The Speed of Thinking Joelle Dietrick & Owen Mundy Interview by Kate Mondloch
Introduction It is with great pleasure that the Van Every/Smith Galleries at Davidson College present The Speed of Thinking, featuring the art duo Joelle Dietrick and Owen Mundy. This exhibition presents research and work developed over the past five years, primarily during the team’s Fulbright-funded research in Austria, Germany, Chile, and China.
forest intended for respite from screen time, and the impossible-to-win game The Speed of Thinking critiques “surveillance and control mechanisms and the immersive screen worlds that we’re always stuck in” through the encouragement of compulsive online play.
Each year, the Galleries present an exhibition that highlights the work of one or more faculty members in the department of art at the college. These exhibitions allow us to honor our own, highlighting the important work they do, foremost as researchers and artists, as well as educators, both here on campus and in the broader art world. But this particular exhibition also allows the Galleries to continue our ongoing support of artists who are exploring complex ideas and processes. Many of the works on view consider how digital technology and automated systems cultivate consumer desire and elicit unintended consequences. The centerpiece of the exhibition, The Speed of Thinking, specifically connects global trade to global warming.
For pushing along the mission of the Galleries, and their dedication to this project and their work, we extend heartfelt gratitude to Joelle Dietrick and Owen Mundy. We are also thankful to Kate Mondloch for her thoughtful investigation into this body of work. As always, we are grateful to Davidson College for providing a space for inquiry, discussion, and presentation around creative endeavors.
Such exhibitions can be challenging for viewers, particularly when artists delve into concepts or formats that confront one’s knowledge or sensibilities. In the case of The Speed of Thinking, the media — digital art such as games and animations — may be the primary obstacle to the visitor less familiar with how to read and experience such works, particularly when presented in the context of a white cube gallery. The enclosed interview between Dietrick, Mundy, and Kate Mondloch, Professor and Department Head, History of Art and Architecture, University of Oregon, is a helpful guide as one navigates works that, as Mondloch points out, aim to be disruptive from the inside. For example, Bamboo Forest is a tongue-in-cheek screen-based bamboo
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— Lia Newman, Director/Curator, Van Every/Smith Galleries
Joelle Dietrick, The Speed of the Thinking, 2019, Archival inkjet prints on Bolero
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On Screening Bamboo Forests: An Interview with Joelle Dietrick and Owen Mundy By Kate Mondloch Kate Mondloch: What led each of you to become an artist? Joelle Dietrick: I came out of the womb drawing and painting. Digital art tools like Hypercard, Photoshop and Illustrator were just coming out as I was graduating from Penn State. In fact, in my freshman year, the university offered students an email address as a perk for being in the honors program. After I graduated from Penn State, I went to work at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Art as their graduate program and publications assistant. It was an amazing time, because Stelarc was in residence at the Studio for Creative Inquiry, Steve Kurtz from Critical Art Ensemble was teaching critical theory, Simon Penny was collaborating with the computer science and robotics departments, and Faith Wilding was making art about genetics and cyberfeminism. So in that environment, it was impossible not to get excited about art and technology, and that was in the late 1990s. Owen Mundy: Both my grandfathers and my dad were farmers, so I got used to tinkering and learning about systems, like motors, or the way multiple parts fit together. I became interested in media activism and the power of the indexical image to speak to a certain kind of truth, so I was looking at social documentary photography. When photography went digital I kind of followed that and worked for years as a web developer, CDROM developer, front end and back end programmer, and I always maintained an art practice that had a media activist edge to it. I was also a photographer in the Navy, which influenced my surveillance-based work. Joelle Dietrick, Bamboo Forest (Process), 2019 5
OM: The collaboration comes out our relationship. We’re obviously passionate about making and thinking, so those conversations are always circling around. When we’re working on our individual work, we’re influencing each other, giving each other feedback. It’s usually the case that one of us has an idea, then asks the other for feedback, and then the conversation goes back and forth. Before long we realize that it’s now not just one person’s idea anymore so we decide to work together. JD: Our first collaboration, in 2006, an installation titled The Darkest Hour Just Before Dawn, evolved in this way. The Coleman Center for the Arts in York, Alabama, had invited Owen to do a project there, and he knew that he wanted it to be about the Civil Rights Movement. But as we started talking about the artwork, we both got so excited about the research and ideas that it became clear we should work on it together. As another example, I began The Sherwin Series, my prints and paintings about the 2008 housing market crash, when I was doing a residency in Salzburg, Austria. That series was very much my artwork. Owen and I talked about it briefly, but he was busy with his own work. But several months later, we discussed how exciting it would be to see that work in three dimensions, to play with 3-D models instead of flat 2-D pieces, Owen developed the necessary software, and that’s what turned into Packet Switching. Joelle Dietrick, Sherwin’s Kinectic Contrasts 15, 2011, Hahnemuhle PhotoRag 308g, 19.75 x 27.5
KM: How long have you been working collaboratively? What have been some of the highlights and challenges? JD: The work in the exhibition is from the past five years, but we’ve been collaborating since 2006.
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OM: I think it’s just whenever one of us is really inspired and makes something and the other one is like, that’s great. Maybe there are fewer unknowns, or we have a pretty good vision about what the piece should be. But at other times we’re still trying to figure things out. Like Tally, that idea is almost ten years old now. I’ve tried to make it and have talked to Joelle about it so much. It was seven years after my original idea that we started to brainstorm about how to give it life again, and together we made a completely new iteration of the idea.
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KM: Are there other collaborative artist teams that inspire you? JD: Allora and Calzadilla are amazing, for sure. Or Ubermorgen, Jodi — OM: — Mel Ziegler & Kate Ericson. Over the last few years we’ve started to develop games, so we’ve looked at other game artists and small studios that are doing works that, I would say, are cultural works more than games. You’d call them interactive narratives or something like that. Burly Men at Sea and even Night in the Woods feel more like cultural works to me than games. JD: If you look at new media art projects, the genre at large, and think about someone like Jeffrey Shaw — a huge number of people contribute to those works. As we’ve moved along in our career, we’ve gotten more and more ambitious, so right now we have projects where we need more people than just us. We’re at the top directing, but team members bring their own ideas, and it becomes even more exciting. We’re okay with that. I think we’ve become less insecure about who came up with what idea and are just excited to see them made as best as possible. KM: The language you use to talk about your process is very revelatory. You just said “our career.” I love that. So obviously the collaboration part is working. Owen, the distinction you made between “cultural works” and “games” is the perfect segue to my next question about your use of screens, which are now staples of both mass culture and artistic production. Your work in this exhibition is dominated by screens in terms of its production and reception, but, crucially, you also seem to be critically interrogating screens, or how screens work in society. You’ve referenced journalist Leigh Alexander on the topic, who says: “I walk onto the subway and I see aisles of people with their faces in luminous screens, tapping and playing
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something. I wonder what we’re doing with our ability to reach that many people and if we’re providing them with meaningful activity instead of just distractionware.” With Alexander’s comment in mind, do you think there is (or should be) a distinction between games as commercial products and games as art? Joelle described your practice as “‘atypical’ game production.” What is the difference exactly and how do your own works fit into this picture? JD: Owen mentioned Night in the Woods. There’s also Sunset by Tale of Tales. We’re interested in the proliferation of games, both mainstream and atypical, and see our recent experiments fitting into the latter category, an alternative to the more mindless eye-candy on the App Store. So we’re trying not to be too caught up in is it art or is it not art, but is it smart cultural production, and to distinguish it from the sea of apps that are out there. Also, what’s the point of putting a game in an exhibition? Should our games only live on the App Store or on people’s devices? At our recent exhibition at Drexel University in Philadelphia, I loved being in the space of a gallery, surrounded by projections and able to watch people play our games. Such a collective experience of games and animations means a lot to me. My most memorable game experiences have been social, and my most memorable cultural experiences have been at art venues, so it makes sense for me to put the two together. There are exceptions, like Javier Téllez’s project at inSite 2005 that culminated in a “human cannonball” being shot across the border between Mexico and the United States,1 but organizing brilliant spectacles is not my strength. I prefer thinking about the internet as a daily cultural 1
or One Flew Over the Void (Bala perdida), Venezuelan artist Javier Téllez collaborated with F psychiatric patients from the Baja California Mental Health Center in Mexicali to create a public event that involved stunt performer Dave Smith being shot across the border between San Diego and Tijuana. https://library.ucsd.edu/dc/object/bb59416196. Accessed July 9, 2019.
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experience and intervening in that space, and then, because the landscape of the web can be so overwhelming, representing those online projects into the meditative space of a gallery or museum as a way to process technology’s impact on cultural production and our lives. OM: The gallery is also a great place for experimentation, play testing. There’s a certain performance of culture that happens in galleries; it’s a place where you can not only test the software but test the idea. Galleries are problematic in that most people don’t visit them. Most visual art has this problem. In his book Internet Art: The Online Clash of Culture and Commerce, Julian Stallabrass quotes Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, who complained that art, because it has refused to embrace reproducible media in the way that literature, films and games have, has basically removed its popular audience and hidden itself away in the land of craft production. So we’re thinking that not only is there not a distinction between art and games — that games can be art and art can be games — but also that we’re deliberately trying to get outside of this protected, walled-off, so-called avant-garde space and work with a larger audience. KM: I’d like to come back to the Alexander quote to make sure I understand where you’re coming from. She speculates about the perceived need to provide content that invites “meaningful activity” as opposed to “distractionware.” How does the dualism of “meaningful” versus “distraction” inform how you think about your own work? JD: If you think about Tally specifically, the images are beautiful and playful. They suck the viewer in and make them want to spend time with it. But the way the web browser
(previous spread) Tally battle, Internet of Things monster, 2019 (right) Tally Console Game monster card, 2019
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extension functions is meant to be meaningful in that it makes people more aware of when there are trackers on a page. We all know trackers exist, but for the viewer to be alerted to that immediately because of this game that they’re playing, that becomes meaningful and gives them critical insight into how companies are collecting data to predict and manipulate their behavior.
KM: Attention is a big issue for artists, perhaps now more than ever. I just got back from the Venice Biennale and, as you might expect, the flashier, noisier, or more kinetic the work was, the more people would gather around it. But at the same time, that didn’t mean that people were actually spending sufficient time with the work.
OM: We’re working on a handful of different games, and we ask this question all the time: Are we adhering to the message that we want people to consider and, at the same time, are we making it fun? I say this about my cat-mapping website a lot, that I used cats so that I could have a conversation with a larger audience.2 The human interest story that I attach to it and the playfulness of it was just a way to get people thinking about the surveillance economy. In some way, the playfulness of games, the “juiciness” in games, is what gives the work staying power. UX designers Morgan Brown and Chuck Longanecker describe this as visceral design, or designing for the gut.3
OM: Distractionware.
So the juiciness aspect is another way for us to reach an audience and get their attention. Tally is a great example. We want them to play this game where they’re getting points for being surveilled. We’re playing with the mechanism of the surveillance economy, and we’re making it so that you score higher when you engage with it. How are we going to communicate to the audience that this game mechanism they’re using is part of the problem? Owen Mundy. I Know Where Your Cat Lives (2014–19) is a data visualization with 7 million public images of cats on a world map using coordinates that people unknowingly uploaded in their metadata. See https://owenmundy.com/site/i-know-where-your-cat-lives. Pictured left. 3 Morgan Brown and Chuck Longanecker, “How to Design for the Gut,” UX Magazine, no. 1027 (2013). http://uxmag.com/articles/how-to-design-for-the-gut.
JD: Right, [laughing] a different type of distractionware. KM: Exactly. Joelle talked about this dynamic a bit in a previous interview; she observed that one of the biggest challenges with creating time-based work is getting people to actually spend time with the art. How do you think about viewer attention when you’re making or installing your work? OM: All the animated pieces that we’ve made — as far back as our second collaboration, a data visualization titled Anemophilous Formula for Computer Art — are slow and deliberately meditative.4 So there’s a sensibility of subtlety in everything we make, which says slow down, take a moment, this is intended to be thought about. JD: I’ve seen people sit with Grid, Sequence Me, and they watch the architecture spin around for ages. When I think about artwork that I like, or films like Béla Tarr’s Sátántangó, the pacing is super slow. So that does position us in a different space than RPGs [role-playing games] or other types of games where faster is better.
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A nemophilous Formula For Computer Art. Aspect Magazine, V12: Vital (2008). http://www.aspectmag.com/works/anemophilous-formula-computer-art and https://owenmundy.com/site/anemophilous-formula.
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OM: Tally is maybe a little bit different because it’s decentralized. Tally is a browser extension that transforms the data advertisers collect into a multiplayer game. It’s what you call a turn-based RPG, like Pokémon, where you move across the web and when there’s a tracker it is shown as an animated monster that you have to battle. If you win, it gets blocked from your browser. So through play, the game transforms into a progressive tracker blocker, where you earn the right to be let alone. KM: I find your use of color very intoxicating and beautiful. Could you talk about that? JD: I was trained as a painter so I’m always thinking about color. When I first got to graduate school I was doing experimental short videos that were super-focused on color. The Sherwin Series was appropriating the color forecasts of Sherwin-Williams to underscore the manufacturing of consumer desire through design. In 2012 we did a public art commission for the University of Florida’s College of Journalism and Communications. That was where the whole Packet Switching series came from. At that point I was still looking at color forecasts from paint companies, and the one that we used was called High Velocity. It had a lot of highlighter pinks and greens and intense blues. Once we installed it in the space, we realized how many televisions were there — of course, being the College of Journalism and Communications — and I was so grateful that we went with those extreme colors to compete with the televisions. So when we’re designing games, we again need to consider the context. What colors will communicate the core ideas, but also, how will the games stand out in the sea of content available? KM: To pivot slightly, you’ve both talked about how your work is interested in social justice and cultural critique, especially as both relate to technology. The exhibition Owen Mundy, I Know Where Your Cat Lives, 2014–ongoing
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statement, too, says, “Dietrick and Mundy continue to develop artworks that encourage public dialogue about the powerful technologies of the information age and how they can be revised to do less harm.” Could we talk more about the challenges of trying to be disruptive from the inside? For example, you’ve described your game The Speed of Thinking as encouraging “compulsive” play, but at the same time you express interest in critiquing surveillance and control mechanisms and the immersive screen worlds that we’re always stuck in. OM: In a lot of ways, it’s a non-game. I think it really would depend on whom you ask, but it balances between artwork and game, between traditional art and traditional game. There are parts of it that feel like a game — you’re awarded points, you can level up, there’s a goal and challenges to reaching that goal — but at the same time, the game isn’t really that hard. KM: Yes, my son was extremely disappointed [laughing]. He said, it’s so easy, and I told him I didn’t think that was the point. OM: Any 16-year-old who plays games will tell you it’s not a good game. The intent is not to make it challenging in the same way that action games cause spikes in adrenaline. Rather, we made it slow and deliberate, and challenging in that it asks players to consider the moment and the context they are operating within. Games today embellish first-person shooters and silly puzzle mechanics with cold war and capitalist themes but never address the appropriation of that content. We have tied the game mechanics to the content and goals to invite reflection. The player builds a colorful generative structure, which is not that hard to do, yet this deviation will hopefully open the door to questions. For example, a 16-year-old who is good at games could play forever, but it’s actually an impossible game to win. This is a
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metaphor that we built into the piece — ultimately, the game system’s memory will no longer support new containers and the system will crash. The metaphor here is that there is a capacity — JD: — limited resources in the world. The other interesting observation is that we weren’t trained to make games, so we’re like professional amateurs. If you look at the early days of video art, when the media landscape was dominated by broadcast TV, by the time artists got a hold of Portapaks, they were hungry to actively work against the high-end production values of mainstream TV. There was a sense of urgency, a real need to record these experiments, so they just made those videos and put them out there. Making games is so hard. Sometimes I question this new direction we’ve gone in, but I’m also proud that we’re trying. What does it mean to be trained as a visual artist and activist for 20 years and then experiment with games? KM: Does it matter to you if one knows the whole game play in advance? Let’s say someone reads the wall text and knows that, for example, it will eventually crash. Is that advance knowledge okay, or is it more important for you that viewers experience it and figure it out on their own? JD: I think ideally they would discover it through playing. I don’t think we should have to depend on wall text. OM: A lot of times in the work that I make, I push back on the requirement that art has to have mystery to it. But at the same time, I think people appreciate figuring out a puzzle on their own. Like the conversation you had with your son about the game — I showed it to my game development class and they were not impressed [laughs]. But with a couple of questions, you can get them to think a little more deeply about it. Like, okay, this is more than a game, this is intended to make you think. What do you think will happen,
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and what does that mean? The wall text alludes to it, but it’s not super-specific, so there’s a reward for the person who spends time with it.
surrounded by technology, so maybe you’re not really that relaxed. A viewer could take a couple of different readings from that.
KM: You’ve described Bamboo Forest as a “counterpart to the prevalence of manmade seaport infrastructures and public buildings. It’s a place where people can relax and take it in after compulsively playing the computer game.” Joelle mentioned at the outset of our conversation that the two of you visited the lush bamboo forests in Hong Kong to unwind from all of your computer-based work. But in the exhibition, you’ve created a seeming paradox — you’re inviting viewers to take a break from all of their screen time by relaxing in an entirely screen-based bamboo forest! How did you make that choice?
KM: Yes, it’s the open-endedness that makes it so powerful. It’s the perfect ending to the exhibition.
JD: I think it was my sense of humor. It’s funny-but-sad that we bury ourselves in these products, and then because of the resources that are necessary to produce and transport these products, bamboo forests eventually might not exist, and there would just be this digital version of a bamboo forest where you would tuck yourself away to detox. It’s like my daughter and I doing yoga with videos of the sunset. It alludes to a possible future. It also revisits our Pollen animation for which we took pollen — this thing that makes you sneeze and feel awful — and made it virtual, so it turns into a gentle yellow snowstorm in front of a fake mural of the Tallahassee landscape from which the pollen came.
Kate Mondloch is Professor of Contemporary Art and Head of the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Oregon. She is also the founding director of the University’s graduate certificate program in New Media and Culture and a former editorial board member of Art Journal. Her research interests focus on late 20th- and early 21st-century art, theory, and criticism, particularly as these areas of inquiry intersect with the cultural, social, and aesthetic possibilities of new technologies. She is the author of Screens: Viewing Media Installation Art (University of Minnesota Press, 2010) and A Capsule Aesthetic: Feminist Materialisms in New Media Art (University of Minnesota Press, 2018). Her current research examines the history of attention and artistic experience from 1950 to the present.
OM: It’s pointing at the paradox itself. Joelle’s decision to put that piece in a room next to all this other stuff is intentional. It’s a little self-deprecating [laughs]. We could critique technology all day long but, at the end of the day, we’re going to use it. There are pretty wonderful things we can do thanks to technology, but at the same time there are all these problems, like positioning this space as a meditative, relaxing place, but you’re still
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Works Tally 2019–ongoing Web browser extension and tracker blocker Available for Chrome, Firefox, or Opera Tally is a browser extension that uses artificial intelligence to gamify data tracking. Once installed, a friendly pink blob named Tally lives in the corner of your screen and warns you when companies translate your human experiences into free behavioral data. When Tally encounters “product monsters” (online trackers and their corresponding product marketing categories), you can capture them in a turn-based battle (e.g. “pokemon style”) transforming the game into a progressive tracker blocker, where you earn the right to be let alone through this playful experience.
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The Speed of Thinking 2019 Mobile game https://sneakaway.studio/the-speed-of-thinking The Speed of Thinking is a game about global systems so complex that they feel out of control. If Tetris is about the innate joy of putting objects in order, this game oscillates between the bliss and abyss of automation. Game play is simple: the player controls a cargo ship to catch containers on its deck. More like homemade kids toys than rugged steel boxes, the cubes collect in dense, Jenga-like structures that shift in hue. The constant color change adds a childlike wonder as you build the tallest structure. If the poppy colors and meditative low-stakes play are the bliss, the abyss arrives when the player realizes that the game is never-ending until the game play crashes. During game play, data from The Observatory of Economic Complexity from the MIT Media Lab scrolls on the side, listing products based on past patterns of trade. Photograph next page by Holly Clark
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Grid, Sequence Me 2013–2019 Three-channel video (color, no sound); 5:00 Dimensions variable Grid, Sequence Me is a three-channel video first installed in Washington, D.C. Generated with custom software, these fragments echo financial systems and housing market fluctuations. They mirror mortgages repackaged and sold, titles lost in administrative tape, and dreams confused by legal jargon. Like the complex financial systems of the housing market heyday, the software generates an infinite number of arrangements. The complexity of unique and dynamically-created algorithmic outcomes contrasts with the comforting predictability of grids. Photographs by Brandon Webster
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Bamboo Forest 2019 Three-channel video (color, sound); 15:00 Dimensions variable Bamboo Forest is a video installation with simple, abstract animations of bamboo at sunset. Some of the fastest growing plants because of their unique rhizome-dependent system, bamboo species are famously resilient, sometimes described as invasive, and commonly the focus of young painters in the regions where bamboo is prevalent. The tradition of painting bamboo in ink requires confidence and composure to perfectly execute the structures of the bamboo including its cylindrical stalks, repeated internodes and translucent leaves. Within this exhibition, an early prototype of this piece provides a reprieve from humanbuilt infrastructure. Photographs by David Ramsey
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Artist Biographies and Acknowledgments Joelle Dietrick
Sneakaway Studio
Joelle Dietrick is an artist who produces work about the human impact of global trade. Her paintings, drawings and animations have been shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville, Transitio_MX in Mexico City, Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) Chicago, MCA San Diego, Long March Space Beijing, and Soho20 New York. She has attended residencies at MacDowell, the Künstlerhaus Salzburg, Anderson Ranch, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Banff Centre for the Arts, and the School of the Visual Arts and received grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the University of California, Florida State University, the Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (DAAD), the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program.
sneakaway.studio
Owen Mundy Owen Mundy is an artist, designer, and programmer. His research investigates public space, information security, and big data. Works include mobile and web-based apps like the alternative photo app, Mirawarri (2017); visualizations like Illuminus (2015), a research-based risk analysis tool which appears in the Peabody-awarded web documentary Do Not Track; the online viral big data visualization, I Know Where Your Cat Lives (2014), which maps seven million images tagged with #cat using the locations in the metadata users unknowingly uploaded to social media; and Give Me My Data (2010), a tool that helps users export their data back out of Facebook. Mundy’s work has been reviewed in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Time Magazine, NPR, and Wired Magazine.
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Joelle Dietrick and Owen Mundy publish games as Sneakaway Studio, a more appropriate name for the app store. Not only does the name speak to their desire to tuck away in their studio, but it also connects to the content of the work. Specifically, the work visualize physical and digital infrastructure that is no longer infra-, or below the surface, but rather omnipresent and needing examination. Many thanks to the people and institutions who have support these projects. Davidson College, the North Carolina Arts Council, the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program, the PollockKrasner Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Mellon Foundation and The MacDowell Colony helped to fund these projects. These projects and exhibition would also not be possible without Lia Newman’s support and Davidson College’s strong belief in the connection between research and teaching. In particular, Tally benefited from the ideas and designs of Gretta Louw, Jacob Waites, Conner Hill, Jared McElveen, Ryan Strauss, Chloe Pitkoff, Owen Keefer, Rebecca Cobo, Bayne Brannon, Lauren Crane, and Adelle Patton. More at https://tallygame.net/credits
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Joelle Dietrick & Owen Mundy: The Speed of Thinking Publication Š2019 This publication was produced in conjunction with an exhibition presented in the Van Every Gallery at Davidson College, August 26–September 24, 2019. Van Every/Smith Galleries Davidson College 315 North Main Street Davidson, North Carolina 28035 davidsoncollegeartgalleries.org All rights reserved. Printed in the United States. No part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Inside Back cover IMAGE?
ISBN: 978-1-890573-30-0 Curator: Lia Newman Interviewer: Kate Mondloch Editor: Stephanie Cash Design: Joelle Dietrick, Graham McKinney
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