Interview

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1

How did the idea for the Post Internet Survival Guide come about? I’m interested in the origin of the theme as much as the conception of the project as a whole.

Well, the idea for Post Internet Survival Guide was developed in the dark ages of early 2010. I am not sure if anyone remembers that time anymore, but the world functioned in the following ways: Gene McHugh’s Wordpress (!!!) blog Post Internet was the most exciting thing on the net, thanks to R-U-INS? network Tumblr was super fresh and thrilling, Brad Troemel and Lauren Christiansen’s Jogging ruled, people used Flickr a lot, surf-clubs like Nasty-Nets and Spirit Surfers were still the place to go for the best ideas, etc. I was supposed to start my graduation project for graphic design department of Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam. I knew I wanted to make a book and I knew that post-internet was my topic of choice. In the midst of writing my thesis I figured that my meta-interest in this whole variety of young art and online practices was something much more fundamental - namely the narrative of human evolution and how it fits with the most ‘contemporary’ elements of our world. So the title of the book was just a juxtaposition of the most recent trend with the general law about trends. The goal was to capsule and archive the very present moment, from a fundamental perspective.

This present moment has obviously now advanced, but only into a brand new equivalent. How does the project respond - does it attempt to capture (/colonise?) this new present moment? Or have we already enough space to start recontextualising and reframing what was happening two years ago?

Yes as I said part of the project was to capturing something as fluid as web activity and visual/material trends on Tumblr. And by doing so reflect on the very nature of this fluidity. It is also becoming clear now how after two years some things have been coming and going (like Paint FX) and some self-maintaining (like Egypt or the Facebook theme). Eventually in another couple of years Tumblr will seem as historical as MySpace or 90s chat rooms feel now, losing the coolness value and possibly acquiring an archival value. As a document of a very specific moment in ‘present’ time Post Internet Survival Guide makes a case for what we perceive as an increasing merging of matter, information and value. What actually is happening is we as species have possibly reached a state of complexity where categorizing things in strictly binary/dialectic categories proves no longer to be adequate. Hence the need for a guide. The reality of evolutionary development is the fundamental truth worth referring to in any assessment of human nature and culture. One can take a whole fresh look at human history and history of art with this insight -- based on evolutionary psychology/biology, theories of chaos, emergence etc.

How important for you was it that the project encompassed more than just the printed publication? It seems to have become a surrogate identity hosting all of web based, sculptural, performance and curatorial work. Has it become, in this sense, a brand?

I guess Post Internet Survival Guide is a little brand. It started as a brand, with a logo - I first made the cover of the book before I put together any content. And what I did is that I hijacked/developed the just-then born tag of post-internet art and turned it into my own thing and yet a broader more collective thing - a publication with works of around 50 artists, a series of exhibitions, collaborations etc. It keeps growing around the web and IRL. The idea was that the project would participate in similar ecologies it was about - real world, art world, Tumblr and everything in between. PISG events that I was directly involved in include Post Internet Survival Guide launch exhibition co-curated with Mike Ruiz and Future Gallery in Berlin featuring works by Martin Kohout, Timur Si-Qin, Micah Schippa, Damon Zucconi, Lorenzo Bernet & Yannic Joray, Aude Pariset, Sam Hancocks, Kate Steciw and Oliver Laric; TruEYE SurView in W139 Amsterdam with Anne de Vries and Yngve Holen; SO REAL in b-galleria Turku Finland with works of Jaakko Pallasvuo, Emily Jones, Ida Lehtonen and me; Greater Cloud exhibition at Dutch Institute of Media Art with a solo show of Harm van den Dorpel. The whole overview of the ‘brand’ ecology can be seen on my website where I pretty much document all important appearances and developments of Post Internet Survival Guide.

The TruEYE show had its own detailed print/PDF publication as well, which begins to suggest how these different ecologies feed off of each other. Has there been reached a certain level of import within the contemporary environment to frame/extend the individual art project in this way?

I think when active lifespan of an exhibition is a week in Facebook ‘likes’ or a post on Contemporary Art Daily with zero public conversation about it, some interesting things are lost. Namely an opportunity for the show to make a claim for a longer attention cycle and concept importance. Publications help to reassemble ideas and works into a new whole that is able to outlive the actual exhibition and pursue its agenda as an autonomous marketable work. The existence and quality of an exhibition catalog validates the show itself. Ideally there should be a catalog-like thing for each project I do and every project I do should be worth of time and money investment into a catalog.

A key point of interest within the journal seems to be an emphasis on the transmutability of internet and real life situations -- an element of reflexivity between our online and everyday lives. Would you agree with this? How has this aspect of the project developed over the last three years?

I think the difference between online-offline things is by now not the most interesting topic to look into. This transmutability (there are many different words to describe it) is a status quo and I am eager to go next level. Working on projects related to Post Internet Survival Guide pushed me further into ideas about the nature of socio-economic orders, as opposed to Tumblr/Facebook media research. I intuitively decided that before I rush into analyzing post-internet world of brands and commodities from a marxist/psycho-analytic/post-structuralist position I’d better look at the basics of how we as species got here in the first place.

It seems easy to stay on trend and stay informed (thanks Twitter!); it is more difficult and exciting to look for new and unique properties of both online and offline worlds to create and propagate my work.

How has the Post Internet Survival Guide been more about the development of speculative projects than the documenting of a recent history? Are the two initiatives combined?

The two are definitely combined. If PISG was about narrative creation through selecting, assembling and filtering reality it is also about the narrative itself of the world where selecting, assembling and filtering reality is itself a successful method of creation.

To me, this notion of narrative creation seems to segue nicely into the topic of survival itself. Can you explain your idea of ‘evolutionary fitness’?

Evolutionary fitness is the preference of other organisms around you to replicate you, buy you, mate with you or generally associate with you for the gain of you both. For each species there are certain parameters that constitute fitness and the more complex the animal the more nuanced they are. It can be earned and it can be inborn. But one thing is true in all cases -- fitness has to be displayed. For me the reality of fitness display became a very revealing way to understand art and what’s going on in the world.

How does this relate to your use of high-end consumer material in your sculptural work, for example Nike push-up grips and google products? To what extent do they invest belief in an evolutionary future developing within current economic conditions?

I am one out of many artists these days who appropriate commercial products and services in their work.

Within market economy there are processes that are somewhat similar to biological evolution and morphogenesis. The endless supply and demand dynamics creates conditions for an amazing variety of man-produced artifacts. This variety is in constant flux as new stuff becomes valuable and old loses its appeal. For me the interest lies in picking out specific forms and assembling them into new ones.

Parrots are becoming a recurring motif, or specific form, within your work. Is this representative of an underlying logic? Where does your use of this symbol come from?

One thing that deserves a special emphasis in what I am trying to do is readiness to work with the inherent forms and properties of things (nature). Images of parrots are not functioning as symbols for some kind of second-level reality -- they are the already layered reality I want to engage with and feature in new narratives. In other words when people see my works with parrots I want them to react to parrots; there is no extra translation needed, no hidden puzzles. The parrot is a natural story in itself and I use images of parrots to trigger some parts of it. Parrots are special birds. They are extremely intelligent, social and beautiful; they are large, live in rainforests and can learn to speak human language. There is something weird about the way they look, as if they were designed in a product design department as opposed to nature. And they look like the best designed product ever. There are different color-schemes for them and different ‘looks’.

To what extent are we to look to natural ecologies as a virtual space for negotiating realities of the contemporary urban and internet-infused lives in which we are so embroiled? It might be tempting to view some of your iconography as escapist or overtly exotic - the image of the waterfall in the CSS:Bard show, for example. Is there any truth in this? Or do you view this as a much more practical area of enquiry?

I think the ‘truth’ is more simple and profound. Contemporary urban and internet-infused life are natural ecologies. The waterfall in the CSS:Bard show is a first image found on the Wikipedia article page for ‘nature’. If you follow evolution of life from its origins until today, there is no reason to look at human culture with all its complexities as anything but a natural consequence of emergence and selection for the fittest. Just basing one’s thinking on this insight allows for a whole new understanding of art, commerce and aesthetics. Now that doesn’t mean that everything we do is right because it is natural -- on the contrary, we are as ecologically selfish as a species can get, we are in constant battles with each other for resources and we might end up self-destructing.

I think, quite simply, these notion of responsibility and participation in nature are fundamental. We’ve talked about history, and perhaps we’re at a moment where these ideas are finding importance again, and could be embodied to a similar degree to the 60s. If post-internet has gone full circle, and reached a level of transparency where it can emphasise this, then I think we could be at an exciting juncture.

My work is basically about nature. I am in awe of the levels of complexity life has reached and its even greater future potential. Evolution as an endless process of form finding procedures is most weirdly observed in man-made non-living artifacts -- images, products, art, rituals etc -- things that we make to increase our own evolutionary fitness. Making art for me is ultimately about bonding with, filtering, and assembling reality creating narratives of its own origin. These days reality happens to include a lot.

2

Can you explain more what you mean by a ‘neo-materialistic’ understanding of contemporary art? Is this a concern we can directly relate to your practice, or is it something you’ve observed in your peers more generally?

Neo materialism is a term I first came across in early 2011. The main two sources of it were articles by Israeli writer and film-maker Joshua Simon in the e-flux journal (titled Neo-Materialism, part one and Neo-Materialism part two) and the work of Mexican philosopher Manuel de Landa. The writings of both men influenced me a great deal and became a conceptual premise for TruEYE SurView. They both ended up being in the catalog for the exhibition -- Joshua Simon as himself and De Landa through an essay by Timur Si-Qin (he was one of the two people who introduced me to De Landa in the first place). Despite the use of the same term their philosophies are vastly different from each other. Today I can say that the term neo-materialism has been officially claimed by Simon, who is releasing a book this year with Sternberg Press titled Neo-Materialism. My personal understanding and use of neo-materialism though is much closer to De Landa’s.

The starting point of Manuel De Landa’s philosophy is ontological realism. His assemblage theory of emergence and morphogenesis provides a new framework for understanding the nature of human societies. It goes against dominant 20th century theories of language-bound experience divided into subjects and objects (‘post-modern’, everything is a simulation, language determines our world, etc). De Landa claims that, despite our limitations, we are capable of knowing what reality actually is – by looking at physical processes, evolution and its dynamics. Ultimately it comes down to energy, and material emergence. De Landa’s morphogenesis refers to the production of the semi-stable structures out of material flows that are constitutive of the natural and social world (from Wikipedia). Commodities, artworks, animals, computers, human brains, digital images are all example of such assemblages, and electricity, heat, chemical reactions, bit streams, language are examples of such flows.

Joshua Simon’s neo-materialism, although expanding to look at commodity ecologies, still exists within Marxist/Hegelian philosophy of commodity fetishism and dialectics. For him there is difference between subject and object, nature and culture, and material and virtual. In the mentioned e-flux article he describes how after the de-materialization of US dollar and emergence of major global de-regulation strategies in the 70s the gap between ‘symbolic’ and ‘natural’ has been narrowing. Financial markets remind us of unpredictable viral ecological systems, and our hi-tech house appliances substitute farm animals as helpers and companions. Simon looks particularly on the new role of readymades as neo-materialist agents. I agree and relate to his sensibilities and observations, but his underlying terminology is based on essentialist notions that are impossible to apply to the natural world.

So in a way I use neo-materialist and ecological as synonyms. I am interested at looking into the main ways technology and art are included in the general ecological cycles of the planet and human society.

What’s the role of the commodity in your work?

Our contemporary condition has been defined by commodities – brands, commercial products, consumerism, etc. Similar to biological evolution, the world of commerce is based on selection and competition where attraction plays a crucial role. Commerce is a huge ecological and geological force that defines our influence as species. So in my work I try to explore this grand geological narrative on a case by case basis. It is not about critique of commodities, it is about rendering the evolutionary origins of our matter-manipulating culture. At this point in time commodities and digital environments is where it is at.

Do you see culture as being able to evolve from reliance on the commodity form? Or at least form a new relationship with it? In a way, in this question I’m wondering to what extent your work considers future evolutions, and implied futures. By tracing these histories, and rendering them visible, are we able to predict and perhaps impact how they will develop, do you feel? Or is this left more ambiguous in your work?

Speculation and extrapolation is definitely something that I use. It is a bit like trend forecasting but with an awareness of how trends come to be, and what visual or conceptual vessels they are expressed with. So let’s say in such projects as Expo 2020, or Post Internet Survival Guide, the future histories are assembled from a present substrate of information and visuals. In both projects the agency of the storyteller is placed at the moment when the proposed worlds are documented. Thus the ‘speculative research’ becomes archiving or journalism -- a bit like sci-fi i guess, but less prone to fiction literature or movie tropes. One of the inspirations I have is the work of Dutch designer Femke Herregraven, who I worked with on Expo 2020, and who does it so much better than I ever will.

The most interesting thing about ‘future evolutions’ is when you find out that your extrapolation was a valid one, and suddenly there is a revolution in Egypt (there are some elements of revolutionary Egypt in PISG); or you find a render of a foreign company’s project in Africa and it looks exactly like something we did for Expo 2020. Lately my projects have had less of the speculative elements in them as I found a limit in how gimmicky this stuff can get.

Having said that I am now starting to make a new book which revolves around nature and technology. But instead of implying the future I will aim at rendering the present as specifically as possible.

This seems a return to Manuel de Landa: “all presents are actual”, and from this, past and future are “topologically stretched in an unlimited way”

In a way, I’m wondering if applied futurism is an anachronistic concern. The predominant historical thought here being: If we systematise society, map modes of production and ways of doing things, perhaps we’ll be able to predict how these processes will develop, and following this find ways of making these processes more efficient. This I think can be identified in the culture of cybernetics, and the desire to control and regulate so many facets of society that became the predominant reality of the late 20th century. This is not to make any direct link between this history and your work, but when thinking of ecology we might also be concerned with control (would you live in a house built by Google?)

Brought to mind right now is a quote by Guy Hocquenghem, from The Screwball Asses:

“..[O]ften in the Western world having only bodily power brings frustration. And so desirable bodies dream of another power than that of the body, and their desire turns towards those with the power of speech. This is a difficult relationship, it scares them sometimes, and they sometimes prohibit it in themselves for fear of being marked, but it is their true cybernetics.”

This, for me, sits right on this juncture between a traditional and comfortable augmentative notion of cybernetics, and our society of today structured around semiotic capital (a point where conversations around branding become interesting, too). What it does is highlight a question that is still hugely pertinent: What is our true cybernetics? Probably one that looks very unlike cybernetics as we’ve come to visualise it, via Adam Curtis et al. For despite capital(s) being widely and notoriously unregulated, we should not let this occlude the ways in which we are regulated, controlled and systematised - our, therefore, true cybernetics. Hocquenghem directs us towards the power of speech, and I think it is in this way that he is both terrifying and exhilarating.

Yeah I actually find it a bit unfortunate that so many people in arts and culture got acquainted with cybernetics via Adam Curtis. Curtis is an amazing storyteller, and BBC has an amazing moving image archive, yet for me his films have the value of a very well written, but emotionally and ideologically charged opinion article -- aka to be approached with caution.

The true cybernetics is the real one -- based on actual material processes. Thus application of cybernetics in explaining social phenomena is limited. For instance, I am not that much of an expert in this field but I learned that behavioral psychology based on early ideas of feedback loops and old school cybernetics has been challenged by evolutionary psychology, which looks less at closed systems and more at the vast variety of innate, social and environmental factors that emerge as human relations. The main difference is the degree of systemic determinism and the scale you are looking at: if on the cellular level things can be explained in cybernetic terms, it is much harder to do so in international politics. So personally I don’t consider a broad cybernetic outlook on things to be a relevant tool of insight.

The question of control and power is indeed super interesting. Throughout our history many varying models of social organization have been tried out. There is a huge difference between how things work in Finland and Saudi Arabia. I am not familiar with Hocquenghem, but I agree that something as fundamental as speech can affect socio-political reality in quite different ways. For me Hocquenghem’s quote reads like a characteristically 20th century statement -- a mix of psychoanalytic notions applied to politics. But the sensibility I think he tried to convey is that something as ‘immaterial’ as words can trigger real changes and disturbances. And that is an incredibly democratic ‘equal-opportunity’ resource that most people possess -- anyone can find themselves in a position to be that last voice that pushes the sentiment into action. And there is a great power and freedom about that.

The trouble I find myself in is that I am not sure whose words express reality most accurately when it comes to the political domain. If you are used to the ideological sidings of UN, Al Jazeera, RT, BBC, Occupy or FOX News and it feels like you’ve figured it out - for example about what is going on in Syria - then you turn on a Russian TV channel and things you thought you knew are turned upon their heads. So in that sense speech is fundamentally a sectarian weapon, and the multiplicity of narratives leaves me deeply suspicious. I still have no idea what is going on in Syria.

At the same time, multiple narratives are of course an important progenitor of difference, and the self-determination that comes out of that; the problem is though when they become an ideological weapon of any organised entity. When that multiplicity is overly codified and controlled, then its rendered useless.

Yet I’m curious in what ways the artist-figure might mediate this, however, and if at all. Maybe it offers the possibility of the localising of narrative, in opposition to current and oligopolistic structures. To sketch this quickly: the artist has a narrative identity that they are able to manifest and communicate through processes developed in interaction with reality. By giving these processes/ideas visible form (the production of ‘art’), you allow them to have a social value, or at least an impact in the way we might structure lived social relations. Thus alternative realities can then be formed.

Does this have valence on a wider level? Federico Campagna has forwarded the idea of a ‘shared wood’ (see: http://th-rough.eu/writers/campagna-eng/inventing-life-beyond-narratives-parts-1-2) - a fracturing of mass consensus into local collective narratives. This seems similar to John Berger’s notion of the pocket, “formed when two or more people come together in agreement”, and which he thinks of directly as a form of resistance. Maybe the artist is allowed social responsibility for suggesting particularly speculative potential narratives, although of course this is something by no means limited to the artist.

To regain focus: do these ideas resonate with you at all? In what ways is your practice invested in finding a language for this type of communication, and community?

I am not sure I understand all the implication of the question, but I will try to respond.

I see identity as an emerging byproduct of the works, collaborations and other things I do as an artist - not as a target in itself. Each project is a specific attempt to create what you call a ‘social value’. They vary in scale and ambition, but ultimately the goal is to have a continuity of work strong enough for a certain narrative and vocabulary to surface. The social aspect of this whole thing makes it of course a collective experience and negotiation, with certain properties of tribalism. If now my artistic ‘vision’ is powered by the ‘pocket’ value of my peer group, I expect it to expand in the future to include pan-tribal attention (from FB likes to museums). All my recent works have been specifically using general knowledge and general aesthetic elements to claim a larger attention pool. The effectiveness of my ‘vision’ and narrative also depends on the success of my current social group. I will be better heard if you, Arcadia Missa, Amalia and other people around my current work are doing well.

My work does not necessarily come from a place of conflict or resistance -- it is about uniting things rather than setting up oppositions. It is actively embedded in social relations but I am not a socio-political activist, nor do I want to be one.

This notion of ‘pan-tribal attention’ stands out for me - and its implications upon the structuring of attention in a networked economy. The efficiency with which people can now come together and form peer groups directly related to their interest groups, and outside their immediate geography, is a good example of both the complexities and dynamics of social networking in our age - I don’t think it can be underestimated how these groups of people both living together and working together can directly affect their reality. I’m interested in how this could potentially lead to a networked paradigm in direct contravention to the state-reliant political mass that has historically directed how we structure society. I think it is in this context that ‘pan-tribal’ becomes so powerful - the recognition of local autonomies within a greater, networked support system.

Thinking about the socio-political activist: I think art is probably not the way of creating this, but I think it can be a powerful and poetic way of instigating change. It’s the art vs life question in a way, maybe. I think a certain degree of removal is useful; pushing this and narrowing this though is exciting.

Responsibility is I guess about fairness of resource distribution. Of course the reason why art fairs can appear so obscene is wealth being exchanged there in contrast to the inner-city poverty around. That wealth barely ‘trickles down’ and thus keeps the economic disparities reinforced. As a young woman born in Soviet Union and raised in an Eastern European ‘social’ inner-city, I see my responsibility in tackling that on a personal level. I don’t think communism was a great idea, but there were some radically interesting parts about it -- like that bit where art was seen as a society-building force, women held global feminist symposia way before anywhere in the West, and racism was proclaimed to be an archaic atavism. Where am I going with this? Hmm, probably to the point that art has an important role in imagining utopias. And wherever there is a movement to materialize a utopia, artist can find themselves to be front runners in that process. But so far zero utopias have come to existence.

Maybe another way of asking all these questions is ‘To what extent can you actually shape your reality?’ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_warping;) Maybe this has been in my mind since reading your artist statement Bonding with, Filtering, and Assembling reality, the title of which in itself seems particularly potent and exciting.

I am not sure these days artists can or should change social systems or laws of gravity as part of their work. But we can surely imagine or critique these things and there is already a great value in just doing that.

Detail from Curiosity and Opportunity: Next Best

Thing To Being There, 2012.

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