On creative resistance in the digital world

How do you describe what you do to someone who’s never heard of media art?

That is a really good question, and I often actually have trouble explaining it to myself sometimes. I think the reason is that we think of media as this fixed thing, but it is actually fluid. It changes over time, it evolves. Media artists can work with anything ranging from video, to interactive installations, to web-based work, really running the gamut.

So I guess what I like to tell people is that I look at the stories we tell ourselves about technology and our relationships with technology, and then I try to unpack and investigate those. Because stories don’t just appear from thin air, they are socially constructed. They are created for specific purposes by people in order to justify, explain, rationalize, or reinforce things that they want adopted into mainstream society.

Particularly around the narratives of technology, what I like to do is use tools and systems that have been around for a while. I work a lot with web technologies, basically HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, but I also try to pair all of that with more tactile elements, like drawing and printmaking. I have a recent series of works I did in stained glass that I worked with a fabricator to produce. I really like to bridge the physical and digital in my work. I think we also have a tendency to think of digital art and digital media as this immaterial thing that doesn’t take up any space, when actually we know that’s not true. A lot of the recent conversations around AI are pointing to the data centers, the resource extraction, the water needs, the electricity needs, all of these things that tend to get eclipsed in our general understanding of what digital media is. There is no such thing as purely immaterial media.

How did you get there? Was there a specific moment, a person, a project, something you encountered that just clicked?

It wasn’t really a first moment so much as a slow realization. I am of a very specific generation, born in the mid-80s. We grew up knowing a world without computing, and then all of a sudden computing was there, at formative points in our lives. When we were in high school, when we were in college, when we were getting our first jobs, we did all of that alongside these rapid developments and exponential innovations in technological systems.

In the more immediate sense, when I decided I wanted to go back to art school, I chose the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU, which is really focused on art and technology. Learning to code for the first time, working with electronics and sensors, that first year in particular really just made my brain start working in a new way. It was a moment where I felt like I was finally able to embrace something I’d always been interested in but had never really been given access to. Computer science was never really made to feel like it would be welcoming to somebody like me, a very artistic person who came from a visual background.

But I think you have to go back even further. When I was a teenager, I kept a LiveJournal. And the moment I realized I could go into the backend and edit the CSS myself, I think that was the moment where I thought, oh, I can actually take this medium and be expressive with it. I can manipulate it, I can be hyper-specific to my own interests and aesthetic tastes. It wasn’t until I went to art school that I realized building an art career working with the things I’d always loved was actually possible.

You’ve spent years researching new media artists, as well as being part of that community yourself. Before we get into what you found, I want to ask: how does this community see itself? What’s the story new media artists tell about who they are and what they’re doing?

I think in general, the arts have always been a really powerful way of starting conversations and getting people to realize that there are aspects of human existence that aren’t reflected in the ways we’re told to be living our lives.

Where we get into trouble, and you see this a lot with new media art in particular, is that that capacity for engaging people and lighting up different possibilities can very easily get extrapolated into “I’m going to solve all of the world’s problems.” New media artists in particular tend to see themselves (ourselves) as being able to see things about technology that are invisible to everybody else. Like, “I’ll make this project that shows how terrible surveillance capitalism is, and then everybody’s going to be aware of it.”

I don’t want to dismiss the possibility of art doing that. But art itself is not going to save the world on its own. We’re not going to have this cathartic moment where enough people see our project and that leads to a rapid shift in society. What really crystallized this for me was during my PhD, at the end of every book we read, these really incredible works by reputable scholars about the harms inflicted on society by technology, you’d get to the last chapter and it would say something like: “Well, we’re in a really bad situation. But look at this artist, they can show us the new way forward.” That started to really frustrate me. That view treats artists almost as if they are exempt from all of the problems that plague everyone else in their relationships with technology, when in reality they’re just as susceptible to all of this. We really have to start reckoning with that idea rather than thinking of ourselves as somehow exempt.

I want to connect this to something you write about in your research, this idea of strategic transparency. Can you walk me through that?

It’s really easy to gravitate towards this idea that our work has to reveal something about how technology works, it has to expose something, bring something out into the light that nobody’s seen before. And again, it works in certain circumstances. But what that often ends up doing is magnifying something so that once you expose a flaw, the flaw can get fixed on the surface, but the underlying structural issue that caused that flaw goes unaddressed. It’s like what Safiya Noble talks about in Algorithms of Oppression, you point out a racist image that comes up in Google search results, and Google will just remove those images, but the underlying algorithmic structure that caused them to appear goes unchecked. It becomes a really cat-and-mouse way of addressing these issues.

The whole idea of strategic transparency came from observing that tech companies use artists as a kind of clout. I really go into depth in my book analyzing the way that Google utilized the Arcade Fire project, the interactive music video they did for “We Used to Wait” in 2010. It was a really innovative, amazing project, but it was also a launch of Google Chrome, meant to show all the things Chrome was capable of that other browsers weren’t. The tech industry frequently utilizes artists as a way to legitimize or popularize their projects. I make parallels to gentrification—the first thing that real estate developers usually cite is, “Oh, look how many artists live here.” And so I think—because we hold this kind of clout for the industry, we maybe should start utilizing that. We should start thinking about how we might take advantage of the expectations the industry has of us in order to foster slower, more piecemeal change underneath the surface. It relies on patience, on a slow, duration-based engagement with digital systems and with processes of making change, something that as a society we don’t have much capacity for right now. But maybe sometimes waiting and implementing change slowly is actually how you get something lasting.

Something that kept coming up in your research is this idea of the medium being really unstable, the tools updating, the platforms shifting. How does that actually affect what you make?

It changes how work exists in the world. I have web-based projects that simply don’t exist anymore, because at some point the maintenance cost outweighs the reason to keep them alive. That’s partly why I’ve gravitated toward web standards that have been around since the nineties and barely changed. There’s a certain guarantee in that stability.

I’ve also dealt with industry protocols really hindering the creative development of projects. A 2016 piece that ended up relying on Twitter data was directly shaped by what Facebook refused to give me access to. Once you start looking at it, there are a lot of ways that industrial protocols put restrictions on artists, regarding the way they’re able to use and misuse technology, distribute their work, and follow their original creative vision. These are negotiations that happen constantly in the process, and I don’t think we actually stop and think about it very often.

I want to go back to the stained glass, because I think it’s where everything you’re describing becomes most visible. McLuhan keeps coming to me when I look at your work, the medium is the message. Do you think the form you choose changes what the idea itself can say?

One hundred percent. Thinking about how these algorithms get spoken about, a lot of times it starts to feel very religious. We put faith in the algorithm the same way we put faith in divinity. We expect it to make these all-knowing decisions for us in ways we can’t imagine a human being able to do themselves.

So I took diagrams of these algorithms, from scientific textbooks, visual representations of what the algorithm is doing, and I translated them using forms I found recurring in years of research into medieval church windows. Not the biblical depictions themselves, but the shapes, the borders, the geometries, the lines, the things that kept appearing again and again in how these windows were built. And I reinterpreted the algorithm diagrams using those forms, in stained glass, to call attention to the fact that we have deified technology in this way. What if our valorization of these systems is socially constructed in the same way as religion? And once we know that, how does it alter our understanding of their roles in society?

I think just a simple shift—a simple re-imagination of a form—can do so much to make those connections into spaces and aspects of human existence that are not readily apparent in the ways we’ve been conditioned to understand these tools. I like to create that cognitive dissonance by utilizing different forms, to get us to understand the larger impact of these things beyond the narrow boxes we often put them in.

What do artists say in your workshops when they’re given the space to talk honestly about their relationship with technology?

A lot of artists start to realize how much the “move fast and break things” ideology of the tech industry has really seeped into their daily practices, how they feel pressure to move at a certain pace in their work that is dictated by the expectations we have of technology. We expect it to be seamless, to move quickly, to give us what we want immediately. And I think a lot of artists have really internalized that.

People come out of those workshops articulating a desire for a slower practice. There’s also a desire for societal and cultural support for the arts. A lot of the folks I was talking to were based in the US, which is notorious for not supporting artists. There’s a real desire for recognition of the arts as labor in and of itself.

What also comes out is a desire to engage more with communities, to not think of ourselves as siloed, individualistic geniuses. Both the art world and the technology world are guilty of elevating individual people at the expense of the larger network and community that helps sustain each other’s practices. No artwork is ever coming from a single perspective or a single mind or a single pair of hands.

For someone reading this who feels overwhelmed, who wants to engage with these questions but doesn’t know where to start, what’s a realistic first step?

First, read the work of the scholars who have been doing this investigation for decades. People like Safiya Noble, Wendy Chun, Ruha Benjamin, Virginia Eubanks, all of these people have written amazing books that look at the deep societal impacts of technology and of the push towards automation on the way our interpersonal interactions are evolving.

At the same time, I would really take an introspective look at the way that you rely on technology. I have a whole series of work where I render QR codes really slowly, and sometimes non-functionally, an attempt to unpack the way this digital form seemed to become ubiquitous almost overnight, and we developed this instinctual gestural response to it.

Try to introduce some friction into your relationship with technology. It’s okay if the webpage doesn’t load right away. It’s okay if things don’t give you that instant gratification, because that often offers an opportunity to reflect on why you get so frustrated and what your emotional response to technology tells you about the ways you expect these systems to function in your everyday life.

I read that you’re working on turning your dissertation into a book. What does the book get to say that the dissertation couldn’t?

The book is under contract right now, the projected timeline is fall of 2027. I think the book is really about expanding reach. Ultimately I think I wrote this for my fellow artists, to give them a starting point for understanding our relationships with the systems we’re utilizing in our work and with the ideologies we may have subconsciously adopted, and giving us space to really critically analyze that.

I really hope this book gets people to understand that the first step to actually making change is being honest about what we’re not looking at in our relationships with power, and how power might actually be informing the way we’re conceiving of change in the first place.

Donna Haraway really denounces this idea of the “god trick,” of seeing everywhere from nowhere, floating above and seeing everything from an external perspective. We really have to take stock of where we are internally, where we are connected to the things we don’t want to be a part of, and how we might utilize those connections in service of where we want to be in the future.