that we were pulling was helping them cope,
in a way, with the fact that they were supporting that system.
And... it kind of felt like we were the comedian on the Titanic,
like telling jokes as it was sinking.
Or, it felt to me that way.
And so at some point it felt more powerful to kind of just say
'Goodbye' and maybe put a message in a bottle and jump off the ship
rather than sit there and keep bailing out the ship, right?
And so that's where I was at the beginning of this year.
And so the work that I'm gonna show from this point on,
which I think I still have.. yeah, ok, 25 minutes or so,
is kind of the work I've been doing to try to get back to that point
that I had when I first saw FETCH and FTP and kind of understood,
in a very rudimentary way, how the internet functions,
and what that empowering moment felt like,
and trying to struggle to get back to a point where I could make art
that was engaged in the internet again.
And so, one way.. one way I started that search was to sort of start
from the beginning, and thinking about, like, what is our cultural conception
of what the internet is, what it looks like.
And we have generally a kind of very poor visual metaphor
for what the internet is, right?
So this is just a google image search for the word 'internet'
which doesn't, to me, feel very representative
of what the network is or what it feels like.
And so I started to get more into thinking about
what it was, like, it can't just be, you know,
blue-glowing logos in clouds, it has to be something physical.
And so I started reading Andrew Blum's book 'Tubes'.
I started reading Neal Stephenson's 'Mother Earth Mother Board',
which, if there is any sort of internet infrastructure nerds,
is like an amazing primer,
kind of the first maybe seminal texts about following internet cables
around the globe, which is kind of understanding
what it looks like in these moments of transition, when it sort of
enters the water and reaches the land.
And one thing that Andrew Blum talks about in his book is this idea
of these kind of like.. there's no monuments for this thing that's really
a major part of our sort of time here on Earth,
and maybe our part of culture.
It seems like there's not these places that we can kind of
go visit and commune with in the same way there are other
architectural landmarks.
And so you get these kind of like lonely manhole covers
on these very desolate beaches in Nova Scotia.
And so, at the same time that I was sort of doing that research,
and this is gonna sound like a big left turn, but I'm gonna pull it back,
at the same time I was doing that research I was also working
on another project that required the use of an infra-red camera.
And so I was kind of spending my time doing this research and looking
around the internet trying to find really cheap infra-red cameras,
'cause of course I'm an artist and I'm broke,
and I kept finding myself on these websites of people selling technology
to ghost hunters, which is a community that I had no interactions with,
no experience of, but they just had really good cheap infra-red cameras.
*laughter*
And I was like, I was sitting there in these online ghost hunting shops,
and they were amazing.
Like, I felt myself having one of those moments with technology,
where.. that I hadn't felt in a long time, it was just like a kid.
Like, looking at this technology, I mean, like 'What the fuck is this,
like, why, I don't understand!' and they..
But then I started to get interested in it more on
kind of like a metaphorical or conceptual level,
'cause what the ghost hunter.. ghost hunting community was..
is kind of interested in doing is, they're.. they talk about disembodied human energy
a lot,
and so they're making tech to try to visualize disembodied human energy.
And in a sense this felt like what I was trying to do with a lot of the work
that I was doing, which was trying to take all this kind of invisible momentum
that's getting stored in servers and going through the fibre-optic cables
and thinking about ways to kind of visualize that work to come to some understanding
of it.
And the ghost hunting community had this amazing tech to do that with.
And so then I started to go really deep down this ghost hunting rabbit hole,
which was another fun way to spend three months on the internet. *laughing*
I'll show just one clip.. 'cause I'd never seen any of this,
so people that are familiar with these communities, this is
maybe old hat, but to me this was like just fascinating.
So this is.. they also come from where I come from, so this is like,
the Mid-West Spirit Organisation, like they're all from the midwest
in the US, right?
'Cause it's super boring there and so apparently like.. *laughing*
you either do drugs or you hunt for ghosts, and.. *laughing*
so this is one from the Mid-West Spirit Group, and this is one of
many many clips on youtube.
So this is a video shot in full-spectrum camera, which is just a camera
that has been modified you see a little bit more of the ultra-violet spectrum
and a little bit more of the infrared spectrum, and the audio you're gonna hear
is from what they call a spirit box, which is essentially a hacked radio,
that just keeps scanning,
and I'll talk more about that in a bit.
Guy: This is a device that you guys can come forward any spirits and speak with
me. (??)
Ah, so, if you have a message, please come forward and speak to me into this device.
*noise* Female voice: Hi. Guy: Hi, tell me your name. *noise* *noise**boop* *noiseboopnoise*
Evan: Ok, I'll let you do your own youtube searching for that.
But even that idea, like, if you have a message for me, come speak into this device,
like, I wanna use that for like the title of
my next solo show, to me it's like sooo...
there is like something happening there that seems like a statement that
is greater than the ghost hunting community.
And also their relationship with technology kind of feels very.. I mean it's strange to
say this
'cause for me as a sort of non-believer in ghosts I find the technology maybe
inherently flawed, but I.. the approach seems so honest to me in a way.
Like they're really setting out to make tools in a very honest way, very little commercial
interest,
to try to satisfy this niche community.
So anyway, this is like a... it was really getting
back to sort of, like, DIY culture
of people making technology for their own needs.
And it's a relatively self-aware community too,
like they talk about this idea
of matrixing a lot, which is the same as apophenia, right.
It's this idea that our brains are kind of hardwired to find patterns in randomness.
Like, they're aware of this. And so scepticism is like a big badge,
that people, if you wanna rise the ranks in the paranormal community,
you have to kind of debunk more ghosts than you find, right?
And this to me is something that's really interesting too,
'cause I think that they might actually be more critical of the investigations
they're doing than we're doing, right?
And so then when we look and see that we've got 5807 friend requests
it feels like this might be a matrixing that we're doing with our own technology,
with social media rather than the ghost hunting.
Or whether.. like, the kind of like popular idea
that technology can solve our problems,
that we can explain all these complicated problems in 13 minutes or less,
and 120 characters or less, it seems like maybe our relationship technology
maybe isn't any more flawed than their relationship with technology.
And so I decided to sort of set out on my own kind of... pilgrimage
to the internet, right?
In the same way the ghost hunters.. this isn't something that ghost hunters do
kind of around the kitchen table over coffee, right,
they go to what they call 'areas of activity', which are actually not graveyards,
right.
This would be an area of inactivity. It's more, like, abandoned hospitals,
or insane asylums, like areas where activity happened.
And so the.. because I wasn't looking for ghosts, I'm looking for more
of this, like, reforged relationship with a.. an innocence lost of the internet.
The area that I decided to go to, which is talked about a lot by
Stephenson's 'Mother Earth Mother Board' article, is this Porthcurno beach,
which is.. if you're in the UK and you just keep driving west as far as you can
until.. literally when the land ends there's a hotel called Land's End,
and when you're there, you're within, like, 3 km of really cool stuff.
So you're in.. you're where 15% of the global internet flows through fibre-optic cables.
It's historically where the pirate ships would hide in the coves.
2000 BC it was where all the standing-stone circles..
there's all these standing stones in this area.
It's where in 1870 the first telegraph came out
of the ocean, the exact same beach
that the fibre-optic cables are at now.
2 km up the beach is where Marconi was building these amazing structures
to send the first wireless transmissions over the Atlantic,
all within this super-remote area way out at the west of the UK.
And so, I made my map and I had my little destinations I wanted to go to,
I rented a car, I got my gear. I had a mix of, like, ghost-hunting gear
that I bought and some that I'd made, and some just other devices that I'd thought
might come in handy.
And I started by doing something that Neal Stephenson suggested to do
if you're hunting for the internet, which is to follow the manholes.
And so I started just following the manholes.
And.. it really.. it's.. so when you're on these like surfer beaches,
where nobody is and you see like 30 manholes in the parking lot
that's meant just to get to the beach to go surfing,
you're probably getting close.
On these little farmroads that were just out in the middle of nowhere
with just sheep kind of grazing, every once in a while there'd be a driveway
that had these really large sort of access covers,
and when you looked, they're designed to look like these typical british country
houses,
but on closer inspection you can see that there's all these extra security measures
and blacked-out windows, and so this is a internet landing location.
Farms that have way more airconditioning than they need for the .. *laughing* .. sheep.
That's probably a good sign you're getting close.
But I wasn't.. I wasn't really interested in.. as a sort of journalistic endeavour,
like, it was really more.. I wanted to sort of step away from the computer
for a moment, I wanted to get out into nature
and I wanted to sort of just see what it felt like to stand on top of that
cable,
you know, what would it feel like to stand on top of this cable where 25% of the traffic
was flowing through.
And so I started taking this series of landscapes, like just landscape photography.
Sometimes.. sometimes the cable was within the frame.
When I took this photo I actually didn't know exactly what I was shooting,
but in this frame is both the cable and the GCHQ-tapped cable,
which you can kind of see the dishes up there in the background.
But it's.. it was less for me about, like, those actual recording the cables, the dishes.
It was more about something that I read about in Andrew Blum's book,
was there's this really interesting phenomena that happens when you go hunting for the internet,
which is like you end up in these super-remote locations,
like you're trying to go have this research and
experience with telecommunications,
but you end up like on these really lonely beaches which is by design
'cause they don't want cables and nets around them.
Many times you don't have 3G or cellphone service, and it's kind of just you and like,
you know,
this lonely beach. It's.. this.. sort of interesting,
for me it was really beautiful, like, It really felt.. it felt good.
So.. this is something I've been doing more and more lately, and I just..
I go to these places as a way, not to necessarily document
physical artifacts of the internet but more just putting myself
in sort of a place where I wanna make art about the internet.
And the internet manifests itself in different ways in different countries.
In the UK, it's just these wooden signs, this is.. it's just a yellow wooden sign
that says 'telephone cable' on it, which is like the most beautiful
kind of, like, anticlimactic understated monument you could have, right?
So this is one of the biggest global internet connection points in the world
and it's just this little tiny sign, you know?
And to me that was really perfect in a way, like, I was.. I was really..
it felt good that it was that, and that something else.
And.. so at the same time I was taking that photography, I was also taking readings
with this series of ghost-hunting devices.
This is probably my favourite one, this is called the Ovilus 3.
This is by a company called 'Digital Dowsing', which is a really great name for
a ghost-hunting tech company, made by Bill Chappell.
And so the Ovilus 3 has this kind of like old.. it's called visual draw
mode.
And based on kind of EMF and temperature readings, it has this drawing system,
that it spits out.
And so at every place that I was taking a photograph I was also taking this reading
with this ghost-hunting device.
And so, this manifested in different ways. When I showed in the gallery one way was
in this series of essentially paired landscape photography where on the top is just a photograph
from these various places and then on the bottom
sort of laser-etched into the surface of the print
are these readouts from the ghost-hunting device.
Which is kind of.. even.. even if you didn't know
that came to the piece and didn't know the background
there's meant to be this kind of play between analogue and digital and this play between
kind of the spiritual and the real, and when you view these prints,
you kind of have the same interaction with the print
that I was having when I was documenting them,
which was you.. you had this kind of natural position when you're kind of viewing
the horizon line,
and then when we kind of check our phones, right,
and it's kind of like this all day long.
And so the pieces are meant to have that as well,
where you.. you kind of look at the horizon line
on the photo and then you kind of bend down to look at the little digital read-out.
So this was.. this was one of the series from an exhibition I did in London last year.
6 months ago - no, 3 months ago I got an invitation to come to New Zealand
which is a place that was on my kind of like bucket list for internet exploratory research
purposes,
because New Zealand has this.. this.. they have
more than 2 cables, but there is 1 cable
called the Southern Cross Network, which is essentially its main connection
to the globe, and it comes in on the West Coast and then
crosses, like, I don't... like 30 km maybe, and then exits on the right.
So it comes over from Australia, goes underground for a very short
amount of time, then bounces off for essentially California.
And that's its main connection to the world, these 2 very actually unguarded
connection points. I.. maybe in the Q&A I can talk about more..
about that.
But basically, on this trip I got.. I mean I got there and they were doing
construction work
and the cable was just really there, like, it was dug up and in a puddle
and just sitting there next to this military compound
with like this military airstrip
with like planes taking off.
And I was there for 2 hours with a ghost-hunting device just kind of touching the cable
and nobody said anything. It was amazing. *laughing*
And.. prior to this trip though I was doing more kind of research to try and understand
what the internet really really was, and.. there's a lot of people in the room
who are more, who have more technical knowledge than I do, so if I'm..
if I'm misquoting things please tell me afterwards so I can update this.
But my.. my current understanding is that what's going through the fibre-optic
is essentially infrared.. infrared laser light that's being modulated at different frequencies
that kind of centre around this 1550 nm mark, right.
And so give or take a few nm, the internet happens generally in this near-infrared spectrum.
Which is interesting to me as kind of an artmaker, because most of our digital devices can sense
in that near-infrared spectrum, in that same 1550 nm range.
So most.. most digital cameras you can open up
and .. if you go all the way down to the CCD
you can take off the infrared-blocking chip and you get left with a camera that senses
that light, and you can put another lens on top
that blocks everything but the infrared light,
and then you're left with a device that's kind of
in my head anyway,
sensing the world in the same sort of spectrum that's going through the fibre-optic cable.
So these tutorials are. have.. this presentation I'm gonna have a link to at the end,
so the links are here but this is from a website called Life Pixel which has really amazing
like screw-by-screw tutorials for how to do this with most consumer and like prosumer
digital cameras.
And so then I started shooting these.. these are photographs from
this is from the West Coast of New Zealand, shot with this modified Lumix GF1 camera.
And so it started like.. I had this feeling where
the visuals that these cameras were giving,
like.. in.. there's like a technical connection to the internet, but for me there was also
sort of a visual connection where the photos had the sort of feeling
that I was having, they were sort of these dark strange glimpses of the internet,
that wasn't Nyan cats and unicorns, right, it was this kind of, like, darker stranger
view
of what the internet landscape looked like, and the more I was taking photos
the sort of less and less interested I got in actually shooting a cable
and the more and more interested I got in just what these landscapes looked like.
And so in this example you can kind of see the dirt that's kind of slowly growing over
from where the trench was dug, or in this one.. from this distance
you can't see anything. There's a small moment where like
an old coaxial cable kind of comes out of that cliff.
But for me it's more about really thinking about like an old-school artform,
of like the landscape, and trying to think about
how I can make these landscape images
that are sort of reflective both of the physical landscape and of our kind of like
network landscape and cultural landscape.
So these are just some of the kind of images I was taking on this New Zealand trip.
And yeah, again, sometimes there is like no visual evidence,
sometimes it's just.. just a tree that happens to be growing on top of the internet.
And so I'm still.. this is stuff I'm still going
through at the moment.
Now I'm kinda drifting into works in progress,
but where I'm thinking this is going in one way is a series of new websites
that I'm gonna be making that are really boring.
I think there's like a really big market in boring in the arts
that's coming up.
Like I think we've had enough of this like really quick stuff,
so now I'm gonna take it back, and so I'm making pieces that are..
I had these experiences.. so these are tripod shots.
I'm shooting usually like 10-15 minute tripod shots at these
different locations, and... so these are really quiet moments,
essentially just video streaming into a browser,
and part of the idea is like giving.. forcing people to have the experience
that I was having, so it's.. I would find myself in these amazing locations
and sometimes there'd even be like whales breaching in the background
and like 7 minutes into the shot I'd catch myself, like, you know,
bending down to the phone again, and like, even in this like amazing environment
like I was having a hard time breaking out of that really like rapid-phased
sort of click-bait mentality that I'm starting to fall into as well,
and so I want these websites to be super super boring,
like, more contemplative, more on the timeline of what viewing nature is
like
rather than what viewing the web is like.
So this is.. this is the triangular sign here is
what the cable signs look like in New Zealand,
which is, if there's any copy-me fans, like, when I got out there and found
that there's this like beautiful triangle, like, standing over the internet,
was like an amazing moment for me.
But the.. so these websites are gonna be different websites.. each website will
just have one video flowing through it, slow, infrared video shots with this sort
of audio
in the background. The audio is made from my own ghost-hunting tech,
which I'll be releasing when I get finished with all the stuff.
So this is my own version of the spirit box,
where, instead of just scanning through the radio, I have it hooked up
to a pulse sensor, so it's skipping through the radio stations
based on my heart beat.
So every time my pulse goes it switches radio stations.
And.. so the audio is like.. yah, it looked.. I looked rather strange like just kind of
sitting there
trying to commune with the internet, like, hooked put to this heart monitor
and this infrared camera.
But the pieces are sort of meant to kind of hopefully give
some of those feelings I was having when I was there.
And the other idea is that these videos are all gonna be located in servers
that are as close as possible to where I shot them, so
I'm actually thinking of them less as websites as kind of like network-specific videos.
And so, in the New Zealand example, I have server space in New Zealand now,
where these videos are hosted, so that when you view the video,
it loads into the browser and it's streaming.. you know, chances are,
you have like kind of like a 50-50 chance depending on what country you are in,
that the video, as it's being converted into the same spectrum that it's shot in,
is also streaming kind of like just underneath the frame there.
And so even though you can't kind of witness this visually, the idea is like
trying to.. kind of like I was doing with the
wikipedia series.. like trying to come up
with not just a piece that's kind of a visual aesthetic of the internet,
but something that's really kind of about an experience of the network.
And then the last sort of thing I'm playing with is the..
they're gonna be all hosted at these URLs, that when you copy and paste the URL
into a mapping application, the URL is actually a GPS coordinate,
so if you paste the URL into Google Maps, it'll take you to the exact location
where the camera was housed (?).
And so, in Google Earth you can kind of see the triangular sign and the tree
that is the same sign and tree from the image.
And so, I'm kind of playing with the idea of the URL as being both
an address on the globe and the network, and trying to tie again together these 2 things.
And part of this for me is again, like, without being too nostalgic for the internet
of old,
allow the influences that I'm drawing from, from the kind of earlier net art scene
was characterized with this kind of classic net art diagram, where.. the art happens here,
right,
like it's not.. there was this big push in the earlier net art wave that wasn't about
having kind of imagery that was sort of quasi-antithetic(?) of the internet
coming on tumbler and being printed in 3D printing into objects (?)
and showing up in a gallery, but it was really thinking
more fundamentally about the internet as a platform and a vehicle
for viewing art and art that can only happen within that medium.
And so I'm kind of trying to take that idea that's an old one,
and overlay that diagram on top of something that's like one step removed
in terms of the metaphor, and thinking about art that happens in a physical location
and in the network at the same time.
I could do one more project or we could do Q&A,
how much time do we have now, 5 more minutes?
Maybe I'll wrap it up there. Angel: ... 10-15 minutes...
Evan: Ok, ok, I'll do one more project. Ok.
So that was.. that's going up to like yah, 3.. this is now 2 months ago..
3 months ago. I got invited to do a piece in Paraguay
which is not one of the main internet hubs, globally.
But I decided to kind of wrestle with a different piece of the infrastructure of the
internet,
which is kind of the surface, right, the place that we have this
more immediate contact with the network.
And.. 'cause I noticed when we.. when you film
devices in infrared it has this interesting scenario
where the visual spectrum is kind of inverted in a way where.. the LEDs don't really
emit much infrared light at all, and so the screen, to the viewer,
you see everything, but to the infrared camera it's almost completely black.
And similarly the kind of infrared lights that sort of shine from the top
of all of our iPhones at our faces all the time,
which we can't see with the naked eye, become more and more apparent
when you're shooting with the infrared.
And so, I started.. built this kind of contraption that I set up in my hotel room
which looked really strange, and then invited people to come up to the hotel room
and kind of put their device on top of this camera rig, and then
the invitation was just to waste time, like, again, trying to get back to this idea
of casual computing, like, what do you do when you're in line
at the grocery store, waiting at the doctor's office, like, what's your bag,
is it Angry Birds, is it checking facebook?
And I just said, 'here, waste 5 or 10 minutes' and I would record them with this
infrared camera and it's kind of.. in a way it's connected
to the paranormal research, but maybe it's more connected
to the multi-touch series that has to do with sort of
backgrounding, the digital backgrounding, the interface design and foreground
in the human movement.
And so, what you get left with is.. you see the way people are kind of moving
over these different devices without seeing these designs that the..
that Apple and Google are designing for us.
So I'll play just a minute what that looks like.
*electronic noises like birds and bass*
Evan: A little boring, right?
No, but that piece is meant to be this.. have this kind of..
these things that kind of feel so natural and we get so into it,
and when you kind of remove what's actually happening,
it kind of ends up looking and sounding so alien, right?
The audio is actually just from a contact mic that's placed in the back,
so it's not.. it's just an analog microphone picking up the kind of soft fingertaps on
the screen.
And so the.. it became just this series of people
that sort of agreed to meet with me
and give me 5 or 10 minutes of their computing time, shown in the gallery
of this kind of series of again of like portraits through technology.
It's called 'Dances for Mobile Phones'. It's meant to be idea
that we're kind of dancing for them.
Anyway, so I'll leave it there. So this is me, kind of struggling through,
trying again to make work and trying to find these sort of optimistic paths
through a kind of increasingly dark internet landscape
and get back to this kind of more magical moment I first had
when we first kind of understood what technological empowerment felt like.
So thank you so much for spending the hour with me,
and if there's any Q&A, I think we have a couple of minutes now.
Thank you.
*applause*
Angel: Thank you so much for your phenomenal talk, Evan,
I think you can tell by the applause that the people really really liked it.
Evan: Thank you. Angel: It was really awesome.
Angel: So we have another 5-10 minutes for questions and answers.
If you ask questions, please move to the microphones.
We have 4 microphones here in the hall. Do we have any question from the internet?
Internet? No? Alrighty. So we'll start with this question from over there.
Question: I really liked your term 'disembodied human energy'. I'm gonna start using that
"DHE".
Evan: It's not my term, but I like it too.
Q: I've been writing about that as well from the dark side of how the internet
and digital culture is affecting our behaviours and society, and was
kind of putting that into terms of disembodying experience.. disembody..
disembodied information, and I'm really going after that a lot in terms of
analyzing digital culture, and just wondering what you think we might do
in order to reembody our culture more and not get so lost in these
technological things that we can do, but to, like, I just was covering
the failed Paris climate summit, and I feel like the corporate agenda
is liking that we are going more and more into a disembodied place,
because it can capture our energy more. So I'd just like to ask you
if you have any ideas, what we can do to be more reembodying our experiences.
Answer: Yah.. no, good question. I mean, I can only talk about what I'm..
how I'm kind of wrestling with it. In.. one sort of decision I made as an artist,
kind of, is like I feel like I make better work when I'm optimistic
rather than pessimistic. Like, I think, anyone who suffered
through depression, like, you know, or had people around you with depression,
it's not a good place to be in when you wanna make thin.. produce things, right?
And so, part of it is like just finding ways to fall in love with it again.
And so, for me that was part of it, it was just trying to find ways
to kind of fall in love with things again, to the point where I really want to make them.
And the other one, for me, too, I mean I know there's whole movements of people
who are doing these kind of digital retreat things which is something I hadn't
participated in in a formal setting, but for me just getting away for a moment
and having these excuses, even for just a few days or a week, to sort of
exist by myself without connection.. I know it's nothing new, I know
that people are talking about this, but it had a real effect on me.
I mean, one thing that i noticed was, I was much more present, like,
especially on the UK trip, where.. these are like really cliffy regions,
you know, so a lot of the hiking trails that I was shooting on were like
really steep drop-off on the other side of this path, and so I couldn't even do
what I normally do, even when I'm away from email, but I'm walking around the city
and I'm still thinking about.. 'Oh, I gotta email this person, I gotta do that..'
I'm not really present, right. And I noticed that I had to, like,
stop doing that because I kept slipping and falling and, like,
I didn't wanna die. And so I had this moment
being out in nature again, where, not only was I away from the tech,
but mentally I had to step away from it too, just to be really thinking about
'Left foot, right foot, left foot, right foot'. And being able to do that for a few days,
like, now, I'm lining up my schedule throughout the year
where I'm setting up these moments, where I have that time to do it.
And, I don't know if that's the answer or not,
but for me it's been one way to deal with it.
Angel: Thank you very much. Next question from this microphone please.
Q: Thank you very much.I don't know, is it on?
Angel: Yeah, it's on. Just speak into it.
Q: Thank you very much for your talk. I'd actually, for me personally,
I've been also struggling a lot with the thought about the dark sides of the internet
recently,
and your talk actually gave me back a lot of
positive attitude about it, so
that you very much for that. But one question that I have:
What is your 10-second definition of what is art, for you?
Evan: Oh my god. *laughing*
Evan: Alright, here's a short one I came up with,
'cause the long one's hard, right?
I think design is creative work that is influenced directly by money and art is creative work
that is influenced indirectly by money. And that's kind of the only difference.
*laughing* *applause*
Q: Thank you.
Angel: Thank you. Next question from that microphone over there.
Q: Hi. So I wasn't familiar with your work.. I'm over here.
I'm not familiar with your work, and I really like it.
And what I liked most about it is really that sense of excitement and wonder
that you first had when you discovered.. what was it? SCP? No, it was..
Evan: Yeah, FETCH. Q: Yeah, FETCH, right.
That's sort of.. that's still there in many ways,
it's different, but it's still there.
So, you know, I.. I recently discovered physics, and I've had sort of
the same thing where I am like, wow, we're able to understand things
in a way that I didn't think it was possible, because I hated physics
in school, and realized that this way it was taught
that was really boring. And so I'm thinking, ok,
if I were to do something like that, it requires you to
sort of take that step away from the technicality of it
to see the technicality of it. And how do you, with the internet,
how are you able to keep that distance and has that been a problem for you?
Evan: I mean, maybe it's easier for me because I'm not all that smart technically.
I mean, it's not like I was ever so close, like most of the code.. I had some
formal training when I got to graduate school, but I was never..
I'm not a very happy programmer.
You know, it was never my kind of native realm anyway,
like, I came more from the design field.
So it didn't feel like anything I was having to turn off so much
'cause maybe I wasn't ever all that close to it, in a sense.
I don't.. that's maybe a bad answer, but it's probably the truth.
I've been trying to get closer to physics too.
Q: Yeah?
Evan: Like for me, like, I'm super fascinated by the electromagnetic spectrum right now.
Like the answer's in there, somewhere, I feel like, you know? *laughing*
Q: Alright, thanks! Angel: Awesome. Next question from here.
Q: Ok, thanks. I just.. I mean, the idea of understanding what's happening
in the internet is quite important, and I think we're a bit biased here
because we all have that visualization of the internet, and
my question now is: Your visualization is of course very
very valid and very vivid, but all those people that.. that do those
movements and they scroll facebook, how can we make this visualization,
because your.. yours is quite complicated, actually, and not as fast.
How could we.. how could we manage to give.. give them some sort of visualization,
because what.. what they see is only the apps, and they don't really
get to think about it more.
Evan: Yah. I don't know the answer to that. I mean, it's.. for me, part of the reason
that the infrastructure side is so interesting, is that I think that there's something
empowering about seeing what it is and knowing how it works.
Like, when it seems less mystical and magical, like the cloud, of course,
is this terrible metaphor that we all hate, and I think once.. even when I'm explaining
my work to non-technical people, the conversations I get into are actually
kind of interesting, 'cause they're interested in knowing that too, 'cause people
don't really talk about it. The media doesn't talk about it.
The companies that are trying to sell them services don't talk that way
'cause it doesn't benefit them, right, it's like... Apple, when your phone fills
up,
they just want you to click here to get more cloud storage space, and
they don't want you to know how to plug in a cable and get it off.
And so I think it's.. the question that you're asking is one that I'm asking myself,
like, how do you communicate some of these ideas to people that are..
I mean, I'm interested in both sides, I'm interested in people that are
technically adapt, having interesting ideas and conversations around this,
but then, how do you also communicate to people that this is a new conversation
to?
I don't know the answer to that, that's what I'm trying to kind of wrestle
with
in a sense.
But I have.. I recently did a show in Florida at a university, and the docents there,
like the people that introduce people to the work, were all like senior citizens
that were volunteering time to the museum, and they were one of the most engaged
group of people I've ever had surrounding my work, 'cause they.. they knew..
it's not like they never heard of this stuff before, but they had a relationship with
technology, but they were more willing to ask questions about it,
like they weren't.. they didn't.. they didn't care if it sounded stupid,
and they were asking all those really interesting questions, and
seeing that happen to a community of people who were maybe
a further step removed from technology than I even am, that..
it's not that it was successful, but it felt to me that.. that they could
understand and have a relationship to it as art pieces, meant that there
was something there that was consumable by people that weren't.. aren't in this room,
you know?
Angel: Alright, thank you. As time is almost up, guy in orange,
you got the honour of the last question.
Q: With your browser cache thing, I did something similar with my computer.
I wrote a little script that runs in the background and makes a screenshot
every.. random seconds, Evan: Ok.
Q: And I had hoped about.. forgetting about it, but actually the...
the counterpart happened, that I checked the screenshots for every moment
I didn't have anything to do. And my behaviour was extremely
affected by it. Was.. did you have the same feeling about your browser cache?
Evan: Yeah. Q: Ehm, work?
Evan: Maybe later we can trade notes, I'd like to see your work.
Exactly, like one of the main things about that piece was like, it's like
living with a security camera, right, and you always know it's there,
like, I've gotten better and better about forgetting, but I still know it's there,
I still think about it, and I tried to do portraits of other people, like,
friends, like who else you're gonna ask to give your internet cache browsing data
to,
right? And it's..I recognized it was like a really
invasive question to ask people, you know?
You're really asking people.. I mean, usually the cache people give me
when I was making portraits of other people, I would tell them and then they would surf
and give it to me. Like, to just tell them, give me the cache
that
you didn't know I was gonna.. you didn't know I was monitoring, is like a really
invasive question to ask. But yeah, it's like essentially learning to
live with a security camera. But that's meant to be kind of built into
the piece, too, 'cause maybe, getting back to the last question, like,
one of the reactions I get from when people see that work in the gallery is
like.. they're like, oh wow, that's a really.. maybe giving is the wrong word, but
that's a lot of.. it's a lot of.. you're sharing a lot, right, is the common reaction
I get from people.
And.. but part of the idea is then.. we're all kind of sharing this
in different ways, right, this print, just because I put it in the gallery
doesn't mean there's any more or less eyeballs on that set of data
than your data, or your friend's data.
But yeah, of course, when you know the camera is there, it definitely
affects behaviour.
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