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Peter Bauman: Hello everyone, and welcome to this Le Random artist discussion following the release of the final, I can't believe it, chapter of our generative art Timeline covering the 2020s. It's the last chapter. It has been released, and this is our last chapter discussion. I'm your host, Peter Bauman or Monk Antony. I'm the Editor-in-Chief at Le Random. Joining us today are four guests, four artists who shaped and defined what we can probably all agree has been a wild decade. One guest will describe it as the "Shit Hit the Fan Era." Those guests who we are so happy to have today are Lauren Lee McCarthy, Erick Calderon or Snowfro, Itzel Yard or Ix Shells and Rafael Lozano-Hemmer. Then also joining us from the Le Random team are our co-founder, thefunnyguys, and our collection lead, Conrad House or Nemocake. Conrad is also the Image Coordinator for the Timeline, so he helps add all of the images for all the moments and categorize them. It's a lot of work because there are over a thousand moments, so almost that many images. So thank you very much, Conrad.
Speaking of the Timeline, it's really hard to believe, and strange, that this is the final Timeline chapter release and artist discussion. This is our 10th chapter, but it's our 11th discussion because Chapter 4 on the '60s had two. We do plan to continue having Timeline-focused discussions now that the chapter releases have concluded. What we'll do is make them more inter-decade. We'll have somebody from the 2010s and maybe somebody from the 1990s and somebody from the '80s and then somebody from this decade or something like that. But we want to have them more cross-generational. So that's the idea.
The Timeline is also now fully released, which I similarly can't believe. It's 10 chapters and over a thousand moments and well over 100,000 words. It covers 70,000 years of art history, digital art history, systems thinking history. It also represents almost two years of work and writing, and it hasn't just been me. It's also been a team effort. It's a lot of work, so we appreciate your appreciation of it. It's also something that I'm going to keep working on, editing and fine-tuning it and adding things. Then eventually we want to completely overhaul the design and make it a lot more user friendly. Ultimately, we want to also have a physical book. So stay tuned. This is certainly in no way the end of the Timeline, but it is its completion in some ways, which is very nice to say.
But the decade that we're here to talk about is the 2020s. Sitting here today, towards the end of, well, the second half of 2024, we are almost halfway through what has been a fascinating, extraordinary decade. An enormous amount has happened in only about a whirlwind three or four years. We're here today to look at how that tumult has affected digital expression and even vice versa, how the digital can examine and address some of our current issues. Some of the themes of this decade so far, besides just what's been a very challenging decade from a macro level, have also been the rise of generativity in art. There's been the NFT mania of 2021, the rise of AI art and its advancements, peak institutional interest, which we talk about. Well, we talk about all of these. Peak tech love in our relationship with tech and then just the culmination of so many long-term trends in mass media and art, which is also related to our relationship with tech. We're so fortunate today to have four people with us who drove those themes firsthand.
I'll introduce them now. The first is Erick Calderon or Snowfro. He is a generative artist, the CEO and founder of Art Blocks, which is the world's first platform dedicated to decentralized generative art. Erick likes to work across both physical and digital media, including LED art, ceramics, 3D blocks and digital art. He is best known for creating Chromie Squiggle, a generative art collection and Art Blocks genesis project. Calderon's Chromie Squiggle #9999 was recently acquired by LACMA and will be exhibited in its upcoming Digital Witness: Revolutions in Design, Photography, and Film in November, later this year.
Our next guest is Lauren Lee McCarthy, who is an artist examining social relationships in the midst of automation, surveillance and algorithmic living. She's also the creator of p5.js, the very widely used, open-source and educational platform that prioritizes access and diversity in learning code. McCarthy is also a professor at UCLA, where she co-directs the Social Software Studio with Casey Reas, who also joined us for the 2000s talk. She has received grants and residencies from Creative Capital, United States Artists, LACMA, Sundance and Eyebeam. Her work is in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art. She has received awards such as Ars Electronica's Golden Nica and the Japan Media Arts Social Impact Award. Her work has been exhibited internationally at the Barbican, Seoul Museum of Art and SIGGRAPH.
Our next guest is Itzel Yard, who is an artist and self-taught coder, also recognized as Ix Shells, with a background in architectural technology and computer science. One of her most outstanding projects includes Dreaming at Dusk, which was a collaboration between Yard and The Tor Project from May 2021, which made her the top-selling female NFT artist in the world. That same year, she was placed on Fortune's NFTy 50, and her work has been acquired by Buffalo AKG as well as exhibited at the upcoming Tina Rivers Ryan-curated Electric Op, opening in September 2024. Her work will also be featured in the upcoming Against All Odds: Historical Women and New Algorithms at the National Gallery of Denmark.
Our next guest is Rafael Lozano-Hemmer. He is 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 much more. He was the first artist to represent Mexico at the Venice Biennale in 2007. He has shown at biennials all over the world, and collections holding his work include MoMA, the Guggenheim, the Tate and many others. He has received awards including BAFTAs and, like McCarthy, the Ars Electronica Golden Nica. He has lectured widely at Harvard, Princeton, MIT and other top institutions. Finally, his work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions across the globe. His solo show, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer: Caressing the Circle, opens at bitforms Gallery in New York on September 4, and his recent work will be shown at the Armory Show in New York, also in early September, September 4 to 5.
Wow. We can't believe the four people that we have on. We're so excited to share this talk with you. So let's get started.
With the Timeline, each chapter, and most of the chapters, have covered a decade since the 1950s, and then I've named each decade. So the '70s was the Artist-Programmer Era and then the '80s the PC Era. Last decade I named the AI Era, and that's because there were so many advancements in AI after this decades-long AI winter. Now I'm opening it up to everybody about what you think the name for this decade should be or could be. You can make the case that it could be the AI Era again. It could be maybe the Platform Era with the introduction of things like Art Blocks. The Institutional Era. I think there's a strong case that this is probably the most institutional interest we've seen since maybe the late '60s in new media art in general, but that's debatable, so we can talk about that. It could be the On-Chain Era, maybe the Community Era, the Co-Creation Era. So those are some ideas, but I'm wondering what anybody thinks.
Erick Calderon: Something to me that stands out is that we've had the last couple of decades to be able to create ourselves based on the resources that are available on the Internet. Now with AI, anybody can become anything with enough resources and time and focus. And I think that's been happening for a couple of decades. I've been able to do a lot myself without being skilled in any of those things. And I think this era is the era where all of those things... It's like we bought a 3D printer a decade ago, and it's like, what am I going to do with it? But now we have this era where all these things are coming together. It's a software era, and that software era makes it possible for anybody to do just about anything. And so it's the coming together of all of the things that over the last couple of eras or decades have been niche into this self-empowerment or self-productivity era that is catalyzed by AI, YouTube, forums back in the '90s and early 2000s to make people be able to be productive on their own without necessarily reliance on others.
Lauren Lee McCarthy: Oh, yeah. I was going to add to what Erick was saying. I think it's been really interesting to see these new platforms and these new tools emerging with so much energy. And when you think back to where we're starting this conversation, which I guess is 2020, it was the beginning of the pandemic. I've been working on this project that's called Driverless, and it's been thinking about just what is that feeling of being on something that's moving at high speed towards the future with a questionable driver in the driver's seat, if any. So I'm trying to figure out what the more positive way of naming that is, but there's something about this feeling of just we're moving quickly. We're ceding some control to these autonomous systems that we're interacting with, and there's really exciting things that come out of it, but there's also a caution that's needed, I think, or just in the back of my mind a bit of who's driving here and where are we going? And also, we're in the middle of this decade and we're talking about it, so there's something very open-ended about it to me. Is this the end of the world decade? I'm not sure.
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer: Yes. I'm adding my voice to Lauren's. I do think there is a desire for all of us to be techno-optimistic and to feel like we are getting empowered. And I have seen a lot of examples of friends of mine, for example, in Mexico, in Brazil, in places where they have never had the mediation of the art world, be able to survive thanks to some projects that they have done digitally that have found platforms that can keep their operations going. So that's certainly a source for optimism. But just in general, the bigger picture, I think that this era should not, in my opinion, be called something that's very positive, because we are seeing just such a decimation of the planet. We're seeing such a loss of accountability with new oligarchs that are concentrating power in such few hands. We are seeing the rise of an unbelievable amount of the most toxic nationalisms and adversarial politics. We're seeing the lack of trust in any political institution, even in the media that we communicate. I would say that it would be like the Fuck Around and Find Out Era or the Shit Hits the Fan Era or the Dump the Earth Era.
Maybe if we're only talking now about art, what I would say is that what we've been doing digitally for so many decades is now entering what I would call a normalization. What I mean by that is that the art per se is not valued only by the means with which it's produced or consumed but also by a series of concepts or relationships or criticism or poetry that relates to other traditions of experimentation. For example, I really like how Le Random has had this chronology of historical moments, because I think that gives us a historical perspective, which is something so needed. I think that we are in the period where institutions are realizing that we're here to stay, that digital art forms part of globalization, that this is not about collecting novelty or originality. It's about the inevitable language, which is technology that we can't be outside of. If we want to speak about our society today or our economy or our relationships, what's natural, what's normal, is to do so through technology. I think that we're seeing that all of these institutions, publications, art critics and so on are understanding that this is not just like a little ghetto. This is just people trying to speak with the language of their time. So "Normalization Era" is one that I have, and I have one more, which is digital dramaturgy. A lot of times what I've been seeing, especially with... I work a lot alongside interactive installation and immersion and so on. And what we're seeing is that people keep coming up with truly theatrical, performative approaches to the digital, which connects it back to very long traditions of theater making. I mean, digital dramaturgy is something that I would love to emphasize, because what it emphasizes is the actual content. It's what does it tell you? What does it make you feel? What are the questions that it's asking? As opposed to the novelty of the actual medium itself.
Itzel Yard: I think people know me as someone that likes to live in peace. My surroundings are always very calm, very sad. My partner is a very stoic person, and I like to live like that. But I know that chaos is part of society and all of us, just as art is, and it stimulates us in a way. And I know not everything can be perfect. But if we learn to adapt and to live, and the more people adapt, just like we're creating collective experiences, the more we're going to be able to live in a balanced way. I think it's all about that, right, at the end. Just when you're playing with noise algorithms and you're like, oh my God, this is so erratic. This is making me so uncomfortable. But then you find the right point where it's like, okay, subtle enough, but it's also like, oh, you can play music to it.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, I think it's fascinating how this decade has been so filled with challenges from the very beginning, literally from January 2020. I think that's when COVID first started. Since then, we've had this dissonance between a lot of success and normalization in new media art, like Rafael spoke of, but also social challenges that we maybe haven't seen in decades that we're also dealing with, with pandemics and two Western wars and then wars, things that are happening in other parts of the world, conflicts and crises that don't get as much attention. Things that Rafael, your work touches on quite a bit, things like social issues at the US border, for instance. I'm wondering how the early challenges of this decade, and this is open to anybody, how they've already impacted our relationship with art and technology.
Itzel Yard: I myself, growing up, I used to think that I could solve many problems. I remember applying to computer science, and I wrote this letter of intent that would say I wanted to come back to my country, Panama, with enough knowledge to create applications that will help with climate change and all the challenges that we're facing as a developing country. There's islands that are disappearing where native people live, and that's the only way they know how to live. There's the water of the Panama Canal. It's drying out, and that is affecting the whole world and the economy. And we depend on that to generate income in the country. I think I just wanted to study computer science or study that because I wanted to get enough knowledge to create these apps. But then I got distracted. I was like, okay, this is also used to create art, and it's beautiful. And I started learning more about that. And that's something that made me feel safe, almost like in a bubble of safety.
I think many artists think that they can change the world, and we can change it as a collective. There's a programming that is running in the background of everyone's minds and computers. Sometimes we're seeing people doing the same reactions, the same interactions. Like they're talking to someone and they're on their phone just scrolling down. That's programming. They've been programmed to do that. And I think we can program in a more positive way. We can create collective experiences and movements that can change things around.
Erick Calderon: I'll just add more on the pandemic moment. I feel like for the last couple of decades, we've seen this inevitable shift towards a more digital-focused world. We spend more of our lives online. And as a result, we value our digital possessions more than we did in the past. I think that's something that was coming for a really long time. I think the pandemic just helped everyone, or at least for me personally, pre-pandemic, post-pandemic is more the moment that I crossed that chasm of understanding how much our time in the digital space impacts and affects us as humans, psychologically, emotionally, all those things. I feel like it was gradual. It didn't come out of nowhere. Let's say, I was logging into BBS in the '90s, right? And then all of a sudden it's Facebook and then all the things that come after that. Kids playing more and more video games, immersively just spending their time in a digital space. But when we were not allowed to leave our house for a while, that clicked in a different way. And I don't think there's any putting that genie in the bottle. That was already happening for a couple of decades. But the pandemic specifically just made it clear, at least to me, that this is what the future is going to be in terms of whether it's for better or worse.
I think we go through cycles of enjoying the digital space and then desperately wanting more physical, in-person, immersive, interactive experiences. But I do think the pandemic starting this decade is an interesting moment in that I do think it catalyzed a lot of the communication, a lot of the conversation around what's happening with digital art. It also gave us more time at home to make stuff and learn stuff and think stuff. You have a question later for me about the platform evolution, and I have some comments on that, on how that time just allowed us to learn more about the digital space. We spent more time online than we ever did, probably. And I think there's just this moment of we can't go back. We can try, but I think we can't go back as a society, a society where, if you offer a kid $100 cash or $100 in Roblox, they will take the digital over the cash a lot, if not most, of the time these days. And I think it just catalyzed that for me. The pandemic itself just catalyzed that for me.
Peter Bauman: Yeah. I think that's one big topic, coming from such a reclusive state of COVID and trying to find ways that we can participate more. And I think what Itzel mentioned was really nice, where we don't have to be a bunch of scattered islands, but we can all come together. I think this is a really good transition into the next general question. So again, this applies to everybody, but all of your artist practices or even beliefs have a common interest in the participative power of generative work, as well as the emotional approach to what I think a lot of people consider a cold medium sometimes. But this reflects a broader trend in this decade where artists are using technology not just as a tool but as a means of fostering connection and community, whether it's through platforms like Art Blocks or even open-source initiatives such as p5.js. We share this understanding that the digital realm can be as emotionally resonant and participatory as traditional forms of art. But although we believe these things, we still see this traditional divide between the traditional art world and the media world, where there's been this large disconnect for decades now. Are we still seeing those distinctions blur now that we do have, I think, a broader interest in digital art? Or are there significant challenges to closing this gap between the traditional world and the new media world?
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer: I think participation is fundamental in art. I think Duchamp said it is the look that makes the painting. We're ultimately making art for it to be completed by a public. And one of the qualities of digital art has always been, or at least of my type of work, that it's incomplete and out of control. What I mean by that is that it is the participation of the public that actually interprets the work, takes it somewhere where I did not anticipate, where it might generate some surprise. And then the out of control is that part where the artwork doesn't really instruct you how to do things or not do them. It's something that is more of a platform that allows for self-representation. So for me, participation is the fundamental aspect of creating relationships of intimacy instead of intimidation, the spirit of the great Marxist composer Frederic Rzewski, of coming together. Why are we making art? And he would answer a very 1971 answer, but I think it's good for us as well, is for people to share experience, for people to come together.
So I think the digital, for example, in many of our works allows for a distribution of these works in a way that was unprecedented. Now we can reach out to different communities in different geographical locations, for example, or across different types of boundaries that are set for us. And the possibility of coming together is no longer something that takes place necessarily only face to face and in the meatspace, which, of course, is always welcome, but it's something that's a little bit broader. I mean, I've been working with participation from, say, an Internet side since the '90s, and I have a feeling that this is here to stay. I have three children, and when they were little, they would go to museums and look at a painting and say, Dad, turn it on. It's off. It needs to be active. It needs to be telling us a story. It needs to create a more theatrical opportunity for all of us to come together. They're better now. They don't say things like that anymore. But all of this to say that I am a strong proponent of the fact that this participatory practice makes the artwork open, makes it versatile, makes it critical, makes it poetic and, most importantly, takes away from the artist's position as a messianic voice. We're just facilitators of experience with people, which then brings us to politics, if you guys want to talk about that.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, it reminds me, Erick, of something that we've talked about before, where you've mentioned how participative elements of just this space in general have brought people together, and in ways that traditional art seemed to not be able to achieve.
Erick Calderon: First of all, I just want to second what Rafael just said. It's so impactful. I often share the story that I grew up playing the violin, going to the symphony, and I can't get someone to go to the symphony if I pay them to. It's just not immersive. It's not exciting enough. It's not interactive enough. The way you describe how your kids look at a canvas and ask you to turn it on, I feel like that's the difference between people going to a Skrillex show and being assaulted with lights and a lot of music and wanting to jump around, and maybe that becoming the standard for what is an exciting cultural experience, not sitting down in a room with a bunch of 90-year-olds and very quietly listening to music. So I really want to reinforce what you just said there.
And I think the participatory part of this, going back to the idea that video games are a way that younger generations interact with each other. And this, to me, feels like a way that, not necessarily older generations, but... I can't put on a headset and play Counter-Strike, I mean, I wish I had the time, and interact with my digital community in the way that younger generations would be able to do that. But I can get on Twitter and share ideas about art and share my art and share other people's art and talk about art in an engaging way, in a very similar digital connective approach as what those generations are doing while they're playing video games and interacting with each other. It's like this unlocked that, or maybe, going back to the idea of normalizing, a normalized community for a generation that's not sitting there and playing video games all the time. And I think there's something really powerful and performative about all that.
And I think there's something really exciting about getting people outside of their shell a little bit. We live in a society where we act very guarded a lot, and that's just the way that we've been trained to be. And there's positives and negatives to all the technology, but by hiding behind a profile picture, a lot of people have been able to express themselves, in some ways for the best and in some ways for the worst, in ways that they wouldn't in real life. But it's unlocked individual expression in a way that I think wasn't really available before. So I think that generational shift is really... It's just becoming more accessible for a broader audience than just the ones that were brought up waiting for the canvas to be lit up or turned on.
Lauren Lee McCarthy: I personally have never been that interested in what is a traditional art form. I'm interested in what are all the ways that art can exist in our everyday lives? Because a lot of people don't go into museums at all or into any art spaces. So I think digital art is one way of exploring all the different ways that you can reach people. I think this is similar to what Rafael and Erick are saying.
I think there's something else, because digital art hasn't been accepted in the same way as some more traditional media. I think that's largely a financial question of how the work can actually be owned and collected. And we started to see some changes in that with things like NFTs. But I think what it's done is that it's created these communities of artists working digitally, because we have to make our own support structures. We have to make communities to be able to foster the work that we're doing because there isn't the same support coming from the financial market, or at least not on the same scale. And so while that's been a challenge, I think it's something positive, because when I think about my experience of being an artist, the thing that makes it worth it is the community. It's not easy to be an artist. And so I think to have those networks of people that you really trust and enjoy being in conversation with, that's the thing that ultimately is redeeming for the struggle and the energy that you put in. And I think working in digital art, you get a unique opportunity to connect with people, because everybody is online and also because it is a little bit outside of the mainstream.
Peter Bauman: It's interesting, Lauren, that you say that, because in your career, in your work, it seems that you're constantly balancing these two opposite sides of technology. On one hand, you celebrate the impacts that software can have on communities, on creative expression. But on the other hand, you also look very critically at software as an artist. You question a lot of technologies such as computers, the internet, AI, facial detection, which are all built by war agencies and mega corporations. I'm curious, how do you manage this tension between these two sides of technology?
Lauren Lee McCarthy: Yeah, that's a great question. I think about this a lot in my work and also in my teaching practice. Something I've been thinking about lately is, why am I teaching students to code? It's not necessarily necessary. I don't believe it has the same promise of class mobility that it did maybe 10 years ago, with all the AI tools and things that are emerging. And when I come back to it, I believe it's... I don't think everyone needs to know how to code or to use technology. But I think that by doing this, we get an understanding of what is happening in the world. What is this thing that's shaping so much of our lives in society? What does it actually mean to write code or to make something with technology?
And it ultimately, I think, comes down to a feeling of autonomy. I really believe that to be able to contribute to the direction of the world or the development of technology, it's not necessary to have an advanced degree in it. It's just necessary to be able to experience what's going on and critically reflect and feel the agency to make decisions about how you want to engage with things and what your opinion is. I think that's the thing that's often taken from us when we interact with different companies or technologies. There's this narrative that we're the user, that we have to take things as given, that this is just the system in place and we exist within it, or often the product that's distributed through the system. And I think that is a narrative, and it's something that we can counter and say, no, I can look at something and try it out and decide if I want to use it and how.
And so I think a lot of my work and my teaching is about that process. So it's not just across the board saying, oh, I love technology. Let's see what we can do. But it's also not saying, oh, I'm so critical, I'm not going to touch it. I want to engage with it so I can understand it on a more nuanced level and then be able to make decisions about how I want to interact and use it or what other tools I want to make. And the artworks that I'm making or the experiences that I'm trying to make in class are aimed at trying to give other people that same sense of agency. Like, oh, I can have an opinion about this. I am an expert on technology because it invades my life and I have an opinion. I think every person should be able to have that feeling and not have the power taken away from them.
Peter Bauman: It's such a fascinating point. I do have a similar question for Rafael, just about your approach to critically engaging with technology. Something you said recently, well, within the last few years, is, if we're going to use technologies like AI in our society, somehow as artists it's our job to either pervert the uses, make their abuses evident or make our approaches to them more connected, poetic or critical. How do you navigate those tensions?
“I really believe that to be able to contribute to the direction of the world or the development of technology, it's not necessary to have an advanced degree in it.” — Lauren Lee McCarthy 34:17
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer: The answer is badly. I navigate them badly. There is an ongoing paradox in my work, which is, on the one hand, a lot of my pieces are about making tangible the mechanisms of control, tracking, pursuit, metrics. A lot of my works have this ominous, dark surveillance aspect to them. While at the same time, while we're policing the public and we are being complicit with what we denounce, we are also going for that seduction of participation and the selfie and the reality TV. There are these two lines. There is this artwork that can work from the perspective of seduction and inclusion, but that same artwork works from that level of like an Orwellian predatory vision. And navigating that tension is what my work is about. It's something that I don't think needs to be resolved. My work does not want to be moralistic about technology, nor do I want to just be adopting it for its own sake. So I want to be able to explore the space in between. In between, there's a full spectrum. Then, depending on that artwork, you want to negotiate with the public. That's why we're doing it in the first place, because you yourself cannot resolve it. It cannot be resolved. You put it out in the world for this debate to continue.
Peter Bauman: Using technology or using art to subvert and challenge the role of technology in our life, Erick, it seems like Art Blocks, and you, tend to stress more of the positive elements of artistic intervention with technology. For example, artists can use the same tech stack, the same language and the same browsers that evil governments and mega corporations use but show audiences that art and technology can have a positive impact on culture and community and creativity. So what's your approach to using art as maybe a lens to critically examine technology?
Erick Calderon: I think anything in the world... The dollar can be used for good or for bad. A pocket knife can be used for good or for bad. And obviously, as we get into technology, it makes it hyper good and hyper bad. For the same reasons that we have this ability to distribute our work to a greater number of people and engage with a bigger number of people because of the technology that's advanced over the last couple of decades, you can also damage a greater number of people. And so you could spread a more positive message or you could spread a more negative message. And the political landscape these days is really just an example of how that technology can be used for misinformation. And sometimes the reality of the real things gets lost in all that. So I feel like any of these things can be used for good and for bad.
“There is an ongoing paradox in my work, which is, on the one hand, a lot of my pieces are about making tangible the mechanisms of control, tracking, pursuit, metrics.” — Rafael Lozano-Hemmer 36:42
And unfortunately or fortunately, like with any new technology, there's going to be a period of overhype around the technology. I've personally stated that the overhyped financialization of a lot of the things that happened over the first half of the decade, especially the beginning of Art Blocks, was detrimental to the long-term impact of all these things. It doesn't mean that the generative medium or the digital art space will not survive. I think that it put a bad taste in a lot of people's mouths. It changed the perception or the reason why people participated in it. And I think, for example, the intentions that I came at this with, why I created it, were just out of pure curiosity and excitement to help people release work in a way that I thought would be interesting and impactful. And it turned into something much bigger. What you need to consider, though, is that there's this top of funnel, right? We talk about top of funnel in a lot of different things. And top of funnel here is that as a result of the potential financialization of what we did, we got a huge top of funnel. And that over time has filtered out into a group of people that are actually truly passionate about this medium, both as creators and collectors. And you have to ask yourself whether they would be here or not if it wasn't for that. So it's like for every good thing, there's a bad thing. And you have to wonder where, and not just Art Blocks, I just mean the generative medium as a whole, the digital medium as a whole, where we would be today if it hadn't been for that top of funnel that carried with it some negative connotations and impacts in terms of the hyperfinancialization of the work. The hyperfinancialization of the work is the same process and mechanism that allows us to distribute our work in a hyper-distributive way. And that's what's so beautiful about this technology. So again, everything has its pro and its con.
And we as the artists... The Contemporary Art Museum here in Houston, they have this slogan. It says Trust Artists. That's their slogan, and it's just Trust Artists, period. And I think to some degree we as artists take on this burden of trying to do what's best with the technology and try to bring it to the best possible light, because I think that a lot of artists, a lot of creators, are truly passionate about what's going on. A lot of collectors are truly passionate about what's going on. And I think that deserves a chance to be known and to be accepted. And I was saying, in the early days of Art Blocks, we'd tell people, look, I'm here to let creators create art and share their art in a new way, and you should buy stuff because you like it. And the response was like, you're stupid. You're making it. You really want us to believe that you really created this platform for art and not for this madness that ensued? And I'm like, well, there wasn't really a precedent for this madness to ensue when this was created. I mean, this wasn't a precedent that was set. I think you could argue that with things that came after that, you can't possibly deny anymore the potential impact of what you were doing within this ecosystem. But in those early days, there was no indication or no precedent that this was going to explode in the way that it exploded.
And as a result, at least with Art Blocks and myself as an artist and a lot of the artists that are within the digital art community, they were artists before and they are artists today, and they're here to share their work and try to share their message with this broad a number of people and ultimately, hopefully, inspire that curiosity and delight. I say those terms a lot. I think that's what draws me to technology. That's what draws me to art. I'm not one to have a deep message in my work. I just like to make people smile. But more importantly, I want people to be curious, and I want people to explore. And there's so much to explore, with everything from the libraries that we use, like p5.js and Processing and Three.js and all these things, to the interconnected nature of the community that forms around it. And I think that's just so powerful, and it's so exciting. And again, you can't put that genie back in a bottle. And I wouldn't want to, even knowing some of the negative side effects that come with it, as there's negative side effects with anything else in the world.
Itzel Yard: I like the term of using light as a change as well, just like you, Erick, because just by sitting here, I'm in this museum, right? And if I turn around the screen, you can see all these statues. I've never seen this in my life. There's no such thing in my country. But what I can see is that they change depending on the amount of light that they receive. They can change their form, their structure. It's easier to look at things when they receive natural light rather than being locked inside a room where there's this artificial light that makes you feel a little bit trapped and you don't feel the artwork as alive. I think that's a good metaphor for what artists are trying to do in these communities. Most artists want to find light, even if they used to make a lot of dark, grainy, black and white artwork, just like I used to do. I used to get upset if I created an artwork and I wouldn't be able to share it because it had so much color. And I had to follow this pattern of black and white because that's how I felt during that time. And I have changed a lot. I feel like a more positive person. And I think that's all thanks to this community that I became part of.
I became more talkative. I wanted to share my appreciation to artists by acquiring their work, giving it a home. That way I could remember them and think of them, and they will see that I actually value what they do. They've become my friends. I talk to them most of the time. And it's just a beautiful way to connect, a link. I know not everyone thinks this way when they go and collect art, but I think it's easier to have an artwork and an art piece that will become meaningful in some way when you actually love it rather than just expect that this will become the next big thing, right? The negative impact that can have on our communities in terms of finances and all of that, it can become something actually positive. We can change lives. My life changed completely. I come from not having a computer that was strong enough to create artwork to being able to buy a good computer and run 11,000 pixels so I can show it to a lot of people at a time in real time. It's just something I always dreamed of, and I'm able to do it. I wish more people could have that opportunity. I think it's important to focus on that because there's dreamers, and as long as you keep dreaming, the world keeps moving. I think in that way, it's a way we can stay safe in this world that is so unfair, right?
Peter Bauman: Awesome. And just in response to Itzel's comments of creating art and dreaming in this unfair world that we have, maybe you can expand on the work that I think you're just about to showcase. We've already talked about it a lot before, but I think all of your work engages with audience interaction and participation in the upcoming piece that you have at the National Gallery of Denmark. How do technology and generative works permit you to include the public in ways that reflect the more intimate side of the digital?
Itzel Yard: My heart has been pumping all day. We've been doing previews of the work, and the reactions and the way people just engaged with it, even though they've never seen something like that... It's just so interesting and moving to me. It's interesting because I'm used to it. For the longest time, I've seen so many interactive shows online. I haven't been really in person too much, but I used to share artwork from other artists just for fun. Nobody knew my name or my face. I'm just like, I love it. I want to share it. I became community. And I think it's just beautiful to see how... For me, it's a way to change lives.
When I started sharing art, I was just very introverted. I used to spend a lot of time in my room, but I found a way to connect online, just like in video games. It's like you create a profile. You are getting all of these small achievements through the day, like finishing an artwork and finishing something that you want to say about the artwork and sharing it and getting this feedback. It's a game. Sometimes I'll just do it and leave it that way and not expect anything for many years. But then it became something that can be impactful, just like NFTs, where we started doing fundraisers. I thought it was a mission. I thought it was a big responsibility. I needed to step out of my shell. I'm using little terms that everyone has used during this conversation. And now I feel like I'm in a quest to become part of a world that I'm not really used to or I really don't know too much. I didn't study art in school, or I didn't dream of being part of a museum or a gallery, ever. That was impossible to me. I was just sharing for fun, literally. I would just create a bunch of outputs for the day and pick one, two, four, who knows, and share it on the stories or any medium I had. And that's something that people really appreciate. And there's still people that used to follow me during those days where I was just nameless and out there in a way. But now they're still there. And I can feel their support. How they text me like, wow, I've seen you grow. I've seen you change in so many ways, and you're still doing what you love. For a while, I thought it was very overwhelming to be in such a position. But like I said, I think now it's more like a quest, a mission to become something that I don't even know what I'm going to become. But it's making some waves. It's making changes. Maybe more people will start learning this program, TouchDesigner, or any other program that allows you to create art. And there's going to be more spaces for people to show through this, even for us in the community.
Peter Bauman: It's very clear how your art has been evolving over the years, and you're definitely on a very interesting trajectory. I hope I can find some time to make it to Copenhagen and experience your work in person. I'm aware that we are approaching the end of our scheduled time, very sadly. We want to leave some room for all of you to just share some closing thoughts or maybe to direct some questions to the other participants. And maybe, Rafael, you can go first. Is there anything you want to add? Is there any question you want to ask?
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer: Yeah, I want to mention, as we were thinking about this decade... Of course, it's been insufficient, but I have seen a really healthy move of museums that have been finally resetting their collections and programs away from dominant colonial, racist, patriarchal, heteronormative representation, and they're opening more to performative, ephemeral content. For a long time, I've said that digital art is not visual art. It's performing art. And one of the reasons why museums are having a hard time adopting it is because they have not been open to things that, like generative art does, change over time or that are event-based. But I do want to note that that's changing. I think that there's not a museum of contemporary art I can think of that isn't actively starting to be engaged with more performative approaches. And I think that's a really good tendency that's happening this decade. The second thing that I think is also happening is there's a newfound interest in conservation of digital art. So as we enter these collections, there are really robust questions to be asked over how these things can actually survive over time. Entire generations of artists have been erased because their work has not been backed up, has not been conserved properly. And I think that we are now beginning a really good tendency of thinking about conservation as something to be able to maintain a legacy. So I just wanted to note those two tendencies that I see that are positive that are happening in this decade.
Peter Bauman: Just a very tiny, brief follow-up. In your career, which I believe began around the early '90s, Rafael, do you think that this decade has seen peak institutional acceptance since then?
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer: Yeah, especially at the level of collections. So I did start in the early '90s, and most of my work was in performance. Just like, say, Art Blocks is now to a whole bunch of contemporary artists, back in my day that was the ZKM, Ars Electronica, V2. So the digital networks, they still exist, by the way, but that helped me develop my work through these festivals. And then gradually I entered more the gallery world, and I was very much against collectibles. I always thought that the art world was vampiric, and I still think that, but now I'm part of it, and I'm understanding the ways in which actually galleries, collectors, can actually have relationships of sustenance to maintain an operation that can be sustainable. I think that, for example, museums did not buy my work until, say, MoMA in 2005 bought 33 Questions per Minute, a generative piece that I made for the Havana Biennial five years earlier. And then the moment that MoMA acquired my work, all of a sudden it's almost like you had a stamp, and other museums felt that it was safe to acquire my work. But what I'm seeing now is unlike anything. I think that the rise of curators like Tina Rivers Ryan, or people who are getting to positions of power, are making this process a little bit easier. So, yeah, definitely in this decade I think that there is a lot of artists who have been in the margins who are being brought into the collections, and that's a super healthy thing.
“For a long time, I've said that digital art is not visual art. It's performing art.” — Rafael Lozano-Hemmer 51:52
Itzel Yard: Since you mentioned Tina Rivers Ryan, I think she's one of the most amazing curators that are out there. She helped me not only pick an artwork when she came into this Feral File exhibition but also acquired a lot of works from digital artists. But we spoke for two hours at a time, just sharing thoughts. She would just be an actual friend. She felt like a friend of art that would also teach me at the same time. I also wanted to mention that there's an exhibition that she's doing in Buffalo, which has been in the making for five years. It's about optical art, and it includes a lot of artists, including my work.
Going back to something that you mentioned, Rafael, about preservation. The conservation of art is one of the most important things in terms of working with museums. It's one of the reasons why I connected to them, because I really believe in it, just like I believe in documenting my own art as a way of living. That's one of the reasons why I started, because I really wanted to leave something behind where people could see what I used to do, what I am, what I will become. It's like a diary. Trying to share a bit more about the exhibition that I'm part of, it's about women that were forgotten in the 1800s. They used to make art in other countries. They traveled a lot because they weren't recognized where they lived, just the way I can relate, because I had to travel across the ocean in a 20-hour flight to be able to have some visibility in the physical world. And now I'm learning a lot. And maybe I can go back to Panama, where I actually live, and bring some of that knowledge and spread these seeds of growth with my art. That is a way I think it can be a positive effect.
Lauren Lee McCarthy: I wanted to follow up a bit on Erick's point earlier, which I really agreed with, that sometimes there's a tendency to reduce a technology or a tool to good or bad. And I think Erick was making the point that it's more nuanced than that. There can be many things happening at the same time, and it's important to take the time to unpack that and to really grapple with it. At the same time, I want to push back on the idea that everything is good and bad, because I think that while that's true, every technology also has values that are embedded in it that come from the people that make it and the beliefs that they're bringing to it. And so different technologies facilitate different outcomes and have different affordances and limitations based on the way that they were designed.
So I think that's something we thought about a lot in the creation and development of p5.js. What are the values that we're bringing to it? Who are the people in the room working on making it? And then how do those values then propagate and get actually built into the tool itself? And then what comes out of that? What is possible? And it's something I think about in my own practice as well. So while my practice is pretty performance-based, I'm often making apps and tools directly responding to some of the dark patterns and things that I see in a lot of technology platforms. So I just wanted to reflect on that and think about... A lot of people in this call are building systems in different ways. And I think it's interesting to look at those different systems and then reflect on what ideas are embedded in that. I think that's one of the exciting things about digital art. Because there's this system making that's happening, you really get to look at some of the ideas and beliefs and thoughts that are being communicated by the artist or the toolmaker or the person creating the system. And then that plays out in the artwork or the tool that's made and the outputs from it.
Erick Calderon: I love that. If you look at p5.js as a technology, I think it may qualify as something that is only good. I just can't really put my finger on a non-positive use of that. So I agree with what you're saying, Lauren, 100 percent. I just want to say that I'm in a room with a lot of people that I just greatly admire, and it's just really humbling to be here, and I really appreciate you guys, every single one and all. And I'm really excited about what Le Random is doing to help document this. I think it's just so important and valuable, and you guys contribute to the positive side of things in a way that very, very few people do in this ecosystem. And so I just want to express my gratitude for you guys as well and say thank you for bringing us together. It's really special to be here.
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer: And I have one closing thought, which, of course, is Duchamp. Duchamp said that the artist is a creator of context. And part of my problem with the context of digital art is exactly that it's not reflective of the work that is included. And I think that both Art Blocks and p5.js are examples of contexts that critical, poetic artists can adopt, can feel at home in. And that is so important. So I want to thank the context makers in the room for making that space for artists.
Peter Bauman: Well, thank you so much for turning it around on us at the very end. Very tricky of you. But thank you. And I think it's brilliant to close with Duchamp, Rafael. I also like how Duchamp has described art before as a way of understanding life. And I think that's what all of your practices do. They give us all a way to understand life, even that little bit extra and more. And so thank you all very much. I can't even begin to express how grateful we are. And hopefully we can all meet again and chat again soon. It's been a blast.
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer: Thank you, everybody. It was such an honor.
Erick Calderon: This is an amazing group to have. Thanks, guys. Thank you, guys. Have a great day.
Peter Bauman: Bye, everybody. Bye-bye.
