As a review of our 2015 program, an on/offline exhibition Face to Interface at Chinatown Soup in Chinatown, three young artists take the time to review the concept of their works in this show, as well as their performances on the closing night. We learn how they believe their works inform their respective art practices.
Face to Interface at Chinatown Soup in Chinatown. Photo by Taole Zhu.
Chelsea Liu (CL): All of you drew from experiences of daily life: manipulating the Internet, social media, and computer screen with its abundance of digital images into the gallery space as well as the contemporary art context. Was this done consciously? What do all these things essentially mean to you and your art practice?
JS Tan (JS): I don’t think that it’s a topic that I think about in an active way. These are the mediums I grew up in and are surrounded by everyday—it’s kind of my default, so it’s what I use. To me, this question is also about craft. Thinking in the forms of social media has become my craft, and the best way for me to speak towards the topics I’m interested in. Maybe I was a great writer, I would’ve written a book instead. In terms of transferring this stuff into the contemporary art space – I think about the contemporary art audience as an audience that is willing to entertain things that are not capitalistic in nature, which is hugely important to me because not everything I make fits the ‘market’. Maybe if I figured out how to transform my projects into businesses, I wouldn’t need the contemporary art audience. Having everyone else consume my work would be fine.
Chris Fernald (CF): I agree with JS—It should be no great revelation that like many artists I tend to work from my own experience online and off, and my life, like most other people in the western world, is heavily mediated by technology, so it was natural to reach there for material. Spaces and systems of media transfer can be a sort of funhouse mirror that both complicates and reflects ideas of escape, erasure, and transformation. These spaces have really changed how I view the body in the most awesome and awful ways, but maybe more importantly they’ve provided me with an elastic context to examine presence.
Xiaoshi Vivian Vivian Qin (VV): Similar to JS and Chris, I don’t see working with digital media as a statement or a characteristic of my practice.
Installation Shot, Do you want to immigrate to the future?, Xiaoshi Vivian Vivian Qin, 2015. Photo by Taole Zhu.
CL: How do you feel about the exhibition? Did it meet your expectations? How does your work change when put into a real, as opposed to virtual space?
JS: I thought the exhibition closing night was really fun! I’m really glad that I was a part of it all – and that I could see Vivian’s performance as well as Chris’s videos.
For me, Silent is still an art piece. And it’ll continue being an art piece until it becomes an ideologically opinionated, sustainable and usable web service. For me, the show was extremely meaningful because I got to chat with people who were confused but interested. They got to listen to me talk a bit about the design intent and about some of the larger ideas I was thinking about when designing it. I’d also like to think that putting the work in a gallery encouraged people to think a little deeper about an overly simple looking app. Of course I got a bit of the user-testing: Finding bugs, and user-experiences that were confusing, features people had wished for…
I’m curious. Can an art audience also be early adopters if the subject is right?
CF: Unfortunately I wasn’t able to make the show, so my perspective is a little skewed. Though it did feel pretty fitting that a video stood in lieu of me during the closing night, considering the theme of the show.
VV: Honestly most of the time I am not really happy about my work. Actually I am almost never happy about my work. I remember what I put in my artist statement a long time ago was that I want to create one good work in my whole life. Now I think it is too fetishistic. But I found myself still working in this mindset. I try to tell myself “work = process,” and that’s how I manage to keep going. People react differently in different spaces. I think we should consider the space which your art occupies as a part of the work. The difference of my work in the gallery vs online is people lie a lot in real life compare to online.
CL: Vivian, your work in the exhibition Do you want to immigrate to the future? is based on a famous online post. You asked performers (who wore rabbit-ear sensors that picked up their emotions) to converse with visitors, through Google Translate. Can you talk about how you came up with this idea?
VV: The format of the piece is similar to “36 Questions lead to love”, where through a set of escalating self-disclosures two people can accelerate intimacy. You can also say it is Socratic. I found conversing via Google Translate’s voice function was a good way of communication. It lets you connect in a different way than an awkward conversation with a stranger. Do you want to immigrate to the future? comes from my early writing practice. Ray Kurtzweil, an engineer and perhaps the most famous futurist of our time has successfully predicted how technology changed our lives. For example, he predicted the wide use of the internet in 1990 while the technology was still clumsy. Instead of predicting the future, in some way he is making the future. On the other hand, I want people to talk with my performers who sneaked in questions from a list I come up with, relating to the future about immigration and race. I really want people to take a moment to think. Also there’s some irony in the work. You kinda have to have a smartphone to participate.
Installation Shot, Silent, JS Tan, 2015. Photo by Taole Zhu.
CL: There is a natural tension between the work and its audiences in the work Silent, in which the participants are not supposed to talk to each other—they simply are together on this online platform, www.silent.buzz I wonder how you interpret “language” in our modern modes of communication. Do you think that verbal language (or verbal interpretation) for the artwork is crucial?
JS: What’s specific to today’s social landscape about the mode of communication is that language is becoming more about context. For example, the language that a hashtag offers is usually not that powerful – it only becomes really powerful with a certain context, part of which is how the hashtag can link you to a larger conversation. Silent offers a kind of language similar to that; it is a kind of communication that is driven by context. For example, being ‘silent’ in itself is meaningless – but there are certain contexts where silence and being present is the most meaningful. And part of the goal with Silent is to explore what those contexts are.
CL: How do you feel about the audiences for the arts vis-à-vis those for more practical fields? As an artist and also a programmer, can you talk about the work process for each role? How do you see art emerging from the tech space?
JS: I’m a programmer (by training). To me, it’s not really about tech emerging in the art space or art emerging in the tech space. I’d say—get over it. Ultimately, these are just a set of traditions & technologies let you do things. They are tools, and they happen to be the tools that I’ve been trained with. So, I don’t think of my identity as: Artist X Programmer. It’s more like, “artist that knows how to program…” That way I’m not really responsible for questions like: “what’s the future of art and tech?”
Installation Shot, Pop Effigy II, Pop Effigy IV, Pop Effigy I (from left to right), Chris Fernald, 2015. Photo by Taole Zhu.
CL: And Chris, your creative process for the work involved making performative gestures. Can you talk about your presence (as a body/gesture/medium) in your work, especially given that you were performing from Atlanta, in a New York space, via your video?
CF: My friend and I attended a couple writing courses at Bruce High Quality last year, and we found the whole concept of standing up and reading your work as “the” way to share your words with an audience kind of lackluster. When I was asked to consider doing something for the closing night, I thought about how I could play with the form of a “live reading” a bit. Then came the idea to write from an entertainer’s perspective, from the point of view of someone whose practice it is to perform, package, and transmit their body-image and presence to an audience. I wanted to create an auditory and visual space that evoked a resting place in a personal ritual of self-export. The text is a fantasy of immaterial transfer, self-export as a bodily process, and though the language is largely metaphor, I think the sensory details are truthful. Therefore, most of my recent work takes as its subject this transformation of personhood into transmittable gestures. There is an emotional reality based in bodily experience that obviously remains in tact as we navigate virtual worlds. I guess I’m interested in how digital spaces confound those experiences and how different platforms produce post-body expressions of self.
CL: Back to your online project Treatment, which layers a meditative narration over all kinds of images. The voice and the visual imagery form different layers of narration. Can you talk about how the voice and images function in this work?
CF: For the imagery I scoured YouTube and my own backlog of unfinished or unreleased work. Making this piece reminds me of a passage from Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be. This could be totally false, but I seem to remember one of the characters describing her process of making as throwing sand at an invisible castle. Eventually the sand starts to stick in odd places, at different angles, slowly revealing the castle. I think a lot of art is actually like that. We stop short of filling in the whole castle but leave enough sand to let you know it’s there. I wanted the images and the rhythm and the text to be like a constellation of these different points of contact between the sand and the castle. Each is coming from different places, made of different materials, but describing the same thing. That tactic of circumventing a subject, sort of tracing its boundaries, really resonates with me. I wanted to see if a visual experience full of different conduits that existed parallel to the words but rarely intersected with them explicitly could create a situation where the understanding kind of folds into you effortlessly, as if entering your brain through back channels. That deeper, bodily linkage with the digital is what Treatment (hopefully) produces and describes. I think a lot of my time on the internet is sort of like this. Sometimes what you’re looking at matters less than the motion of changing screens. The rhythm of consumption – that’s the point of pleasure or pain.
