Evan Roth: Internet Landscapes

In Internet Landscapes, Evan Roth will discuss his work as it relates to visualizing, archiving and understanding the Internet and its effects on culture with a focus on the misuse of communication technologies. Roth will trace his personal and creative history within an Internet landscape that has changed significantly in the last 16 years. The presentation will include a range of work culminating in his more recent pilgrimages to the beaches of the UK, New Zealand and Sweden, where submarine Internet fiber optic cables reach the land. Armed with an array of paranormal technologies, Roth will recount his personal quest to visualize and reconnect with a changing Internet landscape.

Evan Roth

Angel: Our speaker today is Evan Roth.

He's a multi-disciplinary American artist
based in Paris.

He's working with sculptures, prints,
videos and websites

and in the upcoming hour during his talk
he'll 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 Evan Roth, our speaker today!

Thank you very much!

Applause

Evan: Hi everybody, thanks so much for coming,
I'm really humbled and honoured to be here.

It's my first time on this side of the internet
with you all, so thanks so much for joining.

Ya, my name is Evan. I'm an American,
I'm living in Paris at the moment.

I'm an artist, and so I'm gonna 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 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've been 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
is sort of see things that have other

sort of unintended uses, right.
Female voice in bg: Introducing the iRobot

robot..

Evan: To make things, like consumer domestic
products much more interesting, right,

so this is the doomba,
this old old internet meme, right,

laughter
but, so good, right,

such a wonderful gift that the internet gave
us

with the doomba,

like I can't wait until.. I really feel like
this

should be in the permanent collection

of the Museum of Modern Arts,
this is one of my favourite sculptures

I've seen in the last few years.

But for me, I tried to have like doomba vision
when I'm doing activism

or when I'm doing art
and thinking about like

what else can I ducttape knifes onto
to make it more interesting than it was

the way the manufacturer sort of
er, advertised it to me, right?

Ahm, and so that's kind of a main inspiration
for a lot of the art work 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 gonna try to show through different projects

are 1) this idea of technological empowerment,
which is part of the reason I became an artist,

and the other this idea of visualisation
through misuse.

And my kind of .. my history with technological
empowerment went back to the ..

when I was an architect.
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
it 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're
gonna

do things like 3D modelling on Autocad,

and there was one week about the internet.
And I had like this really vivid memory

where the professor brought up
this fetch window on an old Mac,

and like edited it in a little text document
and dragged it in and the dog

ran it up to the internet and then
he'd 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
knell on my architectural career.

Like I would go on to graduate
and work for a couple of years,

but very quickly I 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 .. kind of had my first introduction
to open source,

like reading Joshua Davis' praystation 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 this shows up in some of my work,
I'm gonna start around, like, 2005

with some projects that I've been doing
up to projects that I've been doing right

now.

Back in 2005/2006 I co-founded an organisation
called Graffiti Reseach Lab

with a friend named James Powderly,
while we were in residency at IBM 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're 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 toolbuilders.

And so, with that as, like, a premise,
we sort of thought of ourselves

as the Q 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'd invite activists and
we'd invite graffiti writers,

and we'd set up on this 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 that there couldn't be a censor 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 grey 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
press than we deserved,

and we were trying to figure out
why that was happening,

and one thing we sorta came to was
we were sorta fulfilling this narrative

that the media wants, which is
that we are living in the future now, right?

Which is why everyone is reporting on
hoverboards now, like, ???

we're here, you know?
And graffiti writers with lasers

was one of those apparently, like,
monumental future points that we'd hit,

and so the media was trying to write
about our projects,

and 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 gonna
use what even Franco called radical entertainment,

This idea that you could make sort of engaging
media on the internet

that people are gonna want to click on,
not because they agree with the politics,

because they wanna see people
acting a fool in the streets, right?

So I'll show, I'll show one project here.

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 projects.

So this was one where we rented a..
actually, Aram Bartholl was 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, ducttape and wires.

There was nothing technical in this project,
it was purely a social hack.

And this was probably my second greatest
technological empowering moment.

Driving the google car is fucking amazing.

Here is what that looks like.

music

laughter

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, it was breaking down.

This is the drinking and driving.
Laughter

applause

And if you wanna know how strong google's
brand is, this is a staged carjacking,

where someone off the street
risks their life to save a corporate automobile

engaged in spying practices.
Laughter

And so the idea is that we were then leaking
these on the internet and

this was a long time ago back when
we were not sure if google was evil or not,

right?

So this discussion was happening.

It's happening more in Germany than in
other places, actually.

But the idea was to get those conversations
happening outside of places like this,

and outside of places like our gallery
and art institutions and more in, like,

the mainstream press,
and, like, people over coffee

picking up this story

and starting to talk about these issues.

That was kind of the idea behind
F.A.T. Lab function.

I was also maintaining a solo practice
at the same time as I was doing these

more collaborative projects.

This is one called 'Free Speech' I did
in Vienna in 2000.. I don't know, like 3 or

4 years ago now?

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 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
enough to call that would have their phone

routed directly to the speaker,
and there was noone on the other line,

so their first realisation that they were
sort of in the system when they would just

hear themselves, like,
'Hello?' echoing throughout the streets.

I'll show a bit of that that looks like.

noise
Female voice: Hallo? Hallo!

Ich bin der Champion!

Male voice: Laughter

noise

Children: Hallo! Fick dich!

Male voice: Laura! Ich liebe dich!

Music

Group voices: Hallo? Niiiiice!

So fresh, man. TschĂś.

Evan: And so, like, that guy was maybe my
favourite,

or maybe that guy who picked up

and just started laughing,
even though when confronted

with this sort of

louder voice in public, and they were..
maybe thought that were gonna have,

when they set out, commute to work or
go to coffee,

even though maybe they didn't choose
to say these more poignant points, you know?

Maybe just the laughter to me was this
more pure feeling of what technological

empowerment feels like, right, like
just laughing on the streets

because you kind of have
this empowered voice.

Like, that, that's the feeling I wanna
get as an artist and so,

some of the work I was doing was trying
to sort of set up, set up these systems

that would allow other people
to have these 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 3 years

has to do with 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 3 or 4 years
ago,

I did this sort of homage to wikipedia.

I still love surfing wikipedia.

For me as someone who 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 is semi-egoless 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 doroknot (?) functions,
or they really want to explain

how a boxer engine works, right,
it's content that if Konstant were here

he would call media with an alibi, right?

It's media that has 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 and honest place to surf sometimes.

And so, I made this series of eleven websites,
kind of as a monument to wikipedia,

where I spent a summer just surfing
for animated GIFs on wikipedia

which was a really awesome way
to spend the summer.

And then, when I found ones that
I would wanna kind of use as raw materials

I would just copy and paste it
a couple of hundred times

and rename the files so
that when the browser tries to load it in

it doesn't cache them all immediately.
It thinks they're all separate files.

And so what 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 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

were depending on your process,
your speed and what browser you're using

and how fast your internet connection is.

They're always gonna 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 if you view these same pieces
in the TOR browser,

which I don't have to explain
what it is in this audience,

which is really fun for the first time,
laughing

you get get a sense of how...
so this is the exact same website

just viewed through TOR.
And you can see in the piece

how the composition is altered, right,
because, as the pieces are moving around

and 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 is some kind 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 algorithm,
so just pack all these images

into the smallest amount of room possible,
and I'll make these prints

that are just straight print-outs of
my internet cache.

So this is what one month
of my internet cache looks like.

That is what 3 months looks like.

They're relatively uncensored.

I go through it to look and make sure,
'cause sometimes my wife will use the computer,

I'll make sure there is nothing of hers
she doesn't want on there,

and I check it for banking details,
but besides that it's pretty..

pretty much uncensored.

And so, it's meant to be..
I kind of think of them as self portraits.

They're.. I think of them actually more
like false self portraits,

'cause it's.. unless you truly think
that you are your browsing data,

it's not.. it does.. it's..
these prints aren't who I feel like I am.

But in.. I think over the long term
the idea is more they are meant

to be this sort of portrait of the internet
at this one moment in time, right?

And as sort of screen size has changed
and screens shift from our laps to our pockets,

and as browser resolutions
and all these standards change,

and the kind of fabric
of the web changes,

and 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 in time.

That's the idea anyway.

Another related series has to do
again with this kind of shift 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 had this series called
'Multi-touch Paintings',

that are created just from,
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 to unlock'.

This is a.. this one's called
'Zoom in, zoom out'.

And they're literally just 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 meant to be,

maybe purely a visualization
in a sense.

But I think maybe..
I hope that there's more, there is also

like kind of an artistic side of these too,
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
in 99% of the time, right?

For the 10 people that see this
hanging on a wall,

the rest are just gonna 'next'
through this on instagram, right?

And so it's meant to sort of,
kind of archive, like, the bug in amber

a little bit, 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,
a 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.

Laughing And so..
Applause

So the grid starts in the upper left corner
with level 1-1.

Whoever else has a Angry.. or had
at one point an Angry Birds addiction,

you know the level well.

And then I just played straight through.

It takes me full-time Angry Birds play,
like 8-10 hours a day for 3 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 attempted level,

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, I was thinking about
conversations we had earlier

on the F.A.T. 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 2

weeks,

it was like we were
dead on the internet, right?

And we felt this kind of like push
from the internet

that we 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
mean something slightly different

for people that are gonna invest
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 you come in and you sit
on this bench, right,

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 I could have done
at that time, right?

Like, I coulda learned French,
I coulda lost ten pounds,

I coulda learned how to cook more,
I could've read a whole bunch of books,

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..
it can be consumed in Instagram quickly.

I like the reading..
I.. if people are able to sit with it

and maybe contemplate these larger issues
I like it as well, but I think

in art-making right now there is this..
I'm trying to make work that isn't

just addressing the internet's drive
to have things faster and quicker

and in blogpost titles, right?

'Cause I felt it sort of affected
the art I was making.

And also the internet has like
fundamentally changed, right,

like I think.. I think the times
that we were at IBM and

we were doing F.A.T. Lab
and the times that we were

sort of wrestling with that work -
things really changed, like,

we all felt it.

And in this crowd I don't
really have to talk about it, right?

But for a while, the internet to me
felt like this, and shame on me, you know?

But as I've been making work and
the work's been changing,

and my relationship to the internet
has been changing,

and so I'm gonna 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
gonna happen

and it's just gonna keep multiplying,
getting bigger and bigger

and there'll be a server for every interest,
and everybody'll be a publisher,

everyone's gonna be empowered.

And I thought it was this
Big Bang model of what was gonna happen.

And 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.
Laughter

You know, I think once we, like,
culturally decided that

someone could read our emails
and advertise us 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 into fewer and fewer servers,

and.. anyway, we all know this stuff, right.

And so this kind of like, this condensation
of the internet down to one point

feels like it's happening.

The kind of targeted marketing
that just was annoying at one point

now feels really more sinister, like,
I mean, it was kind of ok

to read our email and
advertise to us,

but then when you start, like,
kind of snitching on us,

that was just.. that was hard for me.

Like, we don't even need to talk about this,
'cause 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 that I was taking
for, from the kind of free culture movement

and free software movement,
engaged with the internet, and like,

the convolution of these 3 things, of like,
monetization of the web,

the centralization of the web,
and then this kind of spying scandal.

They really left me in kind of like staggering
for ways to get back to making art

about an internet that didn't feel
funny to me any more, right, like,

the internet was ..
this is how I felt like.

I felt like the lolcats 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 any more.

Like, I thought, the internet was
the land of the cats and unicorns,

and now, the fur has kind of been removed
and you see the terminator's shiny skull

and the red beady eye.

And so if.. and just like from 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 transmediale last year,

or here, or, I mean, around the internet.

I thought it was in the internet
for a second there.

This was Peter's talk at transmediale,
where he gets on stage

and he basically says
'We've lost, and it's over.'

which is something I know that
we've heard here from Frank and Rop

10 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.. like, the Pirate Bay, for me,
and the work that Piratbyran had been

doing,

has been really one of my main, like,
heroes, one of the main reasons

I started making art.

Like, 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 to thinking about

how entertainment and activism
could overlap,

and how people could really
change things

and have kind of powerstructure-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 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 have somebody else say that..
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 F.A.T. Lab internally,

and, not by unanimous decision
but by majority we decided

that we were gonna shut the doors
at F.A.T. Lab.

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, kind of again, like as
a.. kind of my personal take

on how I'm working through this stuff
was like.. I felt like F.A.T. Lab..

like the internet had sort of
outpaced us, like,

that idea of radical entertainment
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 Wieden+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 David and Goliath
narrative to people.

Both within the group, they were
getting closer to sort of Silicon Valley,

and our audience, which I felt like
was getting closer and closer to Silicon Valley,

that like... people that were getting
entrenched more into that way of thinking

were 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 the fact that they were
supporting that system.

And... it kind of felt like we were
the comedian on 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 jump off the ship

rather than sit there and keep
bailing out the ship, right?

And so that's where I was
at the beginning of this year.

And so the work that I'm gonna show
from this point on,

which I think I still have.. yeah, ok,
25 minutes or so,

is 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 functions,

and what that empowering
moment felt like,

and trying to struggle to get back
to a point where I could make art

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 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.

And so I started to get more
into thinking about

what it was, like,
it can't just be, you know,

blue-glowing logos in clouds,
it has to be something physical.

And so I started reading Andrew Blum's
book 'Tubes'.

I started reading Neal Stephenson's
'Mother Earth Mother Board',

which, if there is any sort of internet
infrastructure nerds,

is like an amazing primer,

kind of the first maybe seminal texts
about following internet cables

around the globe,
which is kind of understanding

what it looks like in these moments
of transition, when it sort of

enters the water and reaches the land.

And one thing that Andrew Blum
talks about in his book is this idea

of these kind of like.. 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
in the same way there are other

architectural landmarks.

And so you get these kind of like
lonely manhole covers

on these very desolate beaches
in Nova Scotia.

And so, at the same time that
I was sort of doing that research,

and this is gonna sound like a big
left turn, but I'm gonna pull it back,

at the same time I was doing
that research I was also working

on another project that required
the use of an infra-red camera.

And so I was kind of spending my time
doing this research and looking

around the internet trying to find
really cheap infra-red cameras,

'cause of course I'm an artist
and I'm broke,

and I kept finding myself on these
websites of people selling technology

to ghost hunters, which is a community
that I had no interactions with,

no experience of, but they just had
really good cheap infra-red cameras.

laughter

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.. that I hadn't felt in a long time,
it was just like a kid.

Like, looking at this technology,
I mean, like 'What the fuck is this,

like, why, I don't understand!'
and they..

But then I started to get interested in it
more on

kind of like a metaphorical or conceptual
level,

'cause what the ghost hunter..
ghost hunting community was..

is kind of interested in doing is, they're..
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 fibre-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 to go really deep
down this ghost hunting rabbit hole,

which was another fun way to spend
three months on the internet. laughing

I'll show just one clip.. 'cause 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 Mid-West Spirit Organisation,
like they're all from the midwest

in the US, right?

'Cause it's super boring there and
so apparently like.. laughing

you either do drugs or you
hunt for ghosts, and.. laughing

so this is one from the Mid-West
Spirit Group, and this is one of

many many clips on youtube.

So this is a video shot in full-spectrum
camera, which is just a camera

that has been modified you see
a little bit more of the ultra-violet spectrum

and a little bit more of the infrared
spectrum, and the audio you're gonna hear

is from what they call a spirit box,
which is essentially a hacked radio,

that just keeps scanning,

and I'll talk more about that in a bit.

Guy: This is a device that you guys
can come forward any spirits and speak with

me. (??)

Ah, so, if you have a message, please
come forward and speak to me into this device.

noise
Female voice: Hi.
Guy: Hi, tell me your name.
noise
noiseboop
noiseboopnoise

Evan: Ok, 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 wanna use that for like the title
of

my next solo show, to me it's like sooo...

there is like something happening there
that seems like a statement that

is greater than the ghost hunting
community.

And also their relationship with technology
kind of feels very.. I mean it's strange to

say this

'cause 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.

So anyway, this is like a... it was really
getting

back to sort of, like, DIY culture

of people making technology
for their own needs.

And 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 scepticism is like a big badge,

that people, if you wanna rise the ranks
in the paranormal community,

you have to kind of debunk more
ghosts than you find, right?

And this to me is something that's
really interesting too,

'cause I think that they might actually
be more critical of the investigations

they're doing than we're doing, right?

And so then when we look and see
that we've got 5807 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 technology can solve our 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.

And so I decided to sort of set out
on my own kind of... pilgrimage

to the internet, right?

In the same way the 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.

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.

The area that I decided to go to,
which is talked about a lot by

Stephenson's 'Mother Earth Mother Board'
article, is this Porthcurno 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, 3 km of really cool stuff.

So you're in.. you're where 15% of the global
internet flows through fibre-optic cables.

It's historically where the pirate ships
would hide in the coves.

2000 BC it was where all the standing-stone
circles..

there's all these standing stones in this
area.

It's where in 1870 the first telegraph came
out

of the ocean, the exact same beach

that the fibre-optic cables are at now.

2 km 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 area
way out at the west of the UK.

And so, I made my map and I had
my little destinations I wanted to go to,

I rented a car, I got my gear.
I had a mix of, like, ghost-hunting gear

that I bought and some that I'd made,
and some just other devices that I'd thought

might come in handy.

And I started by doing something that
Neal Stephenson suggested to do

if you're hunting for the internet,
which is to follow the manholes.

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.

On these little farmroads 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,

and when you looked, 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

and blacked-out windows,
and so this is a internet landing location.

Farms that have way more airconditioning
than they need for the .. laughing .. sheep.

That's probably a good sign
you're getting close.

But I wasn't.. I wasn't really interested
in.. as a sort of journalistic endeavour,

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

and I wanted to sort of just see
what it felt like to stand on top of that

cable,

you know, what would it feel like to stand
on top of this cable where 25% of the traffic

was flowing through.

And so I started taking this series of
landscapes, like just landscape photography.

Sometimes.. sometimes the cable was
within the frame.

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.

But it's.. it was less for me about, like,
those actual recording the cables, the dishes.

It was more about something that I read about
in Andrew Blum's book,

was 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

'cause they don't want cables and nets
around them.

Many times you don't have 3G or cellphone
service, and it's kind of just you and like,

you know,

this lonely beach.
It's.. this.. sort of interesting,

for me it was really beautiful, like,
It really felt.. it felt good.

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 wanna
make art about the internet.

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 it'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
that something else.

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 favourite one,
this is called the Ovilus 3.

This is by a company called 'Digital Dowsing',
which is a really great name for

a ghost-hunting tech company,
made by Bill Chappell.

And so the Ovilus 3 has this
kind of like old.. it's called visual draw

mode.

And based on kind of EMF and temperature
readings, it has this drawing system,

that it spits out.

And so at every place that I was taking
a photograph I was also taking this reading

with this ghost-hunting device.

And so, this manifested in different ways.
When I showed in the gallery one way was

in this series of essentially paired landscape
photography where on the top is just a photograph

from these various places and then on the
bottom

sort of laser-etched into the surface of the
print

are these readouts from the ghost-hunting
device.

Which is kind of.. even.. 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
analogue and digital and this play between

kind of the spiritual and the real,
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 had 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

on the photo and then you kind of bend down
to look at the little digital read-out.

So this was.. this was one of the series from
an exhibition I did in London last year.

6 months ago - no, 3 months ago
I got an invitation to come to New Zealand

which is 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 2 cables, but there is 1 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... like 30 km 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
for essentially California.

And that's its main connection
to the world, these 2 very actually unguarded

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 this military airstrip

with like planes taking off.

And I was there for 2 hours with a ghost-hunting
device just kind of touching the cable

and nobody said anything.
It was amazing. laughing

And.. prior to this trip though I was doing
more kind of research to try and understand

what the internet really really was,
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 misquoting things please tell me
afterwards so I can update this.

But my.. my current understanding is that
what's going through the fibre-optic

is essentially infrared.. infrared laser light
that's being modulated at different frequencies

that kind of centre around
this 1550 nm mark, right.

And so give or take a few nm, the internet
happens generally in this near-infrared spectrum.

Which is interesting to me as kind of an artmaker,
because most of our digital devices can sense

in that near-infrared spectrum, in that same
1550 nm range.

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 fibre-optic cable.

So these tutorials are. have.. this presentation
I'm gonna have a link to at the end,

so 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.

And so then I started shooting these..
these are photographs from

this is from the West Coast of New Zealand,
shot with this modified Lumix GF1 camera.

And so it started like.. I had this feeling
where

the visuals that these cameras 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 the sort of feeling

that I was having, they were sort of these
dark strange glimpses of the internet,

that wasn't Nyan 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 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.

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,
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 artform,

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 is 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.

Now I'm kinda 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 gonna be making that
are really boring.

I think there's like a really big
market in 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 gonna take it back,
and so I'm making pieces that are..

I had these experiences..
so these are tripod shots.

I'm shooting usually like 10-15
minute tripod shots at these

different locations, and...
so these are really quiet moments,

essentially just video streaming
into a browser,

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 amazing locations

and sometimes there'd even be like
whales breaching in the background

and like 7 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-phased

sort of click-bait 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 viewing the web is like.

So this is.. this is the triangular sign here
is

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.

But the.. so these websites are gonna be
different websites.. each website will

just have one video flowing through it,
slow, infrared video shots with this sort

of audio

in the background. The audio is made
from my own ghost-hunting tech,

which I'll be releasing when I get finished
with all the 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 heart beat.

So every time my pulse goes
it switches radio stations.

And.. so the audio is like.. yah, it looked..
I looked rather strange like just kind of

sitting there

trying to commune with the internet, like,
hooked put to this heart monitor

and this infrared camera.

But the pieces are sort of meant to
kind of hopefully give

some of those feelings I was having
when I was there.

And the other idea is that these videos
are all gonna 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 server space in New Zealand now,

where these videos are hosted,
so that when you view the video,

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 are in,

that 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.

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

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.

And then the last sort of thing
I'm playing with is the..

they're gonna be all hosted at these URLs,
that when you copy and paste the URL

into a mapping application, 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 and the tree

that is the same sign and tree
from the image.

And so, I'm kind of playing with the idea
of the URL as being both

an address on the globe and the network,
and trying to tie again together these 2 things.

And part of this for me is again, like,
without being too nostalgic for the internet

of old,

allow the influences that I'm drawing from,
from the kind of earlier net art scene

was characterized with this kind of classic
net art diagram, where.. the art happens 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-antithetic(?) of the internet

coming on tumbler 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 viewing art and art that can only
happen within that medium.

And so I'm kind of trying to 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.

I could do one more project or we
could do Q&A,

how much time do we have now,
5 more minutes?

Maybe I'll wrap it up there.
Angel: ... 10-15 minutes...

Evan: Ok, ok, I'll do one more project.
Ok.

So that was.. that's going up to like
yah, 3.. this is now 2 months ago..

3 months ago.
I got invited to do a piece in Paraguay

which is not one of the main
internet hubs, globally.

But I decided to kind of wrestle with a
different piece of the infrastructure of the

internet,

which is kind of the surface, right,
the place that we have this

more immediate contact with the network.

And.. 'cause I noticed when we.. when you
film

devices in infrared it has this interesting
scenario

where the visual spectrum is kind of inverted
in a way where.. 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.

And similarly the kind of infrared lights
that sort of shine from the top

of all of our iPhones at our faces
all the time,

which we can't see with the naked eye,
become more and more apparent

when you're shooting with the infrared.

And so, I started.. 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 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,

is it Angry Birds, is it checking facebook?

And I just said, 'here, waste 5 or 10 minutes'
and I would record them with this

infrared camera and it's kind of..
in a way it's connected

to the paranormal research,
but maybe it's more connected

to the multi-touch series
that has to do with sort of

backgrounding, the digital backgrounding,
the interface design and foreground

in the human movement.

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 Google are designing for us.

So I'll play just a minute what
that looks like.

electronic noises like birds and bass

Evan: A little boring, right?

No, but that 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 in the back,

so it's not.. it's just an analog microphone
picking up the kind of soft fingertaps on

the screen.

And so the.. it became just this series of
people

that sort of agreed to meet with me

and give me 5 or 10 minutes of their
computing time, shown in the gallery

of this kind of series of again 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,

trying again to make work and trying
to find these sort of optimistic paths

through a kind of increasingly dark
internet landscape

and get back to this kind of 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&A, I think we have
a couple of minutes now.

Thank you.

applause

applause

Angel: Thank you so much for your
phenomenal talk, Evan,

I think you can tell by the applause that
the people really really liked it.

Evan: Thank you.
Angel: It was really awesome.

Angel: So we have another 5-10 minutes
for questions and answers.

If you ask questions, please move to the
microphones.

We have 4 microphones here in the hall.
Do we have any question from the internet?

Internet? No? Alrighty. So we'll start
with this question from over there.

Question: I really liked your term 'disembodied
human energy'. I'm gonna start using that

"DHE".

Evan: It's not my term, but I like it too.

Q: I've been writing about that as well
from the dark side of how the internet

and digital culture is affecting our
behaviours and society, and was

kind of putting that into terms of
disembodying experience.. disembody..

disembodied information, and I'm really
going after that a lot in terms of

analyzing digital culture, and just
wondering what you think we might do

in order to reembody our culture more
and not get so lost in these

technological things that we can do,
but to, like, I just was covering

the failed Paris climate summit,
and I feel like the corporate agenda

is liking that we are going more
and more into a disembodied place,

because it can capture our energy more.
So I'd just like to ask you

if you have any ideas, what we can do
to be more reembodying our experiences.

Answer: Yah.. no, good question.
I mean, I can only talk about what I'm..

how I'm kind of wrestling with it.
In.. one sort of decision I made 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 had people around you with depression,

it's not a good place to be in when you
wanna make thin.. 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,
it was just trying to find ways

to kind of fall in love with things again,
to the point where I really want to make them.

And the other one, for me, too, I mean
I know there's whole movements of people

who are 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 are 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 on the UK trip, where..
these are like really cliffy regions,

you know, so a lot of the hiking trails
that 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 gotta
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 wanna die.
And so I had this moment

being out in nature again, where,
not only was I away from the tech,

but mentally I had to step away from it too,
just to be really thinking about

'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.

Angel: Thank you very much. Next question
from this microphone please.

Q: Thank you very much.I don't know, is it
on?

Angel: Yeah, it's on. Just speak into it.

Q: Thank you very much for your talk.
I'd actually, for me personally,

I've been also struggling a lot with the
thought about the dark sides of the internet

recently,

and your talk actually gave me back a lot
of

positive attitude about it, so

that you very much for that.
But one question that I have:

What is your 10-second definition of
what is art, for you?

Evan: Oh my god.
laughing

laughing

Evan: Alright, here's a short one I came up
with,

'cause the long one's hard, right?

I think design is creative work that is influenced
directly by money and art is creative work

that is influenced indirectly by money.
And that's kind of the only difference.

laughing
applause

Q: Thank you.

Angel: Thank you. Next question from that
microphone over there.

Q: Hi. So I wasn't familiar with your work..
I'm over here.

I'm not familiar with your work, and
I really like it.

And what I liked most about it is
really that sense of excitement and wonder

that you first had when you discovered..
what was it? SCP? No, it was..

Evan: Yeah, FETCH.
Q: Yeah, FETCH, right.

That's sort of.. that's still there in many
ways,

it's different, but it's still there.

So, you know, I.. I recently discovered
physics, and I've had sort of

the same thing where I am like,
wow, we're able to understand things

in a way that I didn't think it was
possible, because I hated physics

in school, and realized that
this way it was taught

that was really boring.
And so I'm thinking, ok,

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.
And how do you, with the internet,

how are you able to keep that distance
and has that been a problem for you?

Evan: 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 my kind of
native realm anyway,

like, I came more from the design field.

So it didn't feel like anything I was having
to turn off so much

'cause maybe I wasn't ever all that
close to it, in a sense.

I don't.. that's maybe a bad answer,
but it's probably the truth.

I've been trying to get closer to physics
too.

Q: Yeah?

Evan: Like for me, like, I'm super fascinated
by the electromagnetic spectrum right now.

Like the answer's in there, somewhere,
I feel like, you know? laughing

Q: Alright, thanks!
Angel: Awesome. Next question from here.

Q: Ok, thanks. I just.. I mean, the idea
of 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 your.. 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.

Evan: Yah. I don't know the answer to that.
I mean, it's.. 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,
the conversations I get into are actually

kind of interesting, 'cause they're interested
in knowing that too, 'cause people

don't really talk about it.
The media doesn't talk about it.

The companies that are trying to sell
them services don't talk that way

'cause 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, and

they don't want you to know how to
plug in a cable and get it off.

And so I think it's.. the question that
you're asking is one that I'm asking myself,

like, how do you communicate some of these
ideas to people that are..

I mean, I'm interested in both sides,
I'm interested in people that are

technically adapt, having interesting ideas
and conversations around this,

but then, how do you also communicate
to people that this is a new conversation

to?

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 recently did a show in Florida
at a university, and the docents there,

like the people that introduce people
to the work, were all like senior citizens

that were volunteering time to the museum,
and they were one of the most engaged

group of people I've ever had surrounding
my work, 'cause they.. they knew..

it's not like they never heard of this stuff
before, but they had a relationship with

technology, but they were more willing
to ask questions about it,

like they weren't.. they didn't.. they didn't
care if it sounded stupid,

and they were asking all those really
interesting questions, and

seeing that happen to a community
of people who 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 and have a 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?

Angel: Alright, thank you.
As time is almost up, guy in orange,

you got the honour of the last question.

Q: With your browser cache 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,
Evan: Ok.

Q: And I had hoped about.. forgetting
about it, but actually the...

the counterpart happened, that I checked
the screenshots for every moment

I didn't have anything to do.
And my behaviour was extremely

affected by it. Was.. did you have the
same feeling about your browser cache?

Evan: Yeah.
Q: Ehm, work?

Evan: Maybe later we can trade notes,
I'd like to see your work.

Exactly, 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, but I still know it's there,

I still think about it, and I tried to do
portraits of other people, like,

friends, like who else you're gonna ask
to give your internet cache browsing data

to,

right?
And it's..I recognized it was like a really

invasive question to ask people,
you know?

You're really asking people.. I mean,
usually the cache 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, give me the cache

that

you didn't know I was gonna.. you didn't know
I was monitoring, is like a really

invasive question to ask.
But yeah, it's like essentially learning to

live with a security camera.
But that's meant to be kind of built into

the piece, too, 'cause maybe, 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're like, oh wow, that's a really..
maybe giving is the wrong word, but

that's a lot of.. it's a lot of.. you're sharing
a lot, right, is the common reaction

I get from people.

And.. but part of the idea is then..
we're all kind of sharing this

in different ways, right,
this print, just because I put it 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.

But yeah, of course, when you know
the camera is there, it definitely

affects behaviour.

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