About us
Stay in touch
Peter Bauman: Hello everyone, and welcome to this special Le Random artist discussion. It is our first of the post-timeline era. The reason we are gathering today is in anticipation of the opening of Electric Op at Buffalo AKG. I'm your host, Peter Bauman or Monk Antony, the editor in chief at Le Random. Joining me today are four artists who are exhibiting at the show. They are also just four of the most prominent voices in digital expression over the last 20 or 25 years. They are Cory Arcangel, Joan Heemskerk, Tali Hinkis and Rafael Lozano-Hemmer. Also joining us today from the Le Random team is Conrad House, or Nemocake, always the co-host for our artist discussions. He is the collection lead at Le Random, so everything that we collect goes through his watchful eye.
Our four guests today basically don't need any introduction at all, but I will go ahead and introduce them. The first one is Cory Arcangel. He's an artist, composer and curator known for his unique exploration of digital technology and its cultural impact. Arcangel explores the potential and failures of old and new digital technologies, highlighting their obsolescence, humor, aesthetic attributes and, at times, their eerie influence in contemporary life. From hacked video games to machine learning and social media, his projects challenge and parody technology and art, revealing the multifaceted ways that it impacts our life. His work has been shown, well, everywhere. He's shown at biennials around the world, including the Whitney and the Sharjah Biennial. He is the youngest artist since Bruce Nauman to hold a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, in 2011. His work has been shown at solo and group exhibitions at the biggest modern art museums in the world, like MoMA, Tate, Pompidou and PS1. His work can be found in the collections of the biggest museums of the world, including MoMA, SFMOMA, Tate Modern, Buffalo AKG, Hammer Museum, Whitney and many, many more.
Our next guest is Joan Heemskerk, who is the net art legend. She is a contemporary artist whose practice examines the internet and its potential, including cryptography and quantum non-binary computing, which we got to talk about for a piece at Le Random. Her diverse body of work includes photography, video, software, games, websites and installations. Heemskerk was part of the legendary net artist duo JODI, who pioneered net art in the mid '90s, exploring how the internet's underlying systems shaped the relationship between technology and its users. JODI's work has been exhibited at MoMA, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, ZKM in Karlsruhe, the ICC in Tokyo, Guggenheim in New York, Pompidou, Eyebeam, Rhizome and many others. She recently undertook a two-month residency at CERN, the birthplace of the World Wide Web, and Copenhagen Contemporary. The resulting work will be part of a show at Copenhagen Contemporary in 2025.
Our next guest is Tali Hinkis. She is a cultural organizer, artist and educator. Hinkis moved to New York City in 2000, when she began working under the artist moniker LoVid with her partner, Kyle Lapidus. LoVid's practice focuses on aspects of contemporary society where technology seeps into human culture and perception. Hinkis has organized collaborative projects and cultural events. She has also been a visiting artist at various universities worldwide and a mentor at Columbia University, the School of Visual Arts and CalArts. LoVid's work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions all over the world, including at Postmasters Gallery in New York and ICA in London. LoVid has performed at venues such as MoMA, The Kitchen, PS1 and MOMI. Their work is also in several collections, including the Whitney Museum and the Thoma Foundation.
Another person who, like the previous three guests, needs no introduction is Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, a media artist working at the intersection of architecture and performance art. He uses technology to create platforms for public participation with media such as robotic lights, digital fountains, computerized surveillance, digital walls and telematic networks. He was the first artist to represent Mexico at the Venice Biennale, in 2007. He has shown at biennials all over the world. Collections holding his work include MoMA, the Guggenheim and Tate, as well as many others. He has received BAFTAs and the Ars Electronica Golden Nica and has lectured at the most prestigious universities in the world. He has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions across the world, like everybody here, including a mid-career retrospective at SFMOMA and his first at Pace, both in 2022. His solo show Rafael Lozano-Hemmer: Caressing the Circle recently opened at bitforms in New York.
So we have this incredible artist discussion with four of the leading voices in new media art over the last 20 or 25 years. We're so lucky to have them. Let's get started. I know you're not strangers. Some of you know each other. Does anybody want to talk about who you know or how you know each other?
Tali Hinkis: You want me to start?
Cory Arcangel: Yeah, we could talk about us first. Well, I don't know if you knew Joan or anyone else before that.
Tali Hinkis: I know how long ago it was because I met Cory when I was pregnant with my 22-year-old daughter. That's how long it's been. 23 years, I guess, almost.
Cory Arcangel: Yeah, agreed. Confirmed. Verified.
Tali Hinkis: Yeah, it's crazy, right? I want to give a shout-out to Harvestworks in New York, a not-for-profit for media art. I was actually an intern. I had just arrived in New York shortly before that and Cory was working there.
Cory Arcangel: Yeah, I had been working there from 2000 to... I don't remember what year it was. Was it '01 or something, Tali?
Tali Hinkis: It was 2001, yeah.
Cory Arcangel: I worked there for a couple of years, so I think '04. I had all these different positions. Probably worth explaining, it's a digital media education and postproduction studio: audio studios, video editing, Max/MSP courses, NATO courses, if you even remember that, and spreading out to all that stuff. Very cool place. It was how I got my bearings in New York, working there and meeting people and seeing how things operated. A lot of the older generation of SoHo artists used Harvestworks as their production facility because video artists even then didn't have their own editing. It was still like you had to go to a studio to make a video, pretty much. And sound specifically. They had a recording studio.
Tali Hinkis: I guess that's why, a lot of the time when people come and say there was never a space for digital art or media art, I feel it's important to elevate the spaces that have been doing this for a very long time. And we bonded over Paper Rad and Nautical Almanac and just sending and looking at things on the internet.
Cory Arcangel: Yeah, because Jacob would have just sent me the first Paper Rad email not long before, because they started in 2000. And I saw it first on a computer at Harvestworks. I remember that moment. It was a computer at work, which just would seem so funny to people today. I think I did have a computer at home, maybe, but I can't remember, actually. I definitely worked at work on the work computers. After hours, I would go get a piece of pizza and come back. So that's how we know each other.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, I think it highlights how both of you have strong roots in New York. And especially, Cory, you grew up in Buffalo, where Electric Op is. I just thought that was really interesting, especially because it appears like Buffalo had a really profound influence on your practice, that this tight-knit group of experimental video artists, like the Vasulkas and things like Axlegrease, were based in Buffalo. They were quite unique to that particular city. The piece that you're exhibiting at Electric Op, does it in any way play with that heritage or pay homage to your roots in Buffalo?
Cory Arcangel: Yeah, great question. Definitely. Definitely not consciously, but probably intuitively. The short story is that I'm very much a Buffalo artist. My understanding of what artists do and what art is was pretty much shaped by growing up there. So I thought all artists made experimental video. When I went to college, that's what I thought, but I realized pretty soon thereafter it wasn't the case. I was on a residency at Alfred College, at the IEA, and they had a bunch of the early analog video synth gear. They had, in specific, a Sandin Image Processor. My piece in the show is just a segment of an eight-hour improvisation I did on the gear at Alfred College on residency there. So it's not a direct link, but that stuff is very much the vibe that I grew up with for what artists did.
Conrad House: Expanding on this line of what other works we might be seeing in this upcoming show, Joan, did you want to speak about what piece you're bringing to the show and maybe expand on the influence or the history of the piece a bit more?
Joan Heemskerk: We will show actually a Quake modification where the sounds of the monsters are still intact, but the spaces you visit, they are black and white, like you see in my background. And there is a moiré that pops up because the 3D engine basically can't calculate the distance. So we had huge spaces. And first you think, wow, is that doable? It's horrible. Now it's nice.
Maybe one thing I have to say, the piece was made in 1998. The first version of all the Quake modifications we basically started in Hungary, in Budapest. We had a residency there at C3. And in Budapest there's also the Vasarely Museum, which of course is very op, op art. Then later that year we were invited for a workshop in Aix and we saw the Vasarely Museum there. It's not influenced by it, but it gave a green light. Okay, you can come up with these visuals. At the time, I went to art school. Basically, all the op art was not done. It was a question of bad taste if you liked op art. I think also that you need to find... Because you only see a still image now. But in reality it's screaming and shouting and you can shoot at it. So that's the pop in the op art.
Conrad House: Hopefully the talk will be about the tension between that and some of the more technophile side and what makes this such an interesting movement. Rafael, would you like to tell us about what you're showing at Electric Op?
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer: Yeah, sure. Unfortunately, I'm only showing a print, so I need no internet, no electricity. I'm on easy street for the first time in a long time. They've chosen to show a work called Method Random. Method Random is basically an algorithmically derived print that's got very simple rules. The rules are: take one of the existing pseudo-random number generators in the history of random number generation, choose colors at random and then gradually increase the number of pixels that you can perceive at the same time. If the random number generator was successful, it would produce a grayscale at the end of this entire experience. But in fact, what you see is these repeating patterns very, very quickly. The human can actually see repetition.
“Because you only see a still image now. But in reality it's screaming and shouting and you can shoot at it. So that's the pop in the op art.” — Joan Heemskerk 12:10
I've been fascinated by the impossibility of computing randomness and about the impossibility for computers to truly improvise and come up with something that is not derived by an instruction set. Because the paradox of computers is that in order for them to generate something random, they will utilize a program. If you utilize the same program with the same seed, you will get to the same result. Of course, random number generators are used in everything from cryptography to identity to elections. The fact that ultimately the computers are unable to truly come up with something that is random, to me, is a statement of a tiny glimmer of hope that humanity still has an edge on at least one aspect of development, which is pattern recognition.
It looks very much like just a color grid that you get farther and farther away from. The name of the piece is associated with a linear congruential generator, which is basically like RANDU. It's a really bad algorithm that was used in the '60s and '70s by IBM, which constantly failed at producing randomness. What you see is this algorithm fail.
Conrad House: Incredible. Is this just going to be one output from Method Random that is shown? Are you showing it as a grid like you've done before? I think in 2015.
“I've been fascinated by the impossibility of computing randomness and about the impossibility for computers to truly improvise and come up with something that is not derived by an instruction set.” — Rafael Lozano-Hemmer 14:38
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer: They're only showing one. It's on loan from the Thoma collection. I wish that they had done more because I think that what's beautiful is to do comparative. We started with quadratic equations, which was what they first started using for random number generation. Then you see what it was like in the '60s and '70s and '80s and '90s. If you fast-forward to the 2010s, the algorithms used now for encryption and so on are quite robust. You see that they're almost perfect. But if you spend enough time or you have enough to drink, you will see repetition.
Conrad House: What year is the piece from?
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer: This piece is from 2015, I believe. Or I don't know. I'm actually bad at that.
Conrad House: Yeah, I think it's 2014. 2015 is when... That's great.
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer: Yeah, 2014.
Conrad House: Then, Tali, did you want to expand on the piece, your display ideas and the actual material behind the piece?
Tali Hinkis: Yeah, it's actually really great to hear everybody else talk about their work and how there's this great conversation, especially what Rafael is talking about. So we're showing a piece that was recorded in 2005 called 486 Shorts. It was recorded also at a residency at a university called RPI, another place in upstate New York that has technology art residencies. In 2005 we brought, I just confirmed this, Kyle's childhood computer, which was an Intel 486, opened it up and recorded basically a live recording of shorting the graphics card directly, by just putting cables in and creating physical shorts of the circuitry. We were able to capture output directly from the computer at the residency onto tape, MiniDV tape. So it's this decaying of the circuitry.
Really feeding into the idea of error, we focus on the relationship with analog instruments or analog interactions and perform in this gesture or a moment in time where the human and the machine go at it. Those recordings were edited into a series of very short 486 clips called 486 Shorts and released as a DVD in 2006. Then over the years we did some installations in various locations that are instruction-based, where we asked the curators to collect e-waste that they had around and present the video on a DVD player or a computer. It's an interactive system on a pile of e-waste. So we're exhibiting that for the first time in at least a decade. And it's already been interesting to see the conversations we've been having with Tina on, are we going to be collecting e-waste from 2024 or circa 2005? So it's a mix. I'm thinking of the obsolescence of aesthetic, both in the computer that stayed from the '80s, the interaction with it in 2000 and then throughout how it's going to be displayed as a video sculpture in the gallery.
Conrad House: Interesting. You brought up the conversation you had with the curator, Tina Rivers Ryan. I wonder if anybody can talk more about what the curatorial process is like. Does she approach you or do you have more of a conversation about what work you show? How does that actually work, the decision-making process of what gets shown in an exhibition like this?
Tali Hinkis: In our case, we had a couple of studio visits probably, and there were maybe two pieces that Tina was considering. One was actually an older video recording, recorded in a similar system to what Cory was describing, one of our earliest recordings of analog synthesizer. Probably you have to balance all the artists and make sure that each piece stands on its own.
Joan Heemskerk: Yeah, actually, Tina came in contact, and I have to thank Cory that he said, yeah, there are still some European people who make work which will fit the show. It was like, Cory reminded me that you made something which is very suitable in the show. That's how it started. Thanks, Cory.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, it seems like word of mouth usually plays some role with the curatorial process. Buffalo AKG calls Electric Op the first major exhibition that connects op art and electronic art. But there are books like Frank Popper's Art of the Electronic Age, which is 30 years old or so, that have made this connection. So what do we have to gain by contextualizing new media art and its development through the genealogy of movements like op art?
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer: Well, I think we have a lot to gain, very little to lose, to be honest. I think that whether it's a comparison to op art or conceptual art or performance art, media art needs to be in relation to all of those traditions of experimentation. And it is the job of the museum to actually demystify the new modes of production by sharing continuities and ruptures with what was there before. So I, for one, do welcome these connections because it also helps the artist stand in relation. I don't think art is ever made without a context. Shows like this help us have discussions like we're having right now.
As soon as Tina told me about the proposal, I went and studied op art, and all the op art that I knew was coming from Latin America. I'm a Mexican artist, and Carlos Cruz-Diez or Jesús Rafael Soto, all of these are very, very well known and well respected artists in Latin America. We often talk about geometric abstraction, but I did not know the diversity that actually came through from op art. We think of it as very specific, something that I think Joan was saying, that it wasn't cool. There was something really uncool about the repetition and the mathematical and the way that even media started using op art. I was just reading about Bridget Riley, when she did one of her very first museum shows. At the time, her work was copied and used massively in media. And there were no protections for her as an author to claim a certain degree of ownership over this. Actually, that destroyed her idea of what a museum should do. And that's not to popularize things for advertising.
I think that, fast-forward to today, op art is just a category that is actually quite broad. I'm learning a lot about it. I know what I don't like. I don't like the orderly presentations. I think that everybody in this call is not into the orderly. Maybe, Cory, sometimes you've been into the orderly. But I'm troubled by the orderly in general. Having said that, I really defend this idea of the complot. I think that the image perception trickery, faking, I mean, that's us. The fact that they were criticized for only being effectists is a complete misunderstanding of the history of art. Artists have always been using these effects. And I do think that media artists are following that tradition of effectism for a purpose. So I'm very excited to be in this show.
Tali Hinkis: I agree with Rafael. Recently, everybody loves to celebrate a digital art or media art exhibition. And I always see those with a lot of caution because we're so often lumped into exhibitions based on the process and the tools that we use rather than a theme or a broader exhibition, the way any other art form is put together. So this is a real special opportunity, I think, to have this show and really contextualize it within art history. I'm happy that this is happening. And hopefully that continues to evolve.
And that is the work of a great curator, pulling things together and seeing things that maybe individually we don't see as artists. I know for maybe all of you in the group, we all work in music as well as in visual art and have been greatly influenced by other art forms or other practices and ideas. Those are the things that I think are really interesting for artists. Those are the shows we want to see our work in, these other connections.
Peter Bauman: One thing that Rafael and Tali were talking about is how op art challenges the role of illusion in art and plays with the audience's vision. It does that in a few ways, by simulating motion and also dimensionality. You can see just behind me, it was challenging those things on a flat canvas. And I'm wondering, what do you think this 2024 reexamination of op art is challenging? Could it be challenging the flat surface of the screen? Or what do you see this reexamination highlighting or challenging today?
Joan Heemskerk: Yeah, I think you're right that most of the op art I know here in Europe, it was either paintings or things like tiles in a public space. The thing was that a lot of this op art was generated with computers and they only had the output. I think now for the show you have "electrical" op. The big difference is that you really are on the screen and you really experience the pieces with sound, alive. Probably not all of them. Rafa's work is a print. But in general, I think when you look at the work in the medium it's made in, so in the computer, it's completely different than when you have to print it out or have a representation of the calculation in a painting or a sculpture. Or there's this famous computer artist in the Netherlands who made color tiles all over. You cannot go to one city and not see these color patterns with bit tiles. But you never had a one-to-one experience. I think it's a huge step from the mainframe of these old computers where they had the output. Nowadays we can do it live and it will be live in the show.
Conrad House: Yeah, I think that's an interesting topic that you bring up. Op art has always represented this intermingling between science and mathematics in art. And you talk about how these early op artworks were made with computers, but only on a mainframe computer where only the output was the finalized art product. Maybe we can expand on how we see op art as anticipating the software-based art practices that we see come shortly after.
Joan Heemskerk: Only now it's connected to a previous movement of op art. I mean, you could do shows about digital art connected to pop art or to conceptual art or to performance art or maybe even to Dada. There's all these old art movements you can connect to media art because media art is everything.
Tali Hinkis: I actually have been studying another art movement that has a relationship to op art, which is the Pattern and Decoration movement, P&D, of the '70s, which was primarily painting-based, but a lot of textile, and was related to the feminist wave of the era. I'm reading this great catalog, and in that they talk about patterns as being promiscuous, the promiscuity of patterns, in a sense that they want to expand outside of the frame. In a painting, the pattern can be on a painting, but it can be on a chair and it can enter the domestic space. That was the goal of the P&D movement.
And I do see, not so much in terms of the flatness of the screen, but the limitation of a computer screen or a projection. People who use traditional media, meaning anything where you can assign, whether it's a print, you can decide the size and the dimension and the shape of the work you're putting out in the world. So there's a liberty to it, but still working within defined borders. And I do think that when I look at some of the op art, there is this tendency to break out of the boundaries of the borders and create an illusion of space and draw the audience in. I do think that to some extent, with digital media artists working with the constraint of a screen within a computer or a TV, there is often either this solution, so clearly in Joan's piece right there, where you're creating a sense of infinity, something that could continuously come out of the screen, or you always are referencing or dealing with the border, which is the traditional photographic frame or a painterly frame. In that sense, I am looking forward to seeing how those two issues are resolved in the exhibition or discussed.
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer: I just want to add that Joan had a great idea to do a Dada. Could have a Dada Data. I mean, has anyone done that show, Dada Data?
Joan Heemskerk: To be continued.
Cory Arcangel: One thing is I like the idea that media art is everything. I think probably what actually brings us together, and why you wanted to start with how we knew each other, is that our art, in many ways, couldn't be so different, but we all have been aware of each other for 25 years. That's really, for me, the relationship here. Somehow we're tied together in a way, even though we are all as different as could be. That's the tricky thing with media art. It's everything.
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer: Joan, I had never heard it said that way. Let's do it at a show. I want to just comment on what Tali was just saying about the fields and the repetition and the patterns, because I do think that that's a really fascinating connection between a lot of what we're dealing with, especially dealing with participation and perception that is in the round. I remember the first time I saw a projector, what an incredible thing it was. It was an Electrohome 3-CRT projector. All of a sudden, what was always behind some glass was taking over the body space. I remember seeing your work, Cory, for example, projected and thinking, oh my God, I'm inside of this video game, and this is really significant.
And I think that that's very connected to what Tali was saying, because there is this idea of the field taking over, and we call it a treatment. Sometimes the artwork is not an object. It's a treatment. It's something that then can be repeated. Similar to what Joan was saying about this artist who's repeating all of these patterns of mosaics throughout Holland, there is something pictorial about the mathematics of op art, right? Because it means that you can do this effect very small, or you can grow it. You can scale it in different ways. And I think that's very similar to media art, because the moment that you can project, the moment that you can see it intimate or intimidating, this is something that you can determine on a per-case basis. I don't think that other mediums like painting did that as much. Even when you're dealing with abstract expressionism and there's this field, I don't think that the rules were so clearly determined.
So what I think the op art thing is today is to go back to thinking about the issues of perception. It's not so much the math. It's about, well, how do we perceive image making? And is that in a very constrained environment or does that also contaminate the rest of your world? What was it? Promiscuity?
Tali Hinkis: Promiscuity of patterns.
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer: That's great. I'll pretend I knew that. It's a great term.
Joan Heemskerk: Yeah, it's actually that with the piece we are showing, that's like console space. It's basically that the computer can't cope with the big space. To go out of the box of a small 3D world and you enlarge it, you get these distortions, which normally you deal with. I think in a lot of pieces of the past, digital, you deal with the limitations of the computer, but then you go to the max of what a computer can do. But the whole different thing is, I think, when I talked about these tiles everywhere, for example in a tunnel if you cross the railroad, the difference with the computer, and with works made especially on the internet, is that it's like a medium. It's your broadcast. It's a one-to-one thing. You experience it at your home and it's your computer. I think that's completely different from other art forms, except maybe radio broadcast, television shows, but there are not so many artists who have access to the medium. I think that's a big difference because if your output is like a canvas or a public space, you're never on this one-to-one scale, never on a one-to-one scale like when you're listening to a radio program or watching a TV show or experiencing a digital art piece on your personal computer.
Peter Bauman: I think it's a really good point about the limitations of the screen but then how they can be so personal and personalized as well. I was curious about The Responsive Eye. This was at MoMA in 1965, this big op art exhibition, when it was really becoming popular with Vasarely and Riley in the mid '60s. It had a lot in common with some of the other movements in the '60s. I thought it was interesting that the curator of The Responsive Eye said in the catalog, "None of the artists follow systems or rules. Rather, they discover inherent laws through the creative process," implying that this is not a systems-based art. But then a year later Lawrence Alloway had this Systemic Painting exhibition at the Guggenheim that had basically a lot of the same artists as The Responsive Eye. It had Poons and Kelly and Martin and Stella. And that was all based on systems work. I'm wondering, how do you think of op art? Do you think of it as systems-based work or as sights, as in The Responsive Eye?
Joan Heemskerk: I guess it was visible in the '60s and '70s, and it had to do with the time. It was the liberating '60s and '70s, so you could come up with these colors and these patterns and go a bit funky, in a way like funky abstractionism. Okay, it has to deal with perspective, et cetera, different things. But I know when visiting the museums of Vasarely, the one in Hungary was in a total collapse. The one in Aix, it was like plants were growing into it. Nobody cared. In 2000... Maybe they restarted it now, but basically it didn't have any value 20 years later and it got picked up. I think maybe they got rid of the plants or it's overgrown. I don't know, but it was shocking to see all these paintings in a decay. In Aix there were literally plants growing in the museum. In Hungary, it was just the break open of the border. They had the habit of showing plants in the museum to make it more lively for the people who had to sit there. They had a lot of nature mixing in with this op art, which was, I think, a way of saying, okay, this is it, and we don't care. We just want to live our own life.
Tali Hinkis: That's such a great anecdote. I don't so much think that this is a question or an issue of artist practice. I think this is an issue and question of institutions, and why do things get labeled or curated a certain way at a certain time? There are multiple stakeholders for each of those decisions, like a museum with a massive collection that needs its value raised. And so words like systems, generative and new media become trendy and then untrendy at different points in our history. And artists just do their thing and ride the wave when it's there.
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer: May I say that I think that it's also a false dichotomy in the sense that if Seitz's position is that they were not systems, anybody who pretends they're outside of a system has a problem because everything's a system. Language is a system. Paint is a system. So we can't be outside of systems. The idea, though, that there is a certain emergent set of rules, which is, I think, what he was trying to say, that they weren't starting with the rules, that the rules were emerging, I think that this is a valid point. Because I do think even in my own practice, sometimes I start with the algorithm, exactly like the piece that I'm showing at Electric Op. I start with the algorithm and then develop the piece. But there's other times when the piece itself creates something that forms something that is new and that emerges. And I think that these are the two possibilities that we see in the studio a lot: top down and bottom up, and we embrace both.
Cory Arcangel: It's like a third situation that I have a lot of the time, just being in a totally black room and just feeling around the walls and being totally lost. Or maybe that's a part of those two systems, just being like, I don't know if this is good or bad at all. I have no idea what's going on.
Tali Hinkis: That's like 90% of the time.
Cory Arcangel: Yeah, exactly. And then maybe we could segue back into the question. I mean, a lot of times people don't know what's going on at all with artists, and people just do their best to say, well, maybe this is that, or maybe this is what's happening. I haven't been doing this that long, but entire things have come and gone, and they were just totally wrong or maybe almost right. And even the right ones have vanished in the wrong... So it's been very surprising to me to see how up for grabs everything is. Everything is always being reevaluated, which is amazing but also terrifying. I thought there were adults in the room when I was younger, but it turns out it's like a plane with no pilots. Two different metaphors, sorry.
“I thought there were adults in the room when I was younger, but it turns out it's like a plane with no pilots.” — Cory Arcangel 41:52
Peter Bauman: I was reading something today, Cory, an article you were in in the New York Times, and it was about the death of net art in 2004, so 20 years ago. It was about how the internet had such a bad reputation and net art was over. And it was because of the poor reputation of the internet. Already 20 years ago, because of the dot-com crash, there was this negativity around the internet, and that reflected upon the art made on it negatively. It reminded me of today. It's maybe one of those constant challenges of the digital, that we have to combat the sociology of it and how society just responds to these mediums in bizarre ways sometimes.
One maybe last string of questions or one wrap-up area. I don't know if you know this art historian, Domenico Quaranta. He described op art, and I thought this was really interesting, as radically technophile, for reasons that we've talked about before. And he argued that it was the beginning of the digitization or the beginning of technology and art in a lot of ways in the mid '60s, and that from that point on, in maybe the late '60s, new media art was really forced to become its own autonomous art world, is how he describes it in his book, Beyond New Media Art. And I'm wondering, what was your experience? Like Tali, I mentioned, just from an artistic practice point of view, was it your experience that new media art has become this entirely shunned autonomous world? And if so, how has that maybe been changing over the last decade or two?
Tali Hinkis: You said something about quoting Cory and the dot-com. And I want to make a point that all of us are thinking about the same generation. We blossomed and bloomed and made our careers during that time as a response to the hyper-commercialization of the internet. It was at that moment, and this is something I don't know how everybody's thinking about now, but whether it was intentional or not, there was a political nature to that. There was a lot of intent in working with those systems that were not financialized or necessarily popular outside of our bubble, within which it was very popular.
Another thing I'm going to respond to from the beginning of the conversation, we mentioned Harvestworks and other institutions. Speaking specifically about New York State: New York State, since I think about the '70s, has had an endowment from Rockefeller, I think, to the state funding, specifically to ensure that there's always grants available for media institutions, which is actually why places like Buffalo and Alfred and all the places in New York City, Rhizome, et cetera, have been here for so many decades. And so often that history, in the new wave of awakening to digital art, is being forgotten. But in New York State specifically, this has been a thriving, rich community of artists, curators and institutions for 50-plus years.
If you want to have a marginalization feeling, sure, it has not been commercially as accepted, not in the sense that there aren't artists who work in galleries, but it's not like every gallery in New York is exhibiting and selling a media-based artist. But it has been here for a very long time. So knowing specifically that, talking about New York State: now there's definitely a different awareness, understanding, a welcoming interest, renewed interest, I would say, which is really interesting. It's great. But we just have to remember that not only have we been through the highs and lows, but there is a continuation of a lot of infrastructure and a lot of history.
Joan Heemskerk: I want to add something. Indeed, net art is retired. I think you say 2004. I think even in 2000 it was retired already. The net art group decided to be retired, and I hope I'm still not retired yet. I excluded me from that decision to retire. It will continue. Also, Tali was talking about New York City, but net art is, for example, all over the world. Even today, it's quite easy to transport a digital work. Our work is asked for all over the planet, and it's definitely not limited to the States. It didn't even start, I think, in the States. There were a lot of movements in Europe, in Eastern Europe, and probably also in South America. It's a global movement. I didn't have to deal with, okay, I'd like to be in New York to be a famous artist. While if I would have been a painter, probably I needed to go to Berlin or New York to get any attention. I think the net art movement, it's really a global thing, and it's not limited to the classical art hubs in the world, let's say.
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer: Yeah, I want to defend the idea that perseverance is really important because things come and go, as Tali was describing. To not be sucked up into the specific flavor of the month is really important, to just be true to what you've been wanting to say and you keep saying it. I don't think that media art has been shunned. I do think that some things have changed for the better. Last time we called it normalization. When Cory was on the cover of Artforum, that's a really good thing. That's okay. This is where we wanted to be. Here we are. When Joan's work is at MoMA, that's a good thing. And then, of course, Barbara London is no longer at MoMA. I'm in MoMA because of Barbara London. It's thanks to her that she had the vision to introduce this work. So we do depend still on a frail number of people who sometimes get into power. Tina now is famously going to be, or is already, the editor of Artforum. And so I am seeing younger curators who are open to electronic art come into positions of power. And I do think that that's a healthier thing because a lot of the people who have been marginalized in media art will be able to get a different type of venue while simultaneously paying respects to all the institutions, like V2 in Holland or ZKM or ICC or transmediale. There's just so many of them that have basically supported all of us throughout all of this past 30 years. What one can say is that this is here to stay. We're working with media, which is the language of globalization. It's inevitable. This is not going to go anywhere, so people better get used to it.
Conrad House: I think it's funny how in the beginning of the chat, when we were talking about how the curatorial options were chosen for which work was being selected for the show, it was word of mouth. I think what Rafael says is sometimes it's easier when we have people in positions of power that can help shine a light on some of these secluded moments or movements. It just helps that the person in power is giving us the right word of mouth to spread the works that we want to see around. I think it ties in quite nicely with what we started talking about.
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer: And one more thing, because I just sounded too techno-optimistic. I recognize that 95% of media art, including my own, is shitty. I also think that it's very important to acknowledge and self-deprecate because we're just trying to figure shit out. We don't know what's actually going to be great in 20 years or 30 years. But I do think that there is a justifiable shunning that needs to be done with 5% of what we do.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, I think the point on resilience is really important, and just that these technologies don't always have a good reputation, but that doesn't mean that they will never... And also, that doesn't mean that art can't be used to challenge those technologies and look at them more carefully, like a lot of net art did with the internet, like Joan's work did in the '90s. And Rafael, you mentioned at the very end, it doesn't always have to be optimistic with technology and art. We can look at some of these things through a more critical lens. Does anybody else have any closing thoughts before we wrap up today?
Cory Arcangel: It's so nice to see everybody. I don't think we've ever all been together. I think me, Tali and Joan might have been together, but not all four of us. I was really thrilled about being invited to this. Are you still in Montreal?
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer: Yeah.
Cory Arcangel: Okay. Cool.
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer: You guys should come and visit, capital of good mezcal out of Mexico.
Conrad House: No, thank you. It's an honor to have you guys. And thank you to Peter for really putting together this group. Super happy to have this group here today. Thank you.
Peter Bauman: Thank you. Yeah, thanks, everybody. What a great chat. Thank you so much. All right. Bye, everybody.
Joan Heemskerk: See you all. Bye-bye.
