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Rhea Myers on Code as Cultural Material

Artist, hacker and writer, Rhea Myers, discusses her thoughtful contributions to the group exhibition GEN/GEN: Generative Generations and more with Peter Bauman (Monk Antony). Myers unravels her artistic practice, touching upon code-as-narrative, "Blockchain Aesthetics" and the dialogue between her work and Harold Cohen's AARON.

‍‍Peter Bauman: As one of the artists featured in GEN/GEN: Generative Generations, how do you see your work contributing to the broader discourse around code-as-narrative?

Rhea Myers: I’m from a generation that saw personal computing arrive and knew from the start that artists were using computers to make art. All we had to do was get access to the technology, which was easier said than done to start with. I still remember the first time I saw PhotoShop boot on a Mac II when I was on my art foundation course; I’d never seen anything like it.
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Code is cultural material; it has a history and a plastic form that exceeds its utility. It seemed obvious to me that you could use code as part of a cultural conversation that had started before I was born and was only intensifying with time.

I took the cyberpunk route of treating technological society as my natural environment and code as a medium for representing and manipulating the materials of that society. My work makes arts computing reflexive, turning it back onto itself critically in order to look beyond it. There’s a series of unfolding relations between references and techniques that often disappoint as a narrative but that nonetheless are trying to tell a convincing story of how the world works.

‍‍Peter Bauman: Can you talk about the work you’re showing at GEN/GEN? How is it in dialogue with Cohen’s AARON?

Rhea Myers: The particular pieces that are in dialogue with AARON are the versions of draw-something, which is a drawing program that I started working on in 2004. It came from my frustration at the source code for AARON not being publicly available (I asked Cohen and, probably not for the first time, he very politely declined). So I read as many of Cohen’s papers as I could find, I watched the AARON screensaver for hours, and I attended a couple of Cohen’s talks with the Computer Arts Society, feverishly scribbling into my sketchbook.

Mostly written in LISP like AARON, draw-something is a study of the process of producing AARON rather than an attempt to open source a clone of it. The handling of form, line, composition and color all model my own understanding of drawing rather than Cohen’s. Formalizing them in code does parallel, much more simply, Cohen’s explorations. Think of it as a student sketch of an old-master painting, learning through practice and analyzing how the art that you aspire to is structured and produced.
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‍‍Peter Bauman: Your work explores the intersection of blockchain technology and art, particularly focusing on concepts like "Blockchain Aesthetics" and "Blockchain Poetics." Can you elaborate on "Blockchain Aesthetics" and how it shapes your artistic practice?

Rhea Myers: The feeling that there is relevant social, technical and economic form to this technology, that there is something there, is what drew me in initially. The presence of relationships of form brings it into critiquing distance of aesthetics, which is concerned with the evaluation of formal relations. Artmaking is a way of making this tractable, of giving the viewer something to reflect on. Finding a way of performing this mapping is the aesthetic core of my current practice.
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I want the work to refer out to and draw in chains of associations using the cultural materials that it deploys.

My understanding of the resonant web of associations - aesthetic, philosophical, historical, political - that this exploits is what I regard as the poetics of the blockchain. It’s why we can use it as a medium and subject for artmaking however constrained the resources of an actual chain may be.

‍‍Peter Bauman: How do "Blockchain Aesthetics" differ from digital and traditional aesthetics?

Rhea Myers: They’re infected with economics and game theory (which are the same thing in the current era). This can be uncomfortable for those seeking a realm of pure art, free from the stink of the market, but it is what makes these aesthetics realistic in the sense of historical relevance.

‍‍Peter Bauman: Can you also talk about the impact of William Latham on your work, particularly what's on display at GEN/GEN?

Rhea Myers: I love Latham’s work. Like Cohen’s, it takes an artist’s existing practice to extend and interrogate it by expressing it as software. Latham was drawing forms mutated from each other using pencil and paper. Computers allowed him to make this a rigorous exploration of a much larger space of possible form. Despite the possibly eugenic associations of directed evolution, flourishing aesthetic variety is resistant to social darwinist cheese-dreams of there being “no such thing …as society.” It is not surprising that Latham’s work later found favor with rave culture, which was an epitomization of that particular angle of cultural resistance.

Mutator served for me as a positive model of what arts computing could achieve and so it was an irresistible resource for critique. The platonic solids of Mutator became stealth bombers and fighters, its procedural textures became company logos and its black backgrounds became garishly colored blurs of texts from the cultural history of computing. All of this was behind the source code listing that ran to generate the 3D model forms. Surgical Strike is Latham’s work filtered through War In The Age of Intelligent Machines, the awkward moments in history that the culture of computing wants you to forget. Structurally, it echoes Art & Language’s Hostages series.
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‍‍Peter Bauman: How do you think about the relationship between concept, aesthetics and process in your work? Where does the art lie with you?

Rhea Myers: An art is a craft with a theory. Given this, all art is conceptual on some level. Capital “C” Conceptual Art’s historical moment of retreat into conversation as resistance is long gone, though. I use its materials to invoke that history and its reception as a resource to work into my art. But the work looks more purely conceptual than it is.
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Concept, aesthetics and process tag-team through the development of my work and the work itself. I’m often working intuitively and chasing a feeling through the work.

Or I'm tackling a problem in one domain of the work by experimenting in the others. Often I don’t know what it is really about until after I’ve made it. I just track the singularities. The “art” in my art is in tuning the composition of materials - concepts, aesthetics, processes - to achieve a state of reflection in the viewer, of giving them work to do that cannot be done any other way. It’s maximizing Duchamp’s “art coefficient.”

‍‍Peter Bauman: What are some critical moments in the development of technology and culture in art that you think we have to include in our Generative Art Timeline?

Rhea Myers: Lovelace’s reflections on the potential of Babbage’s engine for culture is certainly one.
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‍‍Peter Bauman: How do you feel about Bitcoin Ordinals? Do you see this as a compelling use case for Bitcoin over currencies like Ethereum and Tezos?

Rhea Myers: I have a passionately ironic love for numerological mysticism and Ordinals scratch that itch for me. They aren’t the first digital property system to be built on the Bitcoin blockchain; I used to use CounterParty. Ordinals resemble the previous Coloured Coins proposal but as a natural property of the system. So I think they’re great, although I don’t use them.

That said, I don’t think they are a compelling use case for Bitcoin over proof of stake chains, as other chains are more expressive for representing digital property and are less likely to accidentally spend it. Bitcoin’s compelling use case is still as secure digital cash that doesn’t require a central authority, which it has worked as for over a decade.

‍‍Peter Bauman: Besides GEN/GEN what are you working on that you are excited about?

Rhea Myers: I’m promoting my book and I have work in a couple of other shows with more coming up. I am incubating too many projects to mention but the ones I’m most excited to finish are Koala Noosphere, which consists of artworks that frustrate ownership through ekphrastic evasiveness and Pure Value, which collapses identity, meaning and price to singularity.
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Rhea Myers is an artist, hacker and writer originally from the UK now based in British Columbia, Canada. Her work places technology and culture in mutual interrogation to produce new ways of seeing the world as it unfolds around us.
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Peter Bauman (Monk Antony) is Le Random's Editor-in-Chief.