A Conversation between Jonah Peretti, Director of R&D and Post-Graduate
Studies at Eyebeam, and design engineer and technoartist Natalie
Jeremijenko

Part I: The Engineer-As-Artist

Eyebeam (www.eyebeam.org) is a not-for-profit organization established
in 1996 to provide access, education, and support for artists, students,
and the general public in the field of art and technology. Eyebeam is in
the process of creating a research and development division, and I
recently had an extended conversation with the newest member of our R&D
advisory committee, design engineer and technoartist, Natalie
Jeremijenko (http://cat.nyu.edu/natalie/). She is in a unique position
to reflect on the role of technical innovation in the context of the art
world. Her work has been exhibited at major art institutions including
the Solomon R. Guggenheim, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the
New York Museum of Modern Art. She has also developed technology
projects at leading research labs, including Xerox PARC, Stanford's
design engineering program, and the Center for Advanced Technology at
New York University. She currently has an appointment at NYU's Center
for Advanced Technologies and at Yale University, where she is creating
a Product Design Studio and an exhibition incubation lab.

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JP: What is the focus of the new lab you are building at Yale?

NJ: I am calling my new initiative at Yale the Product Design Lab
precisely because I don't want to call it "digital media" or
"information technology and society" or "art and technology" or any of
that because of course ALL information technology involves social design
whether explicitly or implicitly, and the projects may or may not
involve the institutions of art. In this understanding, art is another
form of material culture with it's own norms of production, forms of
ownership, etc.

My program focuses on the transformative potential of new technology,
and on understanding how technology works. We are in the field of
engineering dealing with material culture in the very pragmatic realm of
making things work. I am making a centrist claim by calling this
"product design."

JP: But isn't critical theory very important to your work?

NJ: Yes, it is still integral to my approach. But critical social theory
and ethnographic or technographic modes of analysis are really
generative of new designs, new technologies. By contrast, the way that
product design is taught in this country usually starts with making a
"bug list." You spend very little time generating an interesting
problem, and then talk about these designers as "problem solvers." You
design to pre-existing needs but there is very little understanding
about whether you are solving the right problem or that criticism is
generative of possibilities, ideas, and products.

I am interested in technology which is always and already complicit with
social change. That is obviously why most of us work with technology or
are interested in the field. It is the front where things are changing
in predictable and unpredictable ways. I want to make the designs
accountable for the type of change they promote.

JP: In addition to the Product Design Lab, you also mentioned that you
were creating an "exhibition incubation" lab?

NJ: The thing about exhibitions is that they need to be incubated a bit.
By incubating exhibitions at my lab in Yale I can get interdisciplinary
people, political theorists, historians, critics, even engineers to
comment, to generate the discourse before the exhibits move to real
exhibition spaces in New York.

The exhibition incubation lab is both storage and display. It is one
thing to show students a picture of something once in a lecture, but it
is another thing to live with it for three months, to have it there, to
reference, to look at, to examine it. I am creating a culture of stuff
at my lab, a material culture.

JP: What are some of the exhibits you are currently incubating?

NJ: One of them is a project called Scale, which is about curating or
commissioning a series of works that can fit within a couple of square
centimeters - but not scale models of art but pieces actually designed
for that scale. For instance Paul Di Marinis does a lot of amplitude
mapping. He has got a wonderful and excruciatingly small piece called
Edison's pubic hair. It looks like a hair but it is actually the width
modulated amplitude map of his voice during one of the first recordings.

JP: You also mentioned an exhibition on street weapons.

NJ: Right. There is an exhibition called Street Weapons which is looking
at the material culture for inhabiting public space. This includes
everything from skateboards, to cell phones, to designs for bicycle
wheels that print slogans, or pvc piping with arm holds that can create
barriers of people that police can't break. This particular show is
focused on activism and the arms race between activists and the state,
an arms race for the public imagination that one side is fighting with
increasingly militarized strategies, and the other is countering with
playful and irreverent mediagenic tactics.

JP: What else is being incubated?

NJ: The Network Modeling exhibit will look at interdisciplinary ways
that complexity is envisioned and imagined. There are a lot of different
takes on how you represent complexity. There are software networks
models and social theory network models. Putting these side-by-side is
one of the ways to examine what aspects different disciplines privilege.
Particularly when we juxtapose representations of exactly the same
networks, tracing where the important nodes, vertices, and connections
match and diverge.

JP: Will any of your research on toy design end up in an exhibit?

NJ: Yes. For part of the Toy Design research, I have embedded little
cameras and mikes in interactive toys. What happens is the camera turns
on and captures a couple seconds of video every time the child interacts
with the toy. This is in contrast to user studies, where you put a kid
and a toy in a lab for an hour or two and look at what they are doing. I
am able to put these toys in real homes to capture weeks and months of
interaction. That is what I argue is the time frame of learning.

So I am incubating an exhibition that would include footage that I have
collected from the point of view of toys, which is really quite
interesting and amusing to watch. You can see from Furby's point-of-view
or Arthur's point-of-view.

JP: Are there any other exhibitions under development that you want to
mention?

NJ: Sure. The Mechanics of Information exhibition will address the
mechanical interface to information, including everything from LPs to
scratch culture. There are many fascinating mechanisms that make the
delusion of "immaterial" information possible, and artists have also
reissued these. For example, Bernie Lubell made a computer, all the
logic gates, etc., out of large wooden 2x4s!

JP: So it sounds like you are spinning off exhibitions from your work as
an engineer. You are working on toy design or street weapon design as
engineering problems but also as a form of art production. In your
professional life, are you encountering a growing number of people who
straddle these two identities and don't know whether to call themselves
artists or engineers?

NJ: This confused identity is really very interesting. At research labs,
I actually avoid the word artist because it means you are flaky and
marginal. If someone calls me creative I know it is usually an insult.
It means, your work doesn't matter, it is not important.

JP: Chris Csikszentmihalyi at MIT had the opposite problem. When he said
he was the only artist at the Media Lab, many of the other professors
were offended. They think of themselves as artists.

NJ: Well, actually, Interval had this same problem: engineers and
designers wore a lot of black and had long hair and called themselves
artists but didn't exhibit artwork. They were funded by different
institutions, such as venture capitalists, and exhibited in very
different contexts, mainly to patent attorneys. Calling themselves
artists was primarily a way of not being accountable to the [other]
engineers.

JP: And meanwhile you are exhibiting and not calling yourself an artist.

NJ: Well, it is a weird thing. We all tend to use whatever title is
useful.

JP: The worst is when the same person presents himself as an artist when
he is talking to engineers and an engineer when he is talking to
artists. That way the person does not have to be accountable to either
group. Many of us played this game at the MIT Media Lab. But the best
work, which is rare, makes real contributions to multiple communities of
practice in art, science, and technology.

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[In the next exciting installment find out about why empiricism belongs
in galleries, how artists can help establish matters of fact, and why
artist collectives are as real as it gets.]