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Peter Bauman: Hello everyone, and welcome to this Le Random podcast. I'm your host, Peter Bauman, the editor in chief of Le Random. Today we have a special midweek podcast episode as a companion to our Monday editorials. Today's episode is a discussion on New York Frieze Week with Rhizome's Michael Connor, MoMI's Regina Harsanyi and Seven on Seven artist Karyn Nakamura.
The official Frieze fair runs from May 13th to May 17th at The Shed in Chelsea, but the entire week in New York is filled with art programming. That's what we're going to discuss today, especially in the context of the moment.
In particular, what we'll cover is Rhizome's Seven on Seven. We have Michael Connor himself, as well as the artist Karyn Nakamura, who's participating in Seven on Seven. So very excited to discuss the event with them. Also joining us is Regina Harsanyi, who will discuss her event at MoMI, which is a collaboration with the Tezos Foundation, and it's called Open Worlds: An Afternoon of Daydreaming.
Unfortunately, both of these events take place in the afternoon on Saturday, May 16th. So hopefully you can listen to this and get a sense of which one you're most interested in. I'm so excited to have all three of these participants on today. We covered the programming for Frieze Week from three excellent insiders, before turning to a discussion on the broader New York art scene through the lens of Josh Klein's recent, or sort of recent, October essay linking the real estate crisis with art quality in New York and nationwide. I value the perspective of these three so much. This is who I want to talk about the New York art scene with, and I can't wait to share it. Let's begin.
I think maybe just as an overview, or a high level way to start, we can think about the three main events that are involved in the digital art scene. Is this actually a significant week, Frieze Week? What is the significance of it? What are other things that you're looking forward to beyond what you're all involved with, which was, Regina, your programming at MoMI, and then Karyn and Michael, what you're doing at Seven on Seven. Does anybody want to just give an overview of a bit of the week and then what you're excited about this week?
Michael Connor: Well, yeah. I mean, I can say it's Frieze Week, which is an art fair that comes to New York and has attracted different kinds of satellite programs. A number of gallery openings in particular. I'm looking forward to the Seth Price opening at Petzel.
I think that the timing of the week in May, right after the Venice Biennale week, shifts the emphasis a little for this year. But there are a number of major shows in New York. If you're coming to New York from the outside world, high on your list would have to be the Whitney Biennial, of course, the Duchamp show at the Museum of Modern Art, and then the New Museum, where Rhizome is an affiliate in residence. They have the New Humans exhibition, which is really pretty stunning. So there's already three kind of major things to see, and this is maybe a good time to do it.
And then, yeah, lots of different events and everything. Regina probably knows more. But for Rhizome, we have our Seven on Seven program next week, and that's a long-running art and tech collaboration series that started in 2010. That'll happen on Saturday, May 16th, with an after party to follow.
Regina Harsanyi: Yeah, there's a lot to say here. I mean, it's an interesting year in some regard. The last couple of years have been interesting because Frieze, well, there's two major art fairs usually in New York. It's Frieze and Armory. Armory is in the fall. But Frieze specifically is more focused on contemporary art. What's interesting is that now Armory and Frieze have the same owner. And, yeah, so it's a big monopoly. So everybody needs to understand that and look at the hierarchical structure of how these art fairs work and the criticism around art fairs in general.
However, it is a big part of working in the arts, going to all the fairs, whether you like them or not. So I certainly will be going to Frieze. There's also Independent. So we call it Frieze Week, right, because there are satellite events everywhere. Everybody in the city is gearing up for it. There's also Independent art fair. There's Future Fair, which I don't know if I'm going to, but it's a newer fair. Still, ironically, mostly focused on traditional art, actually, for the most part. And NADA, the New Art Dealers Alliance, which is a great fair for emerging artists and galleries that's been around for a long time, and I've done partnerships with them before I was even working at the museum.
Oh, and TEFAF as well, which is one of the most interesting fairs because it's eclectic. It kind of includes everything from furniture mixed with contemporary art and 20th century and, you know, the art of the future. Chinese dynasty kind of vases and scrolls, everything kind of just mixed together, which is awesome. So that's actually not to be confused with the Armory fair in the Armory building during Frieze Week.
I'm probably going to be going mostly to fairs. There are a few dinners and openings. But, of course, as Michael was saying about Seven on Seven and the dinner they're hosting, we're doing a huge all day event on the same day as Seven on Seven at the museum from one. There's a lot of people in town.
Karyn Nakamura: Yeah, mostly around that, and a lot of Berggruen adjacent, Antikythera adjacent people coming to town.
Peter Bauman: So that's nice to hear, because I always wonder if Antikythera is ever going to do events in New York, right?
Karyn Nakamura: Yeah, it's different, because it's the people who became friends through that, which is separate from Antikythera.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, maybe we can also talk about, they've been brought up along the edges a bit, but we can talk about what you're mostly working on for next week, and mostly is kind of why we're talking, which is Rhizome Seven on Seven, what you're doing, Michael, and then also what Karyn is participating in. Regina, you also have an event on Saturday, May 16th, the weekend of Frieze Week.
Yeah, so maybe we can just talk a bit more about these two events. This is kind of like a battle royale, because listeners will need to choose which one they go to. Or is it possible? I don't know. Maybe the most ambitious and intrepid of them can figure out a way to do both somehow.
Regina Harsanyi: One thing I will say, Peter, is that from my understanding, and Michael can correct me if I'm wrong, Seven on Seven, which is an awesome event, it's been around for something like 15 years. I'll let Michael speak more to that. It's about 150 people. It's ticketed. It's all afternoon, just like our event. And the museum event is free. So those who do not, and I'm sure many of the tickets, if not all the tickets, have already sold. I'll also let Michael speak to that for Seven on Seven. We have a capacity of over 2,000 over the entire day. And so I'm sure plenty of people will be able to come to the museum and catch maybe Seven on Seven recordings afterwards if they can't get in and be one of those 150 people.
Peter Bauman: Yeah. What can the lucky 150 expect?
Michael Connor: Yeah. We are adding a, we also have a public live stream and we have a live stream lounge this year. So basically, for the cost essentially of the museum ticket, you can hang out in the Sky Room and be part of the breaks and session experience. And I'm sure many of the people that come to Seven on Seven will hang out there through the day too. So that's kind of a nice option we're able to add.
But for Seven on Seven this year, there are Seven on Seven in our Sky Room and then shared online at a later date. But the theme of that was really around commons and the idea of building the commons through technology. The theme of Seven on Seven is actually in dialogue with that to some degree. It comes from this 1990, or sorry, this 2000 essay, Container Technologies by Zoë Sofia. And it's the idea of containment, which I really love this phrase, because in the world of AI, containment refers to the safeguards around an AI system so that it doesn't go autonomous, rogue and do unsafe things. So when an AI breaks containment, that's very bad. But in Sofia's essay, she's actually arguing for a feminist rereading of technology and thinking about technology as systems that allow us to relate essentially to our environment, to our context, in more mutually supportive ways.
In putting together this lineup, one of the things that we were thinking about, I co-curated it along with Nama Githari and PNZI Systems, and I was really trying to draw connections between a conversation about technology really advancing the human's role almost into unrecognizable realms and thinking about agency today residing within systems that are almost beyond our grasp, which is, in my view, a very prevalent point of view, but one that is very demotivating. And then on the other, ideas of connection and community, which are powerful, but often are seen not to scale or to be sequestered. So I wanted to find links between these, and containment provided that.
The seven artists and seven technologists are put together in pairs. And one of the things about this framing is that artists and technologists has always been a rubric. The artists and the technologists in many ways are doing similar work, but in different fields in a lot of cases. And I think we all know that they share this common root of technique in the Greek language, conceptually in Western culture, at least. So they're very closely related, and asking someone to perform as an artist and perform as a technologist is really a productive rubric for Seven on Seven.
But this year it is notable how many more people are floating between these fields. I think because there's notably more institutional support for people that are doing hybrid practices, and notably and specifically also more politicization and less institutional support for people doing specific kinds of science and technological research. So it's created this really interesting hybrid space that actually is a place where people are able to pursue careers and develop their practice over the long term. So as Seven on Seven has evolved over 16 years, it's really notable to see these changes and see how different kinds of projects and knowledge get created at the event.
So we'll see seven pairs presenting new works. I've really been trying to force everyone to make something new this year. And they all really deal with systems and thinking about biological, financial, technological and knowledge systems, and technological ways of relating to those. It's really a very intense, dramatic event. People are being very vulnerable, sharing work in progress and new kinds of things that they haven't fully rehearsed, which is, I think, what makes it exciting. And typically the lessons of Seven on Seven can take time, maybe years, to metabolize. So looking forward to that on Saturday.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, that's perfect. It's really interesting that the emphasis this year of Seven on Seven is also something that's happening in the world of systems, because it seems like, at least from the tech and art perspective, that is what the conversation that's happening in Venice is as well. So very interesting that there are these transatlantic dialogues happening at the same time or in consecutive weeks.
Maybe it makes sense for Karyn to talk about what you're doing in Seven on Seven, and then we can also, of course, Regina can give her side of the debate. No, again, kidding, kidding.
Karyn Nakamura: Yeah. So I think there's definitely still in the process of working on it. And it's going to be in the process by the time that we present as well.
Peter Bauman: How much do you want to share about it? Because it's coming out in advance. Karyn, maybe.
Karyn Nakamura: Yeah, I can share the general directions that we've been doing a lot of research in, which I think was pretty framed by, when we started, we actually got in touch maybe a month ago. We were kind of just hanging out, and then at the time I was working on this project that I released a couple weeks ago where I was thinking a lot about visualizing, well, I guess a lot of my work involves visualizing the internal logic and the internal infrastructure of systems. And with this work that came out a couple weeks ago called Spitballs, it was sort of about visualizing the internal logic of a specific kind of logic, and language models. And so I was doing a lot of reading on interpretability research then, and I was really interested in this whole entire field of interpretability, because it's entirely dedicated to making these systems legible to humans, which is a really specific goal. It has nothing to do with the functionality of the models themselves.
Yeah, so we kind of started talking about that, and then we decided, okay, let's just both catch up on a bunch of interpretability research. And I was really interested in these papers about the geometry of topics, geometry of features and ideas in models. And there was recently, just yesterday, there was a really interesting paper from Goodfire that people have been posting a lot about, the geometries of certain topics. So we were launching into a lot of interpretability research.
And then we also were thinking about, what are the types of interventions that people typically do? And there's pretty common types of interventions that people do in computer science projects. And one of them that we were talking about is, for example, playing Doom, getting things to play Doom. It's kind of a category of a thing to do, an intervention to do. Getting Doom to play on a PDF, getting Doom to play on something, or getting a PDF to play all sorts of crazy JavaScript programs. So we were thinking about, is there an intervention that we can do that's kind of in that category? So those are the two things that we're thinking about. This sort of interpretability and visualization and interpretability, and also sort of using systems a different way than they're meant to be used, or using these back channels of systems, using these side channels of systems, to be able to push through something else.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, again really interesting, the emphasis on systems and how much you're thinking about the use of systems but also this subversion of systems. And yeah, so I have a piece coming out on Monday about sort of that exact thing. So yeah, super interesting.
Well, yeah, so Regina, can you also tell us about what you're working on and your programming for Frieze Week in New York?
Regina Harsanyi: Yeah. I think it's interesting that you talk about that there's this kind of hot trend going on right now with systems thinking, something that I think about generally when I work with artists but also from a preservation perspective. But what we're focused more on for the event that we're doing at the museum is a typical topic that I tend to curate, which is thinking about digital material, or material as being equally tangible and digital and still being material.
And so this event comes partially out of this year-long partnership we have with the Tezos Foundation, where we were really interested, and I've actually been interested in this for a long time now, in getting more artists to understand how to manipulate and use the Tezos blockchain itself as a material component of their work, behaviorally, performatively. Because we saw a lot of this happening a few years ago on Ethereum, artists that weren't just taking their PNGs and affixing them to a non-fungible token, but instead thinking about ways to use the smart contracts and the transaction methodology and the protocols as a way of expressing the work in itself.
And so we finally got the engineers, that weren't really art people, on board with training a group of artists. Anybody could have signed up. We had about 30 artists who went to every single session. I think we had over seven sessions that these artists joined, and they learned how to program their own FA2 smart contracts. And not only program their own FA2 smart contracts, but also understand and think technically about the Tezos blockchain in other material ways, kind of learn the programming, Michelson in some cases, or using SmartPy, which is a Python method for utilizing the Tezos blockchain beyond just putting something on objkt, for example. Not that we're against objkt.
One of the projects that came out of that, that we also gave a micro grant, was Edgar Fabián Frías. He specifically was working on a project that involved a nierika, which comes out of the indigenous practice of transformation. The idea of a nierika is like a portal or a passage. It's a way of being a seer to the divine, but it's ultimately through a symbolic object. A lot of objects that have been proposed as nierikas use yarn in some way. But of course, for this project Edgar's thinking about this through digital means specifically.
And so the performance is going to include two other local indigenous artists that he's curated for his portion of the event. And we're going to be doing this transformation of this nierika live, and it'll be basically transferred between four or five different hands and you'll see it evolve over time. So it is somewhat generative, but it's generative in this kind of both manual, human to human way that we'll see in person, and also you'll see the digital work transform on the screen. So we are so happy to have been able to support this project that also has a smart contract element that's custom and essential to this transfer of the work itself and how it's recorded.
So that's actually the second program, but I wanted to mention that because Edgar comes directly out of our fellowship program, and we'll hopefully be featuring more artworks from that program in the future, because it is a year-long project.
And then we also, in the beginning of the day, are featuring Travess Smalley's Pixel Rug book, which we're really excited about. So Travess has been working on Pixel Rugs for a really long time now. I believe the book specifically focuses on Pixel Rugs that he's created since 2001. And so just to give an idea overall, for those who aren't familiar with his Pixel Rugs, maybe in the podcast, Peter, you can put up an image or two of those. They're a body of work that he's created that translates these algorithmically generated images that evoke hand knotting. I think that's interesting, tangentially, with the idea that the nierika was often yarn based.
He's thinking about op art. He's also thinking about the long history of computer graphics, this relationship to warp and weft and weaving. If you know the history of computation, it kind of often starts there. A lot of artists work on projects that evoke these similar history of computation ideas through warp and weft. And he writes his own custom scripts around this. A lot of it has been with Processing in the past. And one of the reasons that I love Travess's work is because he's also playing with corruption and corrupting bitmaps specifically, and also chance operations through that. I love glitch. I love actually when artists are messing with me a little bit on the preservation side, with corruption.
It will actually be the first time the book will be ever seen in person, because there's been pre-orders already, but even those who've done the pre-orders haven't received their book yet. So if you really want to take a look at the book in person, talk with Travess and celebrate the launch, then please come to our event.
And then throughout the day, Una is going to be walking around the museum doing a performance that is a part two to a performance that she first launched in Berlin for a Tezos Art Week event that they did there, I think earlier this year or maybe at the end of last year. And she's going to be doing something quite typical that you all probably have experienced yourselves while being in a museum, which is when someone goes up to you and asks if you can take their picture. And I won't give anything else away as to what happens after that, but she will be doing a talk at the end of the day where she reveals more about the meaning behind the piece.
And then we will have drinks and food for everybody, which is in part to also celebrate the new media wall piece that we have up, which I'm very excited about, which is a collaboration between Rhea Myers and Linda Dounia. And it is absolutely gorgeous and involves computer vision, so I could talk more about that if you'd like, but I've said a lot already.
Peter Bauman: No, yeah, thank you for that overview. And yeah, that is interesting, this investigation of the materiality of some of the digital. There's a performance level, there's the materiality of blockchains, and then there's also the materiality of the book. It's interesting you also seem to be emphasizing, I think the way that you're working with systems and with Tezos, it's more like the building of, using systems to build systems. It's going even more meta.
But one thing that I was interested in from the Seven on Seven folks and from everybody is, when you pair a technologist and a scientist with an artist, what are the assumptions that you're making about the difference between an artist and a scientist? And how do you see the difference between scientists and artists other than just what they self-identify? How do you think about them as differently, or do you distinguish between them?
Michael Connor: Yeah, I mean, I think my story about this question is from Ken Knowlton and Leon Harmon, when they made Studies in Perception I, which is showing as part of New Humans. And they submitted it to the E.A.T. section of the exhibition The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age, and there's a form to fill out and it said artist and engineer on it, and they flipped a coin to decide who was going to be who.
And in Seven on Seven, they function as roles. The kind of role that we assign in society to an artist, I think, is someone that brings aesthetics and philosophy into their work traditionally. Having a really, also, connection to different communities that are associated with art institutional systems or art market systems is also part of it. It's kind of like the idea of a field.
In speaking to someone that might be considered one or the other, I like to think about those aspects. And an important part of it is what they say they are. And so if someone says they're an artist, I think it can be a little bit insulting almost to say, oh, we'll have you as a technologist because you're not as good of an artist as the artist, or something. There's something that feels like it's about, there's an affinity group and there's a kind of field that they're trying to position themselves within, a way that they're trying to have their work read by using that word.
And I think that the word technologist is way more forgiving and made up. Really, a technologist doesn't connote a more specific field in that way at all. It connotes a number of different fields, which each have their own kind of logics and histories. But the thing that I think the word brings, and what I'm always looking to have in Seven on Seven, is this connection to a really rigorous approach to a practice. And so in science, that becomes almost too rigorous, in the way that they've developed almost a kind of rigid idea of publishing and citation and stuff like that. And so I think that's a really important part of it, to have that come into the space.
And similarly with technologists, I think these are people that are either deeply informed about aspects of technology that are specialized, or they are people who are actively engaged in building aspects of our society that need to be interrogated and brought into conversation. So there's a number of ways the term can land, and I think of them as roles that we are asking the people to perform in this little sort of pageant of Seven on Seven.
It's always funny. People are always like, you're reinforcing the binary. But I think we have helped collapse the binary by using these words in this way. We have created a thousand articles, and people that have been mad about the division between artists and technologists have gone on to take that anger and build out this hybrid world that we now live in. So I think there's a real value to what we have caused through that, through that performance of the roles.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, I definitely agree. Well, I think that's a really good point about that sort of post-structuralist view of language. And yeah, Karyn, do you want to talk about your experience as one of those artists slash scientists or researchers, and then how you and Lucas think about it, or have talked about it, or live it?
Karyn Nakamura: Yeah, I was thinking the other day when we mentioned to one of our mutual friends that we're doing this together, somebody asked us, who's the artist and who's the technologist? And we're like, it kind of doesn't matter, and it's fluid. My relationship with working with Lucas is that we're both doing the same things. It's just that the way that we communicate is different. For Lucas, the primary way that he communicates the larger ideas that he's thinking about, obviously his job is a software engineer, but the way that he communicates larger ideas is in writing. And it's just that for me, the way that I communicate my larger ideas is mostly in visual experiences. So I just feel like those are just two branches of ways to communicate, but we're really thinking about the same thing. So it's been really fun to collaborate in that way, because I kind of just have access to more. I feel like we're actually really similar.
“We have created a thousand articles, and people that have been mad about the division between artists and technologists have gone on to take that anger and build out this hybrid world that we now live in.” — Michael Connor 26:51
I think in the beginning when we talked, Michael, I remember, oh, this was a comment that another friend of ours, Wendy, had made, that I would probably appreciate being paired with somebody who's more technical than I am. And I think Lucas actually fits all the boxes. He's more technical than I am, or technical in different ways than I am, and also deeply conceptual in other ways than I am.
Michael Connor: Yeah, you know, Karyn was proposed as a technologist. And I was like, I don't know if I believe in that. And I think that it's also that you're visible to our world. And I think part of also the value of Seven on Seven, as it's rolled out, is that we have kind of peeked around some corners and found people that are really talented but are not visible to the art world. People that are in that art technology space surface more often in these conversations as well. There's a kind of confirmation bias.
But I think having you as artists, Wendy's point was kind of partly that she imagined someone doing really rigorous research, asking some sort of complex question and driving at it through their scientific research, was just someone like Dr. Michael Levin, who's in the program this year, who's really asking these extremely interesting and abstract questions that are truly philosophically rich in the way that makes them seem very contiguous with art. And Lucas, I feel, is like a builder, which is cool. It's a different kind of technical than I think Wendy was maybe mentioning to me.
Karyn Nakamura: Yeah, he's definitely a builder. But have you seen his book review that kind of blew up on Twitter the other day?
Michael Connor: No.
Karyn Nakamura: Okay, I'll send it to you. He wrote a book review about this book called Technocrats of the Imagination.
Michael Connor: Oh, yeah, the MIT Media Lab book?
Karyn Nakamura: Is it? Yeah, one about early Bell Labs collaborations and stuff like that. And sort of responding to this new movement that's kind of happened maybe in the last two years, where creative technologists are in house in big tech. And a lot of tech employees will do side creative projects. And just kind of commenting a lot on that movement.
Michael Connor: I want to see it. Yeah.
Peter Bauman: So this is confirmation that Lucas is actually a very good technologist.
Karyn Nakamura: Lucas is a very good technologist. And also thinks at a higher level about these things. He's not just, I know people who are just builders.
Michael Connor: Yeah, it's true.
Karyn Nakamura: He's not just this history, and we were both kind of obsessed with this early 60s, 70s experimental art and tech collaboration history. A lot of my time at MIT was kind of trying to look for breadcrumbs of this stuff, like CAVS and all those early collaborations.
Peter Bauman: And you brought up Michael Levin, and that's another connection to Venice, because Michael and Agnieszka Kurant are both part of Strange Rules in Venice, and then they're both also participating in Seven on Seven. So there's a literal direct link with them.
Regina Harsanyi: I think it's important for us to showcase artists who are very technical, because I think that the traditional art world sometimes still does see this divide, even in 2026, of thinking, oh, we should just pair a painter with someone who works at Google and do this kind of partnership together. But more and more, even with Seven on Seven, I'm seeing this blur. Particularly this year it seems to be less about this relationship between an incredibly corporate entity that is honestly putting anything from creative to even something like archiving last, and seeing more of this blur happening. So I also look forward to reading that book review.
At the same time, I think even looking at E.A.T. and Nine Evenings, what a super technocratic corporate company can really offer an artist is resources to subvert that technology. So I hope that Rhizome continues, and whoever's involved with the Berggruen Institute, et cetera, to push forward that narrative, instead of it feeling too techno-positive, which I don't think is happening here.
Karyn Nakamura: Yeah, I think it's also really valuable to support people who work with technology who just have different ideas. Because if you have more creative or more crazy ideas, it's just so hard to do that, because people just don't take you seriously. And obviously there's a lot of rigidity in academia and industry around ideas that are different.
Regina Harsanyi: And also obviously always thinking about, especially say MIT for example, as Karyn is quite aware, its particular relationship to the military industrial complex. So again, these programs are so important, because we might as well use those particular resources for the good of explaining to the public these realities through art in some form. And then also helping them realize the larger possibilities through these resources that just don't exist within those more rigid structures.
Michael Connor: I'd love to read a history of corporate sponsorship in art. I wonder if there's a good one that exists. But also in relation to E.A.T., because as much as it was pioneering in art and technology, it was also quite pathbreaking for working with corporations, which is a really important aspect of institutional life in the US in 2026.
At Seven on Seven, the main constraint that many sponsors do want to bring is, please use our technology in the collaboration. We don't do that, which basically makes us ineligible for, look, we would do it for other kinds of partnerships, but this program is really meant to be much more open-ended. And so getting people to understand that has been really tricky over the years. And Seven on Seven really kind of continues in spite of itself at this point because of that. That's what makes it exciting.
Regina Harsanyi: Another interesting collaboration, not with corporations, but with the government, was what happened with artists and JPL. And even darker, a directly more militaristic branch of the government.
Peter Bauman: It's a shame we didn't get to talk about Klein. I mean, unless you want, Karyn, do you want to share with us in your last few minutes about, about just about the Klein essay?
Karyn Nakamura: Yeah. I mean, yeah, I guess there was something that you mentioned, you brought up about it, about how there's still creative people, or stuff happening in New York. And I think I responded to that about how I had spent a lot of my time growing up just fighting to do anything creative. And I feel like, I don't know, I still feel like an outsider in the art scene in New York, so I really can't speak for that.
But my experience growing up is I went to engineering school to study physics. And then it was in that context that I was starting to make work. And every time that I've tried to do, I have a weird idea, and because I was young and because the idea was weird, it would just be really hard to do that. I would have professors be like, no, you can't do that, that's going to fail, whatever. And then I would just have to fight my way through to make anything happen, and then create an artifact out of that just to show that I was able to make something. And that's how my creative practice started. So I feel like that really trained me in being able to bounce back and be really resilient and pushing ideas through. I do think what a lot of artists do is basically making miracles happen with no resources. And I think you get a lot of that training being an artist.
I guess for me, it was in this way. And so once I came to New York, I was like, there's other artists around, they understand how I feel about this. So I felt like there was a bigger community in New York. And I think for a lot of artists, they don't really have a choice. They didn't really consciously decide, oh, I'm going to get a studio in this place and spend all this money on making art because it's going to do something. It's just like they just have to do that. Otherwise, what would they do? What would they do with their lives?
Peter Bauman: Yeah, we were talking about resourcefulness. I was just talking to Avery Singer, and she was talking to me about how the reason she became a painter is because when she finished college, all she had to do to make art was scrounge around what she had available. And yeah, I think that's a really good point about community and what that offers.
“I do think what a lot of artists do is basically making miracles happen with no resources. And I think you get a lot of that training being an artist.” — Karyn Nakamura 36:41
My issue with the Klein piece in October was the causal claim. It was like the real estate prices caused bad art. And I definitely agree with all of his premises, that these create difficult to almost impossible positions for artists and that it's just getting worse. But I guess I disagree that that was the cause of some kind of creative stagnation in the city or in art generally. That was my particular issue with the piece. But yeah, does anybody else want to?
Karyn Nakamura: I would say something and then have to disappear.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, you go first. You have to go already, Karyn?
Karyn Nakamura: Yeah. Bye.
Peter Bauman: Thank you so much.
Michael Connor: It's a notable time for it to come out, after a major election in New York in which housing affordability was a central issue. And I don't believe the piece points at all towards the possibility of political solutions to affordability crises, which are only undermined by telling artists to leave. But I don't believe that high rent makes better art. People need time. So those are my two thoughts on it. I think that there's a big public conversation that artists have an important role in about real estate affordability in New York City, and I am curious where Josh sees this article intersecting with that.
Peter Bauman: I think the political point is really important. But before I say anything else, do you want to add anything, Regina?
Regina Harsanyi: Yeah, I mean, this article is certainly the talk of the town. I haven't read it in a few weeks, but I will say, as a native New Yorker, I was also kind of saddened by the lack of solutions, both politically or just a deeper understanding maybe of the history of New York, its resilience, its turning over of culture, and how it's inspired the rest of the country, if not the globe, in such a way, and why that matters geographically.
And so as a native New Yorker, as someone who was born and raised here, for me, I wanted it to not just be about blaming landlords. Which, yes, as somebody who had a startup where we had to partner with landlords, I've seen the ugliest of the ugly side of that. I'd rather look to solutions to enliven this community here. I think if you do move an entire arts community to somewhere like a Providence, it's going to stop looking like the utopia that Josh Klein makes it out to be, and you will have as many sharks out there as well. So I think we're just ignoring a lot of what makes specifically this city an important global hub for the fine arts in general. And I would love to have a deeper conversation about solutions here, despite how awful the real estate is, which, again, I'm experiencing that myself. So yeah, sorry.
Michael Connor: Regina, great to see you. Regina, I'm sorry to miss your Saturday event.
Regina Harsanyi: Same. Yeah, love Seven on Seven. Good luck with that. And I'll try to tune in when I can between my own events, if it's being live streamed.
Michael Connor: Yeah, that's good.
Regina Harsanyi: Maybe there should be a lounge at the museum. That'd be fun.
Michael Connor: Yeah, oh, that'd be cute.
Regina Harsanyi: Yeah, okay.
Alongside that, throughout the year we're showcasing artists on our Schlosser media wall that are also showcasing these relationships. So our first project that launched through this partnership was with Sarah Friend and Yewon Song, and that's sadly coming down right before Frieze Week. The last week to check it out is going to be Sunday the 10th, which this may come out after that. And then next is, and I couldn't have done this project without, of course, came to mind right away, was Rhea Myers. We partnered Rhea with Linda Dounia. And so far, and the next one's going to be Jonas Lund and Yoshi Sodeoka, which we're also really excited about. But the partnerships have been going so incredibly. I feel like I'm making friends out of these artists. It's really lovely to see.
And Linda and Rhea's piece is so special. It's called To Be Perceived Against Evil, because they were both thinking about philosopher Édouard Glissant's right to opacity, and it really fits both of their practices so well. So I could just kind of read the text of what we're showing and why they ended up being such a perfect partnership. Édouard Glissant's right to opacity is this idea that people, cultures and forms of knowledge do not become fully visible, translatable or explainable, do not need to become visible or translatable in order to survive.
So for Dounia, Linda has been following this throughout her career, and I think that's just a really good way to explain her practice. She relates this to the Serer community in Senegal. She was born in Senegal herself, even though she's now based on the West Coast. And in Senegal there is this cosmology that centers around five sacred trees in the Serer community, and the trees are tied to their rituals, their burial, their ancestry and ideas of memory of place. And Linda includes trees that have not been sighted by the eyes of Senegalese for many years. So she's also thinking about, there's also not even a visibility completely to the sacred objects. She's thinking about this wider question of cultural preservation and how to honor that community and its stories and languages and forms without turning them into material for extraction, which is already happening a lot to the Serer community.
And for Rhea, Rhea is thinking of course about trans visibility. A lot of Rhea's practice is about this demand for proof, and has been working with blockchain since Bitcoin in ways that talk about proof and categorization and exposure and systems, to concepts of trans visibility. Rhea had a project where she was proving her own existence through putting her genome on the Bitcoin blockchain, for example.
“Édouard Glissant's right to opacity is this idea that people, cultures and forms of knowledge do not become fully visible, translatable or explainable, do not need to become visible or translatable in order to survive.” — Regina Harsanyi 43:05
But the way that they're both thinking about this right to opacity, what they want to give away, what they want to keep, because it's extraction more than survival, is these sacred trees that Linda's developed generatively over the period of this project will be blurred. So when you first come to the museum, you'll kind of see the wall completely blurry. And then as you stand in front of the wall, there's a camera that detects a person, using computer vision of some kind, using YOLO specifically, for those who are interested. As you take more time to stand in front of the piece, the trees slowly unblur. And the more people that take time and stand in front of the piece, the more the entire piece kind of reveals itself, because it feels like there's this trust and the safety. And at the same time, it's still able to withhold information.
And so you might ask, how does that relate to materiality of the Tezos blockchain in some way? So the way that it works is, when you're in front of the work, it detects a body, and then it takes that information and it encrypts it and sends it to a custom smart contract that Rhea created. And then it looks for a quote unquote proof of presence. And then it decrypts that and then decides pseudo-randomly which tree is unblurred for that person.
Peter Bauman: Okay, that's really interesting.
Regina Harsanyi: It's an interactive piece, but it's responsive depending on the motion that it captures. And yeah, that's it.
Peter Bauman: How long is it running for?
Regina Harsanyi: Yeah, so the piece opens right in time for Frieze Week. It actually opens on May 14th. So May 14th at 2 p.m. But we'll be celebrating it on the 16th together. Like I said, we have drinks and snacks starting at 5 p.m. on the 16th. And that's running through August 2nd. So that will be up all summer.
Peter Bauman: Okay, okay, cool. Well, thank you for today and good luck with everything that's going on.
Regina Harsanyi: Thank you.
Peter Bauman: I'll see you this weekend and next week and all that. And have fun in New York.
Regina Harsanyi: Thank you. Yeah, I'll talk to you soon. Bye.
Peter Bauman: Take care.
