CURA.

Yuri Pattison: I would like to respond to this by first positing this now well-worn quote “The future is already here—it’s just not evenly distributed.”¹ Ultimately the internet is about information, where anything of any value has the potential to be controlled like a packet of information in the network. For example we see this in the evolution of Amazon as a company—from the masterful streamlining of the shipping of used books, to the expansion to goods, crowdsourcing of labor, and now the control over the majority of information on the internet. For many, the company has become omnipresent, encountered daily from purchasing household goods to interaction with government web services. The work I make responds to the fabric of this reality, of living within these wider material conditions. I also consider my work to be dealing with the longer history of the information economy, and the evolution of the internet is just one part of this longer timeline. While the internet has opened up multiple new possibilities it has also accelerated many existing trends within capitalism, globalization and to some degree totalitarianism, we see ideas and power structures from the past re-emerge within the digital realm. So I don’t see the question of “digital art” being one of dichotomy, but more of subsumption. I would argue that open, easy and immediate access to information has led to artworks being made in a more polyphonic way; embodying a deeper and wider view of history/ies; utilizing a wider variety of techniques, technologies and mediums; and working across time zones, borders and languages. However, while the end results might not be so easy, or satisfying, to categorize from an art historical point of view, they certainly do mirror the wider societal changes currently occurring. Ultimately there is always the temptation to vaguely categorize art by its medium or the technology it uses rather than its content. I no longer think this is productive when discussing current cultural production and believe a more nuanced approach needs to be considered. The present is after all still a fractured reality—an increasing amount of meaningful cultural and social experience now happens entirely within the digital realm, and we are seeing an ongoing shift of power and capital to this space for that reason. The restrictions related to the pandemic have certainly pushed these changes faster into the mainstream. Other experiences are, and will continue to be, rooted in the physical, with only minor interactions with digital space. Those with true power will dominate across both realms.

YP: Whether centralized, or otherwise, “the digital” is bound to the physical by its infrastructure—data centers, crypto mines, cell towers, satellites, laptops, etc., and the networks that connect them. Some of my earlier works directly traced these networks through their infrastructure, exploring narratives at the points of input/output and exchange. For example outsourced views² (2013) commissioned images and video clips of the window views closest to the workspaces of Amazon Mechanical Turk workers, constructing a landscape portrait of that labor network; or the ideal (2015)—a first person documentation of the construction of a hydroelectric powered bitcoin mine in Kangding, Tibet—which was made remotely, entirely through the mediation of the internet over several months, with the close collaboration of Eric Mu (CMO of the company) whose frank diary posts I had come across on a bitcoin forum. Funds for equipment (ordered locally via TaoBao) were sent using bitcoin, preview clips sent via the mine’s satellite internet connection and the final footage sent “IP-over-DHL” (to circumnavigate the slow upload speeds due to the Great Chinese Firewall). The edited video existed within an expanding series of sculptures, each containing a working water cooled bitcoin miner as part of their materials and through their exhibition self funded further iterations of the work. Since then I have revisited and expanded upon these strategies in broader more abstract ways—works often reveal the physical instruments of production, automation and mechanization within networks. I have frequently utilized industrial web servers as functional sculptural elements within exhibitions. These servers might locally host data accessible on the web or more recently are modified for the processing and display of video or generative content. In the exhibition user, space (Chisenhale Gallery, 2016) a server automated the functions of a speculative co-working space—controlling access to artificial and day light, altering levels of sound treatment (white noise) and also the display of live surveillance and pre-recorded embedded video content within the space. It explored the implications of a remotely managed, automated, work environment.

YP: I feel experiments in the field of “Mixed Reality” offer insight into the aspirations of corporations to shape and control our perception of reality. A perhaps lesser known development in this space is a novel time unit developed by Facebook, “Flicks” (2018), which aims to allow the seamlessly blending playback of all known recorded media formats (regardless of frame or sampling rate) with reality, a unit of time defined by media rather than astronomical objects. At the same time we are seeing the possibility to restore, upgrade and reformat existing recorded media using generative adversarial networks. I feel these more banal aspects of how we passively consume media, and what we consume, will slowly reshape our perceptions of history and time. We’ve already seen massive and fundamental changes to the social and political landscape through fairly rudimentary developments in our consumption such as via social media. Familiarity breeds contentment touched upon this through its implementation of very primitive AI processes to “spin” content, a technology used to plagiarize material for rogue spam websites with the results often dominating the information available for certain search terms. These new technologies will be equally messy in their feedback loops.

YP: The temporal has been an important and reoccurring aspect of my practice, often exploring different levels of abstraction in the experience of time in networked society. For example I’ve looked at modern sunset rituals, MIThenge³ in (infinite corridor, infinite) (2016), but also phenomena such as the imposition of distant time zones via outsourced labor and telecommuting. true time master (2019-2021) was the first work to truly tackle the infrastructure and fabric of global time. The work implemented a Chip Scale Atomic Clock (CSAC)⁴, a technology I wanted to engage with as it links so many aspects of contemporary society. Like the internet, these miniaturized time keeping devices emerged from development by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and they are now utilized in a diverse range of applications such as satellites, U.S. military drones, data centers, telecommunications, hydrocarbon exploration, finance, etc. Furthermore the CSAC is a cesium atomic clock, providing the most accurate time and frequency standards—the cesium standard has been used to define both the second and the meter by the General Conference on Weights and Measures since 1967. My interest in the CSAC stemmed from looking at the networks which govern our lives and their geopolitical boundaries. The internet is a network governed by time and as such it relies on accurate time keeping to function correctly and it is fed by atomic clocks via network time servers and the GPS network. The atomic master clock at the United States Naval Observatory informs much of the time on networked devices (servers, laptops, phones) in the West. With this oversight I began to view the CSAC as the descendant of the marine chronometers which enabled empires to expand their colonies through exploration. Expansionism within tech is of course on a geographical basis, we see this in projects by SpaceX or Google bringing internet to remote regions of the (often “developing”) world via miniature satellites or stratospheric balloons, but also in terms of penetration into the personal sphere. The new frontiers of the latter go way beyond the much discussed data mining and involve the reformatting and reshaping of reality through content, and as we discussed precision timing via the network will play a role in this.

YP: The sunset provision series used live local atmospheric data uRadmonitors, a kind of citizen science initiative aimed at open sourcing climate data online through distributed devices and averting government level coverups similar to Chernobyl, to influence the aesthetics within sunset scenes rendered by an OpenGL game engine. In part this was very much influenced by our collective awe at the spectacular, and equally artificial, sunsets we are now seeing globally due to particulates in the atmosphere from industry and other man made events. Sharing the same space as these monitors directly implicates the audience within the work, the gasses exhaled also have the potential to affect the scenes. The data is visualized within the scene in an abstracted, objectively useless, manner—an extrapolation of the overly simplistic color codings (green=good, orange=ok, red=bad) often used in the air quality apps I looked at within my research. These apps often vary greatly in their codings and presentation of data as the criteria for ‘air quality’ varies greatly from country to country, there are no global standards and the differences in standards are often quite revealing. This is one small example of the wider trend towards jargon data aesthetics where the visualization overwhelms the information it is professing to represent. These works themselves are not inherently ‘green’—they repurpose used industry standard data center servers (of the type we interact with daily) modified with gaming GPUs (the type also utilized for the mining of cryptocurrencies) to process this data and render these scenes. They participate, as we all do, in this bigger global story.