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HAZING - in conversation with http://karialtmann.com/

Documentation from Core Samples: Blackmoth.info Body Piercings, 2011

We talked previously about an emphasis on Tumblr in dialogue surrounding your work — would you say there’s a frustration in repeating yourself in conversations such as these? I’m wondering if there is a sense here of art reflecting the logic of the meme, and what sort of power structures this might in turn reveal.   This first answer will probably be the longest…   Repetitive questions are normal, especially with work that employs mystery, but maybe this ties more into your prompt below about scattered identity. Artists definitely feel pressure to be a branded thing, summed up by someone in charge going through a list of names and saying, “This artist makes this and that artist makes that,” and making sure it’s all diverse but similar enough to be presented as a teamed organism that communicates some pre-determined message.   Looking at things like VVork in the past few years makes it clear just how much is being created in all the scenes about a lot of the same general memes and topics in the canon. It seems like an obvious answer to specialize in a way that stands out from that: by relying on that generality and striking some specific and disparate frequency, which can be a hierarchical game in its own right, or by joining then diversifying from the packs of like-minded peers you group with through time, which can also be a dizzying process. It becomes like a game of adding some unique vital ability to the organism in order to stay attached. Especially when your peer network becomes connected abstractly through the net, you can find yourself falling to the whims of the pack or the platforms out of efficiency. But of course art as a learning process needs to be exempt from the pressures of product and community at times, so you need to hold on to the freedom of being general, private, repetitive, or discordant. I’m captivated by that notion of unification and diversification within a group that forms based on attractors, detractors, and environment. Online, your morphology can actually go both ways and beyond.

      One trope the internet should help alleviate is this notion of the artist having a single “thing” that they do. When you’re in control of all the elements that brand you, frame you, and disseminate you, why not diversify that portfolio?

    If you’re the one platforming yourself, it makes it much easier for people to see a fuller body of content in one clickable horizon. You’re not forced to put it all into one packaged showroom artwork, one moment, or one style that can be cherry-picked. Focus is still important, and distilling things down to specificity is a good way to get a message across, but branding yourself is something to be wary of more than ever. Those forces are so strong, now! I still go back and forth between generalist and specialist, which the internet allows, because your sites are the most meta frames. You can oscillate between anonymity and entity, and you can travel from context to context in a split second. The cross-hairs are continuously on the move, which is more congruent with how mobile lives have become. Being in control of your own aggregational destiny, so to speak, allows you to retain the final context, which can mean holding on to direction rights and humanity when the hype market wants you to be submissive and bot-like. It’s a constant play fight, but with that choice of authority you can actually afford to play a lot more. When artists become too eager to be objectified they are ripe for external plucking and branding, and the platforms are going to go where the “cost” is lowest, sometimes.   The expectation of brand is also a somewhat inescapable force now, so for me the trick is to be this metabeast brand director and legitimately do whatever I want from day to day, then figure out a way to organize it all into its own teams later. The serial approach seems pretty natural for a process that provides in-real-time control. Creating, naming, and ordering cloud directory structures is also a creative act.    

  After getting hired to do so much brand interpretation and art direction, where your entire job is to locate some “essence” and then make sure it’s present in all of an entity’s visual and verbal output, it just makes sense to treat art with the same production schedule, especially with the research tools that are now available. That’s not to say all my work is organized that way, but it’s one strategy that still seems efficient. Even more efficient is to use a brand whose real estate already exists, but is hazy enough to allow for a much needed personal reuse that has nothing to do with the original.  

 TTOSHIBAA: 10,000 IMPRESSIONS, 2010   I still think of my “artist website” as the big piece or the real product in a way, though it’s 2011 and still no show has ever presented it as one. Curators and bloggers still tend to want to shop it for works a la carte, instead of presenting the full scenes or the networked teams. After some time you’re almost forced to start succumbing to the notions of the standalone product in order to get the message across in those contexts, and to lure people back to your site. Then it becomes a question of what people are experiencing in something like a gallery: is it all just a demo, a prop, or a sample for the real thing elsewhere? It’s an old topic but still surprisingly unaddressed when install time rolls around.

This is a result of the way art venues (and many art portfolio websites) still tend to work as product showrooms of cultural craft and artist names become memes that get reblogged around from different tastemaking sites. You can really watch all these exchanges from platform to platform and predict trickle down trends. It becomes easier online to see who is exploring and going deep, and who is just gleaning things from surfaces elsewhere. (The quirks of networked knowledge or culture communities are a whole other topic.) In the age of the reblog it becomes harder to identify primary sources. Especially when a lot of cultural producers are trying to recycle or rebrand while working in packs, you have to be sharp about who is authoring or producing an idea and who isn’t. What are the other actions and what kind of value should be placed on them? I am trying to be in control of my place in that, is all. There have been a few times when hype waves have tried to turn into undertow and define what my “thing” is for me. A lot of it has just become like tagging, and at times these contact emails seem like they’re running on algorithms. I mean who are you, Harry Burke?  The way internet search services and similar content formulas are developing is really key. A lot of my projects are about reacting in kind.

Excerpt from R-U-In?S Similar Image Haul: Magic Eye XD for K48, 2010 I’m game, but I’m trying to do more in-person, direct presentations where I can create more controlled environments, so that the exported aggregation of the internet is not too dominant. I really haven’t done a lot of shows or events where I’m actually in control, working with a venue I know very well, or resource-enabled. It’s all been extremely outsourced and translated, which I’ve tried to work into my approach. I want more “you had to be there” in 2012. This has all been talked about before and concepts like memes are obviously just how social things work already. Perhaps the difference now is the internet revealing it on such a large and instant scale that these patterns become a lot more apparent? Or that it’s now easier to control (and test) with one small gesture that becomes extremely amplified through an instant and specialized network echo? Any ident can find a platform, audience, and all the resources it needs to open for business in a few minutes. It can also be bootlegged or ripped off in an hour. Repetitive questions are a result of people’s entry point being one thing or another based on what’s been framed for them, as in what portal has been presented and vetted in some way by an outside source. Going to my site doesn’t always provide those concrete answers for a surface user. There is a big focus on Tumblr and the projects on it right now, because those are the easiest things to follow. You can go right into them, they’re super reblog friendly, and people are more likely to see what you’re doing on a platform they’re on socially like that than deep troll yourname.com directly. Maybe this is where I ask for this interview to be more like some promo questionnaire. Ask me my favorite color, or about where I grew up! Just don’t ask me more of the same questions about Tumblr and how the internet works? Or maybe I just say “it’s all part of the performance.” Then we post some pic you took of me hanging at the mall during our interview with lots of lens flares.

Pic of me at the interview with lens flare B-] Probably frustrating to be asked that as a first question, or in fact at all. But I like your response. (In response to external Skype conversation about webcam pic) You asked me questions about performed gender after seeing this pic, which you admitted was the first you’d ever seen. Did you think I was a dude before? It’s not the first time. Dirk from JODI is among the people who have been fooled, even. I call this phenomenon “Karl Artman”. Lol. Well not really, but I wasn’t sure at one point, but only in the way like when you know you locked your front door but still for some reason you think you haven’t and then don’t know whether to check or not…levels of ambiguity. But that’s pretty funny, if not maybe relieving on my part as well. I’m reading Sexual Personae right now, I’d highly recommend it. Really entertaining. To what extent do you perceive your online archiving as performative? Would this be altered if, say,  the images were collated on a hard drive (following the model of a painter in her studio) rather than blogs? I’m wondering whether it’s upon publication that such research becomes an artistic act or if it’s something more integral, more process-based. Not so sure what you’re asking, here. Everything is also on hard drives, and people putting art online is not new? Are you talking about directory structure as art? That’s how more and more people are using their sites: as cloud mirrors of their hard drives with a few additional filters. In this way production and research are more conjoined, things are more live, and you can contribute to shared groups if you have something that doesn’t fit anywhere in yours. Or maybe this is in response to me explaining that my site is not always a showroom, which is the same idea….

I’m wondering how internet artist’s practice would be affected if they didn’t publish it online, at least not immediately. Of course they would no longer be ‘internet artists’ per se, but with so many people rejecting this term, it seems interesting to try and work out where the boundaries lie. I mean I don’t post everything online, and certainly not immediately. I guess a lot of it is at least listed, thumbnailed, or demo’ed in some way to add itself to the overall impression. Net-friendly stuff ends up online naturally but I don’t consider a lot of my work to be internet art per se. Since my site is the piece I’m really working on every day, I guess it all gets framed as that, though. I make everything with my websites in mind, even if it can’t properly be experienced there. It depends. Right now I’m actually more into 3d/4d modeling, plants, bike helmets, and constructing things from Ebay and CVS materials, but that’s a “thing,” too, computer artists trying to prove that they do other, non-computer things! There is still such a public stigma about technology, it’s surprising. I thought the internet hysteria was sort of dying in 2005. I guess I was wrong? Aren’t artists usually hesitant about “genrefication” ? The terminology of internet art, post internet art, art 2.0 v. 3.0, etc. is still a bit arguable. I like post internet because it’s like an annoyed reaction, but of course everything has overlap. It’s helpful to differentiate between approaches, but it eventually seems limiting because of all the bizarre things that get ascribed to the meme of it by others. A lot of talk about virtual art gets wrapped up in coverage of the platforms and mediums, aiming to place it all in a tech product lineage or the history of social media instead of what the art actually is and what the artist is about. It’s like seeing the work for its parts! This goes back to that generality and authorship issue. This is also what leads to the same questions over and over, the same articles being written over and over, as well as the same art pieces about technology being made over and over. Even shows are guilty of this at times: promoting the novelty of the system instead of facilitating the art that is giving life to the system. Everything gets flattened into this homogeneous idea of “content” or “participation” in support of some other framework and it can all get very gimmick-y. That type of feudal, territorial activity is wonderfully ideal for some things, but not always great for going deeper. Users are not all the same, content and art are not all the same and shouldn’t be referred to in a lump sum. Right? Are artists actually annoyed by those tags? Or are they just trying to make sure the terminology stays diverse so they don’t get type cast into a shelf life? The tag is usually already attached if they are reacting to it and genres don’t always get to choose their own name (IDM, WITCH HOUSE, SEAPUNK). I’ll go along with them if they apply, sure, whatever helps, but I prefer “metamedia” and “wi-fi #based” for now. They will continue to change as new topics emerge. Perhaps there is some sort of relationship here between the rhizomatic structures so commonly celebrated in online territories and their inevitable commercialisation, or commercial colonisation. In this sense the hackneyed genres that get picked up by the big rebloggers would be the commercialised nodes, reshaped and contested by their new traffic flow. (Genrefication as abstract gentrification??? http://www.google.co.uk/search?gcx=w&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=genrefication) And artists’ exploitation of these offers a model with which to consider their dynamics up to, even beyond, this point. I’m glad to see genrefy becoming a more official word ;) It’s an important question right now, not least because of America’s positioning of itself as an ideational economy, one whose aim is now to mastermind the branding and concept behind outsourced production. Jaron Lanier talks about this a lot, and David Graeber’s recent debt book is clarifying how payment is not “becoming” virtual but returning to a virtual state. Hypebucks are legitimate currency on the web. These hierarchical cultural battles and subsuming tendencies are, of course, completely mirrored or even foreshadowed online. To what extent do you see your artistic identity distributed / decentralised in your numerous blogs and online activities? Is this is a fragmentation or more of an integration? I feel like this is just a normal desire extended by technology throughout history. When you have that grand, master view of the network, you are free to roam, even from your tiny outpost in it. Power User! It’s a very imperialized lens, far beyond the mechanics of any camera. The roving eye now has its virtual extension, for which there is this dangerous mirage of globalized infinite zoom on an x-y-z scale. That process of generalizing and specifying finds an endless supply, here. There are trends tied to this, too, from having a really open and scattered online presence to a really closed and specific one. For me this depends on what I’m working on at the time, which is the biggest decider of my online mood. Somehow I feel like I’m typing this in response to a lot of social internet situations?? Like, “Sorry but I was busy,” or “It was all a part of the project.” Navigating the divide between these tiny specific audiences and the great beyond of being wifi-based can be intense. I have to say though, having an array of acting projects or identities is really helpful because it keeps whatever karialtmann.com is very free. Your artistic model seems to advocate a very proactive relationship with the information environment, a sort of humanistic enabling through information tools. Are you an advocate of network ecologies? The first issue of Radical Software (1970) suggested, “Our species will survive neither by totally rejecting nor unconditionally embracing technology - but by humanising it; by allowing people access to the information tools they need to shape and reassert control over their lives.” I wouldn’t say I’m an advocate, but my work is a response to its habitat.

Garden Club, 2009-ongoing Is there a certain logic to your image-aggregating projects? Perhaps you could relate this to your notion of “human search algorithms” and the fact that you’ve run into people online who don’t see the underlying structure. The logic is a vital logic. Each project is figuring out a way to survive in the hype economy, either by colonizing more content or diversifying itself, creating some emergent new sub-product, or simply outlasting its bootleg competitors by reaggregating them. If it fails to go viral it makes that failure part of its statement so that it can outlive the lack of favs or reblogs it gets, or it crafts a way to be part of a bigger statement. Basically by setting up these accounts I’m creating an attractor, an algorithm, that starts to build its own DNA sequence of parameters and set up shop via a results page. It’s sampling each post for the material and labor it needs to keep going, like a rebranding parasite. Once its parameters reach a certain critical mass, they can start to colonize everything. (It’s alive!) Even the R-U-In?S project at one point became about explaining itself, and it was a really brand-fatigued era. People who are somehow participating in it don’t always get it, but that’s a part of the territory. I have a background that’s found me in a lot of different creative communities, including online ones, and I’ve seen what fizzles out and what outlasts the social group. R-U-In?S for me was just a different approach than anything I’d been a part of before. The way it’s structured represents a trickled down, black-market-mutated global economy, one in which distanced research entities communicate primarily through their reproduced image-object goods and rebrands in a very public marketplace full of mistranslation, competition, ripoffs, forced diversification, and constantly morphing call and response that is not so obvious to a general audience who isn’t participating. It started as a looted artifact trade based on treating the results of search queries as anthropological records, and it’s grown to encompass all kinds of products and materials in its lexicon of critical currency. Each meme tries to build tiny empires through exchange routes over time that are either supported or abandoned. That’s why the presentations of it have leaned toward Trade Shows, Catalogues, Storefronts, Meeting Rooms, etc. An unspoken social contract develops between each entity as they become entangled. It’s like some warped surf club between fake brands. Even though it’s a project about misappropriation, I’ve had to stand up for it a few times as it gets aggregated into the wrong context. In some ways these arguments are a part of the project, too, because it’s all about researching those structures. In the end it always tries to aggregate those conflicts back into its premise, which forces the premise to expand again. Visual literacy can be a problematic topic in the blogosphere, especially for people who aren't  privy to a behind-the-scenes understanding of media production. Of course, it also depends on a shared library of references, but that’s why the projects I have on Tumblr have this “most common denominator” element to them. They’re presented as seemingly obvious (obnoxious?) memes. That’s part of how they lure you into their back-end, and into working for them. You start to see them everywhere. In viral fav networks like those, you have to try to embed the criticality inside that lure, inside something that can become really commodified based on the ecology it exists in, so that even people who are mindlessly spreading it for all the wrong reasons or trolling it are still somehow working for the cause. No labor is wasted. It’s a hierarchical game, but it’s also part of the comment. You can get much better content when people are acting as the algorithms. You become each other’s search bots, voluntarily or not. Aggregational times, Harry, aggregational times! I like the logic of your responses to Gene McHugh, in that they highlight the mutability of the critical text, too often misinterpreted as rigid and invariable. Also that such texts have their own patterns of circulation, around the internet and in the more abstract intellectual sphere.

But what relationship should the artist have with their own surrounding critical discourse? Are there any parallels here with the instant feedback you must experience in your own online networks, both amongst your peers and in wider (internet) circles?

Gene’s writings on Post Internet were really just a performative blog of looking at things online and responding. In some cases he’d talked to me about the ideas beforehand for over a year, and in some he hadn’t. Essentially they are still his reads, his proposals, with some influence from me. He works as a curator so his texts reflect that, but it was also partially about the experience of coming across things on the internet and trying to figure them out. It stood out because it was actually considered and involved with a lot of the artists it covered. It’s funny that it became such a thing! There really isn’t much directly engaged writing going on about the things I find myself talking about with people on Gchat or at the bar because artists are usually focused on putting it into their work. A lot of posting online is being done by people who have just gone to three urls and a party, so it’s extremely speculative. That’s to be expected, but when that’s all that is ever documented in writing about an artist’s work, those blog posts wind up circulating around, getting printed, and being treated like primary documents when they definitely aren’t. In the case of art online there’s often still a lot of basic presentational framing missing. When filmmakers or musicians release a project, it’s quite an ordeal. There’s a ton of context and it’s very clear what the product is and who is behind it. Those things can be missing in a process aiming beyond a product method, where people assume anything they see on your site to be “it” and begin writing about “it” in the same moment. Product-oriented thinking is still so engrained. I mean at this point most artists are just an email away so it’s assumed that people are going to open up a direct communication line with questions. Talking about it all is very easy, but posting it online becomes a different beast, partially because of the nature of online content and comment section polemics. Whatever press or criticism is, is now bound up in the same muddy arenas with everything else. Plus, you know, you don’t want to contribute to the problem. Trying to create some kind of respectful record of very deep currents takes a lot of time and care. Is any blog the end-all-be-all or the final word? No. There should be a lot more people doing what Gene did, if they’re interested. I consider my Tumblr accounts like publishing outlets, but things that aren’t text-based or book-formatted aren’t always recognized as a form of discourse. I try to show them as documentary films, too. Gene was happy I posted responses because he meant for his blog to be a conversation-starter, and was surprised more artists didn’t do the same (so he’s said). Having something to bounce off of and respond to is really helpful— for instance free range interview prompts like this one with no word or content limit. I wouldn’t write about a lot of these topics normally because I’ve heard them talked about so much, but I forget they might not be as accessible as they could be. So I don’t mind the repetitive questions too much. That’s why I’m interested in projects like Gene’s and others that are more collaborative, because they actually assist artists in the research and citation process, which aids them in representing themselves instead of contributing to the pattern of outsourcing the artist into oblivion. Writing for me is usually post-mortem for when a project is over, and I still don’t think that everything needs to be accompanied by texts, nor do I think any artist should publish those texts until they are ready to do it at a level they’re proud of. In the meantime, there is another big job on deck. You talk about instant feedback but just as an fyi, that doesn’t always happen. Because things connected online are very geographically distanced, even talk about each other’s work can be just as speculative as a result of the lack of contact. When artists have access to each other, they don’t always use it productively, and that’s contributing to the lack of substance. You can only get so far through emails or vague notions of one another. The grant to give would be something that gathers everyone in one place, say, for the big 2012 party. Just a thought! The internet or any kind of scene recognition can actually make people more paranoid about sharing ideas and expressing reactions as much as it can facilitate it. There seems to be this assumption that any productive artist is part of an equally rigorous critical peer group, and that they’ve had tons of practice arguing out all of their ideas. Everyone still seems to assume that whatever’s happening in this area of art is very distanced from them, as though everyone involved is some mega celebrity with their own separate lives…but surprise! You are a participant in something still relatively specific, small, and blossoming, and it might be more up to you than you even realize. You are not outside the network, you are a node.  I wind up explaining this a lot: it’s up to art venues and others in the audience to commission (or at least request) a lot of the ideas listed on the site into final presentations, and it’s up to you to ask the questions you want answered. It’s not that there is no thought or conversation going on about this! It’s just that it’s not always done justice or publicized properly because of that haze. [brands heterogeneity / state. work as an exploration of flux? -> relation to location / lived patterns? -> (how) does this relate to (e-)waste?] ^ Are these questions you’re working on? I guess there aren’t many questions specifically about…what, personhood? Which might be nice to tap into… As I was saying before, artist interviews tend to be really meta online, almost to the point of being droll? I’ve just finished typing out two different interviews, both of which found me talking about brains in jars…

!! Perhaps I’m really guilty of that. Or maybe the internet leads quite naturally to abstracted modes of thinking. It’s already proven that our cognitive abilities are being reshaped by new media, the obvious example being increasing disability to recall proper terms, with emphasis on process (the google search) subduing the actual remembering. Even that example sort of supports itself. Thus I guess we shouldn’t overlook the virtue of conversation around something as seemingly arbitrary as a favourite colour. I can’t even think if I have one now. Yeah the questions get so concept-driven that there’s this pressure to make it that primary document. I just went through this and deleted even more because I find myself using interview prompts and gmail faq’s as an excuse to start branching off into an essay, but those are a different format with a responsibility to cite and reference. I want to avoid that pressure when I’m just typing a conversational Gdoc to someone I don’t know, you know? Not to mention the need now, at the end of typing, to add a lot of interesting links and content, like that Delicio.us TL;DR pressure…I’ll go through now and add some, plus those mall pics. lol. How much of Kari Altmann as a person is manifest in your presence on the internet? Is the personality of the artist something that appeals to you? Right now I’m really into artists’ backgrounds and personal behavior. I want to know all the gossip! Obviously I’m interested in networks and power relationships…I love a good face-off. I’m always relieved to find out all the complicated, torrid social histories that parallel the ones I’ve been a part of in all these scenes. I would much rather be a part of something where everyone cares so much and is going through all these turbulent, deep, and weird things together than faking it or acting super blank. Or even worse— playing it safe, standing for nothing, or doing nothing at all. It’s proof of vitality when there is friction and heat, and that’s what makes those sparks, you know? The alternative is a group of really afraid people doing things that are ultimately forgettable and lost with time. Nobody learns anything. As for me, I’m just available enough online, and it’s about 15% of the picture. I’m sure there is a personality tone that pervades a lot of my online activity. It’s part of my approach to the internet, though: I have slumber party mode and then CEO death cubicle mode. Isn’t this all a video game anyway? http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Internet_(video_game). Final question: What’s your favourite color? Tempted to answer with flourescent beige…but for the sake of fav colors and artist backgrounds: there is a certain color scheme that I’m really attracted to, one that can be described as “Crepusculo”.

Korean WorldPhone Card, bought in Seoul in 2007

Samsung Plasma TV Trade Show Image I’m approaching this as an art direction, but I think my attraction to it is twofold: 1. The range of colors makes for really rich images which obviously seem more “valuable.” 2. It’s embedded into palettes that surrounded me growing up in Texas, which are part of a larger sensation. Not just the muted soil tones of the Silicon Prairie land and the sunlit shades of wide blue skies over superflat horizons, but also the pink bricks of superluxe houses, the concrete of highways and spread out telecom companies, and the mix of dusty, desert-like air with super glossy big-money consumer culture. One of the reasons Texas attracts so many start-ups and franchises is quite literally because of the land: there is tons of it, it’s flat, it’s dry, it’s cheap, and there is no state tax. Not so great for plants and animals but ideal for corporations. Ironically it turns into clay or bedrock pretty quickly as you dig down so things have to be built on very shallow foundations; very few of these developments go below surface level. Marble malls, sparkling limestone Mcmansions, leather Lexus interiors, ice cold air conditioning, tons of slippery blue, black, and gold glass, and lots of franchise-y indoor l.e.d. lighting schemes from a city that was absolutely booming and crashing in the 1990s and early 2000s. It gets more and more desert-like in memory, actually. It was this strange mix of liquid and arid, like a coating of luxury conditioner over this barren frontier-type landscape. It felt geological and synthetic at once? Just something very immediate and chemically enhanced placed over lands that felt very prehistoric and reptile-friendly. The fantasy-image used to plow the earth, you know?

Image from BLOOD:\ (MOBILE UPLOADS), taken in Las Vegas, 2010 Every place has its own flavor of this. The only other places I’ve been that have moments of the same aftertaste are more recently developed parts of L.A. and Las Vegas, both of which are a total mindfuck, and this is part of my fascination with seemingly similar landscapes and cities I’ve yet to visit like Dubai. This is also a color profile that cameras tend to enhance under generic white balance settings, and one that photographers aim for at “magic hour”, which is a block of time when the outside light is at its most pornographic. It’s especially attractive for product images that need to sell that idea of nutrient-rich luxury, or for people shooting in HD.

The places I’ve lived since then have all been extremely different, by no accident. This sort of material was the impetus for projects like blackmoth.org and blackmoth.info, which are interested in locating an earthbound geological materiality in the formations of images left behind by the climes of media production, a method which finds its niche among projects by Heim Steinbach and Robert Smithson. Richard Kelly is also a huge comrade.

I think the project has ended or at least hit a stopping point with Core Samples, and on Tumblr it’s developed a nice network of similar content.

Documentation from Core Samples: Blackmoth.info Body Piercings, 2011

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