 Hello, good morning, Evan Franco and good morning everyone. I am Emanuela Mazzonis, I have assisted Francesco Bonami in creating the Mi Family project. And today we are here with Evan Franco Mates, who I want to thank you first of all for being with us, and for having accepted to participate in this online conversation that is part of our public program in the Mi Family platform that has been launched at the end of October. And today we are at our fourth appointment. So before I start my questions, our conversation, I would like to give a brief introduction to the public about Evan Franco, who are dual active since the early 90s in the art world. They have exhibited under a pseudonymum that is still active if I'm not wrong, 01001 etc.org. It's an internet domain whose mysterious identity fits perfectly in an era when digital languages and the role of the web. We're just starting to enter the contemporary art scene. You are both fascinated by the evolution of the digital world and the way internet has changed the methods of social and political interaction between individuals and also the effects that the web has had on artistic production during the last 30 years. So you always have used the web to reveal stories. You actually did it in a very interesting approach because you still and copy data and images, you use also fake names, you change identities, and all the while adopting transparent strategies without hiding behind the web, always revealing what was your aim and your project. So now considering the globalized society and this ever changing society and generation, what difference do you see between the 90s and today? And how do you think was internet interpreted 30 years ago and how much this interpretation has changed today if you think the interpretation of the internet is really changed in the last 30 years? Well, thank you, Manuela, and thank you to Francesco Bonami for organizing this great show. Thank you to Susan Cotter and all the team at Moodam. Well, the internet in the 90s was of course very different from what we have today. It changed so much that it's almost unrecognizable. In the beginning, the internet was decentralized and distributed. It was pretty much built and maintained by its users. So, for example, we had our own server in our bedroom, which was to our works. So we owned a piece of the internet and we could host and publish our artist friends, artworks, books, images and songs. We were young, we were isolating, trying to make art and we suddenly found ourselves in a global network of like-minded artists. Without any connections, without much resources, we could publish our works and gain visibility. One of the first works we did was called Life Sharing and for three years we openly share our home computer, making its content accessible on the internet. All our artworks as well as private material, including emails, texts, photos, bank statements were freely available for viewing through our website. Consider that social media didn't exist at the time and so personal data were not a currency yet. So it was a reflection of this first, more exciting, perhaps more utopian atmosphere around the internet and free software ethics. The internet we have today is quite different. It's very centralized with a few small giants owning most of it. All our posts, photos, emails are constantly being captured and archived indefinitely and analyzed for commercial or political purposes. As artists we try, I think, to respond to these changes. We try to visualize these contradictions and to create works that embody them. So in the 90s we were obsessed with visibility. Today we're interested in quite the opposite, invisibility with Joel and what we call the peripheries of the internet. Thank you. Very interesting explanation. And I think it is very also linked to my second question, which is related to one of your recent project, because as you just said, Eva, you use the net if I can say the dark net as your space to create art. And now if I think about a time out of joint that is an online exhibition that you recently created, if I'm not wrong, for the Yerevan Biennial, that is actually taking place completely on the dark net on the net. You described this project as a remote location and periphery of the internet. So I would like to ask you a little bit more about this project also in relation to what you said just now that you are looking now for invisibility. Yeah, time out of joint is an exhibition, an online exhibition we created for the Yerevan Biennale taking place entirely on the dark net. We borrowed the title from a novel by Philip K. Dick about the nature of reality with ordinary people experiencing the world unravelling around them. Actually, we had this idea of creating a show on the dark net for a long time. But when the pandemic started, it suddenly felt almost urgent. All art exhibitions worldwide where and still are to a certain extent installed as a ghost exhibitions without being seen by visitors, perhaps never to be seen. Yes. We wanted an exhibition that took invisibility not as an unfortunate setback as a flaw, but simply as a departure from more traditional formats to bring the audience to a place they're not probably familiar with. So you could say if the surface internet is like, you know, art Basel or something that the dark net would be your artist run space in a dirty basement in Brooklyn. A place that's a bit harder to find that works mainly on word of mouth, but where you might discover something unexpected. For the show we commissioned the new works by six artists, Joshua Ciderella, Cluster Duck, David Horvies, Blood and Yoller, Amalia Ullman and 2050 plus studio. The new works were added periodically over the duration of the show, and they were available to be seen copied or reused. Some were specifically created actually to be taken away, other to disappear after the show. The dark net reminds me very much of the 90s internet we were talking about before the pre social media internet. It's an uncharted territory, it's very different from the surface internet got very familiar with on the surface time is past. Everything is meant for immediate consumption and satisfaction. The dark net is also moving, but it operates at the slow speed pages load without brush. Think of slow as something positive, like slow food, as opposed to fast food. It's anonymous it's free of commercial constrictions and it's full of possibilities. I think for attention is what we do online anyway on the dark net, you don't have any of the tools to quantify success. There are no likes, no shares, no cookies, no comments, no recommendations, there's only content. Someone might find it frustrating, like, am I going to know how much views as my video. But we actually think it's very liberating. It's almost Zen in a tree falling in the forest kind of way. It forces the FOMO out of view. So time out of joining is an exhibition to visit from home and without brush. It's an experiment in the attention economy. Maybe the fact that you have to wait for a minute to see a photo load. If you know this photo will be erased afterwards in the case of David Orbit's work, we make you look longer. So is it possible to create a content that would put a viewer in a more contemplative mood online. That quiet and hurting feeling you have when you go to a museum and you sit in a black box and you breathe. So it's an exhibition proportional to buffering time. Now I will jump one second to the other question I will come back to the question about our project and me family platform because you just talk about the dark net. And one of my questions was about your definition of dark net so we said that. You can say that in your work in the fact that you are stealing data putting that visible you are raising questions that are very difficult to answer for the public for normal person that are not very into I think the web and the dark net. The questions are who is controlling our data how and where the data are recorded and monitored and stored for how long for example. What is this cloud that we think is protecting and storing our data if they're really protecting so you said in one interview and many times that the cloud is the real dark net. However you already told us about the dark net about the fact that is only content this is really interesting to me. I'm not very much informed about the dark net. I'm honest because I'm not using it I'm not specialized. But what you said about contemplative mode slow speed I think is very interesting to know more to understand more about this. I don't know if now Franco you want to define us what the dark net is a little bit more I know that ever was already very exhaustive about this but I don't know if you want to add anything else. Well the dark net is a network that runs parallel to the Internet so it's not separate from it. It's just on a different layer. Yes. Kind of like the seven and a half floor in Spike Johnson's movie being John Malkovich. Okay. Remember that movie. Yes. To access this network you need a special software for example the tour browser. The dark net is just designed to let you communicate anonymously. That is no longer possible on the surface Internet in which our every move including this conversation is being monitored and archived. The dark net is largely presented in mainstream media as a marketplace for drugs and weapons and pornography. But it is also a platform that allowed free speech for activists in oppressive regimes during the Arab Spring for example. Or the revelation of whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning. The fact that it's anonymous does not only free from surveillance but also from advertisement. Yes. Like was able to say there is no quantification economy no data mining no profiling no cookies. There's a very interesting issue here regarding the terminology because terms like dark and transparent are being used in a very misleading way often on purpose. The Internet we are very we use every day is considered transparent. It's colorful and sparkling and its interface is very familiar to us. It's comforting almost as a matter of fact we spend most of our time in the same few locations you know Google Facebook Instagram and Amazon. A handful of companies fill up our time online influencing what we see and how we see it. But despite the rhetoric of openness you know sharing and transparency the way they actually work is incredibly obscure. It's mysterious. Contents are constantly monitored and filtered. Our personal data is traded between unknown parts to predict our future behaviors and possibly influence what we're going to buy or who we're going to vote for. For example, if I were to ask you where are your photos. What are your videos. Where exactly are they located and stored. You will know it. Yes, they are in the cloud. Yeah. Where is this cloud. It's not lightly hovering over our heads. They're likely stored in a huge gray windowless warehouse somewhere in the Utah desert heavily patrolled a place we cannot visit. Although all of our photos and memories and arts are stored in it. So in a sense the cloud is the real dark net. Yes. Thank you. It was a very clear explanation and we could keep talking about this I think for other two days because it's a really interesting topic and very actual and it's an issue that we are all facing. Our generation but everyone young kids, old people at the moment are also using the internet and anyway they're in contact with the dark net so the whole world is completely involved in this. So maybe next time we will organize another conversation only the dark net. Now I would like to continue our talk and I would like to mention the work we selected for our me family platform which is entitled Ricardo and cut from 2018. We can say a contemporary portrait you have realized gathering images from a personal phone. You actually offered to buy through a real call on social media. So for $1000 Ricardo this person this guy, he agreed to that his personal data could be transformed into a real art project. So through almost the 3000 images from 2004 to 2017 the life of this person is unfolds progressively. Now if I'm thinking about another project of yours that we actually included in our in the catalog of the exhibition family which is the others from 2011. There is a different approach, I would say you appropriate 10,000 images from people's personal computers and you decided to then include this images in an exhibition space I remember when you describe as the way we should install it you said, possibly you had to install it in a wrong space, which was a very interesting way to describe the installation detail of the piece, and you did an operation that actually anticipated of many years the disclosure of Edward Snowden, and at the same time for told the disappearance of the separation between public and private life. So, in both words, you are raising questions that are related to exhibitionism voyeurism also the self that is shaped in the digital area. I would like to ask you a little bit more about this new projects and the difference that you see between the two. That's an interesting question. Well, these two works probably reflect the changes we were talking about earlier. The others was created 10 years ago. We exploited a small software error through which we found thousands of private photos of people who were sharing them, likely without knowing it. This is a video slideshow with all the photos. We chose this slideshow the beginning because it's the traditional like vernacular way to show photos. And as you said in the museum, the projection is always wrong. It's wrongly placed, for example, on a door is wrongly rotated is wrongly keystone, as if my mom set it up. If you look at the photo, there is not much difference between these supposedly private photos and what we post on social media every day, you know, from the edgy to the banal. But they're not all photos of teenagers party. There are also some very dramatic lives. For example, that of a woman who has been beaten and she's documenting her bruises. And you cannot but start wondering what happened. Who did it? Did somebody else ever see these photos other than me? So, you know, the work is addressing how ubiquitous these powerful technologies are becoming and how on the other hand, we don't fully understand how they work, how they can be, you know, at the same time, empowering and rendering us more vulnerable. In a sense, all the Internet's like, in a sense, like how on the Internet, you don't own yourself. It's like it's the Internet that owns you. Well, Ricardo Ancati's, in a way, a follow up to the others. It was commissioned by the Wee Museum in New York, and we could say is the work based on our digital memories. Through an online open call, we found one person, Ricardo, who would sell his use bone, including all the photos and the videos contained therein, knowing that these material will become public. Like in the others, we created this live show or the phone contents that anyone can see, by the way, on the Moodams website for the Me Family exhibition right now. The final video is one hour and a half and covers 13 years of Ricardo's life. We kept all the photos without editing them in chronological order and without filtering or judging. We have manually changed the duration of each photo to emulate the pace at which we usually swipe through our phones, but the difference is very, very subtle, almost unperceptible. And we added this Jean-Marie Rosson, each man, he's the thing he loves, looping in the background. However, these photos have likely made it their way to the internet. The majority remain unseen, like most photographs nowadays. They accumulate on digital devices or remote cloud servers. They are ignored even by their author to be only forgotten and replaced by newer photos or newer devices. Thank you. I think we can actually quite conclude because unfortunately we are running out of time, but before, I would like just to ask you my last question, which is about a solo show. You had the possibility to install at the moment considering the difficult situation everywhere in the world, so you installed this solo show of yours at the Photo Museum in Winterthur in Spitzerland. And is if I'm not wrong, the first solo show of your work to be presented in a museum context, featuring a new commission that will become also part of the museum permanent collection. So I'm interested in knowing from your point of view how important it is for you to be exhibited in an institutional frame, respect to use the net as your art platform, art display. Yes, so yes, we were lucky to install the show, which will open, likely, like, early March. So we're just waiting for it. We worked on a follow up of Riccardo Ancarte. So that's, it's called Hanna Ancarte and that's the work that's been commissioned by the museum and it's now part of their collection. There are a few new works in the show, perhaps the most striking one, and you really need to go and see if you want to experience this, experience it. It's these strange bright yellow cable tray that crosses all the spaces in the museum, physically connecting all the works in the exhibition, making this infrastructure that is usually invisible, very present. It's on a very low waste level and accompanies the museum visitors, sometimes gently, sometimes closing the doors and forcing the viewer in different paths. I think Franco wants to share this. Oh, thank you. I can see it. I mean, I wish we could all have the opportunity to go and see the show in person. Right. In a sense, this thing is a metaphor of how the internet is reprogramming our lives in an unperceptible way. We like to say that the cable tray reprograms the museum. So to go back to your question, parts of the works are exhibited in the museum and parts of them will appear online, complementing each other. For example, there's a new sculpture called off cat, which is this small taxidermy sculpture based on an online meme for which we will publish a high rest photo under public domain on Wikimedia. Oh my goodness. There is a new series of videos called the box and they will also appear online on this art educational platform during the duration of the show. So to sum it up. It's not only an exhibition of images. It's also an exhibition about image circulation, emphasizing where the images come from. In our case, most of the inspiration comes from our wonderings online and where they go, and especially who is looking at these images. Thank you. Thank you very interesting. I really wish we can have the opportunity some way somehow to see the exhibition. If it's going to open, I hope so in March for how long is going to stay? Do you know? Until the end of May. It's a long run. So luckily. Luckily. Yes, luckily. So, actually, I see the timing and they think we run a little bit out of time, but it was very interesting and I want to thank you both, Franco and Eva for this conversation and I also want to underline to the audience that is following us how interesting again is to explore your digital world where I think we can all be able to learn remote elements of the net we can discover. I think in my opinion is that through your work we can discover the other side of the coin revealing aspects of new technologies. Word where sometimes we can feel loss or I can feel loss but other times we can find a guide towards unexplored direction so I think that thinking about contemporary art that would say that the strength of art of contemporary art is to be inclusive of all kind of production, not to being exclusive. And I think that in your work, we can find this inclusion. I would like to invite the public who is following us to set in a way their minds to be open to the net through the immersion in your projects in your work with another approach and approach of discovery and of inclusion. So I wish to everyone to start this exploration, especially with the work that is in our platform. So Ricardo and I cut and of course with all your other projects that people can find in the net. So thank you very much. And I really wish you good luck for the show. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Bye bye. Bye bye. Bye bye. Bye bye. Bye bye.