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

Part II: The Artist-As-Knowledge Producer

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.

+ + +

JP: You recently gave a talk at MIT entitled, "the artist as knowledge
producer."

NJ: Yes. In the information age, what is information is very much
determined by the hard sciences, economics, or scholarship. Generally,
it is not recognized that artists can also produce knowledge, even
facts.

JP: So have you produced a fact when you were working as an artist?

NJ: Well…[laughter]…ideas become facts when they are persuasive
enough that other people see them as almost incontestable. I am
obviously interested in this process and in my own work I do try to use
some of the very persuasive strategies of representation that are used
in the natural sciences. This is one of the reasons I use empiricism or
empirical representations.

JP: But does it produce a fact or does it just make people think about
scientific representation more critically?

NJ: In my own work, this distinction is tricky to manage. The papers
that I am producing about the One Tree project. You know the One Tree
project, with all the clones of trees?

JP: Yes. (See www.onetrees.org.)

NJ: Right. It's obviously a very simple demonstration.

JP: A demonstration that genetics isn't destiny, that there are still
many differences between the trees even though they are cloned?

NJ: Right. But the problem that I had with exhibiting the one tree
project where the clones were lined up side-by-side was very simple:
everyone who came felt cheated that these trees did not look the same.
They seemed to think "this flaky artist."

JP: Right, like you messed up the science or something.

NJ: Yes. It is easier to question the artist's grasp of the science,
than to understand this very simple demonstration and the challenge it
issues to the popular misconceptions of genetic control of organisms. If
the environment was exactly the same and the genes were exactly the
same, then perhaps what genes control is actually much more partial than
the way that the popular imagination has been informed.

If you look at a river you do not immediately assume that there is a
central processing unit or a genetic algorithm that controls its
branching structure. Yet everyone can recognize that the form of the
river and the branching structure of trees is similar. Yet we assume one
is controlled completely by genes and the other is not. There is a whole
lot of work that looks at how much genes do control - independent of the
nature/nurture question. When I was an aspiring neuroscientist, I was
taught that there is some sort of ideal form that is mitigated or
somehow influenced by the external nature. Rather than understanding
that the external environment is as important to growth as the so-called
book of life, or code, or central processing. Getting that idea across.

JP: Well let me ask you, are you just "getting the idea across" or does
the One Tree project actually help produce knowledge that proves that
the idea is right?

NJ: It is both. Of course, it is both. It is an on-going spectacle. The
trees are now being planted in pairs in public places throughout the San
Francisco Bay Area. So we have many years to answer this question. But
as a simple demonstration people do have to answer the question, "But
why are they different?"

How they answer that is obviously not completely in my control. It is
interesting, however, that the only people who didn't see that they were
different were the art critics. In none of the reviews, did they
actually comment on the differences I was framing: that these trees,
genetically identical, grown in environmentally identical situations,
were different.

JP: Poor art critics! They became art critics because they didn't
understand science, and now they have to review your shows.

NJ: Well, it is a simple thing to notice. But we have to look to the
particular institutional context. The art critics missed out because
they were walked around by the curators, press packs in hand. The
curators in that show were invested in a particular sort of corporate
celebration of this idea that the biotechnological revolution has
already happened hence the show's name Paradise NOW!

JP: So One Tree was offering a counter-example to this vision?

NJ: Yes. Material evidence that demonstrates quite unequivocally that
genes aren't comprehensively controlling.

JP: This makes me think of accounts of Boyle's air pump experiments. He
would place a bird in the air pump and the gentleman of science would
watch as the air was evacuated causing the bird to die. This was
simultaneously a dramatic spectacle and a proof of the existence of the
vacuum. But despite its striking aesthetic and dramatic appeal, this was
never seen as art.

NJ: The people who are really behind my work don't tend to be the
established art critics. And that is a problem in actually showing this
work.

JP: Sure, but your work has been displayed at the Whitney, MoMA, the
Guggenheim.

NJ: But the issue is what happens when it is exhibited. Like with One
Tree, if it had been reviewed in a different way it could have enabled a
different sort of public discourse. I used to get frustrated that such a
simple demonstration could be misread. But then you need to think about
the political context. Take for instance Suicide Box at the Whitney
Biennial.

JP: What did you show? Did you show video?

NJ: It was the video. So here is this footage captured by a high end
Silicon Graphics machine with custom software that was a hell of a thing
to build, deploy, install and maintain in the middle of nowhere to
capture the footage. But the curators at the Whitney wrote about it as:
"simulated footage of suicides off the Golden Gate Bridge." They
immediately assumed that they were not real, that it was not true. So
all of this work producing this empirically gathered evidence of this
actual tragic social phenomena was completely and immediately dismissed.
Any question a viewer might have about how to understand these images
was closed down. They did not check with me. They didn't say, "Is this
real?" It was immediately assumed it was not, and could not be real,
largely because it was produced by an artist.

So in both One Tree and Suicide Box there was strong, completely visual
and unambiguous evidence of something that was radically reconfigured in
the curatorial context. In both of those cases, you can see the
empiricism is overridden by the social institution in which it is
presented.

JP: We have talked a bit about the individual artist's status as a
knowledge producer, but I am interested to hear your thoughts on
technoart collectives. What do you think about underground organizations-
-like the Bureau of Inverse Technology, the Institute for Applied
Autonomy, Etoy, or RTMark–that hide the identities of their members and
sometime attempt to mislead people in order to achieve political goals?
What do you think of this as a strategy?

NJ: Obviously, I think a lot of it. I call this phenomena "corporate
art" since it reproduces bureaucratic fronts. And I think each
organization is quite different. RTMark obscures the people involved but
"For Cultural Profit" is clearly their mission. The people at RTMark use
different names and changed identities. But Etoy, for instance, it is
very much a rock band phenomena - they dress the same and produce a
brand identity. For the Bureau, they obscure on the level of what the
organization is for and what it does, in order to confuse it with other
organizations or corporations. The roles are circumscribed so that I am
"known to be an engineer for the Bureau of Inverse Technology."

JP: Well, this is also mocking the passive voice that is used in science
and research.

NJ: Right. Because technological culture is produced by this dispersed
accountability. Who is actually producing it? Who can you point to who
actually wrote the Microsoft operating system? No one can be held
accountable, it is like "well…I just did the user interface" or "I did
part of the database structure." It is this condition of diffuse
accountability that is very crucial to understanding and perhaps
intervening in technoculture.

At the Bureau, conceptual authorship is left hanging, which has been
confusing for people. There is this anxiety: "Is it real? Is it
simulated? What sort of organization would video tape suicides off the
Golden Gate Bridge? Am I being tricked?" But this is exactly this
productive anxiety that calls into question the corporate bureaucratic
fronts that have the conceptual authorship.

JP: The other thing about these organizations is that a lot of the
members also work at government or university research labs. Do you
think that underground tech-art collectives are just a parody of their
mainstream counterparts or do you think they are a place where real
knowledge production can happen?

NJ: There is a real production of youth culture and alternative culture
that this "corporate art" is a vanguard for. They are not just empty
ironies, they are organizing real human activities, for example the two
of us sitting here spending our time talking about them. Besides the
Bureau has lasted twice as long as the corporate lab Interval Research
did. These collectives are as real as it gets.

JP: Thank you, Natalie. It has been a pleasure speaking with you.