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Simon Denny on Society, Technology and Art

Contemporary artist Simon Denny explores the complex relationship between society and technology in a conversation with Peter Bauman (Monk Antony). Denny highlights both the optimistic potential of technology and the critical questions it raises, particularly in how it shapes the creation and experience of cultural narratives.‍

Peter Bauman: How do you see society’s relationship with technology? Some of your projects appear to show the more optimistic side. I’m thinking of your project Optimism at the Auckland Art Gallery. But a lot of your work takes a more critical approach. Do you see yourself as a techno-optimist or pessimist?

Simon Denny: There's a few layers to that. Some of the work has gone in different directions, as you said. I reserve the right to contradict myself because, as a cultural actor, that's part of my role. I've made projects that focus on asking questions about what technology actually is and who gets to define what technology is. I was involved in curating Proof of Stake at the Kunstverein in Hamburg in 2021. That was asking that question and working with artists that asked that question. Around that time, I was doing a longer-term collaboration with an artist in New Zealand, Karamia Müller, and we made a show called Creation Stories, which asks, “Who gets to define what technology is and what counts as technology?” There’s this ontological question about what technology is, which I'm always asking a bit in my work.

Sometimes I make things that I'm really excited about—new affordances. When crypto came along, that was something that I was really attracted to. I curated Proof of Work in 2018, where I worked with artists who were trying new things with the affordances of blockchains. I was still trying to get my head around what that meant, artistically. I was really also tickled by the narrative of political affordances that blockchains were offering as well.
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Technologies come with new affordances with objects and material in the world, but also with new frames for thinking about what things are. It's like technologies are narrative devices as well as logistical devices.

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My work often goes into the narrative side of things—what stories are told along with technologies. I've looked at things and had some more critical takes as well. So I have a full range. I tend to land personally on the more optimistic side when something comes along, especially with new consumer technology. I'm excited by what I can do with them as a creative person.

It's also a challenge for me to distill the narratives that get birthed by those new systems. On the whole, my personal relationship to technology makes me optimistic and excited. Part of that exploration is, of course, finding the edges of what things are happening and what new things are afforded and framed that can also have negative effects. I'm certainly not afraid of talking about those while being excited at the same time. I also think it's a false binary to say, “Are you either excited about new technical things or are you against them?” And my answer is, “Well, both.”

Often people do feel like they have to choose a side. Going between the worlds of culture, art, technology and technologists, I'm personally friends with people who make companies, technical people and cultural people. There's pressure on either side to be a certain way more than the other. On the art side, there's pressure to be critical and skeptical by default. On the technology side, there's a real pressure to be super optimistic and never bring up the negative. It's actually a really fair question because it's something that I deal with a lot.

‍Peter Bauman: You bring up that essential role of art—giving space to question or critique the role of technology in our lives. Otherwise, we can become submissive to it. What else does looking at technology through the lens of art afford us?‍

‍Simon Denny: It's a healthy society if we're able to give artists the role to reify what's actually happening while asking questions about what could happen.
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Art does its job the best when it describes how things feel. 

I don't think that's always the role of the people building things or even using things. We use things often without really noticing how it feels. Great cultural products provide us with this lens to realize, “Oh, yeah, that's how it feels when I'm f– –g doomscrolling,” or “That's how it feels when I'm now able to do all this amazing new stuff.”

‍Peter Bauman: The reverse reminds me of something you’ve said before, which is, “I see the way that technology changes affect the way that people encounter art.” Can you tell us more about that relationship?‍

‍Simon Denny: One of the other things about being an artist in the genre of art that I grew up with is that you're always designing a situation or experience. For me, that’s often been rooms in specific places with objects in them. One thing that’s changed over time is how people encounter the work. At the beginning of my career in the mid 2000s, websites were a really important way that people saw refractions of rooms. Then, as social media became more and more dominant in terms of people's attention space, what translated into an Instagram post was also way more important for people's mind share. Then Twitter became a part of what I was doing and wanting to describe. It was about framing and experience. The technological mediums that we're projecting through and designing for changed what I do, how I do it and what I think about when I'm making things. And it continues to evolve.
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Experiencing things through screens as objects and making for screens is a constantly dynamic thing. For example, when crypto came along, it opened a new way of making when NFTs started. 

Translating the gestures I made in the exhibition space to a blockchain made absolutely no sense. I had to learn a new grammar for making things that functioned in that totally new space of somewhere between a casino experience, a camaraderie club and certainly a visual aspect to it. Storytelling, for me, became really important in the NFT world. These things always affect what is made and how it's made. That's also part of how cultural objects and art can reify technologies as they happen, because they just do something else.

‍Peter Bauman: Previously, you’ve discussed how technology makes art faster, punchier and more spectacular. It reminds me of conversations I’ve had with Art Blocks Founder Erick Calderon, who said he can’t get someone to go to the symphony with him but would have no problem with something like Skrillex. Where do you see this trajectory heading and does your work challenge or accelerate it?‍

‍Simon Denny: I love both symphonies and Skrillex so I can see the value in all of these things. As much as I like Situationism and Guy Debord, I don't think there's an inherent evil to the spectacular. I don't think there's a fixed politics to spectacularizing. It can be used for many different political ends. These things seem to do a bit of a dance. While immersive media and experience-based exhibitions are on the rise in the art space, at the same time, you see a resurgence in things like poetry and writing. There's always these opposite ends of the spectrum and I have dabbled in both. I've done quite spectacular translations of things, and I've done more subtle, obfuscated work. I enjoyed making both so I go in swings and roundabouts, just like going between full-on optimistic sounds and more bearish sounds coming out of my practice. For example, the version of Dotcom Séance I did in London was quite spectacular, using the biggest screens in the world.

People were pouring off the street to see these flashing animated forms. At the same time, I can work on a drawing, which is also about unpacking particular types of histories. I'm very comfortable working between both and as an audience of both. I also do know that I'll get more people standing in an immersive environment than I will unpacking a cryptic drawing. I don't think there's one direction that things are going. I also don't think more spectacular things are less sophisticated or necessarily less layered. I don't have any decline narrative with that. It's just that different things resonate at different times.

‍Peter Bauman: I don't see a decline either but do wonder how it continues evolving and what a maximum might be. Next will likely be even more immersive virtual worlds and a continued loss of the physical. I also wonder how that will affect art collecting. A recent report came out that Sotheby's earnings were down 88%. One explanation is a structural shift in how newer generations value physical objects versus experiences. Might our relationship with painting be going the same way as our relationship with the symphony? I spoke to Rafael Lozano-Hemmer recently, who said the first time his children saw a painting in a museum, they asked him why it wasn't on.

Simon Denny: These things will always come and go.
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I do think our relationship with the digital will just become more and more layered and sophisticated. NFTs were an early sign of that—the notion of owning something digital and keeping it only in the digital space and that being an important signal socially and culturally.

Even if NFTs are not the most discussed or cherished thing right now, I think that even the fact that it happened the way it did, even including the auction houses, meant that it's a sign that that's possible. But I don't think that it'll ever mean that objects will go away. Like the pandemic showed, I think we'll have surprising turns in what seems valuable at different moments.

The current downturn in cultural spending across sectors is actually an echo of a political instability—that's my personal take. People don't know which way to signal. Buying art and the more official end of cultural production, consumption and canon building has a very close relationship to politics—explicit or not. People are very confused about where the political situations are going in a lot of the spaces that we work in—Europe and North America. Those are the primary military-political environments my work operates within. Everybody's confused about whether we're making a hard turn to the right and conservatism. Are we going to continue in this liberal direction that we've been stumbling along for the last few years or is something even more radical going to happen? That makes people very confused about what they feel close to culturally.

‍Peter Bauman: Your work investigates those intersections of political economy, technology and art. An example you mentioned earlier is Dotcom Séance, where you reimagined Web1 companies using Web3 technology, commenting on the cyclical nature of technological innovation and failure. Do technologies need to fail before they become successful?
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‍Simon Denny: I drew a lot on Marc Andreessen for framing that project because he made bold claims about the dot-com boom being all about timing. All of those ideas were good ideas but it was the wrong moment in the hype cycle to deploy. I think one of the quotes we use is, “There's no such thing as a bad company idea. There’s only bad timing in technology,” which I think is a really interesting claim [laughs]. Boom-bust cycles—more than part of technology products—they're just part of capitalism. I don't know if it's got anything to do with technology itself rather than the technology of the social space of the market. The nature of new exciting products that change paradigms quickly is that people get really excited and overdeploy capital. Then a reality moment comes and there's a correction. Then it builds up again and again.

With crypto, what I was really interested in pointing out is that the timeline of that cycle seems to be shrinking. Boom-bust cycles are so much shorter than they used to be, and seemingly, they'll get more and more short. I think the advent of AI feels like another trajectory somehow, which is an interesting complication to that because AI does seem to be a slightly longer cycle than crypto in terms of how quickly things build and how much capital is deployed in a certain direction on particular products.

I wonder if or when we'll see a spectacular AI bear market come back. It could be just around the corner or it might not behave in quite the same way. I'm not entirely sure, actually. When I was making Dotcom Séance with what would become the Midjourney engine with David Holtz and Guile Twardowski, I was certainly anticipating a crash. Part of relaunching these dead projects was about saying the crash is part of the expression. What happens when you deploy into a space in an up-leaning hype cycle with a celebratory bear signal? There was a perversity to the agenda.

‍Peter Bauman: VC capital is always more willing to change than society. Society takes longer to adjust to these impactful technologies.‍

‍Simon Denny: There's a reason for that structurally, too, because VC money can get out; it’s very easy to move way. You're playing with other people's money, and generally, the people deploying the capital are in no way vulnerable themselves in terms of social or economic impacts. If something fails, it just fails; number goes to zero. Another cycle begins and everybody's still in Palo Alto. Whereas, society has bigger things at stake. With the impacts of social media and AI on politics, we're seeing effects of that in terms of very confusing conversations about democracy and autocracy, what enables them and what can move things in each direction. That is just a more expensive thing for civil society to lose if there's a bust.

‍Peter Bauman: The higher stakes is a great point. In Dotcom Séance, you used that early version of Midjourney like you mentioned. Do you see generative AI as something inherently negative akin to stealing, or will AI in art become so common that AI art as a term is replaced—like computer art—because of its redundancy?‍

‍Simon Denny: Generally, I’m excited. It's a new tool and because of the consumer-facing aspect, it means it's available to a lot of people. It's generally just very exciting what we can now do—what's cheaper, what's quicker, what more unskilled people can have access to.
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Good ideas can trump technical knowledge. And I'm generally for movements that do that, like punk rock. 

There's something about the DIY-ness of being able to create in ways that were very expensive before, which I think is always a good thing. Individual actors will lose. People will be displaced. But this is the longer story of technological change. You have to reskill and reframe. That's just living in a society like we do—a living, dynamic system. I'm not really worried about, on a macro level, the things that are outmoded. I think generally more things are afforded than outmoded in the end. But these are political questions. Of course, if all the value is then captured by a small amount of actors, then we're f– –d. We have to retool for a different paradigm, essentially.

I love working with AI. I'm doing more with it than I had before. I found it initially boring, the conversations that were happening around it, especially compared to crypto, because crypto was so political by nature. Right from the beginning, the big political questions were asked by blockchains. Bitcoin is a very politicized project, and it asks a huge amount of questions about value right off the bat, even before artists got anywhere near it. Whereas the questions around AI and copyright, I find a bit slow and boring. I'm generally a CC0 person. I'm a big fan of conceptual and pop art—taking other people's ideas and doing other things with them, other people's images and doing other things with them. I want to do that on a more interesting scale with more possibilities to misinterpret or misremember. That’s what Dotcom Séance was about—a system reinterpreting and misinterpreting its own past, mistelling its own history because the Internet is the training ground and the raw material for what comes out of AI systems.

Therefore, what does it say about itself? What does it say about its own history? If these things are inaccurate hallucinations, then what does that mean? I find all that very compelling. I’m interested in asking, “What can AI do?” I think that's coming up more and I think people are just getting more used to it.



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Simon Denny creates artworks that unpack stories about technology using a variety of media including painting, web-based media, installation, sculpture, print and video. Denny represented New Zealand at the 2015 Venice Biennale and has exhibited in solo and group shows worldwide, including at Petzel Gallery (New York), Kunstverein Hannover, Hammer Museum, and MoMA PS1. His works are represented in major institutional collections including MoMA (New York), Kunstsammlung Nordrhein Westfalen (Düsseldorf), Walker Art Centre (Minneapolis) and Buffalo AKG.
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Peter Bauman (Monk Antony) is Le Random's Editor-in-Chief.