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Casey Reas, Lauren Lee McCarthy & Chandler McWilliams on Expanding Software

Chandler McWilliams of UCLA Arts Conditional Studio is presenting Art and the Internet in LA, a Getty Pacific Standard Time [PST] exhibition in October. The exhibition is informed by the Mirror archive, a collaboration between Casey Reas, Lauren Lee McCarthy and McWilliams. Peter Bauman (Monk Antony) spoke with the trio about how digital technologies intersect with art and society along with the importance of preserving the history of Internet-based art.‍

‍Peter Bauman: Chandler, could you start by telling us more about the Conditional Studio? Then Lauren and Casey can tell us about Social Software.‍

‍Chandler McWilliams: The Conditional Studio’s interest primarily lies in energy, materiality and labor and how those are obfuscated in the digital age. We specifically investigate how computation gets physicalized—the physical history of computational thinking and computational making. We don’t necessarily focus on hardware, but on how material infrastructures sit underneath what we generally think of as ephemeral and cloud-based technologies. For instance, now we're doing a lot of work with weaving and computation.

‍Lauren Lee McCarthy: We want the Social Software Studio to be a place for interdisciplinary dialogue. We are thinking about a structure for working collaboratively with software and also probing the social aspects of it.
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We’re asking, “How does software affect us socially? What are its possibilities? What are its impacts? What do we do about the biases that are baked into it?” 

The work we're doing is very project-based and collaborative. We often work with a smaller group of students, outside collaborators or faculty within UCLA to carry out different projects, whether that's a show or an event. We're also contributing to the Mirror archive as another example.

‍Casey Reas: We advocate thinking about software outside of technical disciplines, thinking about it in terms of the arts and society at large. That's the overlap with Conditional Studio: social concerns, technical concerns and their interplay.

‍Peter Bauman: You mention these social and technical concerns. What does examining them through the lens of software reveal?‍

‍Lauren Lee McCarthy: When we talk to people about Social Software, especially in other parts of UCLA or people with a less technical background, sometimes they start out with, “Oh, I don't really know anything about software” or “That's not really for me.” Those are the people that we want to be talking with!
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Part of the project is expanding our idea of what is considered software or what it means to work with the Internet.

Software and the Internet have infiltrated our lives in so many ways and some of them are invisible. A lot of artists are working with them in ways that are not so obvious. Maybe you don't see the code as the main part of the work but the work that they're doing informs many ideas about how software is made or what it does in the world. That leads us to Chandler’s PST exhibition. He can answer the question of why he picked software as a frame but I want to emphasize the idea of growing that frame—to be more expansive—and suggest that a lot of people can have connections and points of view on this topic that we're exploring.
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‍Casey Reas: I don't see software as something that's only related to computers and calculating machines. It has this legacy and history of instruction-based artwork—even instruction-based dance scores.
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I see software as related to performance as much as it is to computation and I see computation as a form of performance. One of the dangers of talking about software is that people see it in this limited technical domain. But for me, the domain of software is extremely wide. 

The larger project is a part of this huge Getty PST event. Every few years, Getty pushes a lot of funding into local arts organizations in Los Angeles to put on these thematic exhibitions.
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This year, PST Art’s theme is “Art and Science Collide.” For us, art and science is art and the Internet. 

In 1969, ARPANET began when the very first data was transmitted over the very first Internet connection between two computers from UCLA and Stanford. They sent the letters “LO” and that was our starting point.

‍Chandler McWilliams: I like software as a term in this instance because of its provocation. People have an idea of what code and algorithm mean now but software is very amorphous. Its definition shifts depending on who you're talking to. Some people think of it as an instance of code running, while others think of it as a metonym for an application. Using it in the context of this exhibition allows people to attach their own particular definitions of software and explore in a productive way how these align or clash with concepts like art-making.

‍Peter Bauman: You mentioned this larger project is involved in Getty’s PST. How is the Mirror archive related to the PST exhibition?‍

‍Chandler McWilliams: The PST project has two parts. There's a research component and an exhibition component. Mirror is the research component—gathering histories and highlighting voices that have been silenced or ignored. The exhibition component, which is what I'm primarily focused on now, is to put on a physical exhibition in October in Los Angeles.

We've commissioned eleven artists to make physical work responding to ideas around labor and computation. It will be primarily sculpture, painting, drawing and some performance. Then, Casey and Lauren with Social Software have been extending, discovering and archiving work on Mirror. They are reaching out, getting new contributors and growing that project. Informed by their research, we are exhibiting the following artists at the show: Danielle Dean, Devin Kenny, American Artist, Alice Yuan Zhang, TTZ (Tiny Tech Zines), KCHUNG Ann Haeyoung, Romi Morrison, Ahree Lee, LA Crypto Party and Xin Xin.
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‍Lauren Lee McCarthy: One reason we wanted to put a lens on artists working with software on the Internet is because the history is very ephemeral. A lot of art history, but maybe especially the technical history of artists working with software, tends to be dominated by men. And it's pretty white. We were very aware that, to a large extent, artists create their own context. They write their own history.

Part of this Mirror project is inviting artists, in their own words, to write and document their work—to have that record and to fill in some of these gaps that are missing in the more limited canon that we currently have. Chandler's commissioning artists to make new work speaks to the way that LA is constantly reinventing and thinking about the future—what's next?
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While my work with Mirror is documenting and looking at the past, it's serving this goal of thinking about what space we want to build in the future. What do we want to say?

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‍Peter Bauman: Most people think of the Internet as beginning in the 1990s. What do we gain by including 1969’s ARPANET in the history of the Internet?‍

‍Casey Reas: It started small but it has been around for fifty years. It was two computers, and then it was three, and then it was twelve, and then it was a hundred. Of course, the web was a whole other big explosion in the nineties but there was a lot going on with the Internet before that. Our idea was that things from 1995 onward are pretty well documented. We know that there's a period beginning in the early '90s when things have been less archived. One of the original goals of the project was to dig into that, do interviews with artists who were active at the time and try and find new threads to follow.

‍Lauren Lee McCarthy: Connecting to what Chandler said earlier about materiality—considering the physical environment in which things are happening—we tend to think about the Internet as something in the cloud or everywhere. But we started with the physicality of that transmission between UCLA and Stanford and then expanded from there.

‍Peter Bauman: Can you tell us more about that missing history of Internet art before the mid-90s? What exciting artists or events has the project uncovered?‍

‍Casey Reas: In LA, there was an event space called the Electronic Café that was part of the 1984 Summer Olympics. It was done by Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz. In different sites around Los Angeles, people could come into the spaces and have access to fax machines and other kinds of image-sending technologies. Another was EZTV, which had barely been documented at all but they were doing a lot of work with network television signals and image signals. Ulysses Jenkins also has some extraordinary early video work that was a crossover between performance, technology and activism.
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‍Peter Bauman: That’s what’s exciting about Chandler’s upcoming exhibition. The artists were able to engage with the archive that Casey and Lauren created.‍

‍Chandler McWilliams: Yeah, the artists are looking through the archive to find works that they're unfamiliar with to integrate into the pieces that they're making. We're not strictly requiring any one-to-one correspondence between the Mirror archive and the artist’s exhibited work. But we do discuss the influences that they're bringing in as well as the histories they aim to communicate and engage with in dialogue.

‍Peter Bauman: Speaking of that dialogue, what do you think is important for an average collector or artist in the space to know about this project?‍

‍Casey Reas: It can add some knowledge or context to the space. Computer art, or digital art, has been around for decades.
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What's going on with generative art right now, long-form generative art, is such a small, small slice of the possibilities in the realm of this broader form around software and media. 

You'll find some of your favorites from the emerging generative art scene in Mirror but you'll also find artists who don't even know about that practice. They are working with materials and the Internet in ways that predate some of the ideas that emerged in the last few years. It breaks open the possibilities for the relationship between software, culture and art.

‍Lauren Lee McCarthy: With the speed at which things move right now, work gets made, put out there, and different narratives get formed around it. It's made me realize the importance of being able to talk about the work in your own words. And I think that's one of the things that Le Random is doing, and I really appreciate your work on this, Peter. And so I'm hoping that the Mirror project can be a way for artists to do that—provide a narrative around their work that can feel really authentic to their intention, regardless of what happens in the market of collectors or in an exhibition space.

‍Peter Bauman: How do you think that this project—and the narratives it enables—can play a role in enhancing institutional acceptance of new media art? It seems like a step in the right direction, especially since the Getty has historically not been known to exhibit new media art.‍

‍Chandler McWilliams: One of the challenges and one of the things that I really love about this project is that, since 1969,
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we get to see how art being made with computers also indexes the relationship between computation, the Internet and our lives.

Initially, there were only a small number of people who had access to these machines to do this type of work. Then it started to grow and grow, but it was still this niche, hacker mentality that was very protectionist in many ways and exclusionary. That persisted until we all started getting really powerful computers in our pockets.

Now we're at this moment where these two worlds have had to come into conversation. You see painters who make work about interfaces, because of course they do. Half their lives are on the computer, so why wouldn't that be part of what you're responding to? Then there's this older scene of media arts that's been dealing with these things for so many years. The two are butting up against one another in ways that I find interesting and productive. Those are the people that I reached out to talk to for this exhibition as well.
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Bringing all of those folks into this conversation can highlight society's relationship to technology and how it can be represented in an institutional setting with more fullness, similar to the way that we saw with photography and film.

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‍Lauren Lee McCarthy: It's an unfortunately common scenario where you see older artists that were overlooked for most of their careers now in their 70s or older, getting recognition and starting to have shows for work that they've been doing since their 20s. I think of Skawennati, Shu Lea Cheang, Lynn Hershman Leeson. Often, they're also women and artists of color who fall into this category. We're hoping to have more primary materials dating back so we don't have to dig through history again to do these shows later. Mirror is online. If people are teaching or curating, this could be a resource that they go to. Our hope is to open this up beyond institutional walls so these artists can more easily appear in those shows in the future.
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‍Casey Reas: Speaking for myself, this is a long game I've been playing for decades now of institutional acceptance for this work. This PST show is one rung on that ladder. We've been able to translate this work well enough that we were able to secure funding for documenting it. Now that it's being documented, it's accessible to more people. What was obscure before is now very public, searchable and online. Then the PST show that Chandler has curated will bring in new artists to the PST crowd. I also think we're one of the very few shows that is commissioning new work rather than offering work that was made before.

Getty, on the research side, has long been actively collecting and making materials available related to digital arts. But on the public exhibition side, not so much. They are putting on a big Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) show, specifically covering things like the 1971 Pepsi Pavilion. So the times are changing.

‍Peter Bauman: I spoke with Nancy Perloff, the curator of the E.A.T. show and our conversation will be released soon. Both shows highlight the richness of Getty's upcoming PST Art.‍

‍Casey Reas: For people outside of Southern California, I think it's impossible to imagine the scale of a PST. It is this extraordinarily massive flow of research and exhibition grants that everybody's open to apply for. From San Diego to Santa Barbara, exhibitions are being funded through this. After participating over the last three years, we didn't really fully understand the massive scale until now.
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‍Casey Reas is a software artist and Professor of Design Media Arts at UCLA. In 2001, alongside Ben Fry, he co-founded Processing, a free, open-source programming language and environment for artists.

‍Lauren Lee McCarthy is an artist, UCLA professor and creator of p5.js whose award-winning work explores social dynamics in tech.

‍Chandler McWilliams is an artist, writer, and teacher living in Los Angeles. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the Design Media Arts program at UCLA.

Peter Bauman (Monk Antony) is Le Random's Editor-in-Chief.