 I don't know why I said it like that. Tom is a writer and critic based in central New York and Toronto. He writes extensively on contemporary art with recent and forthcoming essays devoted to Chao. How do I pronounce that? Kao-fei. Kao-fei. Chao-fei. The Astor Gates. Oh, god, you have all these hard things to pronounce. Isaac Genskin, Eileen Quinlan, Wolfgang Tillmont, and Christopher Williams. His most recent book is Boredom, which was published this year. So here's Tom McDonough. Thank you. Thank you, Martha. And thank you to the Barnes for the invitation. And thank you, my colleagues who are speaking here today. It's really such a pleasure and an honor. And especially for someone whose last book is titled Boredom, I mean, it's a risk for all of you, I suppose. But I will. I mean, I have to say, I always wonder when I get up here on the stage, why did I choose to speak about the thing that I'm about to talk with you about? Because I mean, I'm neither going to show you lovely 19th century impressionist and post-impressionist painting, nor am I going to guide you eloquently to works upstairs. I'm going to talk about a contemporary artist who's not featured in the exhibition. So maybe what I would say is something like, what I want to think with you about today is what I could describe as maybe a limit case of Flannery, a limit case of some of the conditions that we've been addressing today. But like everyone else, I mean, I got to start. Where are you going to start on Flannery? OK, here we are. Sure. It's just a throwaway. But no, so maybe we could begin here in the 1860s when French poet Charles Baudelaire penned what we might call the essential project of the Flannery in the 12th of his prose poems collected in the small volume known as Paris Spleen. The piece titled Crowds opens with the famous line, it's not given to everyone to take a bath of multitude, enjoying the crowd is an art. I mean, I think we could say that to bathe in the multitude is indeed the form of urban pleasure, artistry even, established by the Flannery of the great European metropolises of the mid-19th century, and carried forward as a search for the marvelous by the surrealists, those avant-garde explorers of the 1920s and 30s, only perhaps to reach its apogee in the so-called derives, those aimless exploratory urban drifts of the situationists in post-war Paris. You see, I mean, already, boredom is taking a grip. It's a danger. Baudelaire, Breton, Debord all knew how to take their pleasure among the masses, to revel in the vicarious carnality of the street. But to pursue the analogy first developed in crowds, while such baths may be a luxuriant or they may be bracing, one thing they all share is that we at some point leave them. We lift ourselves out of the water, dry off, and resume the business of the day. The position of the Flannery depended, that is to say, on the ability precisely to depart from the crowd, to return to the solitude proper to one's literary or artistic vocation and translate the experience of this ineffable orgy, I'm speaking of Flannery, not the symposium today, the experience of this ineffable orgy into polished words or images. To be a Flannery was to be in, I mean, maybe this is polemic in the context of today, but I'd say that to be a Flannery was to be in but not truly of the crowd. But what of the other term in Baudelaire's definition? What about the multitude itself? How might it come to visibility through modes of artistic practice? Beyond the exemplary individuality of the Flannery are there means by which such collectivities take shape? So rather than tracing some contemporary reformulation of modernity's solitary urban wandering then, I'd like to take some time this afternoon to explore one possible response to these questions. Questions posed, we might say, from the perspective of the crowd itself in the work of contemporary French artist, Philippe Perrenault. Now, Perrenault might not be a particularly obvious choice. He's likely known to many of you here in the audience, well known here, in fact, in Philadelphia as the scenarist of the Philadelphia Museum of Arts remarkable 2012 exhibition Dancing Around the Bride. So you may think of him as an inheritor of the 20th century legacy of Duchamp that has so marked him in many of his contemporaries. Others may recall that his early work was considered an exemplar of the so-called relational aesthetics of the 1990s, structured more around informal participation than the finished object. But I've chosen Perrenault because crowds have long been central figures in his art, appearing variously under the guise of demonstrators, party goers, consumers, spectators, or mourners as presence or more often as structuring absence, even if they've been rarely acknowledged as such by his commentators. From his early performative works to more recent installations, he's consistently returned to the figuration of diverse forms of collectivity and provisional community in a contemporary moment marked by the crisis of the public sphere. Not the flaneur, then, for whom the crowd can only be an image in which to take delight, but rather, in some conditional manner, the struggle for the contemporary mass to find a representation of itself. That's my subject today. So to begin, I think it's not too great an exaggeration to claim that Perrenault's work begins with a staged demonstration. No more reality, la manifestation of 1991, is frequently regarded as one of the earliest successful realizations of the artist's mature concerns. For it, Perrenault enlisted the assistance of young students between the ages of seven and eight from a primary school in Nice. A workshop on protest marches determined a set of demands that these kids wanted, right? Christmas celebrations to be held in September. I think we could all agree on that. Snow commanded for the summer as a resident of upstate New York. I'd say, to hell with that, no, thank you. I mean, it's already a possibility. So anyway, they have these utopian childlike demands all announced under this overarching slogan, no more reality, which the children, perhaps tellingly chose for its resemblance to the ubiquitous Nike advertising catchphrase Just Do It. And I mean, as an aside, you might recall that the Just Do It tagline introduced way back in 1988 by advertising firm Whedon and Kennedy quickly became an instantly recognizable global emblem of the Nike brand. The fact that Dan Whedon based it on the last words of serial killer Gary Gilmore, his 1977 remark, let's do it to the firing squad about to execute him, may reveal something about the necrotic character of late capital itself. A short video documenting this performance protest shows the children parading in the school's verdant playground, shouting their slogan and carrying banners on which it's inscribed. They're happy to be out of class on a sunny day, enjoying the fine weather in their shorts and t-shirts. They're charming, well-groomed kids, clearly the offspring of solid middle-class denizens of the French Riviera. We sense something vaguely parodic in the artist's intent in his substituting of these children and their mischievous demands for the serious adult world of protest. To understand no more reality, we need, however, to set this privileged world against another scene that had transpired in the fall of 1990, just six months or so before the making of Parano's video. From early November, high school students had taken to the streets in Paris and other major French cities to protest insufficient funding for education and an atmosphere of insecurity in the schools. Persistent problems there to this day. These protests quickly grew in size and scope, culminating in a large-scale, so-called National March for Education in Paris on November 12th, which attracted around 100,000 high school-age participants. So you see some kind of a, the happy version of these November 1990 protests here, this kind of a multi-ethnic, earnest group of young people holding the banner, proclaiming the need to improve funding for their studies. But then there's the negative side of this as well, let's say. Among the 100,000 protesting on November 12th were groups of so-called casseurs from the working-class immigrant suburbs of Paris who looted shops and clashed violently with the police. 100 officers were injured, dozens of cars were damaged or lit on fire and destroyed, 91 arrests made that day. If the actions of these predominantly black and Arab youth were decried, as much by the official left that had organized the march, as by the government and its forces of order, they nevertheless represented a spontaneous, violent assertion of a right to the city by those who had been regularly chased out of the center of Paris for the previous 20 years. It was the sort of crowd, we might say, most feared by the Parisian bourgeoisie, the return of all it most assiduously attempts to repress or to use the sociological language of the time to exclude. Perono's own position toward this crowd was, at the very least, ambiguous. In a later interview, he remembered the events of November 12, 1990, in these terms, quoting Philippe, he says, some students demonstrated in the streets of France yelling, money, we want money for better education, whereas other kids sought to profit from the situation by looting the stores for chevignon jackets and Burberry scarves so that they would have the appearance of being serious about their studies. Now, on one level, Perono seems here to insist on what we might call the equally spectacular quality of these two modalities of protest, the one chanting its programmed slogans for eager television cameras, the other determined to achieve an image if only an image of privilege or distinction, even at the cost of criminality. On another level, however, it's difficult not to hear in such a remark a rather dismissive attitude toward those whose lives and opportunities had long been circumscribed by what Kristen Ross describes as the continuing economic unevenness of those edge spaces, semi-colonies to the metropolis that are the French banlieues, kind of working class suburbs of the capital. The caisseurs in Perono's remarks are not part of that virtuous collectivity struggling for a common good, money for better education, but take advantage of the demonstration to advance their self-interested agenda, looting luxury goods as a means to attain what he calls the appearance of being serious about their studies. But I think it's insufficient to simply set the crowd of children in no more reality alongside that of the November, 1990 march. I mean, I think a simple comparison here misses something essential. I think we need rather to triangulate three different formations. Both, that is, need to be mapped alongside a third collective formation. One evoked in a text, Pereno composed for an exhibition held during that same summer of 1991 when the video, No More Reality, was first shown. So this is a short text that he writes that reads Central Park on a Sunday, a crowd of bodies and fashions, rollerblades, it's the early 90s, so you can picture it, so think of Friends, that kind of thing, right? Rollerblades, streamlined helmets, cycling jerseys and shorts of colors so well studied they've become a language of their own. Walkman, it's really dated, Walkman headphones plugged into ears, memories of yesterday's news broadcast on CNN where you could see GIs crawling across the Saudi sand. Finally, the ground and garbage cans so thoroughly dug through by the homeless that you have the impression while strolling of stepping on their crops or on their meals themselves. This account of the atomized, privatized, mediatized crowd, circa 1990, provides us with a broader context for understanding the specificity of the artist's approach to collectivity at this moment. It's sense of unreality in the juxtaposition of youthful rollerbladers with the televisual images of distant war and the infinite social distance of the homeless sets Pereno's viewpoint in a particular context, I think, in 1990, 1991. Perhaps something that's close to the context sketched by Jean Baudrillard in these same months when he was writing the series of journalistic essays that would be assembled in his book The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. So, I mean, the very time that we're thinking about that Pereno's making these videos, writing these texts, you know, Baudrillard, this kind of French hyper-intellectual, I don't know what you call him, pseudo-intellectual, crypto-intellectual, I mean, depends on what you think of the moment. You know, Baudrillard is publishing this series of editorials in the pages of a French daily paper on the events of the Gulf War. In those essays, Baudrillard, the prophet of postmodern hyper-reality, right? He wrote of the aphrodisiac excitement that we seek in the multiplication of the false and the hallucination of violence, of our desperate search for what he calls a hallucinogenic pleasure, which is also the pleasure taken in our indifference and our irresponsibility. Perhaps shades of the badol and the flaneur there as well. That kind of indifference and irresponsibility being the very locus of what he calls our true freedom. This he concludes is the supreme form of contemporary democracy. Seen in such a light, the cry of no more reality from perenos child protesters sounds less like the refusal of an oppressive reality principle in the name of emancipatory ludic desublimation than a demand for the more equitable diffusion of those hallucinogenic pleasures endemic to late capital. But the caseur of November 12th cannot simply be assimilated into this dynamic. The violence of their looting of boutiques on the left bank that day had nothing hallucinatory about it, but was rather an insistence on taking the promises of a society of simulation at its word and demanding now the use of all those goods that are proffered to them as mere image. The motto, no more reality could only mean something very different to them. If politics, as defined by French philosopher Jean Cronciaire, is a matter of, as he says, interpreting in the theatrical sense of the word the gap between a place where the demos, the people exists and a place where it does not, where there are only populations, individuals, employers and employees and so on, then we might say that in this work and this moment of history, the people are not where they appear and appear where they are not. So, I mean, I'm gonna map out, I mean, here in this moment, this initial moment of the early 1990s, a particular ambiguous position on Pereno's part, the kind of, I mean, it's difficult to shake the lingering cynicism and suspicion of this early work. But by the later 1990s, we find Pereno explicitly addressing the question of the public, right? Public that for him can only become visible, we might say, as a specter. In a text of these years, he describes the public as a purely anticipatory phenomenon, at least as conjured within the dynamics of a consumer society. So again, he's writing this text, he says, when one has to present a new product, you begin or end up always wanting to anticipate desires. You try to predict what the client who doesn't yet exist will enjoy consuming. These are the basics of marketing based on a myth, the myth of the public. Hitherto, he says, ghosts haunted the places in which they had lived. Now new ghosts appear, the ghosts of consumers who do not yet exist, but who already desire what one seeks to produce for them. These then are not the ghosts of Gothic imagining, or of surrealist hauntings. Not the phantoms that return from a repressed past with all the force of the uncanny, but rather those that return from the future. They are a prefiguration of our as yet unrecognized desires, the present absent objects around which a mythical public might cohere. In this instance, it's the force of marketing that conjures forth these spirits. But we could broaden the case to say that all public opinion is spectral in this sense. This was certainly the response offered by Jacques Derrida when asked to define the contemporary meaning of public opinion. I mean, a public opinion, we might say, figure that haunts all of these debates around spectatorship and the urban, the quality of the urban in the late 19th century onwards. Derrida when asked to define in the early mid-1990s the meaning of public opinion in the present, he said, the silhouette of a phantom, the haunting fear of democratic consciousness. One way of understanding Pereno's project at this moment would be to see it as a search for a dispositif for technologies that could make a spectral public visible without simply dissolving its internal differentiations. Derrida put it this way, as opposed to a unilateral relation between communication technologies and public, the possibility of multilateral relations of what he called a right to, a right of response, a right that allows the citizen to be more than the fraction of a passive consumer public necessarily cheated because of this. The technology of response Pereno proposed in the mid-1990s was simple enough. A demonstration tool, as he called it, consisting of helium-filled white balloons in the shape of cartoon speech bubbles, purposefully left blank so that the bearer could inscribe his or her own demands onto them. Conceived in 1996 and first realized the following year. He was almost certainly inspired by a moment he witnessed during a massive Paris march of early 1994 in defense of public education. Amidst the densely assembled protesters with their banners and placards, he saw two hands holding a crude handmade sign on a sheet of white paper that read, love, amour. The potency of this simple gesture would seem two years later to have motivated the conception of speech bubbles. Simultaneously, I mean I'm an art historian so I can't leave it at that obviously, right? Simultaneously, the double genealogy of this work with an opposing camps of the neo-avancard is apparent. On one hand, the technology of multilateral response was already prefigured in situation circles of the later 1960s in the strategy of Daytona-Mont. And more specifically in René Viennese's insistence that defacing advertising posters and the like with graffiti would, as he writes, bring to the surface the subversive speech bubbles that are spontaneously but more or less consciously formed and dissolved in the imagination. And here you see a slightly more polished version of this notion of Daytona-Mont. This is an advertising image for Guy Debord's book which had just been released in the fall of 67, The Society of Spectacle. And they're taking a daily comic strip character and instead of, it's like Steve Canyon or some shit, right? Instead of him saying like, I love you, I don't love you, or like, why won't you marry me or something? They have this beautiful, you know, Debordian Hegelian Marxist quote about, you know, the relation between project of revolution and non-life. I mean, I'm not gonna get into it. But anyway, you get the idea, right? To kind of substitute, to subvert these mass cultural images by substituting subversive or revolutionary captions on them. So it's like, I think, one genealogy for Pereno's project. But not the only one. On the other hand, speech bubbles owes its formal specificity to the example of Andy Warhol's Silver Clouds of 1966. Those metalized plastic film pillows filled with a mixture of helium and oxygen so they would float lazily through the gallery on latent air currents. Two remarks might be opposite here. First, that the reflective silver surfaces of Warhol's pillows worked to dissolve their form in an inexact, unstable gleam. Their determinate shape giving way to accidental distorted patterns of light and dark reflected from the space of the room in which they were exhibited. And second, that precisely to the extent that Silver Clouds took up and extended the paradigm of the monochrome, first explored in Warhol's silk screens, they were premised on a radical refusal or negation of the communicative potential of the artwork. In speech bubbles, Pereno effectively inverts the Warholian strategy so that the balloons no longer reflect their ambient environment but now reflect the demands of their bearers, overlaying the monochrome surface with text thereby making it speak. Once again, however, speech bubbles demands to be contextualized within a broader framework than can be provided by the aesthetic or even the political aesthetic terrain alone. Getting to know more about French protest in the mid 1990s than you really plan to on a Saturday afternoon at the Bonnet, isn't it? The date of the works conception, 1996, marks it as a product of the aftermath of the largest wave of labor strikes and mass protest in France since the events of May 68. The pursuit of an aggressive neoliberal agenda on the part of the French government along with proposed social security reforms had triggered a mass popular revolt in the winter of 1995 that showed few signs of quickly abating. I think what's important about these strikes, what's notable here is that they were driven by rank and file union members and non-unionized workers rather than by the trade union leadership. The initial move for these strikes was opposed by the official trade unions. It was really a movement from below, impelled by the base and as such deeply ambivalent toward the politics of representation embedded in the hierarchical trade union movement. Pereno has long described speech bubbles as a demonstration tool specifically designed for use by the communist-dominated CGT, the Confedération Generale du Travail, and legend has them being utilized in a 1997 demonstration by this union, although oddly never documented so. In any case, whether that's true or not, the piece was clearly conceived in the same post-1995 atmosphere of labor militancy that had seen the critique of union representation and the embrace of spontaneity. Or as Pereno said a few years afterward, they were a modest tool for demonstrating that enables everyone to write their own slogans and to stand out from the group and thus from the image that comes to represent it. His language here is significant and clarifies the fundamental political stake of the project. The intent is to differentiate the individual from the group and from the image of the group. From, in other words, one's subsumption to a coercive representation. Jacques Rancier may again help us to understand the import of Pereno's statements here. Leftist thought has typically understood political action as predicated on the passage from disorganized series to fused group, from disorganized urban, the badot, the crowd of badot or the crowd on the street to this notion of a group drawn together as in a form of fusion. Here the language is famously that developed by Jean-Paul Sartre in his famous account of the storming of the Bastille. A group that's for itself, right? Yet this is precisely the dynamic Rancier questions that move from series to fused group. When crowds form in Rancier's work, it's generally not as with Sartre in order to storm the Bastille. They come together, rather, to stage the process of their own disaggregation. He thereby traces the paradoxical outline of the Demos as a simultaneous coming together and breaking apart. I mean, the people is nothing other than the invention of new and hitherto unauthorized modes of disaggregation, disagreement, and disorder. The extent that trade unions like the CGT wished to keep members in their proper places, speech bubbles provided a space where such representations could be resisted. A simple dispositive that nevertheless allowed for a multilateral response against the unison demanded by the demonstration as image. I mean, a resistance in a sense to the crowd as a monolithic entity. Of course, yes, that's something of a utopian horizon for these works. If indeed they were utilized as an actual demonstration tool in 1997, since that time, speech bubbles hasn't been found, covered in slogans and carried in protests, but mute, floating in large bunches under the ceiling of exhibition spaces. In that sense, they remain closer to Warhol's silver clouds than the situationist's subversive Daytona Moll. Whether one reads this as due to the limits of labor militancy in the later 1990s or those of Pereno's project itself depends on one's point of view. And in any case, we should most likely hold both to account. The failure of speech bubbles, which is at once the failure of an entire moment in counter-hegemonic struggle, is perhaps codified within the body of Pereno's work itself. Or how else are we meant to read the blank marquees he has been producing since 2006 than as dialectical reversals of the earlier balloons? What had been a surface of potential inscription becomes an inaccessible space of a unilateral communication that chooses to remain silent, or at best speaks an unknown tongue. The disaggregated subject of protest becomes the collective subject of spectacle. The speech bubbles were always intended for the street. Even when they're confined within the exhibition space, their helium-filled buoyancy threatens to lift them out the nearest window. They practically yearn for what lies outside the Muzale institution. The marquees, like their cinematic real-world counterparts, can only signal an opposite movement, luring visitors into the gallery as a crowd of monads united in their very separation. In the words of one of the great motion picture theater designers of the 20th century, we've attempted to stimulate the escape psychology in the design of our theater fronts to throw off the cares of the day and dwell for a while in the land of make-believe. That, I think, is a succinct summary of the dynamic in the marquees. But we would also, let's say, as an aside, then have to take into account his latest revision of this form. The speech bubble is becoming the hovering fish of his last New York exhibition, and seen most recently floating in the turbine hall at Tate in London as part of his Hyundai commission. Here, we are again confronted with a muteness, but now coupled with a strange impression of non-human sentience as these organic inorganic objects seem to move about with indiscernible purpose, almost as analogies of the exhibition audience itself. Perhaps then we might conclude with one final work. The artist's 2015 film, The Crowd, first screened as one component of his exhibition at the Park Avenue Armory in New York, which opened early in the summer of that same year. It pictures a rather large crowd. The artist used around 300 extras in the space of the exhibition itself, the armory's vast drill hall. In effect, it establishes a mise en habine, imagining and staging a group of people visiting a future exhibition, namely the one in which The Crowd itself was to be projected. But that pat description hardly captures the uncanniness of the film, in which we first see the actors from above as they relax, lounging on the hall's floor, reading, texting, or simply reclining with their eyes shut. As daylight fades and the space darkens, they arise and mill around, at one point standing transfixed by some off-screen spectacle. We'll later be treated to the images of fiery conflagration that caught their attention, and then forming, as you see here, a semi-circle around a spotlit void, listening to an unseen musical performance at whose conclusion The Crowd applauds. Daylight returns to the hall and the actors exit, speaking casually with one another as if a spell had been broken. Throughout, the individuals making up this crowd seem automaton-like, devoid of will, and in fact, Pereno made use of a professional hypnotist to place his actors in a suggestive state. What they enact, however, is not simply the viewing of the exhibition, but something closer to a typology of the contemporary urban crowd. In the yawning, empty space of the hall, we seem to witness, successively, the dispersed leisure of lunchtime or weekend visitors to a park, the distracted wandering of window shoppers at the mall, the more manic rush of commuters in a train or subway station, the entranced gaze of moviegoers at the theater, or the gathering of onlookers and listening to a street performance. In its recourse to hypnotic states, The Crowd in fact returns us to the very origin of the pseudoscience of crowd psychology, which we might understand to be the obverse of the Flemmer's amused typology of the spectacle of urban life, the kind of dark side of the Flemmer's classifications. As it emerged in the late 19th century, crowd psychology relied crucially upon theories of hypnotism in order to articulate the mechanism of imitation that it understood to be the defining characteristic of large groups, in which the individual seemed to lose his or her conscious will and surrender to a form of reciprocal suggestion. Drawing upon contemporary schools of hypnotic research, theorists like Le Bon or Todd attempted to account for what they saw as the barbarous nature of crowd behavior. And in hypnosis, they found an exploration for the forms of collective hallucination and the predominance of the unconscious that in their eyes characterized the masses. In The Crowd, the people are similarly reduced to a set of punctual reflexes, shuffled from scene to scene, an undifferentiated mass whose component parts nevertheless remain isolated from one another. We're familiar with this crowd. It's very much like that of spectators in a cinema. The ones conjured by its irrational influence in Siegfried Krakauer's from Caligari to Hitler. The ones subject to its control and domestication in Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno's culture industry. But another possibility exists. Beyond the sociological quantity named audience lies the potentiality of the demos, the phantom public. Not long after the premiere of The Crowd, Pereno explained, I don't like the word audience. I don't think that as an artist, you relate to an audience, he says. It's not my problem. The public, though, is another matter. There is a dialectical difference. The public is on the side of the other, while the audience is on the side of the spectacle. To be on the side of the other is to recognize that that collectivity, I'm sorry, let me just try that again. To be on the side of the other is to recognize that collectivity is not the surrender of singularity into an undifferentiated mass, but the staging of a disaggregation. Pereno's work, as it's taken shape over the last 25 years, is at least in part an engagement with the various forms through which collectivity has found expression in a period when the very possibility of such communal identification has come under sustained attack. This necessarily entails, on our part, a recognition of the work's openness to social forces that lay outside the confines of the autonomous artwork. So while he may well be an inheritor of Duchamp and a proponent of a relational aesthetics, we need to understand these as ciphers of some larger dynamic, engaging the question of the crowd form in the present. The point, needless to say, is not to force Pereno's work to occupy a particular political position of one kind or another, but to see the manifold ways in which it's given provisional form to a phantom public in those intervals between the Deimos's presence and its absence. Far from the flaneur who gives expression to the crowd, it is here a matter of the multitude itself shaping the artwork under its own impulsion. Thank you. Thank you. Tom, at one point, mentioned edge spaces and the French banlieu, 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 Muhammad-Bruisa 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 like shake it out maybe, move your legs, your feet probably need to move. Like if you can just like stretch all the way up. Yeah, 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 gonna show. I'm gonna talk about some of them. 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 gonna happen, right? 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. Okay. 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 Emmanuel, 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 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 one in a billion, right? And what this means is, has people seen the matrix by the way? I know it's been like a long time. Yeah, show of hands, seen the matrix? No, okay. 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, 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 Uber-Raw, Alfred Jerry's 1896 play. And what, 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, that's like, 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 Bilal's 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 at 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 you 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 be able to 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, 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 like 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 gonna 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 in 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 I'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 artist 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 duration 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. And 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, the construct was, the performance was 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. Got mine, okay, thank you. 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, we're 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, I 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 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 could 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 with 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 the 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 Vido Conti piece. I was really close to including it and I was like, nah, 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 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. They did a project that didn't really make sense to include here a couple of 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, or 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 static-y stuff coming up, that will be the electromagnetic. And so the sounds are me scrolling, the opening an app, liking something, 27 minutes full relationship to what the actions are helps me understand in a different way, gives me another input 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, 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 a very clear correlation with following. And I think that the question then becomes what do we do with that? And that's not something that I 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 barn's thing. I promise it's coming soon. I'm saving it for the end, so. 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, so 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, Reddit, as in April Fool's Day sort of hijinks, 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, 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 the 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 Shelley Bernstein, who's here, who, Shelley, if you're watching, thank you. Also, hi to the live stream 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 Hear. 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 of 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 there. 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 a website as a sculpture, as a sort of a block of clay. 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 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, this 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. Oh wait, we go up here now, right? Okay. Is there water there, can I? Yeah, under the... Tom, do you want one? Thank you. Three super interesting talks. One thing that, one theme that I was sort of noticing coming out in all three of them was the sort of tension between trying to maintain agency when you're part of a crowd and the kind of inevitability of the giving over of the self, losing yourself to the crowd that both Tom and Bridget talked about. It's sort of the kind of definition of the gawker. And I found it a little bit in your work too when you were your own work, when you were talking about the Best Buy project because you were, I mean it kind of comes back to this theme of resistance that we were talking about this morning. Like you were resisting, you were in the consumer landscape but you were resisting being a consumer. You were refusing to give yourself over and you were giving voice to it, constantly with the tweets so the tweets were sort of like the speech bubbles. So I don't really have a question there but I kind of want to, if anybody, I just sort of want to invite you to maybe say more about this idea or this tension. I mean one of the, I can say something very general that just came to mind while you were talking about this problem of agency. One of the things I've been trying to think about in working on this topic is, which I think came out in my talk that we have such incredibly negative associations with gawking and as a behavior. And it's something that when we do it we find ourselves embarrassed by it but I think that I was really struck in looking at these, am I echoing? Does that sound weird? A little bit, but you need to speak up a little bit. Okay, looking at these late 19th century artists who are engaging with this in their, in pictorial form, in their works that they certainly show some very cynical, a very cynical interpretations of gawking behavior. It's, there's a lot of that that's very dark and alarming and disturbing but it's not all negative and that some of it is even quite positive. Some of it's very funny, some of it's about connection and empathy and so I think that thinking about this issue of agency and resistance or protest that it doesn't always have to be a question of maintaining your agency in order to protest. That there's some radical potential too to letting your, the integrity of your individuality dissolve at the boundaries and that I mean that's part of the power of the crowd as a revolutionary force at least definitely in the 19th century French mindset and that there's something powerful about giving oneself over. It's just about who you're giving yourself over to. You don't wanna give yourself over to the state but giving yourself over to each other there can be power to that. I mean that's just a general line of thinking I'm pursuing in addition to the very necessary line of thinking from the beginning of crowd psychology forward of being, you know, concerned and alarmed at what happens to subjectivity within a crowd situation. I mean maybe I'm gonna ask for people's forgiveness for like probably expressing badly something that's too simple to have to say in the first place but you know it seems to me like really significant to in thinking about the question that you're posing Martha to remember that like all of the categories all of the terms that we're dealing with here today are not like objective names for actual things but are ideological and social constructions. I mean whether it's the crowd, the people, the flanner, the bado, I mean that these are all terms that are invented for particular social functions at particular social moments. And it doesn't mean that they have a unified or singular meaning of course but that the fact is that many of the spaces where these terms were first developed in popular literature like the Physiology are there to reassure a middle class audience about their control over a space that they didn't have an objective social control over yet. And I was noticing a few days ago and just reading Baudelaire now I mean I was preparing for this, reading Baudelaire. And it was like almost this, it was like there was a sense of urgency with which he was trying to insist that the flanner has, he makes the meaning. I mean so I agree with you. Yeah so I'm not sure where I'm going to necessarily go with that but simply to say that you know whether it's in the early 21st century or the later 19th, we have to think about audience as well I mean and what kind of, I mean beyond the, I mean it's absolutely necessary to recognize the internal complexity of these practices, objects and the like. But that for, they were shown in particular spaces and consumed in particular ways. So I can sit here and for example talk about speech bubbles by Perano and say look at this intricate careful negotiation but ultimately when there are objects in a luxury marketplace that sets some limits on how, on what kinds of claims I feel comfortable making. Question for you Bridget. And I'm sorry if you said this in your talk and I missed it. I mean we know that the Flanar is of a specific class status. Is there also a class status assigned to the Bado? No and one of the things that interests me most about it as a type and I absolutely agree with Tom that these are types, these are constructions that are theorized and cultural criticism and literature and art that don't always map on to how this actually played out in the streets but no the Bado was an equal opportunity type. Anyone could be this Bado. So they were, I went into the project thinking there was always going to be this class differential of Flanar being affluent and Bado being lower class. That's actually not true. Bado can be lower class but they can also be very wealthy. They can be men, they can be women, they can be children, they can be tourists. They're often actually theorized as tourists so people from other nations, other nationalities and also other ethnicities. So it's just very open model of looking that's I think interests, artists and thinkers. Can I ask though, I mean is the nature of the Bado essentially that it's not you? I mean the Bado is always someone else. Someone else who's the kind of, you know, bit of a sucker, interested in whatever passes by their view and you by your discerning nature of reading this book telling you about the Bado are already like, well, I don't look at that stuff. But no, it's tourists and seeing other tourists and being like, oh, it's tourists. It's actually not true. No, okay. And there, I mean maybe the textual, the kind of classic text that I cited and that several of us pointed to the physiologie du Flener or the Victor Fornel that I cited, some of these early classic texts that talk about the Flener where the Bado also appears but that hasn't been discussed as much. There is often, you know, some of those statements are dripping with condescension and even some of the quotes I gave where the Bado is admired and praised. I'm still trying to figure out for myself how much irony there is there because I know that there are shades of irony to those statements of the Bado is actually an artist and worthy of admiration. I think there's some irony there but I'm still deciding how, on the scale of irony, how much irony. But in the works of art that really brought me to the project and that are the center of the project, what's striking is how much and how frequent, even almost a constant in the artists that engage with the Gawker as a type in the most interesting ways. They are always identifying these figures in pictorial ways that are quite clear where they see themselves as artists as Gawkers too and they completely, they might poke gentle fun that the Gawkers in the ways you're describing but they also, through various means of, you know, perspectival positioning and others analogize what they are doing to what the Gawkers are doing and also analogize what their viewers are doing looking at the work to what the Gawkers are doing. So I don't think that they have that, you know, it's not me stance. Before I, before I just want to ask one more question to man and just to kind of tie your talk a little bit to Angela's because you both talked about artificial intelligence versus human intelligence and there was that moment and in your talk where, you know, you showed what happens when we just, when the kind of human intervention goes away and it's just artificial intelligence and it kind of goes wrong and that happened in your project too, right? I mean, so, and I know you have ideas about the singularity. Kind of apocalyptic ideas about artificial intelligence. How dark you guys want to go. Yeah, I mean, I think it's not, I don't think anyone, it's such a, it's a black hole, right? I think on the one hand, I have deep concerns about the, not concerns but just sort of a paranoia about the evolution of artificial intelligence with regards to corporations and our relationship to those corporations. So if the AI can only be developed by Google and Facebook at the scale at which it needs to evolve to actually have this sort of lasting impact of our lives, what is our relationship to then is like a normal everyday humans? And I think there's a scenario in which we lose sight and I think that's why I started with that idea that we're in a simulation and if we know it, does it change anything? And if we're not, does it matter at that point? So it's a thought experiment at that point. But this idea that at some point the technology will become so advanced that we don't understand what's technology and what's not technology and we lose our humanness in that. And I think if we're gonna have a hope as a species, it's that our consciousness will evolve in some capacity and will become embedded within other AIs basically. And this is like, there are people who have written really smart things about this and I am not one of them. I'm just someone who's sort of looking at what other people are saying and trying to interpret it based off of how humanity tends to evolve. And I think that we're further along than we might, than many people might realize. Or at least that I realized as recently as like a year or two ago. So I think, but I do think there is a scenario in which we're able to evolve in ways that we can't actually predict right now. I don't know what that will look like in one version of it though. It's not flesh and blood human sitting on a stage. And then to me that gets to the idea of like what does it mean to be human at all, right? And this is like as old of a question as there is. Like I exist on this planet. I think therefore I am, but so what? What is it that fundamentally makes us human? And I think that in the coming years that will be much more evident. Sorry. I, can you, is it, is it working? Oh, there we go. Okay, listening to all the three of you. It was a, it was a daunting task to try to write down what you were, the points that you were making. But I, I think I've tagged it to that quote from Baudelaire that enjoying the crowd is an art. Because that runs through all three of your, your, you know, your presentations, especially looking at man's long list of artists. And that listening, and then seeing the artwork that Bridget presents, which I have fallen in love with. Great. I mean, I'm gonna have to really get into that. Tom is, it's, it was difficult. Sorry. I'm sorry. And I don't think I'm alone here. Because I'm gonna have a drink, I'm gonna have a drink of water. Yeah, well, okay. And I think why it was just that it, I kept thinking it was that Pereno was, was possibly, for me, a, a, a tattoo contemporary. But then that's the content. Yeah. Right. Yeah. I just said, as far as I, I, you know, could bring myself because you have, you, oneself is, is, is the focus for, for, you know, for, for all of your work. I see myself as a Baudelaire. I mean, I, when, when, when you sat down and we were talking and you asked, and I said, oh, it's like a, like a butterfly that flies from South America to, to Canada. You got to stop at some point and smell the roses. I think we all tend to, wherever we are, be one or the other, be that gawk or, or to be that flander that's, you know, going to a gallery or a, a play, poetry reading. Where, where do, where do you see Philadelphia in that context? I know where you see Philadelphia. I know where you see Philadelphia. I know where you see Philadelphia. First prize, first prize was two nights in Philadelphia. Second prize was a whole week in Philadelphia. But, but man, I'm happy with men. And I'll give this back because I know I, I tend to bloviate. I'm having my 50th Central High School reunion in three weeks. Oh, nice. So yeah, which is a major miracle. Yeah. But what it says too is that you reached out to Central students to be part of your. Yeah, well, the Barnes has a relationship with them. So they, they made that happen. And that wouldn't, I would never have been able to do that without the Barnes, so. So again, so I, there I am as a Philadelphia and as a fan of the Barnes, I am pulled into, you know, to this, that's why, you know, the question about where do you see Philadelphia is important to each, each of you. Yeah, I mean, I'll speak to, as I spoke to you a little bit, I mean, I have a, this sort of, not complicated, but a bizarre nostalgia for this city. I grew up in, in Ballack and Wood in Belmont Hills and would come into the city on the weekend sometimes. I don't have a, but it's that, that's in the past, right? So coming back to Philadelphia for this project, it was important to me that I kind of secretly looked at my own relationship to the city and the location, in the location that I choose to work with the students. And so I don't know if I have a clear, and I will say this from just a cosmetic perspective, Philadelphia has changed drastically in just a very short amount of time. And I think there's a part of me that, not that I don't like change, but that it worries me. From a perspective of, is the expansion sustainable? Will all that look like? Is it going to go the same route as places like New York where you can't afford to live there anymore? And what does that rate of expansion look like? And who profits from that? And who gets put out because of that? And so that is changing, I'm sure that that's changing the fabric of the city, but I say that as an outsider, someone who has come in and sort of is looking around as I walk from the train station to hear kind of what a general feeling is in the city. But at the same time, it feels kind of exciting. So again, as an outsider, it's nice to see that. So yeah. And I mean, I'm also equally excited to see what's been happening here at the Barnes. I think it's just, the fact that it exists in this space and like, I know I'm a bit of sounding like a Barnes groupie here, but like this building is like, it's amazing. It is a very, it's a phenomenal building. And the program, so the things that are happening here are really exciting and interesting to me from those perspectives, so. That better than the criminal youth. Oh yeah, the youth, what was it called? Detention Center or something? Oh, is that what was going to be on this location? Detention Center, what was it? Yeah. That's a lot of change. Okay, I'm not sure I followed well what was being talked about, but one of the things that came to me when you were talking, Tom, one of the things that came to me and then reflects back on other than the first talk was, let's see how I can explain this. Are you, were differentiations being made between a crowd with agency and a crowd without agency? In other words, when you were showing, for example, all those protest groups, including the against reality, which I really like, which I thought was really interesting, was were you showing that as a crowd of the, I mean, I'm sure you was saying other things about it. You're showing that as a crowd with agency and then the wonderful, I thought it looked wonderful, the artist whose name I don't remember, but the one you talked about most of the time, where the crowd, I guess it was in a gallery, I don't know what the figures were made out of. Sure, those are people. People, okay. So that should be like the not- His greatest creation. The development from the Gawkers and the Plunners to a crowd of not agency. Yeah, no, I think that's very astute. I think that's very astute, absolutely. Oh, wow, that's a good term to bring in, certainly, and something that's been absent from the day, but certainly in trying to think about maybe some of the things that separate 1850s from, 1950s from our current moment is precisely new forms of collective alienation that might be summarized in a term like Riesman's Lonely Crowd, I mean, a book that encompasses a wide range of things, of course. But no, I think the comment about agency is really apt. And certainly, yeah, in the work that I'm discussing in Pereno's work, there's no single through line about agency, and you're right to detect a variety of responses in his own work between an attempt to maybe where it begins in the work like no more reality is providing agency to this group of, we would call it the youth, you know? Kids giving them over a kind of agency that they don't normally have in school to something like in the speech bubbles, a simply a creation of a tool that people can use to develop their own agency to this very strange final work, which I would have to admit if I'm being honest, I probably haven't entirely managed to wrap my head around in which this assembly of people is transformed into some loose, strange, hypnotized agglomerate. I mean, it's almost as if they begin with agency and then lose it and then as they disperse, regain it. I mean, there's something very paradoxical about that. But I think those are interesting terms to bring in. And I suppose maybe agency is a question that while we haven't addressed explicitly is something that's run through the entire day really from Andre at the very beginning to Man at the end. I think we've all been wrestling with that question whether historically or in the present moment or both in these talks. I think that makes a lot of sense. I kind of want to ask about, I want to ask you to analyze the Pepsi commercial, the representation of the crowd. I mean, maybe not everybody has seen it. So maybe that's not a good idea, but it's so related to what we've been talking about today. I've read about it. Have you ever seen it? I'm just, I'm like an old man. I'm like, you know, reading photographs. If we had more time on it, say let's watch it right now and then talk about it as a group. But actually, could I ask a question though? Is that possible? Yes. Okay, because I really actually, I've been thinking a lot about Andre at the beginning in Bridget's talk. And I mean, I think the question begins by hearing your talk and knowing that part of the project for you is to bring this into questions about early cinema, right? I mean that the Lumière brothers enter into this. And that got me thinking about you know, Andre dealing with this imposition of a uniform time that also corresponds with a moment when photography is giving way to proto-cinematic technologies and which are obviously themselves completely bound up with a standardization of time. And we couldn't have Moybridge and the like without a very careful regulation of time. And then I'm curious about whether part of the transformation that you're both dealing with and part of the move from Flannert to Badot and the like has to do with an endpoint in cinema and whether that also means that partly what you're both dealing with is a move from the individual reception of the aesthetic object to modalities of collective reception. And so I'm wondering if both of you might kind of respond to that question a bit, that you know, it's no longer simply the crowd represented in the painting but it's also the crowd as a new mode of reception of the artwork, you know, anyway. Yeah, I mean, I don't know how much my main response to that is yeah. You said it really well. No, I think that it's not just cinema but it's, I mean the 1890s is so fascinating to me as a focal point for this topic which certainly extends beyond the 1890s but I'm focusing there because, not just because of the birth of cinema but also because of these other media that artists like Toulouse-Lautrec and Bonoche and Balaton are working in. These artists who see themselves primarily as painters who start making posters and prints that are just mass distributed in new kinds of print journalism where they are working with a different mindset when they're creating their work knowing they will have a mass audience and that there's a lot of excitement and creative potential to that but there's also a lot of anxiety about that about how to corral or attract and hold the attention of a mass audience and also how to compete. How does a painter still compete when there are posters and when there are movies? And so just that anticipating the collective audience I think is crucially important for this transition and the way that that's thematized in the pictures as well but I do think that there's something about, I mean it's too neat and tidy but there's definitely something about the beginning of cinema that really just kind of codifies that that this is the new regime that we watch things and we watch visual culture in this collective kind of gawking way that we didn't before. Although you know Domié was showing Gawkers in the salon decades before so there's all kinds of continuity but I do think there's something to that. It's so bad. As this discussion has been going on I went back to the 1960s in my mind and I was thinking of Marshall McLuhan. The medium is the message and it seems to me, I wonder how it could be like an overlay with all the different technologies, his perception of reality, of just giving it sort of like a different viewpoint or a different way of being able to look at everything that you've been talking about in just another dimension. Andre has a question too, but did you have another one? Thank you for the talks. My question is for Bridget and maybe it touches on something that Tom just asked and the question concerns the relationship between the spontaneous character and specifically the spontaneous character of the clustering of the crowd of Gawkers and modes of technological reproduction specifically those that were emerging in the 19th century. And the question is how spontaneous is the coalescence, the kind of physical coalescence of a crowd if arguably it's so highly mediated by technological modes of reproduction? And my example for this really goes back to the Baudelaire, the 1863 essay, The Painter of Modern Life which basically starts in a really fascinating way. It starts with a scene in the Louvre where essentially a crowd of Gawkers go to see very familiar works of art as principal politicians and Raphaels but they only go to see those works of art precisely because they've been made famous by the engraver's art which is to say by circulating technologically reproducible images. So I was wondering if this kind of spontaneous character of the coalescence can actually be complicated slightly by the pressure of technological reproduction? Thanks, that's an interesting question that I haven't really thought about in those terms before. I think that in the example you gave, I can see that happening, how reproductive media have actively shaped these potential Gawkers' interests before they find themselves in that situation and channels them in particular directions. But so much of the gawking behavior that is represented in the pictures that I've found and gathered has nothing to do with works of art. And so I'm having a hard time thinking of ways that that would happen, for example, when Gawkers gather around a suicide or an accident. Of course, journalism comes in after the fact, right? So there is reporting and there is eventually even photographs, but that doesn't affect the spontaneity of the crowd forming in the moment as it happens. So I'm gonna have to think about that further, thanks. Andre? Thank you all three. I think another great panel with lots of interconnections. And I wanna shift perspective just a little bit from away from the flunner and the badeau and towards what these figures are actually looking at and whether there isn't a more systematic way to frame and to characterize it. Because I think what has not changed over the 150 years is an art form and forms of spectatorship that are always seeking the excessively topical, that are always after the new, after the news, that are always, if we go back over Baudelaire's lists of things, and Benjamin's lists of things, that we are always traveling in the realm of the political, new media, social media, cinema, mass spectacle, we are at transport and transportation hubs, right? There's hardly any difference between Kaibot at the Garcenasar and Eumann going to the Port Authority, right? And so I'm wondering if that kind of coherence of subject matter almost is a necessity or if it can be broadened. And maybe the more specific questions for each of you would sound a bit like that. So Tom, one of the things that has fallen out of the list, and that was so central for Benjamin, is the public private exterior interior, the domestic interior question, right? And that seems to have completely fallen out of the more contemporary flannery practices, right? And what might that be about? Do we not, does the private no longer hold any kind of promise at this moment, right? And then, Richard, I was wondering whether the Bardot, whether there isn't a closer connection between the Bardot and anarchical culture at that moment, right? Whether that attraction to scenes that are scenes of violence, but scenes of planted anarchical violence that are coming out of the blue and are sort of really powerful interruptions in the public, and whether there isn't a closer connection, and whether the Bardot isn't looking specifically at pretty much everything of accident and newness, but whether there aren't some more emblematic or typical contents for the Bardot, like anarchist intervention. And then, man, I wanna be really cruel, instead of say, what would, if the Barnes had asked you, leave your cell phone behind, take a piece of paper and some crayons, and we'll drive you for an hour into the bucolic landscape of Pennsylvania. Would you have just run a screaming and said I couldn't possibly produce any art that way? What would a man Bardot look like that had lost, if you had lost your cell phone? Sort of is my question, but is there any topic that's taboo in your social media world, right? Do you see what I'm, hmm? I guess we'll go in reverse order. Yeah, I think, well, if the Barnes had presented me with that, I would have said, yeah, let's go right now, let's take that time, put the phones away. I mean, that's what I did with the students, particularly, because their relationship to their devices is even more pronounced than probably most of the people in this room. So, but I think ultimately it's not, you can't, this is embedded in our life. We can't, at this point, we're beyond the sort of realm of being able to completely not have technology in our lives, right? So what's more interesting to me is how do we exist in relationship to it? So sure, you can take a set period of time and say, okay, let's do something for a set period of time without any relationship to technology, and that might be interesting, but then it's ultimately, how does that, what does that mean? Like what does that mean for us as individuals, collectively, and how do we, bless you, and how do we experience art and sort of this common experience together, right? So I think to me it's not as much like the parameters by which might be put upon a project, but more what is our experience in relationship to those parameters, whatever they might be. So that's a bit of a dodge, but I believe that. And I know that like for me personally, I tried for many months to tell myself that I was going to not get another smartphone. And ultimately I did. I did not have the self-will to completely take that out of my contemporary lifestyle. And I have very mixed feelings about that. But the best that I can do, and I think this is with the more recent work with the sound that kind of investigates a psychological and sort of an emotional state of mind that is detached from the intellectual relationship, but is trying to kind of offset. And I talk about that in other places about like just recalibrating my mind. And so that I'm not looking at a screen I'm not mediating my experience through a screen, but I'm kind of creating vibrations for my body and my mind. And that's not intellectual, but that's purely emotional and sort of psychological for lack of a better phrase. So that's how I would approach that particular aspect. Can I jump in here? Even though I know you guys want to answer Andre's question, but I just want to talk a little bit more about the smartphone and the way that it's changed Flannery. It's something that I've been thinking about because it seems to be at once really the sort of enemy of the possibility of being a Flannery, but also kind of like the best tool possible for being a Flannery. And the way that it's an enemy is, if Flannery is sort of about kind of wandering, kind of unstructured wandering and discovery, I mean, think about how often you are using your phone to tell you where to go, to tell you what's the right restaurant in this new neighborhood that you don't know. So there's this chance of this, the possibility of kind of chance discovery is, I mean, of course you can still do it, but we just don't do it as much. And that's a privilege. But it's also such an, I mean, I think the fact that so many people are out there in the world looking and observing things with the idea that I'm gonna take a picture of this unusual thing that I see so that I can post it on Instagram or whatever, maybe it makes us more kind of astute observers. Well, I would say, I'd say two things, but maybe the first thing is to note that it seems to me that the history of Flannery has always been the history of its disappearance. I mean, from the mid-19th century, people were already lamenting, well, the really good years for strolling were the 1830s. That was when you could walk down the boulevard and it was great. And it's just continually like that. It's always looking back to something that's been lost. Or at least, I mean, that's one trope in this literature. And so I think when we sit here and talk about the way that technology has made certain things impossible, we have to recognize that that's itself a kind of vision of modernity that's been around for a very long time. That we're always just a little too late. And that makes me a little leery of, I mean, while I wouldn't obviously discount the role of technological mediation in this whole story, and I think Hamam brought up an interesting argument in his question earlier, I'm leery of technological determinism in telling us that X is no longer possible because of the new regime around. And I do think each new layer of technology forecloses some things and opens up others. That's like my McLuhan-esque optimism breaking through today. Like five minutes from now, I'll be more devotee and pessimistic, but whatever. For now, I've got the smiley face. Kind of end on an up-none, you know? Exactly. It never rains until it rains. That's what I've heard. Ask another question. I have two questions for Tom. The first one is quite naive. It's basically, was Pereno aware of the kind of imagistic quality of the collapse of actually existing state socialism in 1989, which is so contemporaneous with the images of and the film and the creation and the formalization, sorry, of certain forms of protest? And the second one is, my second question is more sort of theoretical. It's to do with your sneaking in of the category of the multitude at the end. And I was wondering, like so much of the talk was focused about the historical category of the crowd, which is so internal to the development of capitalist society. And the multitude is a kind of strange, meta-historical category, or arguably kind of strange, meta-historical category. So I was wondering how do you justify that shift from crowd to multitude? Yeah, sure. I mean, in terms of the first question, this very punctual question, undoubtedly the entire generation of artists who came of age with Pereno are marked by the events of 89 to 91 without a doubt. But I do think there's, I do think there's for me, a very, a much more punctual set of responses that are tied to a particular kind of transitional moment in French labor movement. In some ways, the 90s as like the last hurrah for a particular French labor movement. And I do think there are very particular experiences that he has of these mobilizations between 91 and 95, 96 that are really significant for him. And so I do wanna think about the specificity in that level. I mean, multitude, I don't think I'm gonna be able to respond with a particularly adequate, theorized or philosophical reflection. I mean, I felt the permission to use multitude to sneak it in, in a sense, I'm gonna blame Baudelaire, as I do for most things in my life, my hashish addiction, my collection of top hats. That his own use of this notion of a band, the multitude in the prose poem crowds is how it came in. And then, yes, by the end, I mean, that's something, whether at the end I'm really developing a negrian usage, no, I don't think I could really make that excuse, or I don't think I could really make that claim. I think that, you know, I'm not using it in that rigorous a way. But this is a very private exchange. Sorry, yes. I'm gonna open it up a little bit. Please. No, please. Oh, me? Yeah, you. Well, ultimately, yeah, okay, sure. I mean, I guess, I mean, the question essentially is about the, what is the nature of the collective that I'm saying is called forth and finds representation in Pereno's work. And I guess I would say it is neither the, you know, grand unified monolithic working class coming to its own self-consciousness, you know, modality of 20th century Marxist thinking, but nor is it going to be a, nor is it yet this postmodern, you know, a post-communist notion of multitude. I really am committed to this. I am interested in exploring and rely in this paper on a model developed by a French political philosopher, Jacques Ranciere, that wants to insist that the particular nature of the crowd isn't in its coherence and unity, but is in what it divides, you know, that the crowd is continually in the operation of driving wedges between things, between itself and the state, and then internal to itself. It's always in this continual process of disaggregation and disunity. That I find to be a particularly interesting and vital model, and I think it also is one that helps me to see those works. I mean, I'll admit that it's not driven by my commitment to a political ideal, but driven to a commitment to trying to understand these strange objects and practices. Yeah, that's a, where are we now? So just a question for you, two questions. First, Bridget, thank you very much for your talk, and the accident struck me very strongly. And my first question is, to what extent is the accident, the scene of the accident, or is the crowd the accident? Because the crowd has a temporal transience, right? It's not a stationary object. So to some extent, the crowd itself is the accident. And to follow up on that, I'm an orchestra conductor. So when I look at a score, there's a process of reduction and then a process of expansion. Is it's impossible for me to take it all in at once and create something out of it? And my reaction to the discussions of Flannery and the crowd is that there's an act of reduction, but without consequential active re-expansion for, there's like a deed democratization almost of talking about the crowd. I would love to hear your thoughts about both of these things. I might have to ask you to expand on the latter point, be a little bit more specific. And this is not directed just to you, it's for all of you. Oh, okay, well maybe someone else can take up that one. Well, I think this is actually, I think that your terms are actually precisely mirroring Baudelaire's own in the 1860s. I mean, Baudelaire himself talks about, I mean, his whole oeuvre is structured around modes of condensation and dispersion. And certainly the Flannery entails both. The Flannery entails first that immersion into the bath of the city and that breaking down of ego boundaries to identify yourself with this vast array of people that you're swimming within. But then it's countered by a second moment always of condensation, of the way that that dispersion then results in a strengthening, a return to ego boundaries and maybe even a reinforcement of the ego boundaries. So that almost pulsation is key to a modernist literary aesthetic for Baudelaire, certainly. I think that's, it's very, the two ends are really operative here. Right, and that re-consolidation of the self is precisely what does not happen in the theorization of the Baudelaire, both in theoretical discussions of it and in pictures of it. And I think that's the most fundamental difference, is that you don't ultimately resolve back into an individual subjectivity that's secure. Right, definitely it's like blowing up an image that's already been enlarged. Yeah, yeah. But I mean, in response to your question about the, is the accident, the crowd itself. I don't know if Angron was thinking that poetically in his titling, but I would certainly agree that that is an ambiguity, that the picture proposes and that's in line with the way that I read it and that it's clearly not, the picture's clearly not, as I said, really about the accident. It's about the reaction to the accident and the way the crowd gathers. And it's very much playing with questions of spontaneity and coalescence in the technique and in the way that the crowd is forming. So, and spontaneity is accidental. I think that that's, I think he's really playing with the relationship there. Yeah. Thank you all so much for these, again, enlightening presentations. I have a quick question for Bridget and then one for Man. Bridget, I may just be rehearsing Andre's question from before that you didn't get to answer. Sorry, that's my fault. But I also was struck by this question of what unites what the Badot looks at, because it seems like it could really be such a diverse set of events and not necessarily objects or really events. You talked about violence and celebrity. We've also spoken about art as being a fodder for gawking. I think of natural beauty. I was recently in Jamaica, where I'm not joking, like 10,000 people came to one specific spot to see a sunset, even though you could see the sunset from wherever. So I wonder, you know, and you talk about the emotional connection with the Badot as opposed to the sort of more intellectual, distanced relationship of the funner. So is there an emotion that runs through that connects the experience of the Badot? Is it the sublime? Because I think that, to me, connects both the fear and the beauty. We're talking about Burke. So I just wonder if you have any thoughts on if there is any unifying principle. Yeah, it's a very big and important question. And I think that there is no big or unifying principle to gawking as a phenomenon in modern life. But, and I don't think that was true then, or is it true now? I mean, people gawk at whatever they find fascinating or disturbing or alarming and that can change in time and place for various cultural reasons in all kinds of ways. So what I can look at as a art historian is what writers and artists tend to focus on when they're talking about or picturing gawkers. And there are recurrent themes but there's certainly no unifying emotion or no theme that dominates all the others. And since I'm focusing in particular on the late 1880s and 1890s, a very frequent focus is the politicized crowd. And that didn't come through today because I didn't focus on the artists in my project who tend to be more interested in the political and anarchist crowd. And Valiton is certainly one of them. So you just saw him very, very briefly. But Valiton who was thought to have anarchist leanings were not very sure about precisely how anarchist he was but he traveled in those circles and he certainly depicts various anarchist situations in his prints. So there's, and there's a lot of that in crowd scenes in the 1890s because there's a lot of anarchist activity in the 1890s. So it's on people's minds and it's being reported on. And there's also a lot of activity in Parisian nightlife with these dance halls and cabaret. So it's just whatever is culturally dominant at the moment and on people's minds will tend to get represented in these scenes of gawking behavior. And I think it really changes from time to place. But the political subject matter for gawking in general in this period in Fanta-Sacre-France is major. And it just wasn't a major feature of the two artists that I focused on today. I also wonder if Goya features in your, or if you're really just focusing on France because I feel that he's another artist where the crowd and the figure, the notion of gawking is so dominant. Yeah, he's certainly an interesting one. I mean this topic as I've said to many people it's infinitely expansive as a topic and in order to be finishable by me in my life, it needs to be fairly radically focused on certain case studies. And so I spend time looking at a lot of these comparable artists in other time periods and cultures and they really helped me think, but I am focusing primarily on this moment in late 19th century France where there's a real kind of explosion of these kinds of images in a certain small community of artists and the relationship of that to the emergence of crowd psychology. But it could certainly go in many other directions. And man, my question for you was about the line or it could be to everyone and even the earlier panelists about the line between flannery and voyeurism. I was really struck by the Sophie Call piece in the exhibition and the sort of stalking modality that we see and in your presentation I was really interested in the Nine Eyes Google search project that to me was disturbing mostly on account of the fact that none of these people knew they were being watched and then, you know, photographed or watched and then taken a screenshot of. So I just wonder for you in your own work, do those considerations come into play? Yeah, I mean it's, I have an obligation to take care of whatever audience I'm working with. And when I say take care, I mean like to not exploit them. And that is something that I struggled with with the performances for sure because you kind of, you put someone into a situation and they can choose to watch or not if they're following online or if I'm going up to someone in Port Authority, what agency am I giving them if I'm asking them and what is that relationship to then how that will be used in a performance. And I think my overall kind of guiding principle is to just be as empathetic and sympathetic and conscious as I can with whatever I'm attempting to do in that moment. And increasingly though, that's looked a lot more like inward facing. So I'm, which is not to say that I'm less interested in the crowd now but I'm equally interested in what is, how can I interpret on a personal level my relationship to time and space and my experiences online. And I think in doing that, it kind of saves me from me not knowing how to work with an audience better and because I don't trust myself to be perfectly honest because the relationship with the ego and the performer to when you're in a space and you're holding a space, I'm in a place now where I don't trust that I have the best intentions with the work. And that's to be like brutally honest about that particular relationship that I have. Thank you. I think that we need to wrap up. So I wanna thank you all for coming and I really wanna thank all of our speakers again for your just incredible presentations. Thank you guys. Thank you.