 Do we use social media or does it use us? That's the fundamental question posed by artist Dave Cicerelli in a series of works produced over the past decade. They include Fake Book, a memoir of a fabricated, increasingly unbelievable cross-country trip that Cicerelli documented in real time for his followers on Facebook. Fake Banksy sells out a street sale of openly counterfeit paintings in Central Park. All-Minus-One, a graphic novel version of John Stuart Mill's ideas on free speech and social conformity, done in collaboration with Jonathan Haidt and Richard V. Reaves for Heterodox Academy. And The Infinity Cube, a mind-blowing glass and mirrored immersive installation that challenges participants to deny their urge to take a selfie. Born in 1983 and raised in New Jersey, Cicerelli calls himself an experiential artist who forces the audience to participate in the creation of Mean It, a longtime reason reader who is skeptical of both government and corporate power. He's quite possibly the only artist who counts comic book legend Jack Kirby and the late Senator Barry Goldwater among his inspirations. Dave Cicerelli, thanks for talking to reason. Thanks for talking to me. You work in multiple media. How do you define yourself as an artist? You know, I guess the term for what I do is experiential art, which is really anything that involves the audience as the art, where people interact with it in a moment, in an experience. And their reaction or their interactions with it is as much part of the art as the work that I do. You published Fake Book, a true story, based on actual lies. What was Fake Book? So it was 2009. I fictionalized my Facebook profile and with the mix of bad Photoshop and status updates, I had everyone I ever knew believe that I was in this disastrous cross-country hike. And I kind of picked that scenario for a couple reasons. One is this the kind of thing you've heard of people doing so it straddled that line of like, is this real? Is it not? What I kind of overlooked was that people found that story right when they couldn't look at a spreadsheet any longer and they logged on to Facebook for their, you know, 30 second distraction. And then all of a sudden there's this guy, they kind of know doing a thing they've always kind of thought about doing, especially in that moment. So suddenly all these like thin loose connections became very real and really resonated and people became so emotionally invested in the fact that I was brave enough to do the thing I wasn't doing, that they became very, very supportive in a way I was really not prepared for. Take us through, you know, do a spoiler alert. Like what's the arc? Yeah, I mean, it ends with a confession. So, you know, I mean, I start, I do it for six months and it goes, you know, through these whole series of kind of interesting moments. You know, I go to Amish country, fall in love with this Amish girl, I go on the lam. She ends up cheating on me, which was compelling because everyone had an opinion and everybody was 100% convinced they knew what happened, what side to be on all this sort of stuff. You know, I was a drug mule at one point, I was in a doomsday cult. Like I just kept on daring and challenging people to find out, you know, I mean, ultimately when the whole thing was confessed, the reactions were very, they almost had an arc, you know, where it was like angry, then like, actually that's kind of funny. Then like, wait, how did I possibly believe any of this nonsense that's kind of interesting? Again, this was 2009 I did this. This was before fake news was a thing. This was before influencers were a term, but it was poking at the right questions. It was, you know, I mean, I had somebody literally send me a note, said I inspired her to quit her job. And then, you know, I immediately dry heaved because I don't want that kind of, you know, weight. But, you know, that idea of the influence and all this sort of stuff, it was all right there at the very budding of it. You know, does it pervert or debase an authentic self or does it call into question like, you know, are you the person you are on Instagram or are you the person right here in this conversation or in your studio? I think that's the negotiation we're all doing. You know, like I'd say the two things that it kind of gave me unique perspectives on was fake news and influencers. And I'll just say the influencer won first off. I felt very much like I was shoveling coal into, you know, into the engine to make it keep moving down the track. It's all disposable. It all goes away. And just I felt my entire life was feeding this thing. You know, that I was subservient to it. And I think that's got to be what it's like. Talk about fake news. How does this anticipate fake news and how are you using that term? And what does that say about our kind of current moment? Well, I think part of what I really got away from doing this was I had a bunch of people I would consider very smart believing something very stupid. Right. You know, so this kind of this general thumb nosing attitude about fake news of like, look at those rubes they're too dumb, they'll believe anything, blah, blah, blah. I consider that nonsense because, again, I had very smart people believing pure nonsense. And the reason is there's that emotional hook. You know, like I said before, I was doing something everyone kind of idly fantasizes about doing. So as long as that kind of emotional resonance is there of whatever that fake story is, people will go along with it a long way. Let's talk about the fake Banksy. Sure. You know, so one of the real iconic things he did was the Central Park art sale. He set up a stall in Central Park and they were selling original, authenticated Banksy spray art for $60. He had an old man selling it. He sold there all day, like eight or nine hours. Sold, I think, three customers. Seven pieces, three customers. Then revealed that the following day, I did this, you all missed it. Look, nobody cares about my art. If they aren't told that they should care about it, which is brilliant and great and hilarious. So I called up Lance Pilgrim. We've collaborated for years and years on all kinds of different things. And I was like, yo, we gotta redo this, but we'll go to the exact same place. We're gonna create the exact same stall with the exact same works and we're gonna sell them for the exact same price except we're gonna call it fake Banksy. We're gonna tell everybody, these are not real Banksy's and we're gonna even have legally notarized certificates of inauthenticity, decreeing legally, these are not Banksy's. I know I want one, just hearing about it. Oh, it was great. And we even brought in an old man. We got Lance's father to be the salesman and we sold out in less than an hour. You know, I mean, my favorite moment was when knocked up spray paint at rat off our stand, hit a woman in the head and then she bought it for $60, you know? People just didn't know what to believe. They were just like energized. Like one guy was like sprinting to the ATM and being like, don't sell, you know? I felt like we completed Banksy's statement. You know, his thing was, you know, my artwork's all hype and then we created his fake artwork in the hype and then it sort of became kind of a nice compliment. What are the takeaways of like the fake Banksy project? Cause one way of reading it is you're pranking, you know, the people who buy it or the art world, but that's not where you're going, right? No, I mean, part of what I think is kind of fascinating about art in one sense, art is sort of above value, but an individual piece of art is pure capitalism. It's worth exactly what someone's willing to pay for. Right, at a given moment and that can change because Van Gogh, you know, alive, not worth so much. Van Gogh dead, hey, you know, this is a bargain at any price. Right, is, you know, am I walking by a nonsense Central Park art stall? $60 maybe. Am I walking by a nonsense Central Park art stall after Banksy, you know, made millionaires? You know, it wasn't about the spray art, as Banksy put it, it was about the consumer, it was about us walking by or how we react to it. Let's do a little biography here. You grew up in Middletown, New Jersey. Middletown, New Jersey. Intimately acquainted with this. It's my home town as well. Your interest in immersive reality, is that linked to your biography in any kind of obvious way that you think about? You know, I'd say I grew up in a very practical kind of household in a very practical way. You know, I was just kind of a joke. It was like Dr. Lawyer Fireman pick one. You know, it was like basic, basic jobs. I started taking drawing lessons. I was, you know, planning on being an illustrator, a comic book illustrator, specifically, by this guy, Guy Dorian. He's still one of my very good friends. And he taught me a couple really good lessons, which is one, it's doable. Like, you know, like just proof of example, you can make a living. And then the other was kind of how to give yourself permission. So like, even when I had the opportunity to write fake book, I kind of walked into Barnes and Nobles and was like, I can't possibly be the worst writer with, you know, on the shelves. I've always felt somewhat liberated that I was doing a thing that didn't need credentialing. Right. You know, in fact, I've always kind of never even, I've never been tempted to get like a master's in art because I just think you just do it. You know, like everything I've, every skill I have is because I had some idea and I figured out how to do it. And then through trial and error, you learn a bunch of shit. You, at some point, you became a reason reader as well. Sure, yeah. But is there a connection between a kind of soft libertarian sensibility in what you're doing? Yeah, I think so. I grew up around smart Republicans when I was a kid, which maybe is part of this origin story. But my brother read me Animal Farm when I was like, you know, just barely, just old enough to get it, right? Right. So I kind of had that kind of inoculation against orthodoxy because then when I went to college, I kind of counter-programmed. And I read things like Wealth of Nations. And I read Barry Goldwater as Conscious of a Conservative was the thing that probably shifted me most libertarian, where I kind of that idea of like we're not obsessed with material gain, which is the criticism often. It's like, actually, it's the human spirit. It's this idea of doing, you know, of what your passion is and what your thinking is. And I read Federalist Papers, all this kind of stuff. So I always kind of had that instinct. What I kind of appreciate about reason, I think maybe libertarian's general position in the culture war is they actually have the luxury of being consistent with their ideology or not be so vetted in every single win and loss, that there was like a consistent, realistic, and principled conversation and perspective that was kind of coming through and pushing through. A project of yours that I want to ask you about, and this is something you did with Jonathan Hyde and Heterodox Academy and with Richard Reeves, the Brookings Institution Scholar. It's part of John Stuart Mills on Liberty arguments about kind of free speech or free thinking, really, called All Minus One. Can you talk a little bit about this project and how it fits into your art scape? Yeah, I mean, it was just kind of an honor to work on it. I was, you know, admire of John's work, and I kind of reached out and was like, I like what you do. This is what I do. Let me know if what I do is useful to what you do. And, you know, John Ten-Seven answer. So yeah, I mean, I read on Liberty as part of that counterprogram back in the day. But the idea of it was as kind of cultural censorship is taking rise and people are starting to view words as violence and this kind of base instinct to silence was sort of reemerging in our culture as a puritanical force. It was, you know, this work is really relevant. The idea was parse it down, make it really digestible and distribute it freely to college campuses and high schools as part of a curriculum effort and make the work accessible. And then it was my job again to kind of distill even further into these images that would really evoke and drive it further. And to me it's, you know, the general idea here is the most central to anything to really should be all creative work, which is, you know, the freedom to poke and ask questions. I mean, that's what it's about. It's, you know, maybe you're right or maybe you need to fold a piece of other perspectives and other wisdom to create the truth and sort of this shifting of this idea of truth of being something you own versus truth being the end result of a process of finding it out. So let's talk about the infinity cube, which is your kind of current main focus. Yeah, so I really like to think of it more as a canvas than a single piece of art, but obviously I'm not the first person to point mirrors at each other. You got Yayo Kusama, you've got Hall of Mirrors, you've got your mom's bathroom in the 80s, it's been done. But this is unique in a couple ways. Number one, you'll notice it's motion, it's video-based, it's kinetic, it's moving. That sort of creates a kaleidoscopic experience. Two, you'll notice not only is there a screen, but you see past the screen. So when you look through it, you get that kind of uninterrupted depth. So it's just like, just reflections. Can we go inside? Absolutely. And when you're inside, you can't see outside. Correct. Like we are, I mean, I'm seeing a perfect reflection of us, but they're seeing you and me, they're chatting. They're seeing us chatting and they're seeing all the reflections around us. So our image is being reproduced and replicated and degrading in all directions. Is this a commentary on like we live in a world now because of social meter technology where there are a million versions of us everywhere in a community? I mean, yes. And they're all a little bit different. I think the metaphorical quality of this space is exactly that. You step in, you put yourself on display to an audience you can't see. But they're out there. But they're out there. But you forget them. But you forget them. Yeah. Your relationship to the work or to anything really is are you in front of it or is it in front of you? You know, that's the real tension. And if you put yourself in front of it, then you kind of make everything kind of submissive to your own vanity. You want your trophy. I'm at the Sistine Chapel. Let me put my face in front of Michelangelo's work because Lord knows my face is more important. Like, come on. But if you let yourself sit and let yourself absorb and have it be in front of you, and in this case, wrapped all around you, then you do actually kind of transcend that moment. And what I can do with the lighting trick is that if you give in and you want to take your picture, we make that choice that you made very real by changing the lighting and then all of a sudden the whole audience can see you and you're exposed, which is what you want it. But it's not what you want it. But it is what you want it. And it's sort of that tension is where I think this thing can really transcend just being kind of a visually beautiful and cool experience and actually kind of really deliver on that idea of experiential art and making the audience the piece, the center of it. The Infinity Cube has gone on tour. You've been at like the baseball, Major League Baseball All-Star Game, the Juno Awards, the Canadian Grammy Awards, why are these large organizations paying you to drag this thing out to their events? Kind of the exact opposite of what I want to prove. They weren't really cool pitchers. If Donald Trump walked into the Infinity Cube, would he explode or would it explode? I don't know. That's a good question. I mean, I know there would be a rift in the time space continuum or something, but. Yeah, it depends how comfortably he's looking at himself. I think he's very comfortable. Might be, but. Yeah, well, you know what? We're going to leave it there. We've been talking with Dave Cicerelli. Thanks for talking to me. Thanks for talking to me.