 Thank you. Tom, at one point, mentioned edge spaces and the French banlieues. And I just want to let everybody know or remind everybody that we have an exhibition coming up that starts at the end of June called Mohammed-Bourouissa Urban Writers, who deals very much with that theme. Thank you for that talk. Our last speaker today is Man Bartlett, whose work you saw when you came in on the ceiling of the light court. So he is one of the artists in our exhibition. Do you want me to read? Where are you? Do you want me to read the year that you were born? It says it here. Man Bartlett is a multidisciplinary artist who lives and works in New York. His diverse practice includes sound, drawing, collage, video performance, and digital projects that often use online platforms as outlets for playful, yet subversive social critique. And he's going to talk today about his project upstairs and hopefully about some of the other things that he's been very involved in lots of different aspects of this exhibition. Man Bartlett. You could indulge me in a moment. If we could all stand up. It's been a long day. Blood maybe needs to flow a little bit. So if you could just move your body just a little bit, just shake it out maybe. Move your legs, your feet probably need to move. And if you can, just stretch all the way up, all the way up. Let that out. Let's do a big in-breath and then out-breath. And then shake that out. And then move one seat. So I don't care where you move, just move to a seat that you hadn't been sitting in before you just got up. The reason for that is the seat that you have been sitting in is probably a little warm. And now you'll have a nice new, fresh, cold seat. So the idea in sort of starting over here is to play with the notion of audience and spectacle and this idea of gawking, which I think was really interesting to hear Bridget talk about. And this unpredictability, which I have to tell you, I have some slides that I'm going to show. I'm going to talk about some of my work and some of the work that I think I've seen online and in person for the last couple of years. But beyond that, I don't really know what's going to happen. So I'm trying to keep this as open and flexible as possible. So we'll see how that goes. We ready for that? Got a little blood flowing a little bit? OK. First, thank you to the Barnes, to Tom, and to Martha for inviting me to come to this space. I grew up in Philadelphia, so it's a very particular honor to be able to be here right now. It's kind of 100% surreal, actually. So unbelievably grateful for this opportunity. So radical listening. With me. Quick, name is man. It comes from a manual. It's a nickname. So in case you're wondering, I wear that sort of as a reminder that I need to be a better representation of my gender. And so it keeps me as honest as possible. And I'd like to start with this sort of amazing and ridiculous quote from the Independent. An analyst at Bank of America have reportedly suggested that there is a 20% to 50% chance our world is a matrix-style virtual reality, and everything we experience is just a simulation. So that probability is probably less. If you're a law in Moscow, you say it's 1 in a billion. And what this means is, has people seen The Matrix, by the way? I know it's been a long time. Yeah, show of hands. Seen The Matrix? No, OK, so basically the idea that we live in a simulation, that this reality, and the philosophy goes back many, many years, not just The Matrix. But I think, and smarter people than me, know the full history of that. I'm not an academic, so take that as you will. But I think there's something to this notion that how we experience either the reality or the simulation of reality. And I think about this when I'm listening to lectures or when I'm on the subway. And it informs a lot of my relationship to the things that I create and the things that I look at. My history in coming to this stage is a sort of a very long, roundabout path. I actually started in the theater. My degree is from Emerson College in Boston. And at some point during my college studies, I came across Ubara, Alfred Jerry's 1896 play. And I won't go into the details, but what struck me most about this is that it was a production that started in a riot. And that the entire audience rioted. And the opening word of the play is a bastardization of the word shit. And so that sort of boldness or kind of the absurdity of that action was just really enthralling to 19-year-old man who was like, yeah, let's make some crazy shit. And it stuck with me to the point where, even though there is not much of a correlation, and I think a lot of the work that I'll be talking about today, there's not a lot of correlation directly to even the idea of a flannor or a cyber flannor, but I think that there's a relationship between space, people in space, and either the audience perspective or the individual viewer's perspective. And so as you'll see this sort of stream of consciousness that plays throughout here, each of these works are kind of touching them in different capacities. So the work you're seeing on the right here is We'll Follow the Laws 2007, Domestic Tension. The original name for this piece was Shoot in Iraqi. And I happened to be living in Chicago at the time, and actually I'd just gotten my first gallery show with the gallery where this was being presented. So I was there at the opening sort of reception. And basically the piece, he's an Iraqi-American citizen, and it was to recreate the feeling that his brother had living in Iraq during the war, unable to leave his house. And so he rigged a paintball machine to shoot that the internet could control. So he could go online, go to a website and control this paintball gun and choose to shoot him or not. And there have been very few experiences in my artistic life where I've had the chance to either witness something like that in person, but to be exposed to something that was so visceral, so conceptual, yet performative, and also just completely insane, from a perspective of giving the audience control over a paintball. And it wasn't, it's, you know, paintball, if you get hit by it, it hurts a lot. It's not just like, oh, it's like, no, it really hurts. And we've all documented this performance over the course of the month of the exhibition. And so you sort of saw him progress, and he stayed in the gallery 24 hours, seven days a week. And he subsisted just off of the things that people would bring to the gallery. So just food that was brought to him. And so I think about this idea of the audience, and I think about the people that, and so one of the amazing things that happened during this is that these groups of people started coming together to make sure the gun was pointed away from him. And so the crowd was actually controlling the gun and making sure they had a name like Angels or something to keep it away. And I think that's an amazing sort of outcome of something that could have gone a much different way. So I moved to New York in 2008 to work at a startup. I was promptly laid off. So I was like, oh, great, what are we gonna do? So I left New York, traveled for almost a year. And when I got back, I was trying to figure out what shape my practice would take. And in the intervening years between theater and getting to New York, I had started making visual work, really terrible paintings, which is why you're not seeing any of them here today. Really bad. But I started thinking about how performance could expand into social media. And so I did this piece called 24 Hour Best Non-Buy, where I spent 24 hours in a best buy, shopping, but not buying anything. And so what that entailed was me literally going up to every single product in the store and having a personal relationship to that product to say, to do a little internal checklist. Do I need this? Do I want this? And then ultimately concluding that I was not going to buy it. So it sort of became my mantra. And the project actually was an outgrowth of an experience that I had where I was desperately broke and needed to borrow money from a friend to buy a computer that had been stolen. And after I bought the computer, I realized that I couldn't afford to keep the computer. I needed to pay my rent at the place where I lived. And so in order to return this computer, it took me something like two hours waiting in line. And then they were trying to do all these, like they weren't going to give all the money back. And it was this unbelievably humbling and demoralizing experience. But also when I realized that this particular Best Buy in New York is open 24 hours, which is kind of insane because you might need a cable at four in the morning or a new television. So, all right. How are we doing, by the way? Feeling good? If you need to stand again, just like stand, it's cool. I leave that up to you now. So this is a piece by Jonah Bruckner Cohen. And it's actually, I kind of love this. The GIF is not supposed to look like this at all. But in the translation from the Macintosh to the Windows computer, it has this kind of amazing effect going on. But basically the piece is a drill that was installed. And it's been installed a couple different places over the years, but where a hit to a website correlates to an actual hit of this drill into the building. And again, this relationship between an audience taking an action and something happening in real world. And that's something that I'm deeply fascinated in because of how we communicate today. And this is another project that's really grown on me over the years from John Raffman. And basically John just scoured Google Street View and looked for interesting scenes all over the world. And so we'll just sort of scroll through some of these. And they really tell a story. I mean, in some sense, these are just found objects. And I remember very distinctly thinking at the time that where does, what is the genesis for a work of art? And this is maybe a deeper philosophical question, but when you take something and it's essentially a copy, where does it exist outside of just the action of looking? And over the years, I've come to sort of, I keep returning to this piece because I keep thinking about how it's essentially just a snapshot, but through Google and through a sort of technology which has come to rule much of our lives, whether we realize it or not. And these are some just bizarre and sometimes devastating scenes. And there's little or no context ever given to what was happening. They're not explained. And from what I could see online, the artists didn't even provide a very clear synopsis of other than to just have a website. And he's talked about this project and this project has been talked a lot about. So I started doing these 24 hour performances, partly as an outgrowth of that experience in Best Buy, but also as a way to kind of expand my relationship to time. And living in New York, which is a very like intense place, like all the time you're always kind of like super stressed and like you're not sure if anything's ever gonna work. It gave me an ability to kind of, yeah, to expand time and to kind of decontextualize time. So while it's a very rigid structure, performance in 24 hours, it has a very specific beginning and end time. What happens in between that gets elongated into this very surreal kind of durational experience. And for this particular piece, which was a commission from Creative Time, I went to the most amazing place in New York, Port Authority. And spent 24 hours there talking to people. And I talked to them in line when they were going somewhere. So they were traveling to meet their family. I talked to them online about where they had been. And sort of the idea was to see if I could match those two audiences and make any kind of connections between people who I was meeting in person and people who I was talking to online. And interestingly it was the construct was, the performance is a failure. I'll put that as bluntly as possible. And then I found that in order to stay engaged, I either had to be in one place or the other, right? So I either had to be here, like, okay, we'll have a conversation. Like, how's it going? How are you feeling? Doing good. I'm doing good, thanks. Yeah, it's like, it's going all right. I think you still have the attention, so I feel okay. Thank you. Not yours? Got mine. Okay, thank you. I'll try to keep it. Or I had to be completely separated from that and mediating the experience through trying to communicate to people online. And so when I'm talking like, oh, I'm giving a talk right now. So this disconnect, it's a cognitive disconnection, but it's also a very, you're accessing a different part of your brain. And so these performances, these 24 hour performances were trying to kind of meld those two or kind of see if I could exist in two places at once. And I couldn't. Maybe other people can. I think there have been some amazing people continuing work in this sort of particular area who have done it better than I, but I just couldn't do it. So part of the outgrowth of those performances of which I did quite a few, was I started thinking about other durational performances. And this was right around the time that Occupy Wall Street. And I had been in London doing a project and I came back right as it was sort of ramping up. And I started thinking a lot about the individual's relationship to the gallery system and to money specifically and how we earn a living as artists and where the kind of smoke and mirrors are. And I was talking to a lot of artists who were saying, well, I get money from this place or I get money from here or I have a trust fund or I get this particular collector and this particular donor. And it's a very touchy subject. You gotta be careful when you talk about this stuff. And I actually had one artist friend of mine say, you know, you really can't talk about that. Like I wanna tell you privately that this is a cool project but you will end up on blacklist for this. So it's basically I spent a year documenting my finances and put them publicly in the form of a Twitter account and then as a Google document where anyone can see. And if you can look at some of these, let's get the laser pointer out. Kombucha tea ice cream, protest sandwiches, photocopies, McDonald's and Starbucks. I had a terrible diet. And people would comment on that and people would reply to this account and say, you need to eat better, which was not wrong. But I was a little bit like, come on, like I'm doing the best I can. And I started this project that's something like $70 to my name and I ended this project with something like $70 to my name. And the entire thing was documented for a full year. And it really was awkward. I had, particularly when there were art sales. So I wouldn't say who the collector was but I would say the amount. I wouldn't say what the work was but the amounts that was income was in there. So this sort of radical transparency is something that I kind of play with and then go a little bit back away and then come up and kind of look at again. So yeah. So this is a really interesting project by Heather Dewey Hagborg. And basically she went into different areas in New York and found pieces of chewing gum, cigarette butts, hair, extracted the DNA from them and then made portraits loosely based off of that particular DNA's information. And I think about this particularly in relationship to kind of what we've been talking about today, right? Where you had people going out into the streets, strolling, looking at what's happening, gawking, and then building stories based around that. So I think if we go back to this morning and Andre showed that image of the train, the bridge and it was really, you got a sense that you were there seeing this story, right? I think what's interesting to me about this is that you see a piece of gum and if you pass a piece of gum on the street, you might be able to invent some story about it, but technology is getting to the point where you can actually make an approximation of what someone might actually look like. And that's both terrifying, but from a conceptual standpoint, really interesting. And what are the implications of that, of how we exist in public and how we exist in space? So I was going to show the video conchie piece. I was really close to including it. And I was like, no, you know, we know that one. And it was gonna be a setup for this one, which is Lauren McCarthy's follower. And I just, I really love this quote from the video. Well, first I'll give you the brief introduction of the project, which is a service that grants you a real life follower for a day. No hassle, unseen companion. Someone that watches, someone that sees you, someone who cares. And this notion that you could order someone to follow you around all day with the equivalent being of a social media follower, but in real life. And you don't know that person's there. And then the result is that they take one photograph of you and that's sort of the product that you get out of this. And I don't want another relationship. I just wanna have a relationship with somebody that I never have to talk to. They can just follow me and see me having a relationship with myself. Which like, I don't know how many people you, okay, another poll of the audience here. Who has a Facebook account? Okay, does anyone not have a Facebook account, just out of curiosity? Cool, oh wow, that's a great, that's a good number. So for those of you that do have a Facebook account, if you use it with any regularity, you understand how the system is completely rigged against you to exploit you and I won't go down that rabbit hole, but I would assume that you have some awareness and understanding of what it feels like when someone either friends you or follows you or likes something that you posted. And so this project brilliantly kind of took that idea into physical space. I don't think I have anything else on that one. So this is a recent work called Browsing the Blues. And it's part of a ongoing investigation into the audio space, right? And it's taken a couple different forms. I did a project that didn't really make sense to include here a couple years ago where I created a 24 hour audio collage that mimicked times of day. So I've been thinking a lot about audio and what our relationship is to it. And so this piece took, I had an iPhone that I had a electromagnetic microphones that I hooked up to the iPhone and I was able to record the electromagnetic output of my phone while I was browsing my social media feeds. So the idea is that you're making audible the device that you use to do at least the device that I use way more than I should to kind of connect to the world. And the results, which we can listen to. You're hearing two things. One is actually a drone generator that I have and the other coming up, the staticky stuff coming up, that will be the electromagnetic. So the sounds are me scrolling, the opening an app, the liking something. So you get the idea, 27 minutes. The actions are helps me understand in a different way. You give me another input into what, oh I didn't fade it out, so there you go, that was it. And actually I was in that show, Angie was in that show by Total Coincidence, so yeah. Yeah, that was the show at Arabyte. So internet noise is not an art project, at least not explained as such, but it's a project that Dan Schultz started very recently and it's to basically create noise on your browsing history. And the purpose is that all this information is being collected about you when you do anything online and this sort of the idea is to obfuscate your browsing by throwing out browser tabs with a bunch of sort of misleading information. So two of the ones that I got from a recent experiment with this was disengagement pneumonia raincoat, which is kind of awesome, and playing the Alphorn. And so I think a lot about what, when you're looking at something online, when you're browsing, when you're Googling information, this is, these are in some sense, physical destinations that you're traveling to. And the situation is such right now that lots of very powerful interests are watching you every step along the way. And effectively this is like a very clear a correlation with following. And I think that the question then becomes what do we do with that? And that's not something that I am, have any authority to speak about. I have very personally mixed feelings about what it means to be tracked today and what it means to have that information accessible. I think that privacy is an important thing that we just have awareness of what's being collected from us and then we can make decisions accordingly, not to get overly didactic about it. Okay. So I have two things that I'm gonna show now and then I promise I'm gonna talk about my barns thing I promise, coming soon, I'm saving it for the end. But these two things to me are kind of, they're interrelated. One is the million dollar homepage from 2005 where this person basically just sold real estate on a website in order to help fund his college tuition by selling a pixel for a dollar. And there are a million pixels, it's a million dollars. It's a brilliant project. And it, again, not really an art project more like a social experiment. And recently, actually just a couple weeks ago, read it as an April Fool's Day sort of high jinks. They did something sort of similar called PLACE. And what you're seeing here is a time lapse of 72 hours where any Reddit user could add a single pixel once every five minutes to the canvas. So there's, you should, it's this story of how this kind of came to be is worth reading if you haven't looked into it. It's fascinating what happened over the course of the 72 hours. You can see that sort of black, the little black, oh wait, hold on, I went too soon. We're gonna watch it again, because it's a cool thing. Oh wait, I gotta go back twice. Let's see here. There we go. They make the laser green and the forward green, which is a little confusing. But you can see this sort of black area that started taking over the piece at a certain point by users who were intent on destroying this sort of community. But ultimately, they didn't win. Yay, for once, the trolls didn't win. And it did turn into a little Pink Floyd thing, which is kind of funny. As a work of art, I mean, this is maybe as low-brow as you could possibly go. You've got the Mona Lisa, you've got OSU, and all types of pretty tacky things going on. But as a communal experiment, it's actually really fascinating what developed over that 72 hours. Okay, last but not least, is my project here. So has everyone gotten a chance to sort of see in the lobby? Yes, maybe. If you haven't, it's in the lobby upstairs, and the project is called We See, We Hear, We Are. And it was developed over the course of many months in collaboration with Shelly Bernstein, who's here, who, Shelly, if you're watching, thank you. Also, hi to the livestream viewers. But it was an outgrowth of a conversation in this relationship between physical space and the idea of being a flannor and digital space and being online and what it means to exist online today. And the sort of specific entry point begins with the We See component, which is you're seeing a still from a website which is connected to Instagram's API. So anytime someone posts with the hashtag person of the crowd, this AI attempts to interpret the image that has been posted, right? So person standing in front of a television. So the application went to the Instagram feed to the hashtag and looked at it and thought that it saw a person standing in front of the television. Then it puts that into language and it reads it out loud. So if you go into the lobby, you can hear it, the sort of computerized voice speaking on a continual basis, all the images that are posted person of the crowd to Instagram. And if you do it, you can see, I will say it's a little, you don't know when the image is gonna be incorporated into the piece, so it will be there, but you might wait a little while. And that's part of the idea of kind of separating from a typical experience of the hashtag for an exhibition where as part of a marketing component, you have this hashtag and you build a campaign around it. And I wanted to take that idea of how we engage with social media and into the context of an actual work of art. And so in my mind, it kind of balances on those two between a way of showing how people are interpreting the person of the crowd exhibition as well as how this technology is influencing our relationship to social media and our experience of the world in which we live. The next component of the piece is called We Here. And for that, I worked with the education department here at the Barnes with two different groups of high school students. And we went to 30th Street Station. And I picked that location because we had, I had heard that the Solari board, which is that flip top display that makes all the noise, is gonna be taken down there. And I have such a nostalgic memory and experiences of being in 30th Street and hearing that sort of reverberation of the space and particularly with that actual display, which marks the passage of time and trains coming and going. And it just sounds really cool. And so we went to this location partly for that, but also because it is this kind of transportation hub where people are coming and going. And so what I did is I had the students put their planes, their planes, put their phones in airplane mode. And for 11 minutes, we just sat there in 30th Street and just listened. And the experience was really, students were hearing things that they, their relationship to what they were hearing became so amplified. Because if you get really quiet, you start to hear things. And so I had them write down what they heard and then they spoke to each other and they filmed it. And so the, we hear component in the exhibition as it's installed is a video of their describing what they heard. And so if you juxtapose that with what a computer is sort of thinking and seeing, you have this kind of very subtle relationship between, not subtle at all actually, but you have this relationship between artificial intelligence and human intelligence. And is there any overlap between the two? Where do we get it right? Where does it get it wrong? And vice versa. And the last component, excuse me for one second, is called We Are, which is currently being represented by a Google Street View image from right outside here. And this consists of the website for the exhibition. So it has various information, sort of again, the more marketing information where to buy tickets, what is happening and when. And it also has sort of an introduction into this project. But throughout the course of the exhibition, I've been adding materials to it, taking materials away and kind of working it a little bit like, like a website as a sculpture, as a sort of a block of clay. And the idea is that we'll continue to kind of evolve and expand about the performances that will be happening over the next month. And so I'll be documenting those performances and then incorporating my documentation into this website. And this, I should also say that I worked with some really just amazing people here at the Barnes to put this together. And I also worked with a web developer, Brian Feeney, who is like instrumental in getting the website up. And a code artist, Kyle McDonald, who developed the code for the AI. And also all the students that couldn't have been done without them. So I think my next slide is where it says end here. So thank you. Thanks guys so much.