 Our speaker today is Evan Roth. He's a multidisciplinary American artist based in Paris. He's working with sculptures, prints, videos, and websites. And in the upcoming hour, during his talk, he will take you on a journey about art, politics, culture, the misuse of communication technologies and how all of these are connected to each other. Please give a warm round of applause for even Roth, our speaker today. Thank you very much. Hi, everybody. Thanks so much for coming. I'm really humbled and honored to be here for my first time on this side of the internet with you all. So thanks so much for joining. Yeah, my name's Evan. I'm an American. I'm living in Paris at the moment. I'm an artist. And so I'm going to talk a bit about the art I've been making the last few years, how it's changed as the internet's changed, and hopefully weave some threads through here. The work I'm making is primarily shows up in these three areas of the gallery, public space and the internet, the mediums I'm using are often quite different. But historically, the work I'm making has been connected by this relationship between misuse and empowerment and how misuse can kind of be this lens that we, as we all know, look at technologies, but lots of things in life around us to sort of see things that have other sort of unintended uses, right? To make things like consumer domestic products much more interesting, right? So this is the Dumba, this old, old internet meme, right? But so good, right? Such a wonderful gift that the internet gave us with the Dumba. I can't wait until, I really feel like this should be in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. This is one of my favorite sculptures I've seen in the last few years. But for me, I try to have Dumba vision when I'm doing activism or when I'm doing art and thinking about like what else can I duct tape knives onto it to make it more interesting than it was the way the manufacturer sort of advertised it to me, right? And so that's kind of a main inspiration for a lot of the artwork that I look at, that I'm a fan of and that I'm trying to make in my own practice. And so two maybe more specific themes I'm going to try to show through different projects are one, this idea of technological empowerment, which is part of the reason I became an artist, and the other this idea of visualization through misuse. And my kind of, my history with technological empowerment went back to the when I was an architect and I was at university and I was, I had one class about computers that my dad sort of forced me to take and I didn't think was that interesting. This was back when I was literally still doing like graphite with a straight edge on vellum, right? This was like the first class where they were introducing 3D modeling in AutoCAD and there was one week about the internet and I had this like really vivid memory where the professor brought up this fetch window on an old Mac and like edited a text document and dragged it in and the dog ran it up to the internet and then hit refresh on the browser and it updated. And of course this is like small news now, but for me this was huge. I couldn't believe it. Like I really just couldn't believe that for free I could say anything to anybody and nobody could really censor it. It just seemed like it was too good to be true and that was kind of the death nail on my architectural career. Like I would go on to graduate and work for a couple of years, but very quickly it was falling in love with the internet in the early kind of like flash days. Remember that time was really fun. And so I was coming home from my architecture job and sort of trying to learn code and trying and kind of had my first introduction to open source like reading Joshua Davis's pre-station FLA files if anybody remembers that day. But that was kind of my introduction to technology and it was really empowering. Like it was a feeling that I still remember and try to like hone in on when I'm getting more depressed these days. And so how that showed up in some of my work. I'm going to start around like 2005 with some projects that I've been doing up to projects I've been doing right now. Back in 2005-2006 I co-founded an organization called Graffiti Research Lab with a friend named James Powderly while we were in residency at Ibeam in New York. And the basic idea we had with Graffiti Research Lab was that technologies were getting a lot cheaper to the point where they were almost getting disposable like LEDs, digital projectors were getting really cheap, lasers were getting really cheap. And we were interested in trying to make projects that would start to get graffiti writers and activists talking to the free software movement more. Like have a common dialogue for these two very different groups of tool builders. And so with that as like a premise we sort of thought of ourselves as the cue branch for graffiti writers, right? I'll just show one quick project. This was called Laser Tag. This was a in retrospect very simple computer vision project but we would basically go out with a digital projector and we would invite activists and we would invite graffiti writers and we would set up on the sort of biggest buildings that we could find in town. And we would just have this kind of open system. Like the only rules that we had with the project was there couldn't be a sensor button. People had to be allowed to say whatever they wanted. Most of the times we did it without permission which isn't saying much because at the time there wasn't a lot of people projecting in public so there weren't a lot of sort of laws in this sort of gray area. So even when the police usually came it was more of a conversation than a ticket. And so we were making, this is one example of lots of projects we were making where it was kind of about amplifying free speech like trying to use technologies that were getting cheaper and cheaper and cheaper to level that playing field between people who live in cities and people who advertise in cities and what kind of visual language and visual communication we have in both those places. So that was the work Graffiti Research Lab was doing. At some point we realized with Graffiti Research Lab that the sort of technical hacking we were doing was much less interesting than the more social hacking we were doing. And we also, we were getting much more pressed than we deserved and we were trying to figure out why that was happening. And one thing we sort of came to is we were sort of fulfilling this narrative at the media once which is that we are living in the future now, right? This is why everyone's reporting on hoverboards now. We're here, you know? And Graffiti Writers with Lasers was one of those apparently like monumental future points that we had hit and so the media was saying to write about our projects and so we realized that this was sort of a social hack where we could start to empower other people with maybe more marginalized voices to get in the newspapers more often. And so our mission changed slightly and so we kind of morphed the energy that we had with Graffiti Research Lab into this group called the Free Art and Technology Lab which didn't really have a sort of set code or manifesto but the basic idea was that we were going to use what even Franco called radical entertainment or this idea that you can make sort of engaging media on the internet that people are going to want to click on not because they agree with the politics because they want to see people acting a fool in the streets, right? So I'll show, I'll show one project here. This was, this was from a suite of projects we did in Berlin, gosh a few years ago now, called Fuck Google where we came together to make Fuck Google Project. So this was one where we rented a, actually Aaron Bartholth who's over here, you can see him seated there in the driver's seat, rented this car for very cheap, bought a roof rack off of eBay I think for like 15 euros and then everything above the roof was just cardboard and duct tape and wires. There was nothing technical in this project. It was purely a social hack and this was probably my second greatest technologically empowering moment. Driving the Google car is fucking amazing so here's what that looks like. So once we had the car we were just brainstorming like what are the little skits we could play out that would kind of put Google in a compromised position and so yeah I was breaking down, this is the, this is drinking and driving and if you want to know how strong Google's brand is, this is a staged carjacking where someone off the streets risks their life to save a corporate automobile engaged in spying practices and so the idea is we were then leaking these on the internet. This was, this was a long time ago back when we were like not sure if Google was evil or not right so this discussion was happening, it's happening more in Germany than other places actually but the idea was to try to get those conversations happening outside of places like this and outside of places like art galleries and art institutions and more into like the mainstream press and like people over coffee picking up this story and started to talk about these issues. That was kind of the idea behind fat lab functioned. I was also maintaining a solo practice at the same time as I was doing these more collaborative projects. This is a, this is one called free speech I did in Vienna in 2000 and I don't know like three four years ago now. Another, this is again like a very simple technology. This is another rented car with vinyl letters of a mobile phone number, mobile Viennese phone number and an arrow pointing to a loudspeaker on the roof and that's, that's the only input you get as the viewer and we just drove this around Vienna for three days and people that were sort of curious, curious enough to call, they would have their, their phone would get routed directly to the speaker and there was no one on the other line so their first realization that they were sort of in the system was when they would just hear themselves like hello at going throughout the street. So let's show a bit of what that looks like. And so, so like that guy was maybe my favorite or maybe the guy who just picked up and just started laughing right because even though when confronted with this sort of louder voice in public and they were maybe thought they were going to have when they set out to commute to work or go get a coffee even though maybe they didn't choose to say these more poignant points you know maybe just the laughter to me was like this more pure feeling of what technological empowerment feels like right like just laughing on the streets because you're kind of having this empowered voice like that's that's the feeling I want to get as an artist and so some of the work I was doing was trying to sort of set up these systems that would allow other people to have those sort of experiences. So again like very simple tools for empowerment, very low-tech tools for empowerment. The other thread that I was doing throughout that period and maybe more so in the last three years has to do a sort of this idea of visualizing the invisible which I think is something that artists wrestle with quite a bit and specifically thinking about visualizing the network thinking about visualizing the internet and how the internet is sort of touching us and we have this new connection culturally to each other. And so I did this was maybe three or four years ago now I did this sort of homage to Wikipedia. I still love surfing Wikipedia for me as someone who's sort of maybe has a bit of nostalgia for the old days of the internet I feel like Wikipedia is one of these few holdouts on the internet where there's semi-ego-less uploads still happening you know it's not necessarily people are making uploads not because they're trying to craft their own avatar online but they because they really want to explain how a doro not functions right or they really want to explain how a boxer engine works right it's it's it's it's it's content that if constant we're here he would call media with an alibi right it's media that has a reason for existing beyond just sort of supporting our own online visions of who we are and who we aren't and so for this reason I really love Wikipedia it feels like this really sort of free honest place to surf sometimes. And so I made this series of 11 websites kind of as a as a monument to Wikipedia where I spent I spent a summer just surfing for animated GIFs on Wikipedia which was a really awesome way to spend a summer. And then when I found ones that I would want to kind of use as raw materials I would just copy and paste them a couple hundred times and rename the file so that when the browser tries to load it in it doesn't it doesn't cache them all immediately it thinks they're all separate files. And so it ends up happening is and of course it can't load them all at once right so it just starts loading them in as the packets are sort of being delivered in this linear fashion and so the pieces never quite look the same they're all in a sense these kind of unique views where depending on your processor speed and what browser you're using and how fast your internet connection is they're always going to load in slightly different as the packets sort of traverse the network in this linear fashion. And so what you get is are these compositions that are very simple but they're not in this case like a perfect circle right you kind of see this visualization of the data kind of as it's going through the network. And so if you view these same pieces in the tour browser which I don't have to explain what it is in this audience which is really fun for the first time you can get a sense of how so this is the exact same website just viewed through tour so you can see in the piece how the how the composition is altered right because as the pieces are moving around it's being rerouted to different nodes they kind of come back together in a way that's very different than the way it's happening as a straight connection through Firefox and so the resulting composition is less fluid it's more staggered and you can kind of there's some side of visual clue of how that piece went through the network. Another series I've been doing for several years now is I've been archiving my own browsing folder my cache directory I've been basically archiving that every couple of weeks and then when I get invited to show a piece from that series I just basically I use a image packing algorithms to just pack all those images into the smallest around the room possible and I'll make these prints that are just straight printouts of my internet cache so this is what one month of my internet cache looks like this is what three months looks like they're relatively uncensored I go through it to look and make sure because sometimes my wife will use the computer I make sure there's nothing or her she doesn't want on there and I check it for banking details but besides that it's pretty much uncensored and so it's meant to be I think of them kind of as self-portraits there I think of them actually more like false self-portraits because it's unless you truly think that you are your browsing data it's not it does these prints aren't who I feel like I am but in I think in the over the long term the idea is more that they're meant to be this sort of portrait of the internet at this one moment of time right and as as sort of screen sizes change and screens shift from our laps to our pockets and as browser resolutions and all the all these standards change and and they're a kind of fabric of the web changes these prints hopefully when someone digs out of my basement like 20 years from now they'll have these sort of prints of what the internet felt like in this one moment of time that's the idea anyway another related series has to do again with this kind of shift from from the screen to the pocket like I'm really sort of fascinated with this idea of casual computing which I feel I feel like that move when we started having computers in our pockets every day was a really fundamental shift and so I have this series called multi-touch paintings that are created just from I basically just take a piece of tracing paper and put it over my phone and then perform the sort of interface tasks that it asked me to do so this one's called slide unlock this is a this one's called zoom in zoom out and they're they're literally just ink on ink on paper so the capacitive touch still works through the paper and it's I'm kind of like a maybe a short term it's it's meant to be maybe purely a visualization in a sense but I think maybe I hope that there's more there's also the kind of an artistic side of these two where they're also kind of commenting on the way we're consuming media right now so this one's called next next next right so this is and next next next is the way probably this piece will be consumed 99 percent of the time right the for the 10 people that see this hanging on a wall the rest are just going to next through this on instagram right and so it's meant to sort of kind of archive like the the bug in amber a little bit these these moments that we're going through right now where we're touching pixels for the first time and these things that kind of feel sort of high tech in a sense but quickly are feeling very blunt like to me this feels like a very blunt way to consume media very blunt way to have a relationship with art so hopefully it's commenting on that a bit too this is a related piece from the series this is this piece is called level cleared this is me playing angry birds from start to finish and so so the grid starts in the upper left corner with level one dash one whoever else has an angry or had at one point an angry birds addiction you know the level well and then I just play straight through it takes me full-time angry birds play like eight to ten hours a day for three days to get through and they keep adding levels so when I have to remake the piece now it's even more of a nightmare and it just marches straight through I have one sheet per level per attempt at a level and and so again this piece like I've been thinking a lot about how the art how art and the internet relate in terms of the consumption of art and how time is affected with our consumption of art and I was actually Erin I was thinking about conversations we had early on in the fat days where we were both kind of joking at one point about how we felt like the internet was sort of we always had to load projects up like if we didn't release something in two weeks it was like we were dead on the internet right and it felt this kind of like push from the internet that had to keep making and keep making and keep making and there was something interesting about participating in that culture but then more and more I've been thinking about how can you maybe still contribute and participate in that kind of consumption of media but then have the same piece means something slightly different for people that are going to invest in more amounts of time in it right and how pieces even if people consume it in a blog post title and have one reaction which might be a familiar reaction like laughter which I actually really like from this piece I'm trying to embed in these other kind of readings of the work where if you come in and you sit on this bench right and and this is maybe my interpretation of the piece right and you sit in front of these like 1500 sheets of paper and after the kind of wave of laughter leaves you and you realize like all the things we could have done in that time right like could have learned french it could have lost 10 pounds it could have learned how to cook more you know could have read a whole bunch of books um and instead I was like just flicking like birds at pigs over and over and over and over again and so it's I like both readings like I like the reading that the that it can be consumed in instagram quickly I like the reading um I if people are able to sit with it and maybe um contemplate these larger issues I like it as well but I think in art making right now there's this I'm trying to make work that isn't just addressing the internet's drive to have things faster and quicker and in blog post titles right because I felt it sort of affecting the heart I was making um and also the internet has like fundamentally changed right like I think um I think the times that that we were at IBM and we were doing fat lab and the times that we were sort of wrestling with that work things really changed like we all felt it in this crowd I don't even have to really talk about it right but for a while the internet to me felt like this and shame on me you know um but as I've been making work and the work's been changing and my relationship to the internet's been changing um and so I'm going to go into some things that I know you all know but this is kind of like my personal take on it right my this is like how I came to think about the situation that we're in now I used to think the internet was the big bang right that was how I was introduced to it like I thought holy shit this is going to happen and and that's just going to keep multiplying getting bigger and bigger and there'll be a server for every interest and everybody be able to be a publisher everyone's going to be empowered um and I thought it was this big bang model of what was going to happen and I I think more and more that like it's actually the big crunch model which is when the universe expands to a maximization point and then at some point starts contracting down right and I think I think that that middle point I think that middle point was when we accepted Gmail you know like I think once we like culturally decided that someone could read our emails and advertise this to our inbox I really think people at Google were just like holy shit like they bought it like from that point on it was just really over and so now it's been of course condensing and condensing into fewer and fewer servers and anyway we all know this stuff right and so so this kind of like this this condensation of the internet down to one point feels like it's happening um the the kind of targeted marketing that just was annoying at one point now feels really more sinister like I mean it was kind of okay to read our email and advertise to us but then when you start like kind of snitching on us that that was just that was hard for me like we don't even need to talk about this because I know it gets addressed all the time here but for me as someone who is making art that was engaged in the internet and a lot of the inspirations I was taking for from the kind of free culture movement and the free free software movement and engaged with the internet and like the the convolution of these three things of like monetization of the web the centralization of the web and then this kind of spying scandal they really left me kind of like staggering for ways to get back to making art about an internet that didn't feel funny to me anymore right like the internet was this this is how I felt like I felt like the lol cats were just this trojan horse you know and and I after all this was sort of happening I couldn't even see the cats on the internet anymore like I thought the internet was the land of the cats in the unicorns and now the first kind of been removed and you just see the terminator shiny skull and the red bdi and so if and just from like a personal standpoint it got hard to get interested in making art in that medium again and so that was like all leading up to this talk which maybe a lot of you have seen either at trans mediali last year or here or I mean around the internet I thought I was in the internet for a second there this was Peter's talk at trans mediali where he gets on stage and he basically says we've lost and it's over right which is something I know that we've heard here from uh we've heard here from frank and rob ten years ago right I know this isn't a new narrative but for me Peter's talk came along kind of at the right time where um like the pirate bay for me and the work that period beer and had been doing was really one of my main like heroes one of the main reasons I started making art like the the pirate bay for me is still I think one of the most amazing things made during my lifetime and it was what really turned me kind of from architecture into thinking about how entertainment and activism could overlap and how people could really change things and have a kind of power structure altering things that we could contribute to culture and when you have these kind of personal heroes get on stage and tell you that that's over when I was happy to hear that I had this kind of moment where I was like why am I feeling happy about hearing that you know and I realized that that was kind of how I was feeling and to have somebody else say that um it felt really good's the wrong word but it felt strangely empowering to sort of start to admit to myself that maybe the kind of ship was sinking right and so shortly after that we were also having conversations within the fat lab internally and not by unanimous decision but by majority we decided that we were going to shut the doors at fat lab um and I won't speak for the group but my my personal thoughts on why we they shut down which maybe isn't important in the greater sense but just um kind of again like as a kind of my personal take on how I'm working through this stuff was like I felt like fat lab like the internet had sort of outpaced us like that idea of radical entertainment had a had a moment when there was a loophole in the media where kind of companies and capitalism hadn't really figured out viral marketing yet and we had this this like big opening where we could really speak to people on a larger platform because there weren't whole divisions at widening Kennedy that were just trying to do this for the largest companies like it was we figured that out first and so we had this kind of weakness that we could exploit but as that changed we kind of failed as a group I think to keep up with new modes of activism and the other thing that I was sort of feeling was that we were kind of providing this um David and Goliath narrative to people both within the group that were getting closer to this sort of Silicon Valley and our audience which I felt like was kind of getting closer and closer to Silicon Valley that like people that were getting entrenched more into that way of thinking we're looking and enjoying our content in a way that sort of felt uncomfortable in a way and it felt like the kind of humorous pranks that we were pulling was helping them cope in a way with um the fact that they were supporting that system and it kind of felt like we were the comedian the Titanic like telling jokes as it was sinking or it felt to me that way and so at some point it felt more powerful to kind of just say goodbye and maybe put a message in a bottle and then jump off the ship rather than sit there and keep bailing out the ship right um and so that's where I was at the beginning of this year um and so the work that I'm going to show from this point on which I think I still have yeah okay 25 minutes or so is it's kind of the work I've been doing to try to get back to that point that I had when I first saw Fetch and FTP and kind of understood in a very rudimentary way how the internet functioned and what that empowering moment felt like and trying to struggle to get back to a point where I could make art sort of that was engaged in the internet again and so one way one way I started that search was to sort of start from the beginning and thinking about like what is our cultural conception of what the internet is what it looks like and we have a generally a kind of very poor visual metaphor for what the internet is right so this is just a google image search for the word internet which doesn't to me feel very representative of what the network is or what it feels like um and so I started to get more into thinking about what it was like I can't just be you know blue glowing logos um and clouds it has to be something physical and so I started reading Andrew Bloom's books Tubes I started um reading Neil Stephenson's Mother Earth Motherboard which if there's any sort of internet infrastructure nerds is like an amazing primer kind of the first maybe seminal text about following internet cables around the globe but just kind of understanding what it looks like what it looks like in these moments of transition when it sort of enters the water and reaches the land um and and one thing that Andrew Bloom talks about in his book is this idea of these kind of like there's there's no monuments for this thing that's really a major part of our sort of time here on earth and maybe our part of culture it seems like there's not these places that we can kind of go visit and commune with it in the same way there are other architectural landmarks um and so you get these kind of like lonely manhole covers on these very desolate beaches in Nova Scotia um and so at the same time that I was I was sort of doing that research um and this is going to sound like a big left turn but I'm gonna I'm gonna pull it back um at the same time I was doing that research I was also working on another project that required the use of an infrared camera and so I was kind of spending my time doing this research and looking around the internet trying to find really cheap um infrared cameras because of course I'm an artist and I'm broke and I kept finding myself on these these websites of people selling technology to ghost hunters which is a community I had no interactions with no experience of but they just had really good cheap infrared cameras um and and I was like I was sitting there in these online ghost hunting shops and they were amazing like I felt myself having one of those moments with technology where um it hadn't felt in a long time was just like like a kid like looking at this technology meaning like what the fuck is this like why I don't understand and they um but then I started to get interested in it more I'm kind of like a metaphorical or conceptual level because what the ghost hunter ghost hunting community was is kind of interested in doing is there they talk about disembodied human energy a lot and so they're making tech to try to visualize disembodied human energy and in a sense this felt like what I was trying to do with a lot of the work that I was doing which was trying to take all this kind of invisible momentum that's getting stored in servers and going through the fiber optic cables and thinking about ways to kind of visualize that work to come to some understanding of it and the ghost hunting community had this amazing tech to do that with and so then I started going really deep down this ghost hunting rabbit hole which was another fun way to spend three months on the internet um I'll show just one clip um I because I'd never seen any of this so people that are familiar with these communities this is maybe old hat but to me this was like just fascinating so this is they also come from where I come from so this is like the midwest spirit organization like they're all from the midwest in the u.s right because it's super boring there and so apparently like you you either do drugs or you hunt for ghosts and so this is one from the midwest spirit group but this is one of many many clips on on youtube so this this is a video shot in full spectrum camera which is just a camera that's been modified so you see a little bit more of the ultraviolet spectrum and a little bit more of the infrared spectrum the audio you're going to hear is from what they're called a spirit box which is essentially a hacked radio that just keeps scanning and I'll talk more about that in a bit um this is a device that you guys can come forward any spirits and speak with me so if you have a message please come forward and speak to me into this device I'll let you do your own youtube searching for that but even that idea like if you have a message for me come speak into this device like I want to use that for like the title of my next solo show to me it's like so there's like something happening there that seems like a statement that's greater than the ghost hunting community and also the relationship with technology kind of feels very I mean it's strange to say this because for me as a sort of non-believer in ghosts I find the technology maybe inherently flawed but I the approach seems so honest to me in a way like they're really setting out to make tools in a very honest way very little commercial interest to try to satisfy this niche community um so anyway this is like a it was really getting back to this sort of like DIY culture of people making technology for their own needs um and and it's a it's a relatively self-aware community too like they talk about this idea of matrixing a lot which is the same as apophenia right it's this idea that our brains are kind of hardwired to find patterns in randomness like they're aware of this and so skepticism is like a big badge that people if you want to rise the ranks in the in the paranormal community you have to kind of debunk more ghosts than you find right um and this to me is something that's really interesting too because I think that they might actually be more critical of the investigations they're doing than we're doing right and so when we look and we see that we've got five five thousand eight hundred seven friend requests it feels like this might be a matrixing that we're doing with our own technology with social media rather than the ghost hunting or whether like the kind of like popular idea that like technology can solve all problems that we can explain all these complicated problems in 13 minutes or less and 120 characters or less it seems like maybe our relationship technology maybe isn't any more flawed than their relationship with technology um and so I decided to sort of set out on my own kind of pilgrimage to the internet right in the same way that ghost hunters this isn't something that ghost hunters do kind of around the kitchen table over coffee right they go to what they call areas of activity which are actually not graveyards right this would be an area of inactivity it's more like abandoned hospitals or insane asylums like areas where activity happened um and so the because I wasn't looking for ghosts I'm looking for more of this like reforged relationship with a an innocence lost of the internet um the area that I decided to go to which is talked about a lot by Stephenson's mother earth motherboard article is this uh port kerno beach which is if you're in the uk and you just keep driving west as far as you can until literally when the land ends there's a hotel called land's end and when you're there you're within like three kilometers of really cool stuff so you're in you're where 15 of the global internet flows through fiber optic cables um it's historically where the pirate ships would hide in the coves um 2000 bc it was where all the standing stone circles there's all these standing stones in this area um it's where uh in 1870 the first telegraph came out of the ocean the exact same beach the fiber optic cables are at now um two kilometers up the beach is where marconi was building these amazing structures to send the first wireless transmissions over the Atlantic all within this super remote um area way out at the west of the uk and so I made my map and I had my little destinations I want to go to I um rented a car I got my gear I had a mix of like ghost hunting gear that I'd bought and some that I'd made and some just other devices I thought might come in handy um and I started by doing something that Neil Stephenson suggests you do if you're hunting for the internet which is to follow the manholes um and so I started just following the manholes and it really it's so when you're on these like surfer beaches where nobody is and you see like 30 manholes in the parking lot that's meant just to get to the beach to go surfing you're probably getting close um on these little farm roads that were just out in the middle of nowhere with just sheep kind of grazing every once in a while there'd be a driveway that had these really large sort of access covers um and when you look they're designed to look like these typical british country houses but on closer inspection you can see that there's all these extra security measures in blackout windows and so this is a uh internet landing location um farms that have way more air conditioning that they need for the sheep that's probably a good sign that you're getting close but I wasn't I wasn't really interested in it as like a as a sort of a journalistic endeavor like it was really more I wanted to sort of step away from the computer for a moment I wanted to get out into nature um and I wanted to sort of just see what it felt like to stand on top of that cable you know what did it feel like to stand on top of this cable where 25 percent of the traffic was flowing through um and so I started taking this series of like landscapes like just landscape photography um sometimes sometimes the cable is within the frame um when I took this photo I actually didn't know exactly what I was shooting but in this frame is both the cable and the gchq tapped cable which you can kind of see the dishes up there in the background um but it's it's it was less for me about like those actual recording the cables the dishes and it was more about something that I read about in Andrew Bloom's book was that there's this really interesting phenomena that happens when you go hunting for the internet which is like you end up in these super remote locations like you're trying to go have this research and experience with telecommunications but you end up like on these really lonely beaches which is by design because they don't want cables and nets around them um many times you don't have 3g or cell phone service and it's kind of just you and like you know this lonely beach it's this sort of interesting um for me it was really beautiful like it really felt uh it felt good it felt so this is something I've been doing more and more lately and I just I go to these places as a way not to necessarily document physical artifacts of the internet but more just putting myself in sort of a place where I want to make art about the internet um and and the internet manifests itself in different ways in different countries in the UK it's just these wooden signs this is it's just a yellow wooden sign that says telephone cable on it which is like the most beautiful kind of like anticlimactic understated monument you could have right so this is one of the biggest global internet connection points in the world and that's just this little tiny sign you know and to me that was really perfect in a way like I was I was really it felt good that it was that and not something else um and so at the same time I was taking that photography I was also taking readings with this series of ghost hunting devices this is probably my favorite one this is called the ovulus 3 um this is by a company called digital dowsing which is a really great name for a for a ghost hunting tech company um made by um Bill Chapel um and so the ovulus 3 has this kind of like old it's called visual drawl mode um and based on kind of emf and temperature readings it has this drawing system that it spits out and so every place I was taking a photograph I was also taking this reading with this ghost hunting device um and so this manifested in different ways when I show it in the gallery one way was in this series of essentially paired landscape photography where on the top is just the photograph from these various places and then on the bottom sort of laser etched into the surface of the print or these readouts from this ghost hunting device um which is kind of even if you didn't know that came to the piece and didn't know the background there's meant to be this kind of play between analog and digital and this play between kind of the spiritual and the real um and when you view these prints you kind of have the same interaction with the print that I was having when I was documenting them which was you you have this kind of natural position when you're kind of viewing the horizon line and then when we kind of check our phones right and it's kind of like this all day long and so the pieces are meant to have that as well where you you kind of look at the horizon line in the photo and then you kind of bend down to look at the little digital readout so this was this was one of the series from from an exhibition I did in London last year six months ago no three months ago I got an invitation to come to New Zealand which was a place that was on my kind of like bucket list for internet exploratory research purposes because New Zealand has this this they have more than two cables but there's one cable called the Southern Cross network which is essentially its main connection to the globe and it comes in on the west coast and then crosses like I don't need like 30 kilometers maybe and then exits on the right so it comes over from Australia goes underground for a very short amount of time then bounces off essentially to California um and that's its main connection to the world these two very actually unguarded um connection points I maybe in the Q&A I can talk about more about that but basically on this trip I got I mean I got there and they were doing construction work and the cable was just really there like it was dug up and in a puddle and just sitting there next to this military compound with like um this military airstrip with like planes taking off um and I was there for two hours with ghost hunting device just kind of touching the cable nobody said anything it was amazing um and prior to this trip though I was doing more kind of research and trying to understand what the internet really really was um and there's a lot of people in the room who are more who have more technical knowledge than I do so if I'm if I'm um misquoting things please tell me afterwards so I can update this but my my current understanding is that what's going through the fiber optic is essentially um infrared um infrared laser light that's being modulated at different frequencies that kind of center around this 1,550 nanometer mark right um and so give or take a few nanometers the internet happens generally in this near infrared spectrum um which is interesting to me as kind of um an art maker because most of our digital devices can sense in that near infrared spectrum in that same 1,550 nanometer range um so most most digital cameras you can open up and if you go all the way down to the ccd you can take off the infrared blocking chip and you get left with a camera that senses that light and you can put another lens on top that blocks everything but the infrared light and then you're left with a device that's kind of in my head anyway sensing the world in the same sort of spectrum that's going through the fiber optic cable um these tutorials are I have this presentation I'm going to have a link to at the end to the links are here but this is from a website called life pixel which has really amazing like screw by screw tutorials for how to do this with most consumer and like prosumer digital cameras um and so then I started shooting these these are these are photographs from this is from the west coast of New Zealand um shot with this modified lumix gf1 camera um and so it started to like have this feeling where the visuals that these camera were giving like in there's like a technical connection to the internet but for me there was also sort of a visual connection where the photos had this sort of feeling that I was having they were sort of these dark strange glimpses of the internet it wasn't nigh on cats and unicorns right it was this kind of like darker stranger view of what the internet landscape looked like and the more I was taking photos the sort of the less and less interested I got in actually shooting a cable and the more and more interested I got in just what these landscapes looked like um and so in this example you can kind of see the dirt that's kind of slowly growing over from where the trench was dug um or in this one from this distance you can't see anything there's a small moment where like an old coaxial cable kind of comes out of that cliff but for me it's more about really thinking about like an old school art form of like the landscape and trying to think about how I can make these landscape images that are sort of reflective both of the physical landscape and of our kind of like network landscape and cultural landscape so these are just some of the kind of images I was taking on this New Zealand trip and yeah again sometimes there's like no visual evidence sometimes it's just just a tree that happens to be growing on top of the internet and so I'm still this is stuff I'm still going through at the moment so now I'm kind of drifting into works in progress but where I'm thinking this is going in one way is a series of new websites that I'm going to be making that are really boring I think there's like a really big market and boring in the arts that's coming up like I think we've had enough of this like really quick stuff so now I'm going to take it back and so I'm making pieces that are I had these experiences these are tripod shots so I'm shooting usually like 10 to 15 minute tripod shots at these different locations um and so there are these like really quiet moments it's essentially just video um streaming into a browser um and part of the idea is like giving forcing people to have the experience that I was having so it's I would find myself in these like amazing locations and sometimes there'd even be like whales breaching in the background and like seven minutes into the shot I'd catch myself like you know bending down to the phone again and like even in this like amazing environment like I was having a hard time breaking out of that really like rapid face sort of clickbait mentality that I'm starting to fall into as well and so I want these websites to be super super boring like more contemplative more on the timeline of what viewing nature is like rather than what the viewing the web is like um so this is this is the triangular sign here is what the what the cable signs look like in New Zealand which is if there's any copy me fans like when I got out there and found that there's this like beautiful triangle like standing over the internet was like an amazing moment for me um but the so these websites are going to be different websites each website will just have one video flowing through it um slow infrared video shots with this sort of audio in the background the audio is made from um my own ghost hunting tech which I'll be releasing when I get finished with all this stuff so this is my own version of the spirit box where instead of just scanning through the radio I have it hooked up to a pulse sensor so it's skipping through the radio stations based on my heartbeat so every time my pulse goes it switches radio stations um and so the audio is like yeah it looked I looked rather strange like just kind of sitting there trying to commune with the internet like hooked up to this heart monitor and this infrared camera um but the pieces are sort of meant to kind of hopefully give some of those feelings that I was having when I was there and the the other idea is that these videos are all going to be located in servers that are as close as possible to where I shot them so I'm actually thinking of them less as websites as kind of like network specific videos and so in the New Zealand example I have I have server space in New Zealand now where these videos are hosted so that when you when you view the video um it loads into the browser and it's streaming you know chances are you have like kind of like a 50-50 chance depending on what country you're in that the the video as it's being converted into the same spectrum that it's shot in is also streaming kind of like just underneath the frame there um and so even though you can't kind of witness this visually the idea is like trying to kind of like I was doing with the with the wikipedia series like trying to come up with not just a piece that's kind of a visual aesthetic of the internet but something that's really kind of about an experience of the network um and then the last sort of thing I'm playing with is that they're going to be all hosted at these URLs that when you copy and paste the URL into a mapping application the the URL is actually a GPS coordinate so if you paste the URL into Google Maps it'll take you to the exact location where the camera was housed and so in Google Earth you can kind of see the triangular sign in the tree that is the same same sign and tree from from the image um and so so I'm kind of playing with the idea of the URL as being both an address in the on the globe and in the network and trying to tie again together these two things um and and part of this for me is again like without being too nostalgic for for the internet of old a lot of the influences that I'm drawing from from the kind of earlier net art scene um was was characterized with this kind of classic net art diagram where the art app is here right like it's not there was this big push in the earlier net art wave that wasn't about having kind of imagery that was sort of quasi an aesthetic of the internet coming on tumblr and being printed in 3d printing into objects and showing up in a gallery but it was really thinking more fundamentally about the internet as a platform and a vehicle for for viewing art and art that can only happen within that medium um and so I'm trying to kind of take that idea that's an old one and overlay that diagram on top of something that's like one step removed in terms of the metaphor and thinking about art that happens in a physical location and in the network at the same time um I could do one more project or we could do q and a how much time do we have now five more minutes maybe maybe I'll maybe I'll wrap it up there is it okay okay I'll do one more project okay so that was that's going up to like yeah three this is now two months ago three months ago I'm going to invite it to do a piece in Paraguay which is not one of the main internet hubs globally um but I decided to kind of wrestle with a different piece of the infrastructure the internet which is kind of the surface right the place that we have this more immediate contact with the network um and because I because I noticed that when we when you film devices in infrared there has this interesting scenario where um the visual spectrum is kind of inverted in a way where the the LEDs don't really emit much infrared light at all and so the screen to the viewer you see everything but to the infrared camera it's almost completely black um and similarly the kind of infrared lights that sort of shine from the top of all of our iPhones and our faces all the time which we can't see with the naked eye become more and more apparent when you shoot it with infrared and so I started I built this kind of contraption that I set up in my hotel room which looked really strange and then invited people to come up to the hotel room and kind of put their put their device on top of this camera rig and then the invitation was just to waste time like again trying to get back to this idea of casual computing like what do you do when you're in line at the grocery store waiting at the doctor's office like what's your bag you know is it Angry Birds is it checking Facebook um and I just said here waste five or ten minutes and I would record them with this infrared camera and it's kind of in a way it's connected it's connected to the paranormal research but maybe it's more connected to the multi-touch series it has to do with sort of backgrounding the digital backgrounding the interface design and foregrounding the human movement um and so what you get left with is you see the way people are kind of moving over these different devices without seeing these designs that the that apple and and google are designing for us play just a minute of what that looks like no but the piece is meant to be this have this kind of these things that kind of feel so natural and we get so into it and when you kind of remove what's actually happening it kind of ends up looking and sounding so alien right the audio is actually just from a contact mic that's placed on the back so it's not um it's just an analog microphone picking up the kind of soft fingertips on the screen and so it became just this series of people that sort of agreed to meet with me and give me five or ten minutes of their computing time shown in the gallery at this kind of series of again kind of like portraits through technology it's called dances for mobile phones it's meant to be idea that we're kind of dancing for them anyway so i'll leave it there so this is me kind of struggling through um trying again to make work and trying to kind of find these sort of optimistic paths through a kind of increasingly dark um internet landscape and get back to this kind of like more magical moment i first had when we first kind of understood what technological empowerment felt like so thank you so much for spending the hour with me and if there's any q and a i think we have a couple minutes no thank you thank you so much for your phenomenal talk evan i think you can tell by the applause that the people really really liked it um was really awesome so we have another five to ten minutes for questions and answers if you have questions please move to the microphones we have four microphones here in the hall do we have any question from the internet internet no all righty so we start with this question from over there um i really liked your term uh disembodied human human energy we're going to start using that dhe it's not my term but okay i like it too i've been writing about that as well from the dark side of of how the internet and and digital culture is affecting our behaviors and our society and was kind of putting that in the terms of of disembodying experience disembodied disembodied information and um i i'm really going off of that a lot in terms of analyzing digital culture and just wondering what you think we might do in order to re-embodied our culture more and not get so lost in these technological things that we can do but to like you know i just was covering the the failed paris climate summit and i feel like the the corporate agenda is is liking that we are going more and more into a disembodied place because it can capture our energy more so i just like to ask you if you have any ideas what we can do to be more more re-embodying our experiences yeah no good um good question i i mean i can only talk about what i'm how i'm kind of wrestling with it in in one sort of decision i made as a as an artist kind of is like i feel like i make better work when i'm optimistic rather than pessimistic like i think anyone who suffered through depression like you know or have had people around you at depression it's not a good place to be in when you want to make things produce things right and so part of it is like just finding ways to fall in love with it again and so for me that was part of it was just trying to find ways to kind of like fall in love with things against the point where i really wanted to make them and the the other one for me too i mean i know there's whole movements of people doing these kind of digital retreat things which is something i hadn't participated in in a formal setting but for me just getting away for a moment and having these excuses even for just a few days or a week to sort of exist by myself without connection i know it's nothing new i know that people have been talking about this but it had a real effect on me i mean one thing that i noticed was i was much more present like especially in the uk trip where these these are like really cliffy regions you know so a lot of the hiking trails i was shooting on were like really steep drop off on the other side of this path and so i couldn't even do what i normally do even when i'm away from email but i'm walking around the city and i'm still thinking about oh i got email this person i gotta do that i'm not really present right and i noticed that i had to like stop doing that because i kept slipping and falling and like i didn't want to die and so i had this moment being out in nature again where not only was i away from the tech but mentally i kind of had to step away from it too just to be really thinking about like left foot right foot left foot right foot and being able to do that for a few days like now i'm lining up my schedule throughout the year where i'm setting up these moments where i have that time to do it and i don't know if that's the answer or not but for me it's been one way to deal with it thank you very much next question from this microphone please thank you very much i don't know if it's on yeah it's on just speak into it um thank you very much for your talk and actually for me personally i've been also struggling a lot with the the thought about the dark sides of the internet recently and your talk actually gave me back a lot of positive attitude about it okay so thank you very much for that but one question that i have what is your 10 second definition of what is art for you oh my god all right here's here's a short one i came up with because the long one's hard right i think i think design is creative work that's influenced directly by money and art is creative work that's influenced indirectly by money and that's kind of the only difference thank you next question from that microphone over there um hi so um i wasn't familiar with your work i'm over here yeah i'm not familiar with your work um and i really liked it and what i like most about it is really that that sense of excitement and wonder um that you first had when you discovered um what was it uh fcp no it was yeah fetch yeah fetch right um that's sort of that's still there in in many ways it's different but it's still there um so you know i i recently discovered physics and i've had the same thing where i am like whoa we're able to understand things in a way that i didn't think was possible because i hated physics in school and realized that um it was the way it was taught that was really um boring and so i'm thinking okay if i were to do something like that it requires you to sort of take that step away from the technicality of it to see the technicality of it right and how do you with the internet how are you able to keep that distance and has that been a problem for you i mean maybe it's easier for me because i'm not all that smart technically i mean it's not like i was ever so close like most of the code i had some formal training when i got to graduate school but i was never i'm not a very happy programmer you know it was never in my kind of native realm anyway like i came more from the design field um so it didn't feel like anything i was having to turn off so much because maybe i wasn't ever all that close to it in a sense um i don't know that's maybe a bad answer but it's probably the truth but i've been trying to get closer to physics too yeah like for me like i'm super fascinated by the electromagnetic spectrum right now like the answer is in there somewhere i feel like you know all right thanks awesome next question from here hey thanks um i just i mean the idea of um understanding what's happening in the internet is quite important and i think we're a bit biased here because we all have that visualization of the internet and my question now is your visualization is of course very very valid and very vivid but all those people that that do those movements and they scroll facebook how can we make this visualization because yours is quite complicated actually and not as fast how could we how could we manage to give give them some sort of visualization because what what they see is only the apps and they don't really get to think about it more yeah i don't know the answer to that i mean it's part for me part of the reason that the infrastructure side is so interesting is that i think that there's something empowering about seeing what it is and knowing how it works like when it seems less mystical and magical like the cloud of course is this terrible metaphor that we all hate and i think once even when i'm explaining my work to non-technical people um the conversations i get into are actually kind of interesting because they're interested in knowing that too because people don't really talk about it the media doesn't talk about it the the companies that are trying to sell them services don't talk that way because it doesn't benefit them right it's like apple when your phone fills up they just want you to click here to get more cloud storage space or they don't want you to know how to plug in a cable and get it off um and so i think it's the question that you're asking is one that i'm asking myself is like how do you communicate some of these ideas to people that are um i mean i'm interested in both sides i'm interested in people that are technically adept having interesting thoughts and ideas and conversations around this but then how do you also communicate to people that this is a new conversation too um i don't know the answer to that that's what i'm trying to kind of wrestle with in a sense but i have i i recently did a show in in florida at a university and the the docents there like the people that introduce people to the work were all like senior citizens that were volunteering times the museum and they were one of the most engaged group of people i've ever had surrounding my work because they they knew it's not like they'd never heard of this stuff before but they had a relationship technology but they were more willing to ask questions about it like they weren't they didn't they weren't they didn't care if it sounded stupid and so they were asking all these really interesting questions and seeing that happen to a community of people that were maybe a further step removed from technology than i even am that it's not that it was successful but it felt to me that that they could understand it and have a relationship relationship to it as art pieces meant that there was something there that was consumable by people that weren't aren't in this room you know all right thank you as time is almost up guy in orange you got the honor of the last question um with your browser cash thing i did something similar with my computer i wrote a little script that runs in the background and makes a screenshot every random seconds okay and i had hoped about forgetting about it but actually the um the counterpart happened that i checked the screenshots folder every moment i didn't have anything to do and my behavior was extremely affected by it was did you have the same feeling about your browser browser cash yeah maybe later we can trade notes i'd like to see see your work um exactly like like one of the main things about that piece was like it's like living with a security camera right and you always know it's there like i've gotten better and better about forgetting um but i still i still know it's there i still think about it and i i tried to do portraits of other people like friends like who else are you gonna ask to give your internet cash browsing data too right and it's i i recognize it was like a really invasive question to ask people you know you're really asking people i mean usually the cash people give me when i was making portraits of other people i would tell them and then they would surf and give it to me like to just tell them to give me the cash that you didn't know i was gonna you didn't know i was monitoring this is like a really invasive question to ask but yeah it's essentially like learning to live with a security camera but that's meant to be kind of built into the piece too because it may be again getting back to the last question like one of the reactions i get from when people see that work in the gallery is like they they're like oh wow that's a really um maybe giving's the wrong word but that's a lot of it's a lot of it's you're sharing a lot right it's the common reaction i get from people um and but part of the idea is then we're all kind of sharing this in different ways right this print just because i'm putting in the gallery doesn't mean there's any more or less eyeballs on that set of data than your data or your friend's data um but yeah of course when you know the camera's there it definitely affects behavior