About us
Stay in touch
Peter Bauman: Hello, everybody, and welcome to this Le Random discussion following the release of Chapter 7 of our Generative Art Timeline. That was covering the decade of the 1990s. I'm your host, Peter Bauman or Monk Antony. I'm the Editor-in-Chief at Le Random. And joining us today are the artists who lived art history in the 1990s, especially digital art history. Those artists are Auriea Harvey, Joshua Davis, LIA, Scott Draves and Vuk Ćosić. I'm also here with two other people from the Le Random team, so that is thefunnyguys and Conrad, or Nemocake. So thank you two gentlemen for joining as well.
A little bit more about why we're doing this talk at Le Random. I've been writing this generative art timeline for about a year, and Conrad has been invaluably helping with adding images. The timeline goes back 70,000 years and covers just systematic thought in general as a prelude to generative art. We've had a talk for each of the chapters that we've released so far. This is our talk for Chapter 7, the early web era that covers the 1990s.
Our artists today: I will begin by introducing them. Our first person that I'll introduce is Auriea Harvey. She is an artist that produces simulations and sculptures that bridge a physical and digital space. But she's also a net art and video game art pioneer who contributed to some of the first Internet projects commissioned by a major institution, and that was the Guggenheim Museum. She was the winner of the first major prize given for an online interactive work by SFMOMA. Her work can be found at institutions like the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Buffalo AKG Museum. Auriea, thank you so much for joining us today.
Our next guest is Joshua Davis. He's a renowned American designer, author and new media artist who's been using programming to create interactions with users and generate visually stunning compositions through randomized processes since 1995. He's a very early adopter of the Flash program and a pioneer of Flash art. But he's worked with many other languages, which we'll talk about. His work has been shown at the Tate Modern, PS1, MoMA and Ars Electronica.
Our next guest is LIA. She is a pioneer of software, Flash and net art who's been producing work also since the mid-'90s. Her practice spans video, performance, software, installation, sculpture and digital applications. Her work is rooted in minimalism and conceptualism and has been exhibited at venues such as the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Venice Biennale.
And then our next guest is Scott Draves. He is a pioneering software artist known for his Fuse algorithm and Electric Sheep, which was a collective intelligence consisting of hundreds of thousands of computers and people that used math and AI to create an infinite animation. But he was doing that in the '90s, the predecessor to a lot of today's AI art. So we're very happy to have Scott with us. His work has been shown at LACMA and MoMA.
Our final guest that I'll introduce, certainly not least, is Vuk Ćosić, a pioneer of net art and ASCII art. He's also a lecturer, writer and curator. He's been exhibited and published internationally. And in the mid-'90s, he was one of the originators and founders of net.art. His work has been shown as the Slovenian representative at the Venice Biennale and at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.
So again, what an incredible lineup. It's hard to believe we got you all in one place. So thank you all so much for joining us today. It's a real astonishing pleasure to have you all. So thank you very much. And I think we'll get started with a question. I've been talking way, way, way too much. Maybe we can begin with a question for Auriea. Maybe you can just tell us about starting with net art in the '90s, or getting started in general with working with computers. I think I've read that your parents or your mom worked with computers, and that's how you originally got started. But I'd like to know how you first got started working with net art in the '90s. And if you could talk a bit about skinonskinonskin, that first engagement of yours with the net and the art world. So thank you so much for joining us, Auriea. And please, can you tell us a bit about yourself?
Auriea Harvey: Yeah, I would love to. It's difficult for me to talk about getting started with the net art, but we'll start with my involvement with computers, which indeed does come from my mother, who was a keypunch operator at a certain point. So she had a knowledge of computers in its very early stages of being something that humans, normal humans, could interact with, I guess. And she very much wanted me to know about this world also and put me in computer camp when I was a child, when I was basically nine or ten years old. And that founded a love in me for programming and understanding program directions as something that creates visuals, let's say.
I became a teenager and rejected all of that for a while, as was the way it was in the '80s, in a way. It just seemed uncool. I had no examples of it around me, and therefore it felt like I was doing something very unusual, and I rejected it for a bit until I got to college. And then I got back in the beginning of the '90s. In like '90, '91, I got back into computers again because I was going to Parsons School of Design in New York City. They started a computer lab, and I got a job at the computer lab because I had some previous experience. But at any rate, I got out of school in '93. Still no internet, of course. That was only in '94, '95, around '95 sometime, that I saw the internet.
But I cannot talk about net art without talking about Vuk Ćosić and LIA and all the rest who were already there or who were just starting to get online as well. We were all there at the same time. And so there was a real community there already, and it was an international community. It was the first time I really had anything of that magnitude, where you're really talking to someone in another country. This was just not normal back then, really, to do that. Everything was quite separate. I find that I have to explain this so much. I don't know what the others feel like, but it's weird to have to explain. No, there was no talking to someone in Austria if I was in New York City, just like that. So this was a beautiful thing, actually, and it was very impactful, not only for me but for everyone who was online at the time, to suddenly have this ability.
So I would say, to answer, or at least broach upon, your other question about skinonskinonskin: yes, that's how I met my husband, who was in Belgium, Michaël Samyn, and we immediately started collaborating on that. But I had already been working on my personal website, which was entropy8.com, while I was in New York City, which was my fake-it-till-you-make-it site from '95 till '99, where I was... I don't know, I'd say I was into the same stuff that Josh was into, in a way. Just working, pretending I was a big graphic designer, getting clients. I was working primarily in that time phase with Virgin and movie companies, Virgin Records. I was making sites for rock stars, basically. It was hilarious because it was just me in my little East Village apartment working with these giant corporations and stuff. But you could get away with that back then quite easily.
So the front-facing part was that work for clients. But then in the back room, where I had my real fun, I was doing the net art stuff and meeting people online like Olia Lialina and Vuk Ćosić and many, many others. And we were just having fun on private servers. I think at least three of us were in hell.com. I don't know about you, Vuk. I can't remember. But anyway, there's so much to talk about about that time, and I would actually love to pass it over to Vuk to hear about his early experiences online, because I very much idolized all the people who were involved in the very, very first wave of net.art, which was very different from what we could have done in New York City, which we would never dream of calling net.art at the time. The net.art was the thing that was happening on other mailing lists and different locations on the web. But I would love to hear him talk about it. I know I'm taking it away from you, but I would just pass it over to Vuk.
Vuk Ćosić: Finally, I think that I'm listening to Auriea very carefully. I'm really grateful for the sweet words you said. Now, everybody felt that there's no center. So it's funny to listen to someone from New York sitting in New York and explaining how we were in this third world place. Things were happening somewhere else. And me, I'm talking from Slovenia of all places. And now I'm supposed to, after hearing you, say to myself, oh yeah, we were the cool dudes. This is where it was at. But of course, this emotion, this feeling of being at the super jet-lag periphery of everything, it seems to be global, and there's no centers.
Otherwise, yes, what I recall, it's very similar. You sit with that machine and you feel some epiphany like, oh no, I can do these things. I can communicate to people. I can express whatever I feel without many filters, without any administrative personnel such as curators or gallerists, these waiters in our lives. The cliché: it's wrong when a waiter tells you what you're going to eat. That is how I always felt with curators. You work for me, young man, not the other way around. It's never going to be like that. So fuck off, to put it mildly. So the internet gave us this.
One possibly specific little thing about this mainly European band of net artists is that, yes, with mother's milk we were given this institutional critique, and we felt like we're warriors against some big evil art system. All of us kids in this, let's call it band, or what were we, we all had our brushes with a system. We all disliked our experiences, and so we felt free. So there was a lot of that. Punk was maybe an important influence privately, but the previous pop phenomenon that gave us, let's say, a seriously important lesson was the grunge movement, you might recall. These people started committing suicides twenty minutes after becoming famous, and they became famous pretty much in a second if they ever played. It was so, so fast. So this gave us some ideas how to not behave. So we were looking at defense. So you jump on a stage and you look at people with your ugliest look you can give them. I think that describes our attitude.
And when it comes to work, man, we were very different. It felt a little bit like all these crazy immigrant painters in France in the early 20th century. These Spanish immigrants, they should be expelled, obviously, in a normal world, right? They all had studios next to each other: Picasso, Braque, Gris. And we felt the same, only at a large distance. So I remember Auriea's early octopus and all that, all those things. It was really remarkable. And it's fantastic. I felt like she's my first door neighbor. I can look in behind the shoulder and check, oh, you're working on this. How cool is it? So there's some of the stuff that got invented in the cloud among us. Unclear who came up with what. And I find that to be beautiful. So there you go. That's my very first little short take on what I remember.
“I can communicate to people. I can express whatever I feel without many filters, without any administrative personnel such as curators or gallerists, these waiters in our lives.” — Vuk Ćosić 11:33
Peter Bauman: Yeah. Thank you for that response, Vuk. And maybe we can jump it over to Joshua really quick, since Auriea also mentioned a bit of Josh's work. But Josh, you started early in your career with HTML and just diving around the experimental Internet. And a lot of these early skills that you built were very crucial to the really iconic website, Praystation, that you obviously worked on for a long time. Maybe tell us a bit more about that story and how that emerged from your early practices in the '90s.
Joshua Davis: Yeah, I think the common thread that you'll find between all of us is I really felt like we were all working in a vacuum. It's not like we could walk down the street and walk into a gallery and go, oh, okay, this is how you make artwork with computers. So we were all in this empty void. And I think that's why we naturally all started to gravitate towards each other. Like, what the fuck are you doing? And what are you doing? And how are you doing this? So it was a strange time because there was no social media. There was no YouTube. There was no... I mean, it was dark. We really were making work out of nothing, out of a void.
To go back, I got my first computer when I was eleven. It was a Commodore 64, mostly because I was playing a lot of video games. So my dad bought me a Commodore 64, and he ends up getting me the Visual Basic programming book because he thought, well, if this guy is going to like video games, maybe he wants to program them. So I think my first computer book was when I was eleven. It was programming Visual Basic, and I still have it. It's upstairs. I still have the Commodore 64. I still have the hard drive, which I think weighs the size of a small man. It's easily like fifty pounds. I still have all that stuff, which is hilarious.
I have to talk about bulletin boards, because my whole route was actually the tail end of punk rock, early goth and industrial and skateboarding, and how that whole scene relates into a fuck everyone, do-it-yourself mentality was a big shaper in, like, no one's going to help you but you. And so you want to learn something? Fucking figure it out. Stop crying.
Vuk Ćosić: There's no resource to look up, right? You can't just Google what you've got to program. I mean, it's insane. I don't even remember how it was done. I just had to try things over and over again. Anyway, it's forgotten, thankfully. Sorry to interrupt. Yeah.
Joshua Davis: But if we talk about bulletin boards, I couldn't afford software. And so I remember I went on to a bulletin board in New York called Cemetery Ridge. It's where I downloaded my first cracked version of Photoshop. And in that day, the people who would crack the software would leave a five-minute fully 3D world with planets, cracked by. You'd fly through this thing. And I'm like, I don't know what the fuck this is, but I want to be friends with these people. And it was always this five-minute preview animation. And now when I think about it, when I think about the demo scene, they were doing shit that I'm trying to do in 2024 with GLSL. And I'm like, how the fuck did these people do it in front of this cracked software? So that was my first aha moment into digital work.
And I remember in 1994, I go to school at Pratt, much like Auriea. And I got a job there in the publications department to do Pratt's first website, which I think we launched in 1995. And that was all HTML. And thankfully, with HTML, you could view source. So I could look at what other people were doing, understand, oh, this is how you take two images and have them swap when you roll over. And I remember my first foray into really getting serious about this was like 1995. I had a domain on the Pratt website where I was just working out HTML and JavaScript and Perl.
Now, much to Scott's point, I was so hungry about learning this. And I think I bought thirty programming books, all different. One was C, one was C++, one was whatever. And I just ended up doing the Hello World program in every single book. And what I found is I knew how to write Hello World in every programming language on the planet, but I wasn't a master of anything. And it wasn't until I saw LIA's work that she was doing on Turux and Dextro that I was like, I don't know who the fuck this is, but I want to do this for the rest of my life. And if it wasn't for LIA, I would not be on this call with you today. Any time I get invited to do any show, I somehow weasel LIA into collaborating with me. So I bring her into every... oh, you're doing a museum show? Do you know LIA? I managed to try to pull her into everything, because if it wasn't for what she was doing in Director at the time, it would have not impacted me in such a profound way. I'm going to move it to her because I don't exist without LIA.
LIA: Thank you so much. I'm very thankful, Joshua, for bringing me into a lot of things, because it's a men's world. It's hard for women in this field. Anyway, I started in 1995, and I wanted to become rich, which didn't work out for decades. My boyfriend back then, he did 3D architecture models for architects, and he earned a lot of money. I was like, I want that too. I bought my first tiny computer, and my first job was to cut out images for a CD-ROM. It was about natural healing plants or something. I would go with my zip drive, I was to go by bus into the next district in Vienna, and deliver my pictures. I saw a guy, and he did something with code and stuff was moving. I was like, I want to do that. That's interesting. He makes code. It's like a wizard. He writes things and stuff starts moving, and it was interactive.
I asked him if I could have a copy of the program, because I had no money at this time. I got a copy of the program. I got the handbook, and I basically copied the Macromedia Director handbook by hand twice until I understood what a function was. It was called a handler, and the language was Lingo, and it still is, or was, actually. It was one of the most powerful programs ever out there. Macromedia Director allowed people really quickly do some animations by dragging and dropping without knowing how to code, and then you could enter the next level by actually writing code. So either you would fill your timeline with lots and lots of sprites. That's what they called the images and the sounds and the material you would use for making a CD-ROM. Or you could be super smart and write everything in one script, and it would do the same thing, but it was smarter and nicer.
Anyway, I learned how to program myself, which has advantages and disadvantages. I think the disadvantages were that I was probably much slower in learning, and probably there are smarter ways how to do things. The advantage was that I was so clueless that I tried things for myself. As an example, I tried to build a tree. How do you build a tree? You have a trunk, and then it's branching. But if you only have 150 channels in that Macromedia program, then you have to come up with a solution. What happens if I already have 150 branches? What do I do? Some branches would stop and some would start again, and everything would be interactive and depending on your mouse position on the screen.
If nowadays I would like to make a tree, I would probably Google it and say, okay, tree, and then I would come up with an L-system or whatever boring, ready-made thing. I would never try to do it myself, basically. So advantages, disadvantages of being early. Disadvantages, there was no one to look up to. And advantage, we had to do it all ourselves. We had to be creative and we had to invent everything from scratch, basically. That was my first program.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, thank you for that. Hopefully we can get to a few more questions later, and maybe we can move to Scott. I'd love to maybe hear more about Electric Sheep. I know this was at the very end of the '90s, so maybe you don't have to start there, but I just think it's such a fascinating project, and we've already touched on it offline before the call. So, yeah, can you tell us a bit more about Electric Sheep and how you got started with that project?
Scott Draves: Sure. I mean, it was the first version. I wrote it in a week. I had a month in between two jobs. I think it was 1999. I was living in San Francisco. The dot-com boom was happening. And I think I had a month in between jobs. And I went to Burning Man for a week. And I think I wrote the first version of Electric Sheep. And the original idea was... I mean, it was based on the fractal flame algorithm, which was one of the pre-existing works from the early '90s and actually goes all the way back, which was a series of experiments going back into the '80s.
And I can tell you more about the Electric Sheep, but I really want to at least briefly mention and agree with what Josh said about the pirate software scene. That was really pivotal for me for becoming a programmer and getting into computers, getting the spirit of sharing and just getting access to all the tools and languages that I wouldn't have otherwise had access to. I had just an Apple II at home. And like some of you, I basically taught myself a lot of bad habits. And it all worked out in the end. But seeing those intros and just having to figure stuff out on your own was really pivotal for me. And I remember as a kid, I think, spending a lot of time at home alone in the dark and essentially just trying to entertain myself. How can I write a program that doesn't get boring? Starting out with a spirograph and then random numbers and placing geometric shapes and saying, oh, it's too slow. What can I do to make it go faster? And what can I do to increase the probability that something interesting happens?
And so I think that stuff was really formative for the project that became the flame algorithm, which was released as open source, to refer back to the sharing thing. But the funny thing about the flame algorithm was it was really slow. And part of how it worked was by solving an equation, not just by drawing primitives like lines or triangles or something like that. And so it takes millions or billions of iterations. And so it took an hour to render a frame on a regular PC like what I had. And so when I had originally created that algorithm... I'll tell the story because it's a little bit crazy. But I was actually on an internship, and I had this job in Tokyo. And I had access to a supercomputer, essentially the high-end Silicon Graphics workstation. And so during this brief moment of free time, I was able to just... I had been working on solving the equations. And I had always made approximations in order to get the render time to be reasonable. But this was the first time I was able to just say, hey, just run it and come up with the real answer. That supercomputer was like the telescope that allowed us to see the beauty in the mathematics and extract, start to get the message from this information space.
But it was just a summer job, so I didn't continue to be able to use the supercomputer. I had to go back to the regular PC. And so animation was pretty much impossible or really hard to do for a very long time. But because it was open source, it got put into After Effects and stuff like that. People started doing stuff with it. And at some point I got this VHS videotape in the mail. I don't even remember how they got my address. And it was of a really cool fractal flame animation that some guy who worked at a VFX place had made, maybe somebody like LIA's boyfriend, who had a real job in a render farm. And they had made this cool thing. And I was like, wow, that's great. I wish I could do that. But all I've got is this scrappy PC. So how could I get access? How could I do this? And I think this was when SETI@home had just come out a couple of months ago. And so really, I just put two and two together. And I had the idea for that first version of Electric Sheep. And it just was a quick... I just threw it together and put it out there.
And nobody noticed. I mean, like I said, it was Linux only. And it took quite some time for people to pick it up. And eventually, especially getting some open source contributors to do things like port it to Windows, port it to Mac, then eventually it started to take off. And with the Electric Sheep, since it's participatory, the more people who are running it, the more computer power it had access to. And so that was the origin story for that. And I'm not sure where you want me to go with it. There's different questions or directions I can answer, but that's the basic outline. I think you mentioned the Fuse algorithm also. I can tell you a little bit about that if you want, or is that a separate question?
“That supercomputer was like the telescope that allowed us to see the beauty in the mathematics and extract, start to get the message from this information space.” — Scott Draves 26:46
Peter Bauman: I would love to talk about the Fuse algorithm. One thing, maybe a follow-up about Electric Sheep. And I know one of the artists that you really looked up to was Karl Sims.
Scott Draves: That's right. I knew he had the Connection Machine.
Peter Bauman: Right. I'm wondering about this connection between evolutionary art and the machine learning art that you were doing at the end of the '90s, and also how that relates to the AI art of today, which isn't really related to Harold Cohen and that symbolic logic-driven art. It's more related to this machine learning and big data art. And I think the roots of that are with Karl Sims and Latham and with your work with Electric Sheep. So I'm wondering how you see that genealogy.
Scott Draves: Yeah. I mean, I was inspired by Karl over and over again. And I totally agree that it was an extra step beyond, of course, Harold Cohen's technique, what you would call the expert system. But this was just the normal evolution of computer technology. That was the state of the art in AI when he was going. By the time the late '80s had come up, we had genetic programming and stuff like that. And with more computer power, you could go beyond. I think what Karl did and what the flame algorithm did was we were both using genetic algorithms and genetic programming. Machine learning, but there is an important... Which a lot of people have used, and it's actually not that different from the symbolic AI. They both have just tree languages inside of them. There's a machine learning component instead of a human expert approach. But the language for the search is similar.
And I think the language, which essentially the model is, is a really crucial aspect of machine learning, of course. And by then, I was in grad school and studying information theory, and I was super into AI. And so this idea of language, and machine learning as the approach to art, or just the approach to making things. A finite language is a way to... You can say an infinite number of things. And so there's a way of crossing over there. And so that was the attraction.
But what I was saying is there was something extra, which is in Karl's work and my work, was that it's not just the genetic symbolic part, but there was a pixel part. And that was what was different about the flame algorithm. It wasn't rendered with just a couple of normal triangles. It was like a neural network. It was doing a whole lot of floating point in order to solve an equation. And then the image emerges from all that computation. Similarly, like Karl's thing, it was running the algorithm on every single pixel for his genetic images. And so the end result had this organic, living, more feeling that was a little less human. It didn't look at all like something that somebody would draw or paint or whatever. It really had this alien contact feeling that I liked. And so I think the heavy use of floating point is also a key aspect of AI that was the brute up at that time.
Conrad: Thank you, Scott, for this amazing, fascinating background information. I think now that we have some fascinating background information about all of you, maybe we can skip to some group questions. And actually one that I would like to ask to whoever wants to reply to it: how did the communication exactly happen between all of you in the '90s? I think for someone listening in 2024, it's probably difficult to imagine, but what were the mediums, and how important were the real-life meetups in this community?
Auriea Harvey: Real-life meetups were not necessary, nor required, nor did they really happen that often. But I would say the main way: mailing lists, right? Like legendary mailing lists. 7-11. 7-11.
Vuk Ćosić: Let's hear it. I'm the kid. That time, I did those too. But there's been other stuff. I'm really grateful, Joshua, that you mentioned BBSs. And for me, however old you are, there's always somebody older that was your idol. And for me, it was Tom Jennings. I don't know if you know that guy. He came up with FidoNet, which is not super lousy, right? We all admire it. But also, the things you mentioned: before doing all of that, as an early whatever person, he used to do a gay skaters zine in the early '80s. And I somehow still cannot remove this from my mind, because for him this was a genesis, and I really appreciate it.
Anyway, this is a difference between Europe and the US, I guess. In those days, we did manage to meet up relatively often. It started in the early '95: random emails like, hey, what's this thing you're doing? It's nice. I'm interested. But there was only a few of those. And this question was asked of me earlier, but I avoided it. The first meeting of this nettime band was in June '95, in this Venice creepy village fair. It was funky, because at the time, the Berlin club scene was very important, and the organizers of the Venice Biennale, they expected that these people come over and do a presentation of that. What our German friends did was to organize a three-day rave, which was at the moment quite something. And in the top floor of that theater in Venice, we had a three-day conference of Internet critique. At the bar, we had Marina Abramović selling drinks and Joseph Kosuth and those people who were in Germany at the time.
Anyways, then we started meeting very often. There's been a good conference in Budapest, Hungary, of all places, called MetaForum, every year. We would invite some American people, but not you young people of the time. But we had this cocaine cowboy, John Perry Barlow, I don't know if anybody remembers that name, who wrote that obnoxious Davos manifesto of... What was it called? Independence? Crap. And I don't know, I remember other American people. Hakim Bey, a New Yorker, Peter Lamborn Wilson: great guy. So that was a connection. But we kept meeting and we kept doing books of our texts, and we kept sharing our websites and doing collaborative websites. And so it was dense in Europe for a time.
Heath Bunting, my brilliant, beautiful friend still today, he experimented with only living in festivals. So the entire totality of his luggage was a CD-ROM with his backup around his neck, and he would just move from couch to couch, from festival to festival. This was '96, '98. Before he moved on to Banff, which is in Canada, where artists go to die, he got himself a job for two years. Yeah, it's like... Sorry, the expression, that's what we used to call it at the time, because it was too beautiful. It's in the middle of a national park, and pine trees and swimming pool in the morning and a beautiful, wacko European cafeteria called La Palette, where everything was pink. It was the most disgusting thing imaginable. Yeah, so before Banff.
Anyways, communication was mailing lists all the time, continuously. You would be on three, four lists and you would know everybody alive, and you would be really burning to see which crazy, beautiful person is going to be posting something. You would really genuinely think of that during the day. It's hard to say with nettime, with net.art itself: was our output the communication itself, where the web-based stuff or stuff inside emails was just illustration of what we wanted to talk about? So the actual dialog was more important. And the web-based stuff was just like a promo, like a demo of what I'm thinking of right now. I think that was that communication. And of course, it died quite fast, because people moved into the career mode, and that is the death of community. People started giving their posts to proofreading first before posting them to nettime. That's when we made 7-11. We said, "Fuck this, man." So it's a bit punk.
Joshua Davis: I think for me, the first, and this will fold into, obviously, conversation with LIA and Auriea. I know I started on IRC after bulletin boards, and then there was a follow-up to that that happened a year later called ICQ. So IRC and ICQ were like the WhatsApp before WhatsApp, where you could have a tray of friends, and you could constantly message those people. I don't start Dreamless, I think, until 2000. So I mean, obviously that doesn't relate to the '90s, but I think there was a need for my community of people, who were predominantly using Flash at the time, where Dreamless was a hidden message board where how you got in is you had to view the source. And if you viewed the source, there was the instructions on how to actually get into the community. And Dreamless, I think at the peak, was about five thousand people, and it had all the early Casey, Golan; a lot of the early net art people were all there. It ran for four or five years, and then eventually I shut that down.
So we started doing these things on Dreamless. They were called riots, where we actually started getting... So anyone who was a member of Dreamless could do a riot, and a riot would be like a local meetup in a city. So we had a section on the message board where people could organize these meetups. And the funny thing is, and I love telling the story, is the first one that we had in New York, we had the hello-my-name-is badge, and we all ended up writing our names, and no one knew anyone. And so we had to start over, writing our handles. Oh, you're Praystation. Like, oh, you're Josh. I don't know who the fuck Josh is. So it was funny. We were all using these aliases, and it wasn't until we actually put our names on aliases that we understood who everyone was. But that didn't happen in my collective group of people until 2000.
However, Hell comes along. So I was working on two projects at the time. I was working on Praystation, where I was working out ideas. And then I created a character and an alias that worked on a project called Once Upon a Forest. And Once Upon a Forest got me invited into Hell. And when I joined hell.com, LIA was already there, Auriea was already there. And I would love for them to talk about Hell, because it's such a great project where everyone believed that you couldn't get in and that there was nothing more. But there was actually a private server where we were all talking and showing work together. Of course, that's where I meet Michael and Auriea, and I see skinonskinonskin happen in real time. I watched them fall in love in real time, which was incredible. I would say to the alias thing, LIA has always been LIA, period, which I always admired.
Auriea Harvey: That's true. LIA is always LIA.
LIA: Yeah, it's only because my second name is not really something that... Sure, sure knows it.
Auriea Harvey: But it's great. But LIA, in my show that's up at the Museum of the Moving Image, they blew up the screenshots you took of me the night Michael and I met, when everybody was there in the big chat and we were all on video and stuff. And I started going in the private room talking to Michael, and you took a bunch of screenshots and you sent them to me the next day. This collage of screenshots is now blown up, like gigantic, on the wall. I need to send you a picture.
Joshua Davis: Yeah, I just got to say, if you're in New York and you have not gone to the Museum of the Moving Image, I hate to say this because she's on the call, but the fucking show is incredible. The show that has been put together at the Museum of the Moving Image of, I want to say, her life's work is really something not to be missed. So if you're in New York, please stop by the museum, because it is a wonderful collection of artifacts from over thirty years. It's incredible.
Auriea Harvey: I don't want to speak for LIA, but talking about using computers while female, I think a lot of us really did want to be a bit more anonymous, because it just made things easier, to be able to shift in and out of your actual persona, innocent in that sense. I had many different handles depending on what I was doing for a while. But no one knew my name for a long time at all. That only happened towards the 2000 end of things, I guess.
But to invite LIA in again, the one thing I got to say about that was there were local scenes, or it felt like it. So what was going on in Austria at the time was super interesting. It dovetailed nicely into the 2000s because it was very audiovisual. It was very like... LIA's work was really beautiful. It is really beautiful, but it was really beautiful at the time because it was all these small elements leading up to this big effect. And you could see this local style in a way. I don't know if you felt that, LIA. I've always wanted to ask you that. So many artists who were working with you at the time have just disappeared in a way.
LIA: Yeah, I think we all influenced each other in Austria. And a friend of mine, Norbert Pfaffenbichler, he organized something called Abstraction Now. It was a show and videotapes. There were a group of people in Austria who liked doing abstract work. For me, I always liked abstract work. I never liked to draw real things. Of course, first of all, I'm very bad at drawing real things. I tried to copy twenty-seven books of art history, and I tried to copy almost all the pictures in there besides the cave paintings. Probably I could have done them best. I always like to draw and play with... But playing with colors was my most favorite thing to do. So the abstract art was perfect for me. Playing with colors in the mid-'90s was playing with a very restricted palette. Also, that's why black and white was the first choice, because you could do things that did not look completely ugly in 256 colors.
You were asking about the scene. We partially worked together, but we would also meet up and show each other's work, and we would comment on each other's work. So that was quite a lively scene here. Also, the first question was about the meeting in real life or meeting online. I met both Auriea and Joshua online, and we talked online for a long time. And then years later, we would meet in real life and in person, and we still like each other.
Vuk Ćosić: Can I ask you New Yorker people, did you guys come across The Thing, Wolfgang Staehle?
Auriea Harvey: Of course.
Vuk Ćosić: Did you participate or belong or whatever?
Auriea Harvey: Yeah, of course.
Vuk Ćosić: He was our man in Havana. He was like our Omaha Beach the other way around. He was like our first stop in New York.
Auriea Harvey: Yeah, he was always cool. Yeah, absolutely. Right.
Vuk Ćosić: Just checking.
LIA: For me in Austria, also the Ars Electronica Festival, on my behalf, they invited all the artists from all over the world, and they would come to my country. I'm joking. Of course, they did not do it on my behalf. But for me, it was really cool, because I could take a train, like two hours, and I was in Linz, and I could meet everyone there. Every year, there was this huge amount of people coming here, and yeah, it was awesome. It was both email mailing lists and real-life meetings.
Vuk Ćosić: LIA, did you work together with the Konrad Becker, those people, the Public Netbase?
LIA: No, not really. In Vienna, there were three servers. There was the Public Netbase, and then there was Silver Server, and the third one I forgot. I think there were three, and they were basically... Ta-da, Josh has won the Golden Nica.
Auriea Harvey: Yeah, he did it. I didn't do it. I never went to Ars Electronica, actually. When I moved to Europe, the main reason I was really happy to finally move here in 1999 was because I could finally be in the same time zone as the people whose work I really admired. I really enjoyed finally going by train and meeting you and meeting Olia and meeting everybody, because View Source was the biggest thing. You were so used to viewing people's brains, the inside of their mind in some way, and seeing how their minds work and how their creations were made. And so meeting people in real life... And I'd say that a lot of my work is about this idea, about how you're in the digital, it's also very intimate. This intimacy that you had, this intimate knowledge that you had of other people through their ideas. And then you finally meet them in person, and it was just amazing. You felt like you all had already known each other for your whole lives in a funny way.
Vuk Ćosić: We shared an adventure. We were conspiracy theorists, but our conspiracy was making a better world and not describing the killing of Kennedy. And the passion was, I think, comparable to what we see now with the crazy people.
Auriea Harvey: Are you calling us crazy or what?
Vuk Ćosić: Yes.
thefunnyguys: And maybe one thing, especially talking about LIA, is the re-move project. And we talked about this audience engagement that net art provided you with, allowing your art to reach a global standpoint to some degree. LIA's re-move was very amazing with it, allowing the audience to really interact with the system, really interact with the parameters and change things around. How did this global engagement influence your guys' creative careers or ideas behind some of the work that you created? I'd really love to learn about that.
Vuk Ćosić: Well, the first question we asked was, oh no, now we have a global audience. Is it going to somehow influence our topics? Are we now suddenly going to have to forget our local cultures and things we care about and start behaving like IBM commercials with a little girl in an Indian village operating a keyboard? Well, now everybody had a different answer to this. My little group of people, all of us being very cynical and very anticapitalist and all of that, our choice was to deliberately go for lower tech. Our choice was to deliberately run as fast as we can in the opposite direction from the one suggested by the makers and vendors of any type of technology, be it software, hardware, infrastructure, protocols. So our aim, as I spoke of this particular group of people, was to get away from that. We didn't care, I think. That made the work function. We suggested one of the poetics that later became ubiquitous. That was a question of time also, but let's not complicate it.
LIA: I guess we did not know how many people would see our work, and that made it also like I didn't know who my audience was. There was no analytics or whatever. It gave me freedom to do whatever I want, and I didn't have to fulfill anyone's expectations because there were none. The biggest thing was, I think, to not have to have a gallery or someone who promotes you. You could just put it online and see what happens. That was the big freedom.
Auriea Harvey: Yeah, there was definitely a vibe of trying to avoid anything as normal as a gallery or something like this. We really wanted to see if we could create a different way, a different system. And I'd say that, to what Vuk is saying, it was very eye-opening to encounter the so-called local cultures, the local cultures of anyone, outside of your own skin at that time. And so suddenly to be confronted with what was going on in terms of global conflict and all this stuff from a real personal point of view, because you're suddenly immersed in it, so to speak, via your connection with other people.
I, for one, was obsessed with the server logs of my servers. I was hosting my own stuff, even when I was in New York City for a while, and I was obsessed with knowing where people were coming from and where they were going. You could do that back then. You could just see where the IP address is, do a reverse lookup. You could understand this. To me, this was really important, knowing who my audience was. I had a webcam trained on me. I was sitting at my desk and there was a webcam on me twenty-four hours a day, and people would come to my website. I just replaced my entire homepage by this big video stream, what we would call a video stream. It was actually more like pushing an animation every so many frames, because there were no video streams online. It was just a very fancy GIF animation in a sense. I could see when someone connected, because I would see it on the computer, someone's connected, and I would be able to know where they were in the world. There was an email address, and people could email me while I was sitting there working or whatever. This was amazing, actually.
But I would say the most amazing thing was when I started hooking that up to visualization. So Michael and I, when we got together and we made our web pages, we would always make sure there was a way you could see how many people were there. Just this basic data visualization. You would just see, oh, via the way the pattern was on the page. Or we did an online performance every week via this engine that we hooked up with Flash and Perl scripts and all kinds of stuff. It was called Wirefire, and everybody would be visualized as a speck of dust on the screen. So you come in, and you would see there's fifty people here, or whatever.
I mean, it's a good segue into talking about tech a little more, maybe because Flash was us. I'm just going to say the way you could hook it up to... I mean, there was Director, which LIA talked about, which I think was instrumental in a lot of us understanding in a very easy way how to create interactive visuals. But then you got something like Flash, where you could really hook it up with web tech, literally with other types of web scripting and all this, and create very sophisticated things online very easily. I mean, if I could do it, anybody could, I felt. And that was what was great about it. And I'm sorry it's dead, in a way. And even before that, I think I cut my teeth on HyperCard, which is almost forgotten these days, but it was all there.
Scott Draves: And I was really happy, actually, to hear Vuk mention Hakim Bey and John Perry Barlow. I mean, that stuff was really in the air and influential for me. That's what my friends were talking about; the music we were listening to was that stuff. Critical Art Ensemble. I was in Pittsburgh. I knew, and for me, it was really a lot more in person, with Steve, and Nelt Enhoff actually was a big mentor for me at that time. And just the other grad students who I learned so much from. That's where I learned about the cut-up technique and just the culture of art is life and that stuff. So I wasn't so much in the mailing lists, but for me, it was an in-person thing. And I felt like in this weird club of just a sliver of people who had a double life, or access to some other world that we were as concerned about as real life. So it's good to hear those names and ideas again.
Vuk Ćosić: Yeah, that's Steve. It was glorious. Glorious. Amazing shoes. But there's been all this stuff. I mean, we were all reading the history of the avant-garde, and we were all seeing... I mean, most of us seeing ourselves as like the lone riders of this completely new world. You looked back and there was all your steps in the snow, blah, blah, blah, the cliché. But genuinely, whatever you came up with, you told someone, and it turns out it's the first time that was ever uttered in the history of humanity. Whatever you put your fingers on to try and make, it was like the first tree on the internet. It was like the first triangle on the internet. I don't know. That's intoxicating, and it's beautiful to remember. It's a rush, even now that I recall some of these tiny episodes, super private episodes. It's beautiful and glorious. It feels good. All of us are like Jimi Hendrix who failed to overdose. We shouldn't be alive talking of these things. We've gone with our use, and we should like that.
“Whatever you put your fingers on to try and make, it was like the first tree on the internet. It was like the first triangle on the internet.” — Vuk Ćosić 58:42
Peter Bauman: Thank you for the wonderful image. I agree that it's humbling to speak with all of you. I'd love to maybe continue with questions that you have for each other. And one that it seemed like Auriea asked Josh, but was a bit more about Flash. And I know, Josh, that you are known and you've used a lot more languages than just Flash, lots more, including Java and Processing. And you could tell us more about that as well. But I'd love to get your take as an early adopter of FutureSplash Animator, as it was called. And also you have a quote that maybe you can tell us a bit more about. It's that Flash was a scripting language with a vector-based environment. I like the idea that I could edit things on the fly. There were more possibilities with Illustrator than there were with Photoshop. So I'm wondering, Josh, if you could just maybe break that down for us and maybe explain that to us a little bit more, especially anybody who's listening without any technical background.
Joshua Davis: Yeah. So first, understand that when I saw LIA and her work and knew that she was doing it in Director and Lingo, the book for Director was this big, and the book for Flash was this big. So let's not kid anybody. I ran away from Director because the book was too large. I just felt like, oh my God, there's too much to know, and I'll never be able to catch up. At the time, it was called FutureSplash Animator. When I first started using it, it was not owned by Macromedia. Macromedia then, of course, buys it, and then it becomes Flash.
And really, I'm going to be totally honest, the reason why I really went to Flash was that there was this moment when I realized that when I was working in HTML and JavaScript, and I'm going to watch everyone's face on this call right now, because you'll all understand what I'm talking about. I swear to God, I spent half of my time on a project just sniffing whether they were on Mac, whether they were on PC, whether they were using Netscape, whether they were using Internet Explorer. Half of my code was just trying to figure out what hardware the end user was using. And so when Flash came about and it said, hey, the thing that you make is exactly what the person will see as long as they have the plugin. And I was just like, okay, cool. That's it. I'm gone. Goodbye, HTML and JavaScript. Hello, Flash. The only HTML you needed was the embed tag. All you did was the embed tag. And everyone would see exactly the thing that you intended.
So there was this idea of intention. When you were working in HTML and JavaScript, because it was the Wild West, you just didn't quite know. You'd go over to a friend's house and you'd be like, wait a minute, this triangle is all the way up there and it's green? That's not what I intended it to look like. And so I go to Flash super quick, because I realized the intention that I had, the thing that I could make, I knew that they were going to see it as long as they had the plugin. And the plugin was actually growing and growing at an exponential rate. I knew that it was going to take off.
It was vector based. So you ask this question about raster versus vector, and this is your Photoshop versus Illustrator. So it's like, if I make a square in Photoshop, it's made up of pixels. And if I make it in Illustrator, it's actually points that describe that square. So I always loved working in the vector-based environment, because it didn't matter if it was a CD-ROM or a billboard. It could be printed at any size. And I remember having this conversation super early on with LIA. I was like, how are you making work for these album covers? Because we were all working at 640 by 480, mind you. That was the resolution, 640 by 480. And here LIA was making these amazing album covers. And I think she told me one time, either online or when we met up, that she was making her work super huge. And I think maybe you were tiling it, so that she could assemble the tiles in Photoshop. And then when she would shrink it down to the album size, it would gain in resolution so that it could be printed, right? So these were problems that we had. With vector, it didn't matter. It could be printed at any size.
And it also meant that, and Scott had mentioned this too, when you look at my early work, it's static because I couldn't animate it, because what I was doing is I was writing all these programs in Flash. I was actually passing them through PostScript, and PostScript would generate this .ps file that I could open up in Illustrator. And in Illustrator, I love showing this slide when I give talks, my Flash programs that I was writing, passing through PostScript, were 144,000 layers in Illustrator. So they could not be animated. And that's why you don't see me start to animate things until maybe fifteen years later, where I was able to actually animate some of the stuff that I was generating. So I always liked vector, because obviously when it's raster, it's flattened. And it was very hard to edit anything inside of Photoshop, where these Flash files, because I was drawing with vectors and then painting them back through PostScript to vectors, it meant that if I didn't like something, I could just select that individual thing and just delete it or change the color. So there was this way that I could edit things that was just a lot easier.
And the funny thing is, I spent fifteen, twenty years in Flash. I worked at a studio called IO 360, and my designer was Casey Reas, and I was one of three... We were called design technologists. And Casey then later says, "I think I want to learn how to program." And we were like, "Okay, cool, Casey, you go do that." And he's like, "Yeah, I'm going to take continuing education classes at NYU." And we're like, "Awesome." And then a month later, he's like, "Yeah, I think I'm going to go to MIT." And we were like, "What the fuck is going on?" And it's funny, because I've known Casey for a long time. And of course, he creates Processing. And now it just comes full circle. I'm mostly using Processing in a day to day. So it's just such a really beautiful, weird circle that occurred. And now we do p5.js. We're back to the web.
Vuk Ćosić: Guys, my answer to vectors or raster was ASCII. Don't go where the capitalism is going. Don't go there. I'm not criticizing you for those, young man. I'm just trying to reply.
LIA: No. Right now, I'm redoing, actually, my old re-move works to put them online again, and I'm using p5.js. I had to write something that would... Because of course Director was pixel based, so I have to write something now that puts something onto a pixel and not in between, and not make it anti-aliased or something like that. So in Director, if I would draw a line from one point to the other, it would be really, really pixelated. I had to find something which is called Bresenham's line algorithm that I can actually use to make lines pixelated again, just so that I get the same feel and look from the mid-'90s again. It works for most of the stuff I'm doing right now, but with some shapes, I have problems. But yeah, I'm working on it.
About the output, I remember I went through the Adobe PDF description, which was super long, and I wrote my own Adobe PDF files. I did an output from Director, which would write a PostScript file, so that I could then open it with Adobe as a PDF. I was quite proud of that back then. It did lines and pixels, mostly. Yeah. Then, of course, in 2013, Casey was asking me if I would like to do some Processing piece for the online exhibition of the Processing website. I was like, yeah, sure. Then, half a year later, I was like, oh, now I have to learn how to write in Processing. I had to learn this direct translation, basically, from Lingo to Processing. And in the meantime, I'm using different languages, of course, also. Yeah, I think 2008 or '09, I went to an openFrameworks lab at Ars Electronica. They were kind enough to have me there. And that's where I learned how to program a little bit in C++. I'm still not a very good programmer. I guess I learned a little bit over the last decade.
Joshua Davis: It's like me with GLSL right now. Every time I look at GLSL, I'm like, what in God's name is this? It's like the most crazy language I think I've ever looked at. And it's so funny. It's like, you think you know what you're doing. Okay, thirty years of programming. And then, yeah, now I look at GLSL and I'm like, I have no idea what I'm doing.
LIA: I find it interesting that the different programming languages, for me, it's a different way of thinking with many languages. So the shader programming, I tried. I did some things, but it's cracking my brain every time I try it again, and I forget it again and again and again. So I figured it's just not my way of thinking.
Joshua Davis: And it's funny how node-based programming has really changed people who maybe don't want to learn how to program. It's like you look at... And I wish maybe we had those tools early on, like the TouchDesigners and the Notches. It's really in the vvvvs. It's amazing how those tools have really matured to allow people to navigate in the work that we were having to do completely by hand, which is absurd.
Scott Draves: The Max program goes back to the '80s. So it's really been around. I don't know who was doing it back then, but it's definitely an old idea and still a good one. So people love that. And I think it's great for getting stuff up and messing around. But at least personally, for building engineering or a large, complicated project, at some point all the wires drive me crazy. I get lost and frustrated and always return to just the text. Still a good one in a terminal.
I think, and Vuk would agree, I'm sure, that you can do everything with a grid of characters. Everything. So everything can be expressed with the simplest thing.
Vuk Ćosić: I have an architect friend who is a cynical bastard, a little bit like me, and he claims that he can recognize it. By walking down the street, he can tell which house was done in AutoCAD 3 and which one in AutoCAD 4. That is a trap. I think it's more like a joke, but that's the type of trap I'm trying to avoid. I call it the consumer electronics trap.
Scott Draves: Well, the idea is right there. The language affects us and just the tools affect us, and it leaves its mark in the work.
Vuk Ćosić: Yeah. And then how you actually embrace it. And do you try to fight it, or do you try to exaggerate it, and why not, as a better effect? And call it a plus, not a minus, whatever it is.
Joshua Davis: I just want to really recap something that for me, I think, has really resonated with me for this entire discussion, that in my mind encapsulates our crew in the '90s. And you guys can obviously chirp in or disagree or agree. But I think the thing that stands out the most about something that LIA mentioned was that, for me personally, I was a skateboarder. I did not go to school for computer science. I had to self-teach myself programming. And that was a blessing and a curse. I think it took me a lot longer to learn how to program, but because I didn't know what the rules were, we ended up breaking a lot of the rules.
And so I think one thing that I would say resonates from this decade of navigating this space is that it really was working in a vacuum and a void. And it was trying this work and yelling it into the nothingness, hoping that people enjoyed it as much as I enjoyed making it. But it was a struggle, because there was no reference, there was no YouTube, there was no look up to see how something was done. And I think in a lot of ways that was really beautiful, because we did a lot of things that I think helped forge our community. And also it just meant that we weren't doing things by the rules. It felt like the Wild West. And it's interesting, because if you look at today, and obviously we didn't talk about NFTs because it doesn't relate, but it's amazing how it feels very cyclical. It feels like a lot of the stuff that has happened in the NFT space harks back to a lot of the stuff that we were trying and experimenting with back in the early '90s. And yeah, that's it for me. I think I'm really grateful for the time that we've all had today. And that's my take on this wild, weird vacuum of a time and space.
Peter Bauman: Thank you, Josh. What an incredible conversation we had. And thank you all so much for the time. I think, Josh, it's really interesting what you said about the working in a void. It reminds me of what a lot of the '80s pioneers that we've talked to also said. And maybe you remember that too, Conrad. And what's so interesting about the '90s is that you had these disparate nodes, but then the Internet came and brought everybody together. I think that's one of the big takeaways from this decade. Then the Wild West just got transplanted online, and that's where we still are a lot today. So thank you. What an incredible panel and discussion. I really could go on forever, but we have to respect everybody else's time. But just thank you all so much. We couldn't be more grateful and thankful. It's been a real pleasure, and I hope we can do it again soon.
Vuk Ćosić: For me, it was good. Thanks a lot. I haven't seen some of these faces for quite a while, so this is cool. And there'll be some other occasions sometime, I hope. Let's meet sometime physically, drink beer or not, whatever.
LIA: Thanks for having me as well. Yeah.
thefunnyguys: It's really an understatement that it's an honor to have this group together. It feels like a bunch of lifelong friends getting together to chat, and we get to be at this fireside, fly-on-the-wall situation. But thank you, everyone, for the anecdotal stories and dialog that was able to be brought up throughout this entire time. Thank you all again.
All: Thank you. Bye-bye. Thank you, everyone. Bye-bye. Take care. Bye.
