Art, Life, and Technology, Through Time and Space

Chapter 19 Art, Life, and Technology, Through Time and Space Carla Gannis and Tula Giannini Abstract This chapter focuses on the work and life of digital artist Carla Gannis. Originally from North Carolina, Gannis received a BFA from UNC Greensboro, and an MFA in painting from Boston University. In 2005 she was awarded a New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Grant in Computer Arts, and since then, she lives and works in Brooklyn, where she is a professor and assistant chairperson of The Department of Digital Arts at Pratt Institute. Conveying her journey from painter to digital artist and storyteller, we explore the evolution of her artistic expression from painting to digital art, a story that ties broadly to the development of the digital arts field from the 1990s to present. Presented both through images of her work, and by way of a face to face unrehearsed interview, this chapter touches upon many of the highly pertinent topics impacting artists and museums in the 21st-century digital age. Among these, of special interest to museums are her observations on audiences, and how working in digital media affords new opportunities and multiple ways of connecting to the viewer, and reaching vast numbers of people across the globe, traveling from the gallery to the public square, in particular, Times Square and the Internet, showing that the life of a digital work can have multiple states of being. Gannis emphasizes the cultural positioning of digital spaces in physical places where diverse large public audiences can experience the work and where the artist can feel the pulse of public reaction and interaction. A feature of her work is her expression of self and gender through digital manifestations of persona, being and social consciousness, that take very original shapes and forms, images, colors and animations that merge into digital interpretations of self and the surrounding world revealing her creative imagination and sense of poetry used to convey new narratives embedded in her work and life (Fig. 19.1). C. Gannis Pratt Institute, New York, USA T. Giannini (B) School of Information, Pratt Institute, New York, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 T. Giannini and J. P. Bowen (eds.), Museums and Digital Culture, Springer Series on Cultural Computing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97457-6_19 381 382 C. Gannis and T. Giannini Fig. 19.1 Until the end of the world by Carla Gannis, her solo exhibition at the DAM gallery, Berlin, Germany, November 2017, installation view. (Photograph by Carla Gannis, http://carlagannis.com/ blog/prints/until-the-end-of-the-world/) 19.1 Introduction 19.1.1 When Digital Art Is Life—3D Models, Avatars and Selfies Writing about her art, Gannis explains her thinking and process wrought from digital art and life using 3D models, avatars and selfies (Gannis 2017), while referencing 16th-century painting. Here, we glean the artist’s perspectives firsthand: Portraits in Landscape, a single-channel video from my “After Arcimboldo” series, is a continuation of my focus on combining eccentric art-historical references with visual smartphone language. Through this process I reflect on the constructions and perceptions of identity in contemporary culture. Unlike the subjects of Arcimboldo’s paintings, the portraits in this series are not of aristocrats and wealthy patrons. Instead they began as 3D models, the avatars of our age, that I digitally shaped into selfie poses. I then overlaid the models with hundreds of emoji, similar to Arcimboldo’s process of using everyday objects to sculpt uncanny human likenesses. Bringing the portraits to life in a hyper landscape teeming with “digital nature” expresses my fascination with how virtual and physical embodiments intersect in our networked communication age. (Gannis 2018) Gannis’ Lady Ava Interface, an AI (Artificial Intelligence) assistant created for the Whitney Museum’s Sunrise/Sunset project, draws inspiration from the work of the English mathematician, Lady Ada Lovelace, (1815–1852) recognized as the first computer programmer. Rather than providing practical assistance as does Siri and Alexa, Ava instills creative thinking and imagination, and similarly with her work, Portraits in Landscape, Gannis has applied techniques of Giuseppe Arcimboldo to create Lady Ava’s persona using 3D-modeled emojis, and images of clouds and cookies, all symbolic of digital language. Her works point to the smartphone selfie as a core element of digital culture (Klemperer 2018). Gannis has embraced the digital self and literally immerses her real and digital self in her art in highly original ways that capture the very essence 19 Art, Life, and Technology, Through Time and Space 383 Fig. 19.2 Lady Ava Interface, by Carla Gannis, Lady Ava—Twitter, featured on the Whitney Museum website, part of the Sunrise/Sunset project organized by Christiane Paul, May 2018 (https://twitter.com/carlagannis/status/983861719687712769) of being digital while her art blurs the boundaries between fine art and performance art, especially her intrinsic use of technology that can breathe new life into the works of master painters (see Figs. 19.2 and 19.3) and also in her 2016 tour de force, The Garden of Emoji Delights, based on the triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosh, which is reinvented through digital translation using animated emoji “GIF” images that she created to tell a story for the digital world (Giannini and Bowen 2016; http://carlagannis.com; Lorenzin 2016). 19.2 The Interview: Carla Gannis in Conversation with Tula Giannini Tula Giannini: Today is August 20, 2018. I’m here with the famous Carla Gannis, star of the digital world! Carla Gannis: I’m good with that! TG: We have this wonderful opportunity to have a discussion. I gave you several questions beforehand but will restate each one as we go. The first is about how you think of your own work in terms of its relationship to the past because you have picked up certain artists of the past, going back to the Renaissance that you connect to and then re-interpret, remix, so please talk a little about that. 384 C. Gannis and T. Giannini Fig. 19.3 Lucile Tack Ball (LTB), by Carla Gannis (top left)—“is a work in progress… inspired by the portraits of the 16th Century mannerist painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo (top center) and the American comedy legend Lucille Ball (top right). I perform LTB by using facial tracking technologies and a computer-generated voice—an experiment in comedy through the perspective of a human who is trying to perform as a machine who is trying to entertain humans”. Photograph courtesy of Carla Gannis, http://carlagannis.com/blog/prints/lucille-trackball/ 19 Art, Life, and Technology, Through Time and Space 385 CG: Sure. So, my background is traditional painting and oil painting. I studied oil painting as well as classical music and piano as a child and then I went on to pursue two degrees in painting and obviously in pursuing those degrees in painting I studied a lot of art history, and I suppose many images. I will say most of my references do tend to come from western art, however, and that has as much to do with being a western individual. But also, I was coming up a little earlier. I was in college in the late 1980s and early 1990s and I don’t know if enough or as much attention was paid to, at the time, world history as it is today in art history programs. However, I don’t want to digress too much on that topic. In the digital work that I produce today, I do reference many artists from the canon and there are a few intentions behind that. Much of that work has been a source of inspiration since I was a small child, for example, “emojifying” Hieronymus Bosch. Some people have said I “DeBosched” a Bosch but that wasn’t my intention because there was already enough “DeBoschery” in that piece. An intention in my piece was to pay tribute to the original work, but also to think about it within the context of our time. It is a piece that still resonates and reverberates, and a painting which at the time I had never actually seen, “The Garden of Earthly Delights”. So I only knew it as a reproduction and that was appealing to, me and as well, it was a work that I would be appropriating from or basically translating with the new signs, symbols and iconography of our day—an iconography that isn’t just part of high art but something that has to do with communication and that is used by everyone and so overlaying the emoji with the Bosch was important to me to find different connections between this 500-year-old iconography and iconography we use today often equated with just happiness or vacuity. What happens is if there’s a different kind of gravitas or different interpretation possible in that mashup? (Rose 2017). Now the other artists who I have quoted include Marcel Duchamp, Rene Magritte, and a quite a few of those quotations arose in a project that I worked on for about 2½ years and the project began as “the Selfie Drawing Project” and you’re familiar with this and series of drawings I made, one a week for 52 weeks. I shared them on many social media networks and they were all selfies with augmented reality experiences. I also produced 4K video works, 3D prints, a longer form narrative—so all these works emerged out of this original idea. For the solo show that I produced to represent the translations I used the titled “a subject self-defined”—and that was based on a work of art that Joseph Kosuth made in 1966. The work was titled “a subject self-defined.” I use this title for my show in 2016 as a means of reassessing the state of art now. In 1966, we were reading “The Death of the Author” and it was about expunging the texture of the artwork and it was what the viewer brought to it. There wasn’t any relationship or emphasis, and this was a point that Kosuth and many artists of his time were making on identity or biography. But 40 years later, we find ourselves in a heightened state of identity politics. And particularly as a woman producing these works where women historically have been the object of art and paintings to call oneself a subject and to self-define oneself in the age of selfies felt interesting to me and that’s why I chose that title, so even the title of my work was a direct quotation from an earlier artist. Also instead of neon, I used glow in the dark letters for the title of my show so there was a direct reference 386 C. Gannis and T. Giannini quotation but then, as I was mentioning earlier, quite a few of the works referenced, was when I was referencing the Canon for these works, they’re works that I admire, tremendous works, there’s a Bernini, Saint Theresa in Ecstasy that—my gosh—that’s the best orgasm face on a woman ever—right? (Sauerlaender 2016). So, I wanted to incorporate that one but I’m also inserting myself into that canonical history. Not as an object but as the subject, as an author and that was important to me too, that there was an implicit critique to that. For centuries, we have elevated artists as the masters and the geniuses, but in those histories that we’ve written, many people were omitted. Many times, it didn’t have to do with skill level or any of those aspects, when art was more about a skillset and now it’s much more about concepts. Although I think the best artists and the ones that I love and the ones that I quote, always understood the marriage of form and content and their work is imbued with concept whether it was produced 500 years ago or 20 years ago, but there was something about inserting myself in that Canon and being an author who is like Sherrie Levine—re-photographing those photographs that’s something where she’s going into museums and she’s looking at the masterworks in the male Canon and she’s re-photographing them and then assigning her authorship to them so that was something I was consciously thinking about. TG: Well that was beautifully spoken. It had many different ideas but one aspect I thought about, in your case, I think what stands out is that you might say the artist is art itself. The separation between the artist and the art is shrinking, because of the strength of identity, projection of image, but I also think the digital plays a role in this because whether you’re there or not there, once your art is on the web or Internet, it’s communicating… CG: … and it’s ubiquitous. TG: This is totally new, relatively. And so, the position of the artist, when your art is out there in what I call the digital ecosystem is bumping up against all kinds of things it never would have otherwise. You’re getting different juxtapositions that could jolt your way of seeing, your imagination, you might suddenly be seeing a work of art from 300 years ago that you weren’t thinking about, but it’s in the same mix when you’re moving around on the Internet. CG: Yes, and that’s the point of the Bosch—was that I knew it as a work of art on the Internet. When I left painting, I was an abstract painter who wanted to work figuratively again. I was looking at quite a few photographers like Gregory Crewdson and was interested in telling a story in the moment where you must go into a piece instead of looking across like you do with a timeframe, like time-based media. And since then though over the past few years I’ve been getting back into kinetic work. I’ve done projection mapping, quite a bit of video work. The Selfie Drawing Book was my first experiment with augmented reality through its 52 augments. Halfway through, I’ve started expanding it to much more work that’s 3D augmented reality. And since then I’m now working on a piece Lucille Trackball, that I presented at the EVA London 2018 Conference (Bowen et al. 2018) and Lucille’s first instantiation was 2D and performed with facial tracking technologies (Salas 2016). I’ve now modeled and rigged Lucille as a 3D entity and I have already produced my first, it’s in progress but it’s been published, an augmented reality version of 19 Art, Life, and Technology, Through Time and Space 387 Lucille and then the next state for that is to bring Lucille into a VR space where—I want Lucille to be a VR comedian and it’s actually a human, myself pretending to be an AI being who is trying to pretend to be human. So, there are many layers. But I’m also interested in that because I haven’t done much in-depth research, but in cursory searches there doesn’t seem to be a lot of comedy VR now. One person was telling me that a VR project with which they were they were familiar was misogynistic and Lucille is a big feminist. Many of the topics with which she grapples are topics that come up in her comedy and concern ageism, sexism, and classism, and some topics that in between her puns and her nerdy pun humor there are some biting satire too. TG: I think part of what you felt was that you were not going to start painting representational as it was done in the past. But now you can bring realism in a form you might call digitalism into your work, but in a totally new way as all these new works you created in a digital structure that you now can work within, didn’t exist before—and you are inside that digital space being creative. I think that is where you have been taking a leadership role from everything I’ve seen (Bowen et al. 2018). TG: Do you think about this as being valid? CG: Oh my gosh this is so valid because when I was in graduate school the big issue, and I must admit some of the people and professors with whom I was studying in graduate school were 4th or 5th generation abstract expressionism, but there was still this dichotomy where if you were a figurative painter, you were reactionary. And then if you were an abstract painter you were heroic, and you were dealing with the sublime and it was fractious. I remember when I first got to grad school, I was working figuratively and quite a few of the professors with whom I was working with, one was Alfred Leslie who had historically been an abstract expressionist. He moved into figuration, but he moved into very cool figurative work. The only acceptable figurative work was Alex Katz and Roy Lichtenstein figurative but pop, so it was either very cool and distant or pop. I was angry and had all these ideas I wanted to resolve in my painting at that time, so figurative work didn’t seem to be a vehicle for that expression at this point, if people were to take it seriously. So, I moved into abstraction although, interestingly, in most of the abstract works that I produced in the early and mid-1990s, had these kinds of hieroglyphs and symbols that I would use in figurative works, so they weren’t nonobjective to me because that was also a big debate, nonobjective, abstraction, versus this content laden figurative work. With photography and film, one wonders why anybody would make a figurative representational work. But once I started working digitally, I returned to working with figures and with overt narratives. Not narratives with a beginning, middle, end, because a lot of these were single images, static images and print works. And then I made some interactive works too that were nonlinear narratives but the idea of suggesting a narrative because that had also been something maligned when I was in grad school and in many academic circles. So, narratives were dead and “don’t deal with allegory or metaphor by god” and with a new language. Once I threw away all my paintings from grad school which I did as my Baldessari act, it was liberating though—unfortunately, I spent a lot of money on oil paint and I threw all of those away, but it was liberating 388 C. Gannis and T. Giannini and so once I started working with Xerox machines, etc. I was trying anything, and I would throw away as much art as I created. I was interested in Arte Povera—the Italians and conceptual art and I would combine photographs, Xerox and computer-generated images, collages, etc. I’d try these approaches and I was looking at many artists. And then finally through that process I found myself, found my interests and I began to develop my own language. TG: So this is really revolutionary. Also the notion of thinking digitally. I listened to a lecture by Glenn Lowry and this was his big thing. Think digitally and people around him were not sure what he meant, but to me, it seemed that phrase very pertinent. He sees that as an inspiration for the whole redesign of the museum itself and the exhibits. Does that have any meaning to you? This idea of thinking digitally?—because you’re in that space. CG: It does and recently someone was doing an email interview with me and they were asking in terms of preparing students who would pursue a career working with digital tools or delving into intersections of art and technology. One aspect I mentioned that I thought was very important was it’s not the programs you learn, it’s learning to think and inhabit these digital spaces which requires you to be so much more elastic. You’re straddling different worlds and with that I mean in terms of if you’re thinking art market economics you’re an artist who wants to have a successful career with a gallery, but you also make this work that can be shared ubiquitously. You’re putting GIF images online, you’re showing your 4 k videos with limited editions in a brick and mortar white cube and a select few see that and then a great deal more sees the GIFs you’re putting online but you want to inhabit both of those spaces so that’s one aspect of being a digital artist. That’s thinking about it from the sense of your practice and economics, as if you know how you straddle those. But more importantly, I think as an artist who enjoys my practice, no matter who is seeing it, a digital space requires you to be so much more adaptive so you have to be able to adapt the fact that your tools, your applications, your processes for delivery, your processes for output are constantly changing, updating, evolving and also you have to deal with them dying—with obsolescence of hardware and software and understanding migration and how you have to now adapt to that so you’re a part of this living thing that is so dynamic, and both virtual and physical. I remember when I first stopped painting because I certainly identified as a “painter”—I would tell people “I’m not an artist I’m a painter” and I wore it—I had my jeans covered in paint, I had my arms and fingers covered in paint. I’d sleep in my studio, with turpentine and smoked my cigarettes. I bought into that as a trip and when I switched to digital at first, I felt “[gasp] my hands have been cut off!” I can’t reach into the computer. Because this is 20 years later, I’ve been working with these tools, now it is so intuitive it feels so real to me. I am in that space as much as I am in this physical space and I don’t even like to use “in real life” (IRL) and “URL”. We say “URL/IRL”. They work for shorthand as distinctions between virtual and physical, but they’re all real life now and that’s something else about embracing the digital state of being is recognizing this is all real life now. These distinctions and these dichotomies it’s all blending and so to be elastic and prismatic within that, I think, can contribute to the 19 Art, Life, and Technology, Through Time and Space 389 work you’ll produce as an artist and we still use the nomenclature digital artist, new media artist, interdisciplinary artist but it’s all art today. Even artists who are working with analog tools, their research and so much of what they are doing is informed either by the Internet or by using digital tools. TG: Moving to the next question, it concerns the challenges for digital artists, but in the context of museums. CG: So, within the contexts of museums, recently I was talking to somebody about participating in a show that takes place in a museum and I’m getting this augmented reality app ready for them and they were mentioning all the artists who were participating to make sure we show up for all the testing because the museum staff don’t understand this and either they were intimidated by the technology or they haven’t been trained, because generally they have been trained to deal with physical objects and making sure that they inhabit these spaces safely in these static non-touchable scenarios. So, that’s one thing for artists who are working with new technologies, although interestingly, the second thing is that artists have always worked with technology. Anyway, artists working with digital technologies or computer technologies—it’s just that many museum staff haven’t been trained on how to maintain these works and not even maintain them in terms of if they enter the collection, maintain them during an exhibition, such as turning them on and off or general maintenance. I think there is still some resistance to digital art—maybe it’s not in museums that are well funded, or some private art collections who support new media, but they have resistance to buying works that are process driven, where in a few years you may have to migrate that work to a new operating system or it might require different hardware or software to even run it and that kind of maintenance intimidates certain museums. But sometimes it’s a matter for them now of funding and taking those risks because so many of these galleries that are still trying to operate on an antiquated system. Your artists don’t get paid unless once a year you represent them, they have a solo show, and if they are lucky, they make a couple thousand bucks and the rest of the time they are represented but they don’t have health benefits. Normally gallerists who are young gallerists don’t have health benefits themselves. I’ve been working with Kelani Nicole at Transfer Gallery, and talk about a labor of love, and she has made a tremendous impact in the new media, digital arts world but also within mainstream arts because those things are finally colliding, and those barriers are collapsing but it has been a labor of love. She has worked full time, she runs a gallery, she puts on these laborious exhibitions trying out all sorts of new technology, ambitious projects but it’s always “OK, where are we going to obtain screens? Where are we going to get projectors? Who can help us here?” because if you don’t have some funding it is quite difficult. Much of the work with digital media used to just be sending files and playing it on a screen and that’s still valid, but I think more artists are interested in instantiations in physical space, physical computing or what is it like to get screenbased Internet inspiration, “post-Internet” but then make physical works of art. There are these currents running between the virtual and physical and so all of that, those can be obstacles for people who want to support those projects but it’s just like having 390 C. Gannis and T. Giannini the resources—because the commercial industry has the resources, but their content much of the time—it’s just…crap. TG: But do you think the museums should have a role in this—In other words, to be much more empathetic or much more prepared to support digital art. All their efforts have been going into having the perfect walls for the painting, but they haven’t thought this through very carefully about how they are going to move towards the next step. I think MOMA especially is thinking about that with the new space that they are building now. They’re rethinking the gallery so that has some promise. CG: It seems as if so much has happened on the front end—and when I say front end, I mean “oh yes! Let’s create tours where there’s augmented reality or there are all these new technologies we’re implementing but in the tour of one seeing the paintings and the sculptures” and so what I think will be radical when it’s not only using this technology for tours or to access information or to learn about things or for schoolage children but when you’re now actually committed to nurturing and fostering the careers of artists working with these technologies. Investing in their works either in the programming and creating space that facilitates this more nonbinary, nonlinear work and also representing this work in your collections so you represent the time we live in now. TG: That was brilliant, but I think personally we are at the tipping point for that. Because if museums don’t do this, the perception will be dusty. Because people are coming in being digital people, and they can accommodate both, both can be there but if museums shut out digital art now, I think that’s not going to be sustainable. That stance is a barrier. It’s like another wall, and it won’t hold—we are about at that point now. That’s my sense of it. Embracing digital art will make museums much more exciting and will get more people coming. Visitors can take in both as they’re living in this mixed reality world. It’s not hard for them—maybe five or ten years ago, but not now. CG: Not for generation Z. TG: Exactly. They’re going to be excited by this. They’ll see themselves in it—their sensibilities—their aesthetics. CG: Yea and now you mentioned something. It was funny when I used this term. I said work that’s nonlinear and nonbinary. Now I know as digital practitioners, we’re working with binary code, zeroes, and ones but I feel conceptually—Robert Rauschenberg said something about working between the gap of art and life and I feel as if the work of digital artists is between the ones and zeroes. They can find all that gray area between them to tease out these amazing expressions with binary code that is a result of nonbinary thinking and so to explain my usage of that terminology. TG: So, looking ahead to the future, because you must always have this sense of the path you’re moving on, the direction and how it resonates with the rest of the art world—how do you see yourself moving into the future and where does that resonate within the art world. CG: This year, I’ve been fortunate to have two ephemeral exhibitions and opportunities, outside of the frameworks that we were talking about, the bounds of the gallery or museum walls—having my artworks on the Whitney museum’s website but only at sunrise and sunset so at this very specific time you have this fleeting 19 Art, Life, and Technology, Through Time and Space 391 moment to experience the work of art. The work is also this artificial intelligence assistant who gives you nonsensical, nonlinear poetic advice instead of telling you to schedule your doctor’s appointment and it’s an embodied assistant who is comprised of emojis and again harking back like I always do, there’s an art historical reference. I generally appreciate the more eccentric artists, like Giuseppe Arcimboldo, and so that was an exciting project to be commissioned for, and then also this year the Times Squares Art Project the Midnight Moment which is going on now. The Whitney project is up—I don’t know what you say—on view at sunrise and sunset and then I have midnight this year so I’ve covered everything except for—I have sunrise, sunset and midnight, I need someone to contact me about a lunchtime project and then I will have gotten all of these very important, monumental times and so again, the Time Square piece has been amazing in terms of seeing my art in this context for many reasons. I’m in this hypermediated space and we had talked about this before, how much of my work is hypermediated. Anyway, I call it “horror vacui” (fear of empty space) and consciously or not, I’m attracted, or I have this compulsion to fill up empty spaces in terms of aesthetics and art creation. I do think that’s my response to visualizing “hypermediation”, nonlinearity all these different kinds of frequencies occurring simultaneously. But it particularly fits well with the Times Square environment and it’s been exciting to go up there I think 12 times now in this past month. I’m a little sleep deprived, traveling up there and back, but not only will I invite friends but also there are hundreds of thousands of people there every night from all walks of life, from all over the world, experiencing art for three minutes, some of them recognize it some of them don’t. I’ve engaged a few people in conversation but it’s a totally different context and it’s exciting to have your work in that environment. If you think again about some predecessors, if you think about someone like Beuys who thought “everyone’s an artist.” Warhol gave us all 15 min, but he was also very interested in the vernacular of his time, in advertising language, in the expressions of everyday people and not only lofty erudite “art language.” Even someone like Giotto in the 13th century was interested in the vernacular and the vulgate, and these kinds of things, text and that the current that runs throughout history that I’ve always been very excited about and so this is that moment where I’m very enthusiastic. Outside of the Internet, this is the largest audience I’ve ever had, outside of the Internet and so physical space—all these people from all over the world are seeing these works on these huge screens, now already I know I’ve reached millions of people with my artwork and that’s not to sound arrogant, that’s just true with my artwork, but generally on these small screens and so I’ve been able to reach people, I have sometimes people from high school who aren’t studying art who will contact me. I really like that. It’s not as if I’m only appealing to a sophisticated elite class, accessibility is another aspect of my work that is a conscious choice and so to have it in this context where I’ve had this much of a viewership every single night, almost reaching levels of the Internet but in a physical space. That is cool. CG: I’ve been photographing many things associated with my work, just that juxtaposition with the other—and we were talking about James Rosenquist earlier. In Times Square my works become Rosenquist-like pictures in motion because there 392 C. Gannis and T. Giannini are all these different ads and things juxtaposed (since I don’t get every advertising screen in Times Square). And to see that it’s just become this huge montage and that’s exciting! TG: It makes the viewer suddenly see the other things differently. That’s what’s important. CG: It’s re-contextualizing. TG: It’s very big. I think it has much more impact. CG: I agree. TG: And they are in their environment. You see they’re in their space. You’re in their space. CG: I’m in their space and it is a subversive act. With Times Squares Art and the Time Square Alliance, it’s a delicate dance. It took a year for all of this to go through and there were layers and those kinds of things, but it’s exciting that they have committed and stayed committed to a project like this because I think that is vital and you’re correct, the art—and especially my art that has a pop quality to it shares certain aesthetics with contemporary advertising and so it re-contextualizes many of those commercial works and you see “oh wow there’s cross-pollination here too and this is how an artist can parse all these messages, all these things that we’re constantly bombarded with and that entertain us, that can be sensual experiences all that and again not denigrating it but this is how I have somewhat filtered it to create an expressive language that represents the age in which we exist. TG: And now moving into the future—what do you see ahead? CG: Yes, but I brought these works up because I feel like they both are events and have been events that are directing my vector for the future. However, I as a digital, thinker, responder, feeler who in the dynamic age we live in, I’m constantly in flux, and even though there are undercurrents that I think most people can, maybe now they are more familiar with my work, they think “oh yes, I can see that’s Carla in there” but it is taking a different direction—I like to take different directions sometimes aesthetically but also challenging myself to learn new technology. So, for creating the Whitney piece, for this AI being, Lady Ava Interface was her name, and with Lady Ava Interface I was starting to approach topics about comedy but there’s no audio, there’s no voice and so that spawned the project Lucille Trackball that I’m now embarking on, now here Lucille is empowered with a voice. I’m doing the writing for it although I’m probably soon going to try to get some professional writers to collaborate with me on that and giving a voice to Lucille and thinking about that dark comedy has been infused in my work or I’ve infused in my work for several decades now, but I’ve never given a voice, a comedic voice to it. Going forward, one of the things I’ve been thinking about is pushing myself in terms of the ambitiousness and scope of my projects. I would like to do this to the point of sometimes working with people who can bring it to culmination is also that level of detail or finesse because one of my good friends had told me “you’re very Fluxist, constantly making things but it’s this and it’s this but sometimes they don’t have refinement to the idea or the actual object”. I think, oh OK, I’ve done that, I don’t want to refine it, so that’s something I’ve been thinking about in terms of scale, ambition and I’m becoming older, committing longer to—ah, OK, I’ve got the 19 Art, Life, and Technology, Through Time and Space 393 Fig. 19.4 Selfie Portrait 32 (2017), by Carla Gannis, American Digital Artist. This portrait is part of her selfie series of selfie portraits that was awarded the Lumen Prize for Digital Art in 2017. A brilliant and ground-breaking work that reveals the digital self in multiple facets of identity confidence too because it was a self-esteem thing too. I’d think “I’ll just dip my toe into that idea pool and see what I can come up with” and now I think after this year I’ll have much more confidence. TG: That’s great. CG: Yes, that’s something, prior to the selfie project was another project I did where I collaborated with a poet first and then we invited all these people to participate, as performance artists, poets, artists collaborating we did performances in various locales and what was exciting about that project too was our publisher called it a Multi-tentacled Beast and so we started out with a text, this old text that he redacted and I created these drawings in response -you’re familiar with this—we created an app, we created these projection mapping pieces, remix pieces with Mark Amerika’s students in Colorado. We did other remix projects on Governors Island and taking these texts and finding ways to express it across all these different channels and in gallery channels and poetry houses all these things (Fig. 19.4). TG: When you look ahead to the future do you see what you tied to the digital future in a sense, digital tools, digital thinking, technology, is going to evolve because it would be accepting change as a part of the whole thing, for some people extremely difficult, like you’ve said, but you don’t have control over how it’s going to evolve—what will be the tools. How the tools will change—that’s an interesting thing although artists have dealt with that in the past but not at this speed. CG: Not at this speed and I was talking about the joy in the studio, but it can be daunting. There are times when I feel overwhelmed to the point of exhaustion, particularly by having too many options. Because with proprietary software, they develop things that keep your productions within their parameters for one. So, you 394 C. Gannis and T. Giannini think “I’ll try this one of this one,” but at some point, you do need a stable platform that you can learn deeply and have ease in producing and making things on an intuitive level and so that sometimes can be daunting. When I’m adding plugins then I’m skipping to another program or I’m working in this program and those kinds of things and sometimes it’s just being capable of processing all of that and still thinking about what did I read that generated this idea or what drawing I made with a pen, on the subway, that got me started working in this application. I don’t want to lose touch with that stuff and sometimes when you get too much into a technical quagmire the poetry disappears and so it’s very important for me—it’s like music scales. TG: So, keeping that poetic thread, which Gareth Polmeer puts forward in Chap. 3, seems critical. CG: That’s so essential otherwise why are we doing this? TG: It is a very good point, and regardless of the context or your tools—and the other thread is nature itself. CG: Yes, and nature is a very important point especially regarding human nature and coming to terms with our culpability. At this point we’re developing technologies and other intelligences that we have to think about, albeit I’m excited about artificial intelligences but we’re responsible for encoding responsible data sets so these intelligences don’t propagate the worst in humanity. It’s not only about AI superseding us, it’s about things like perverse substantiations, their instantiation of “commands” in what we would deem perverse because we’re so biased. TG: And it gets coded in. CG: And how we fit into nature, the new nature we are building but the other nature that we have destroyed, and so there’s a lot of reconciliation going on and all of that certainly affects an artist’s practice if you’ve got your ear not to the ground but to the Internet to anything right? One other thing I said about my future trajectory was it’s not just the past year but the past couple of years I’ve been garnering more attention and more critical attention to my work and that’s been very exciting and, although an artist should have a healthy ego and believe in themselves, it certainly helps when other people start paying attention. So, I do have more confidence but this is also based on how long I’ve been making work, my years on the planet, and my years in New York. Something else in addition to just confidence is: I used to, because I was working in the tech industry, to support my “art habit”: before I got into teaching, I was sometimes terrified of not knowing a program or someone else saying “What? You don’t know how to do that?” So, I would stay up night after night reading manuals so to make sure I would know technically how to “keep up with the boys,” as it was generally more boys. I’ve got to prove myself partially as a woman. I’ve got to prove twice that I’m smart enough or I can do the code and now I think no I’ve got things I want to say and a very limited amount of time and generally also considering “how can I say it”. It’s not as if I must use the most advanced system out there that costs tens of thousands of dollars. How can I be economical? Because that’s the other thing, artists are very good at being economical because historically we haven’t had funding. Thus, for example, Matthew Barney can produce a film for a million dollars that Hollywood takes 64 19 Art, Life, and Technology, Through Time and Space 395 million dollars to produce and his is more stunning. So, economy is important to me too. TG: Looking forward, do you think digital will become for the artists more intuitive, more natural in the connection? Do you think digital will get to the point that painting has reached, with an intuitive sense to it—as if a body extension and mind extension, so do you think it’s moving in that way? CG: I think it’s already there—but I do see in terms of these technologies that they will disappear and what I mean by that, the Internet of Things (IoT) is going to become smaller and smaller and so all the things now that seem distinctive and artificial will become “natural.” I think those distinctions will slowly disappear and blur again. TG: But I think AI is particularly interesting, looking back to the 1940s with Claude Shannon and Alan Turing. They perceived AI as something artistic and something directly connected to humans as a mind-spirit state—not technical, and envisioned a thinking machine, which to them was the mind. CG: Well if you think about that, there’s been this obsession throughout human history. Automatons and bringing the inanimate to life from Pygmalion to a “golem” and the human fascination, not with the technology but infusing life or creating life and a mind but through a different portal. TG: It’s Lucille. Lucille is this person. CG: Yes, so we’ll see what happens. TG: You’ve given Lucille life. Thank you, Carla—that is brilliant. CG: Yes! Your questions were brilliant. 19.3 Conclusion In this interview Carla Gannis touches upon many of the most pertinent topics impacting artists and museums in the digital age. Among these, of special importance to museums are her observations on audience and how working in digital media affords new opportunities and multiple ways of connecting to the viewer, and reaching vast numbers of people across the globe, a journey from the gallery to the public square, such as Times Square and the Internet. The life of a digital work can have several states of being (Bowen et al. 2018) and Gannis stresses the cultural positioning of digital spaces within physical locations where varied large public audiences can encounter the work and where the artist can sense the feeling of reaction from the public. It’s not like I’m just appealing to a sophisticated elite class, accessibility is another aspect of my work that is a conscious choice and so to have it in this context [Times Square] where I’ve had this much of a viewership every single night, almost reaching levels of the Internet but in a physical space. That is cool. Carla Gannis’s observations of issues encountered when digital art is on exhibit in museums, provide important insights to some of the critical barriers that museums 396 C. Gannis and T. Giannini are experiencing, in terms of display, issues of preservation and conservation, and cost issues associated with digital artist’s tools. Further, Gannis speaks to issues of gender discrimination that permeate computer science, which has meant that women need to prove themselves to a higher standard and be more facile than men. Still, most critically, contemporary art museums have been slow to recognize the importance of showing digital art, which more than any other art form ties museums to the present, to relevance and participation, and brings into harmony, the self of the digital visitor, the museum onsite and offsite, and the conversations between the museum and the visitor, and lest not forget, the voice of the artist living and working in today’s digital landscape. As Gannis notes, moving from painterly tools and methods, to digital tools and methods, changes the message, the meaning and connections to the viewer. If museums choose not to engage with digital art and artists, the more time that passes, the less relevant the contemporary art museum will become, and the dustier it will appear to the visitor. On the other hand, as museums form creative partnerships with digital artists, not only exhibiting and acquiring their work, but including them in the process of these activities, the more excited and engaged visitors will be as they connect art and contemporary life in the digital ecosystem—a place and space in in which they too can participate and create. As an artist, Gannis’s work lives in both physical and digital space connecting with a wide audience, from art aficionados and art lovers to the general public and straddling the domains of high, pop, and commercial art in a seamless flow of artistic energy and thought, harking back to the likes of Andy Warhol and Robert Rauchenberg. This mixed media, multifaceted approach to art and identity is emerging as a movement across cultural boundaries and differences. Talking to Gannis about her journey from the 1990s to present, as one of discovery of art and self, of consciousness and emotion, of thinking and feeling digitally and working intuitively, speaks to her work as a digital artist conveying original and authentic ways of expression, that inspire and engage her audience. As we observe how digital culture is radically changing art and life in the 21st century, we can see how digital art sits at the heart of that transformation, situating culture in global contexts and new understandings of what it means to be human in a sea of diverse cultural narratives and artistic visions. These new relationships challenge museums to be more inclusive and to work more in partnership with artists and their diverse communities. References Bowen JP, Giannini T, Polmeer G, Gannis C, Gardiner J, Kearney J, Wands B, Weinel J (2018) States of being: art and identity in digital space and time. In Bowen JP, Weinel J, Diprose G, Lambert N (eds) EVA London 2018 conference proceedings, Electronic Workshops in Computing (eWiC), BCS, pp 1–7. https://doi.org/10.14236/ewic/eva2018.1 19 Art, Life, and Technology, Through Time and Space 397 Gannis C (2017) The augmented selfie. In Bowen JP, Weinel J, Diprose G, Lambert N (eds) EVA London 2017 conference proceedings, Electronic Workshops in Computing (eWiC), BCS, pp 319–326. https://doi.org/10.14236/ewic/eva2017.66 Gannis C (2018) Portraits in landscape, August 1, 2018—August 31, 2018. Midnight Moment, Times Square Arts. http://arts.timessquarenyc.org/times-square-arts/projects/midnight-moment/ portraits-in-landscape/index.aspx. Accessed 8 Jan 2019 Giannini T, Bowen JP (2016) Curating digital life and culture: art and information. In Bowen JP, Weinel J, Diprose G, Lambert N (eds) EVA London 2016 conference proceedings, Electronic Workshops in Computing (eWiC), BCS, pp 237–244. https://doi.org/10.14236/ewic/eva2016.46 Klemperer LV (2018) Contemporary artist Carla Gannis takes on the selfie. Art Report, Artist Interviews, 4 Apr, 2018. http://artreport.com/contemporary-artist-carla-gannis-takes-on-the-selfie/. Accessed 9 Jan 2019 Lorenzin F (2016) The emojification of reality: interview with Carla Gannis. Digitcult. http:// digicult.it/news/the-emojification-of-reality-interview-with-carla-gannis/. Accessed 9 Jan 2019 Rose F (2017) Young digital artists, anxious about … technology. The New York Times, 24 July 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/24/arts/design/sothebys-digital-artists-bunker. html. Accessed 9 Jan 2019) Salas S (2016) Altarpieces for the digital age. Hyperallergic, 9 Mar 2016. https://hyperallergic.com/ 278335/altarpieces-for-the-digital-age/. Accessed 9 Jan 2019 Sauerlaender T (2016) The new narrative portrayal of women: artist Carla Gannis interviewed by curator Tina Sauerländer. Artefuse, 17 Mar 2016. https://artefuse.com/2016/03/17/artist-carlagannis-interviewed-by-curator-tina-sauerlander-124445/. Accessed 9 Jan 2019