Episode 055 Jon Ippolito

Show Notes

Since 1991 when he somewhat accidentally landed a curatorial position at the Guggenheim, Jon Ippolito has been passionately dedicated to building curatorial projects, research initiatives, and collaborations revolving around the preservation of time-based media art. Through projects such as the variable media questionnaire, exhibitions such as Seeing Double, and books such as Re-collection: Art, New Media, and Social Memory (co-authored with Rick Rinehart), Jon’s thinking about how to approach the documentation and preservation of art has unquestionably influenced a whole generation of professionals – not least of which through his role as director of the digital curation program at the University of Maine where he has been for the past twenty years. Tune in to hear Jon’s story!

Links from the conversation with Jon
> http://three.org/ippolito/
> https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/fac_monographs/198/
> https://umaine.edu/newmedia/people/jon-ippolito/

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Ben: From Small Data Industries this is Art and Obsolescence. I'm your host Ben Fino-Radin and on this show, I chat with people that are shaping the past present and future of art and technology. This week on the show, we are visiting with someone who has been very influential in shaping how many people think about preservation. 

[00:00:20] Jon: Hi, my name is John Ippolito, I'm an artist, a teacher, a writer, and a curator, not necessarily in that order.

[00:00:27] Ben: Since 1991, when he somewhat accidentally landed a curatorial position at the Guggenheim. Jon has been passionately dedicated to building curatorial projects, research initiatives, and collaborations revolving around what back then he was referring to as variable media. Through projects such as the variable media questionnaire, exhibitions such as Seeing Double, and books such as Re-collection Art, New Media and Social Memory, coauthored with Rick Reinhardt, Jon's thinking about how to approach the documentation and preservation of art has unquestionably influenced a whole generation of professionals. Not least of which through his role as director of the digital curation program at the university of Maine, where he has been for the past 20 years. It was just such a treat to sit down with Jon and hear his story and to share it with you all this week. Quick reminder, before we get started, if you can't get enough of the show, I highly recommend clicking the link to our Patreon in the show notes where our lovely little community of supporters enjoy all kinds of extra exclusive content. Including outtakes that don't make it into the show and little voice memos from yours truly about stuff that I'm working on. I hope to see you over there soon. And lastly, speaking of stuff that I'm working on, or rather not working on by the time you're hearing this episode, I will be heading out the door for a very much needed vacation in the form of a little bike tour through the forest. So next week, no new episode, no reruns, nada. That's a first for the show so I hope you all don't miss me too much. Rest assured I have some incredible guests lined up for you this fall. Many of whom I can't believe I'm going to get to talk to you really, really exciting stuff. Of course there is a backlog of 54 past episodes for your listening pleasure over at artandobsolescence.com or wherever you are listening right now. And now without further delay, let's dive into this week's chat with Jon Ippolito 

[00:02:42] Jon: I had the curse of having two parents who are artists. My father was a second generation abstract expressionist, Angelo Ippolito, and my mother is, still an artist who works in figurative sculpture. I was certainly interested in computers early on even when they were a pretty clunky technology. I took a college course when I was in high school where we programmed Fortran on punch cards, which was absolute nightmare. Waiting in line for 20 minutes only to find out that you had put your cards out of order or typed the wrong key on the sort of keyboard, where we had a little typewriter thing that would punch holes out of these paper cards that you had to get in the right order, each of which corresponded to a different computer instruction. So that was sort of a nightmarish introduction to computers, but somehow it seemed like there was something there. And maybe someday we wouldn't have to depend on an entire room full of machinery to make them work. I love both my parents and I really admired their work. And I'd made, you know, drawings and paintings since I was young, but I didn't feel that art was something that you needed to study at the time when I was young in order to succeed at it never seemed like a career in the conventional sense, and since I was torn between science and art, I realized that pretty early on. Hey, if you want to become, you know, someone who studies the cosmos and figures out theories or look through telescopes for a living, you need to study that in school and do it pretty seriously and go all the way to grad school and so on. So I flipped a coin my freshman year in college between fine arts and physics, and it came up physics. So I studied that. I was really interested in the big and the little, right? What's happening at a sub atomic scale? What are we made of? What are the little tiniest bits that we can say, you know, this is what we are, this is what the whole universe is. And then on the biggest scale, like, hey, you know, where'd the universe start? How long is it been around? Where's it gonna go? What happens when you fall inside a black hole and those kind of questions. And I didn't really. A very good schooling. I, I kind of, went to some rural high schools, so I just went to libraries and looked up books on, on physics. And the great thing about that was that they didn't have a lot of equations in them they just had these big philosophical questions, which I thought were fascinating. So when I went to college, I had the luck of getting into Harvard and studying astrophysics with some really smart people. I later realized though, that this was a mistake on the college's part. At least I think so, because my first, uh, week there, I had filled out this whole form to say, you know, what kind of preferences I would have with a roommate, well, someone who's really interested in, you know, art and science and, you know, maybe obscure classical music and this and this, and then I got, I got placed with the first year football quarterback. And I was like, well, that's interesting. Not really what I expecting. And partway through the first week he introduced me to this other guy named Joe Ipolito now my name's John Ippolito, so it's only one letter difference. I was like, Oh, isn't that funny? We just, our names are so similar. And he was like, Yeah, I was supposed to get him as a roommate. And only this year, looking back on it, I realized that I was probably mistaken in my application for this guy who was a 250 pound, six foot five football recruit. And that's the only reason I got into college. Anyway I ended up struggling as a astrophysics major. One of my eventual later roommates was asked what I did for a major by someone else. And he said, Well, John's a student of theoretical physics. Well actually more, he's theoretically a student of physics. that was pretty accurate description because I was really having trouble surviving in that field. By the way, uh, fun fact, another temporary roommate of mine ended up being the person who spread the first internet virus to the arpanet, but that's another story. Anyway, I barely made it through a defense of my thesis and I didn't get into any grad schools after I graduated. So that was the end of my astrophysics career. I ended up going off and traveling around Europe and lucking into this job teaching basically in a glorified high school in Rome, which was fabulous. I went around all across Europe doing watercolors and pastels, dragging, you know, art equipment, up volcanoes and down into, you know, valleys. And then after a while I was offered a job at Scientific American which was a kind of prominent publication for explaining, cutting edge science to ordinary folks. And I came back to the US but that didn't work out and I ended up crashing at the University of Pennsylvania. They gave me an unofficial sort of moniker as artist in residence because I ran a lot of programs when I was there, even though I was basically just finding a place to live while figuring things out. I got jobs doing like catering and moving boxes, and then eventually taught some inner city kids and Vietnam vets writing and math. So it was a time when I was just kind of trying to figure out what the heck to do with my life, having failed in my first career. And I ended up, uh, taking a painting class at the Tyler school there in Philly and continuing to paint. And that's just something I decided I wanted to do. And I kept sort of, pushing that, applying to grad schools again and again until eventually I got in. But it took five years between undergrad and grad school for me to kind of make that transition. I think the problem with painting is it's incredibly seductive. It's so kind of material and bright and colorful and gooey, and you, you smear these schemes of vegetable matter on a canvas and suddenly this whole window opens up to some world that you've created, whether it's abstract or figurative. This space that wasn't, there was just a, like a white piece of cotton stretched across some wood, and then suddenly it becomes this new, world new window. And that's super seductive. I miss the process of just mixing paint with one of those wonderfully flexible little, uh, pallet knives. So I was really seduced by it and I think a lot of. The art world is still seduced by painting mostly to its detriment honestly I think there's too much painting still in the art world today, but I certainly understand it's allure and I had the great fortune of art professors at my graduate school telling me to stop. Uh, William Bailey, who's a very conservative artist and painter, but actually has an eye for surprisingly radical artwork. Saw my paintings and said, why are you doing this with painting when you could be doing it in other means? And I said, Well, I have this kind of natural urge to paint. And he said, stifle it. At the same time though, I was taking some classes with Stuart Moulthrop, he's kind of an electronic literature guru at Yale, and he encouraged us to play around with hypertext, which at this was in, you know, 1989 or something like that. And I was really excited by the possibilities and I created this entire sort of world in hypertext based on the idea of a möbius strip where you would be surprised, you'd think you were moving in one direction and then you'd end up moving in a different direction through this narrative. And I had it on an old Mac se or something in my studio during my final critique for my grad program, and at the last minute, I threw a sheet over it. It was the smartest thing I ever did because the artist wouldn't have understood it, but it gave me a sense of, you know, maybe there was some connection I could make between the possibilities of these digital media that were emerging and the things that I wanted to explore as an artist.

[00:10:22] Ben: So you graduate freshly minted MFA painter and eventually you find your way to the Guggenheim and the rest is history. But, there were some years in between there. So I'm curious what was happening, like were you trying to like really give the professional artist thing a go? 

[00:10:38] Jon: So actually I stumbled directly from my MFA into the Guggenheim pretty much by accident. I didn't have many options when graduating. I mean, you get a degree in painting, you either become a painter or you don't, but you still have to pay the rent. So I had had some background in art history, obviously from my mfa and I had a background in martial arts just because when I was living in Philadelphia I studied karate and Wing Chun and stuff like that. So I wanted to moved to New York, uh, with a couple of my classmates from Yale. And I'd heard that the Guggenheim did this program for guards who are also docents. And I thought, hey, art history and security, I could do that and I'd get to like hang out at a museum and how cool would that be to be your day job, you know, work in a museum. So there's a sort of industry annual conference called the College Art Association and I went to the CAA conference and found the table that I thought was to apply to be a guard. And they said, Oh no, this is to be a curatorial assistant. I said, I don't know what that is, but can I apply for that? And the person said, well, your, your qualifications are really not what we're looking for, so don't get your hopes up. And three interviews later, the chief curator said, well, you were very different than the other applicants. And so we're offering you the job. Every single senior graduating in art history had applied for positions like this. And so they all kind of looked the same and I looked different, and I, they had a sense that maybe knowing something about computers might be helpful and for whatever reason they ended up hiring me. I'm sure they regretted it later, but that's how I got a job at the Guggenheim. The weird thing is that the Guggenheim was being renovated at the time, so it wasn't even at the museum. So what that meant was that there was a lot of things to do that weren't conventional museum things. Like we didn't go out and hang paintings. We didn't go, schedule tours or the kinds of things you can imagine that a curator does. Instead, we spent all our time developing exhibitions and the collection and systems and so forth. So literally the first week they're like, oh, John we have this Panza collection that we need to process. Why don't you deal with Donald Judd? And Donald Judd was a famously cantankerous artist. Who had great emnity for Panza, this is Count Giuseppe Panza di Biumo, who's a Italian collector, extremely important collector of minimalist and other artworks of the sixties, but who had a sometimes, let's say, loose connection with the artist who worked with him. Many artists really adored him, but some like Judd felt that he was taking too many freedoms with works that needed to be recreated. So in Judd's case his works weren't necessarily meant to be variable in the sense that, like, Sol, it, drawings are redrawn every time they're created, but they were made of materials that even though we might think they're durable, they're really not and they degrade over time. So, for example a beautiful polished, you know, copper surface is gonna oxidize and it's not gonna be that beautiful orange glow over time. So they were just like, hey, John, take care of Jud. And I was like, Reading through the correspondence going like, Oh my God, this guy like, hates what people are doing to his work. How am I going to like confront him? I'm, this like kid just outta school. So it was definitely a, uh kind of hit the ground running experience.

[00:14:13] Ben: So what were some of your other early projects at the Guggenheim and you know, when did this whole variable media initiative kind of begin to percolate? How did that all come to be?

[00:14:27] Jon: The earliest projects, I worked on dozens of shows mostly as the kind of coordinator, not necessarily the curator. And I had the luck of working with some people who were working with very interesting artists. I worked with Lisa Dennison and Nancy Specter and, and later John Hanhardt who was a really important figure in media art curation in the, you know, late 20th, early 21st century. So I got to work with people who were doing interesting things with the format of art. I helped coordinate a show called The Material Imagination. And it was all kinds of artists working with natural materials in ephemeral formats often. And Meg Webster is a environmentally conscious artist who created this stick spiral. And it was just this kind of labyrinth you walk into that's made of basically limbs and flowers and leaves of trees , that have appeared recently and appeared, I'm using that word deliberately, because as an environmental artist, she didn't want cons, you know, preparers to go out and chop down trees to make her work. So she said, Well, you have to find these kind of limbs or twigs or branches, and then assemble them into this giant spiral that people walk into. And it was great because it was like you were surrounded by this kind of natural labyrinth and it, you could smell any of the flowers and the it literally had that sort of feeling of walking into the woods, even though you're in the middle of a white cube in a gallery at the Guggenheim. And so normally this piece had been exhibited at rural venues where, you know, winds come by and knock down trees and stuff, and you can go gather these branches without having to cut them off the trees yourself. But here we were in the middle of Manhattan and it was like, What are we gonna do? Well, thankfully the storm came through and everybody went off in a pickup truck and picked up as many branches as they could from Central Park. And et voila, we had an exhibition. But it was really interesting because I was like, Wow, okay, so here's someone who wants things to be fresh. It's not an artwork. You pull out of a crate and stick on the wall, and then you put it back in the crate and 10 years later you put it out on the wall again, it's the same. This thing changes every time. And I later asked Meg, like, What would happen if you showed this in, you know, Santa Fe? You know, what would be the sort of branches and, and materials? And she said, well, you'd have to draw from the local, botany of what's available to you, cactus and tumbleweed and so forth. And so that kind of temporal and spatial variability was something that kind of registered in my head. I also got to work with people like Felix González-Torres, for whom works were very performative. Many people know the candy spills where viewers are allowed to come in and take bits of candy and eat them or put them in their pocket and leave with them. There was an exhibition, I think it was one of the Whitney Biennials where guards temporarily put like a stanchion in front cuz they were running out and it was because he used Baci which are those delicious Italian chocolate candies and everyone wanted to just eat those. But the idea of putting a stanchion in front of them was terrible was like, it's not about the material. It's not about keeping this static thing in the corner that people can see. It's about people consuming this thing and tasting it and the relationship often to a portrait of a particular person that Felix was trying to capture in that piece. Right. So, luckily later he chose things like really hard licorice rods that didn't taste that great and were hard to eat. So that made it easier to keep the supply going. But I remember at one point my office at the Guggenheim when Nancy Specter did a retrospective of Felix's work, was surrounded by boxes of this black rod licorice candy that we had in case they ran out. And, it was so, distasteful that I wouldn't be surprised if there were still some boxes of that at the Guggenheim today. Then there were people like you know, Robert Morris the artist who also as part of the Panza initiative, we were acquiring his work and there was a big, exhibition retrospective that we had. And as part of that, I was in charge of his archive and I was really interested in the dances he did for Judson Dance Theater and thinking about like what would happen to those, like how would those stay afloat? They were very important in their time and kind of iconic sixties works. And it was like, well could you collect a dance, you know, as a museum, what would that mean? And so we had some interesting conversations about that. Then finally the biggest influence on me probably was John Cage. Julie Lazar in LA had worked with John to create what is essentially his last artwork, which was a reconceiving of the museum, playing the museum like a musical instrument called Rolywholyover. A Circus. And that exhibition Julie was the curator who started it at LA MOCA and then it came to the Guggenheim SOHO and there I was, the local, whatever you wanna call it. I don't think I used the word curator, but I was the person in charge. It was an incredible undertaking. It involved 60 different organizations across the city of New York but it did things like have one gallery where there was one item from every museum in New York. Chosen at random and another gallery where there were artworks being moved from place to place every day. So when you walked in, you saw art handlers pick up a painting and move it to another wall and move a sculpture from here to there according all to chance operations. And it really was, um, striking to me how Cage was able to really grasp the sort of fundamentals of museum and turn that into this crazy performative sort of substrate on which to build this really crazy experience for anyone who saw it. So the funny thing is that I was experiencing the variability and openness of all these artists working in non-digital media. At the same time the then director Thomas Krens made a sort of liaison with KZM. The now well known. Museum devoted to digital art in Karlsruhe Germany. At the time, it wasn't well known and this was an opportunity to sort of get the ZKM and its collection better visibility in the US. So the Guggenheim Museum, SOHO I had in 1993 done an exhibition there, of Virtual Reality, and it had people lining up around the block and Thomas Krens saw that and he said, you know, this could be a thing. And so he decided to sort of take this building that we had in SOHO and devote it to art and technology, or at least make that one of its major themes. And so there was an exhibition called Media Scape which had works from the ZKM primarily installed on both floors. Mediascape was really to my mind, one of the first exhibitions where this kind of classic interactive art installation and sculpture could be seen en mass. And although the show is successful on some metrics, to me what was surprising was how, static the works were being considered in the long run. Of course, they were interactive and you could push buttons and see things or video multi-channel, but compared to the works by people like Cage and González-Torres and Webster I felt like the standard for collecting these was almost like collecting, you know, a video tape. Like let's just put it in a box and in a crate. And it didn't seem to respond as much to the venue or the unfolding nature of technology or how viewership changes over time the way some of the analog artists did. You take a, even an installation with a bunch of monitors and, you know, maybe some sculptural elements and you just kind of plunk it in a part of the gallery. It didn't really expand to fill the gallery, it didn't adapt to the space. It didn't change its technology. It was always the same kind of monitor you pulled out of a crate. So I was thinking about the way that new media artwork seemed to be following this paradigm of, at least in museums of kind of sculpture, like it's something you put in a crate and you take out later, you happen to plug it in, yes, but people weren't really thinking long term about what happens when A C R T disappears or how people's expectations about the resolution of an image change over time. At the same time, that was my day job and evenings I would spend in the studio working with two other collaborators, Janet Cohen and Keith Frank on artworks that we made collaboratively. And we were realizing at the time that our coming out of painting, when you start working with other formats, the same seed could kind of germinate in multiple media. And eventually that steered us online where we realized that we could get more exposure by creating websites, which were pretty, nascent at the time and as net artists, you don't have to wait for obsolescence to prove that you need to be thinking variably, everything's already variable, right? You make a website, especially in the mid nineties, and anyone who looks at it is gonna see something different. Windows, colors look different from Mac colors. The screens were much less calibrated than they are now. The fonts look different on a Windows machine or on a Mac machine. The fonts and colors and behavior were very different on different browsers, and there were like a dozen web browsers back then. People's internet connection was different. Someone's computer would have this website load instantly and someone else's would have it crawl in slowly to do, because they're on a, you know, 2,400 baud modem or whatever. So working online meant dealing with variability immediately, not waiting for things to go obsolete in 10 or 20 years. And so, with some specific problems that I was given at the Guggenheim, I started to think about what if we thought about variability not as something that's a tragedy and a degradation of the artwork that we have to do because it's gonna go obsolete. What if we thought about it as something that is a value, something that is a way that artists can explore new dimensions of art making? 

[00:24:23] Ben: I just think it's super interesting these seeds of where things started, coming out of, contemporary art forms that were inherently variable and just were immediately accepted as such because it was so inevitable. Like it had to be that way. And then it being the kind of like dot com era, it sounds like those were two really converging forces. Led to this kind of like aha moment as far as the variability of media art is concerned. What, led to the kind of formalization of the variable media initiative as a thing, and I'm super curious to hear more about the history of that project and like, who were your collaborators and, what did it look like when it got started?

[00:25:11] Jon: The Variable Media Initiative really started from conversations, right? Conversations I was having with my artistic collaborators conversations I was having with all kinds of different people at the Guggenheim and they weren't in any kind of formal or organized way. It was just like, doesn't it seem odd that, you know, we have to stockpile these, light bulbs that we're supposed to be off the shelf easily, fungible pieces of an artwork. Isn't it strange that your website looks so different on this computer versus that computer? So, the formalization, if you will, was kind of an accident, again, me kind of pushing things where I probably shouldn't have, which is that I was invited to write a column for this sleazy art magazine called Artbyte. It was actually Fine magazine, most art magazines at the time, I considered sleazy so this one was no worse than that. And it was really exceptional in that it was a magazine devoted in America to digital art. And I didn't know anything else like that. And so I was excited to be part of it. So I had to write a column for this magazine and I was thinking, wow, you know what if I took these conversations and I put them into this article. And so looking at Dan Flavin, we can see that there's a problem with art light bulbs , becoming obsolete but also I had created a work in Macromedia director back then with the help of Jolene Blais, and I was realizing that that's not gonna last forever. So both the digital side and the analog side were kind of having problems, but at the same time I was learning more about works. Artists from the sixties who just took that as an advantage instead of a disadvantage like Sol Lewitt and people who created works that were meant to be recreated over time. And so I said in conclusion, you know, my colleagues and I at the Guggenheim have this new initiative called the Variable Media Program, and we're going to solve this problem. And I totally made that up, like no one had ever called it that. And there was no formal group like that at the Guggenheim. But afterward, people started who had read the articles started saying like, Oh yeah, the Guggenheim has this initiative. So it kind of coalesced around that. And I was very lucky that I got to meet some really smart people who collaborated on this joint project. The first was really the the Langlois Foundation which was an important new media. Nonprofit up in Montreal and Alain Depocas in particular contacted me because I had said, Hey, can I apply for a grant to do this? And he said, why apply for a grant? Let's be partners instead. And so we created a network, we called it, and eventually got NEH funding and so forth to build out a series of test beds where we would apply this to multiple programs, multiple institutions, multiple genres of art. So, from the Guggenheim Lena Stringari was really important, a conservator at the time. She's now deputy director as well at the Guggenheim. And she really opened my mind to how much conventional paintings and sculpture are variable, which I always thought, well, this is never gonna apply to that, right? You wouldn't wanna go tinker with an oil painting or change the frame or change, the armature holding up a bronze. So it turns out conservators have to do that all the time. And so if you talk to conventional, you know, well trained conservator, they will tell you, that these works are not fixed in time and the frames do need to be fixed or changed. And armatures do need to be adjust and patinas need to be treated. And so their mentality is already coming from a more informed place than the average. Maybe even museum staff member who assumes that, no we just pull something out of a crate and it's done. In terms of other collaborators Rick Reinhardt then at UC Berkeley was really important. Now he's at the Samek Art Museum and he later co-wrote a book with me called Re Collection, in which we sort of tried to update some of the ideas of the variable media initiative, Michael Katchen at Franklin Furnace. So we had a performance archive as well as the performance Art festival and archive in Cleveland, Thomas Mulready. There New Langton Arts was involved. And then we ended up hiring a, uh, a fellow, the first variable media fellow who's Caitlin Jones, who then, went on to have her own an important career at galleries and head of Western Front and these were all people who came together from totally different backgrounds. I didn't mention Rhizome was also important partner, and there were certainly people like Christiane Paul who played a role in helping to craft this joint effort. So it was definitely a lot of different people representing things as, as diverse as, you know, net art and minimalist sculpture and performance art, all kind of working together. 

[00:29:44] Ben: I know that you had an exhibition that everything kind of culminated in called Seeing Double, and it's one of my great regrets that I wasn't old enough or aware of it at the time to have seen it in person because I still think to this day, it's just such a fascinating concept. So I was wondering if you could kind of, share a bit about what that exhibition was with our listeners.

[00:30:08] Jon: So there are a number of things that came out of the Variable Media Network, including, you know, artist questionnaire and books and internet art commissions and so forth. One of the most visible ones was, Exhibition called Seeing Double, and a conference called Echos of Art that went along with it and Seeing Double the premise was. There's this new strategy for preserving stuff called emulation, and it's been applied to certain, like vintage games, and it really came out of a sort of fan base of gamers want to play Donkey Kong and Mario Cart. And these old games that only worked on obsolete consoles like Nintendo cartridge system. Could we play them on contemporary computers well they figured out how to make a new computer impersonate an old one so you could run the old code and the new computer, and this has become a very powerful mechanism for preservation. Drastically, I think still underrated in the art world but of increasing visibility and acceptance in the larger community. So you can go to the internet archive, for example, and play all these old. You know, arcade games, you can play old Flash animations that you can't run on a current computer because Flash has been deprecated for years. And so, that stuff is kind of out there in the culture at large and largely came out of the interest of gamers. We said, what if we could apply this to conventional artworks? And what if we thought about emulation beyond just the software idea, but also in terms of emulating the physical look and feel of a piece as well as its behavior. Or even behaviors, like for example, a dance that is recreated. In what sense is that emulated? So seeing Double was an exhibition at the Guggenheim, I think 2004, in which we put the original work with its original equipment, original manifestation, butt up against the emulated version. And we asked people to respond like, hey, did this capture the spirit of the original? What's what changed? What needed to stay alive? Did it stay alive? Is it true to the original spirit? We had computer games. We had video installations. We had a Robert Morris dance that was in its original version with Morris, himself and Carolee Schneemann and then a version with new actors who performed the same roles but, you know, were obviously different people. And those were represented in the gallery by two videos next to each other. They had been re-staged for this purpose. The centerpiece was this big installation by Graham Weinbren and Roberta Friedman called the Erl King, one of the very earliest interactive video installations from 1982. And we put two versions side by side mirror image of each other. Each of them had a little seat and a touch screen, which is kind of an inventive at the time, you didn't see those kind of touchscreen interface contexts, uh, like you do now at an airport. And this video would play, and then when you touched different points, it would seek a different clip on an analog video player, these ancient video discs that looked like, I don't know a giant version of a cd. And then that would play on a CRT, conventional television monitor overhead. So, this was a really important historical work for a number of reasons. One is yes, it was the ability to interact with video and change the story as it went, but also it had a Pascal program running on the CPM operating system. And while many things in this kind of art I think are variable and can be swapped out, in this case, the code was one of the first times artists had created this kind of map based interaction with the different clips of visual narrative and how they would work together. And so the code was kind of an historical artifact that was really important to us. So we didn't wanna just throw that out and rewrite it in Java or whatever we said wait let's keep that original code and then can we wrap it in something that's like an emulator that would then make the same behavior happen. But instead of relying on these antique laser discs, which you couldn't even find these players on eBay anymore, and they're gonna die any day, now let's put it on, wow. You know, we could take all this hours and hours of footage and put it on a single terabyte hard drive and we can run it on a Linux box. And instead of relying on a vacuum tube, TV set from 1980, we could put it on a flat screen, but embed it in the casing so that it looks like the original. So basically we faked it, but it still ran the original code and it ran a migrated version of the video. And we put them side by side and we asked viewers, Hey, do you think the new version captures a spirit of the old one. And the answer was, I don't get it. Why did you put two versions of the same work in the gallery? It. Wow, I guess it worked. So what we did is we ripped off the front panel of the casing and put a plexi screen, basically a window so that people could see, oh, the original one was this nightmarish construction with this black box and 104 cables and the new ones this clean little Linux box in the corner. And so you can see that the guts are totally different, right? One is definitely from like 1980 and one is from at that point, 2004. We did a more formal survey of all the works and found some interesting results, which are documented in the book Recollection. There wasn't a huge sample size, so it's hard to make this case convincingly, but roughly speaking, there were two kinds of approaches. One was like the Earl King, where it literally looked the same. And the other was we took a John Simon Junior who's a early artist who worked in digital sculptures, as well as net art. And we took one of his Power Books, which was an early Mac Book where he'd ripped off the sort of chassis. So all you had was like the logic board and the actual LED screen. And it was this kind of sculptural object. Suddenly the electronics were actually quite beautiful, and he put them on the wall like a painting, and then he'd have some pixels dancing according to an algorithm on that screen. And of course, these are highly hardware dependent, right? Because you've got a version that is, you know, from a MacBook created in I don't know, 1998 or something, and another version that's created in 2002 and all the graphics have gotten better. The screens brighter, it's bigger, the electronics around it, all the transistors and so forth look different. So we're like, Okay, well what would it mean to emulate that? And he said, Well, I think we take the original and we put it up there and we take the code from the original, but we just put it into the new MacBook and we strip out that chassis and put that next to it. So you had an old kind of dull but vintage version. And then you had the newer brighter, but also clearly, you know, from the same kind of laptop idea, a version next to that. And so there were the two different really kind of models here. One was keep it as close as you can to the original, so people can't tell. And the other was like, well reuse the original code, but update it to whatever the current standard is in terms of the other features. And people reacted differently. Some people said, well, obviously the one that looks the same as the original is better because you've captured the spirit. It looks the same. And other people like, No, because we're not the same people we were in, 1990, now we're in the two thousands and we expect better, brighter displays. So the one that actually upgraded things, that's better in keeping with the spirit of the original cuz the viewer has changed. And the interesting thing about the study is that older people who are less savvy, less kind of familiar with technology tended to prefer the exact replication of the original experience. And younger people who've been through more sort of upgrades and experiences of technological procession, they tended to prefer the one that actually upgraded the look to the current day. And so that was kind of a really interesting generational shift we discovered in the study for Seeing Double. 

[00:38:18] Ben: That's amazing. To this day, you know, I don't know if there's been, a public facing exhibition like this that actually just transparently presents these things to the public. So that's, one of the things that's always really fascinated me about that show. So, eventually you move on from the Guggenheim and you go on to teach at the University of Maine and you've really built up quite a program there. So, I'm just curious if you could speak a bit to that transition and getting to Maine and what it's been like to build up the program there and really just like what it is for people who aren't familiar.

[00:39:01] Jon: There was actually a surprising amount of overlap there. I got the job at the University of Maine. But kept my job at the Guggenheim for I'd say maybe three years, which was kind of crazy kind of trying to hold down both positions at the same time. But there were just things happening at the Guggenheim that I wanted to continue working on, like the internet art commissions. And you know, it was a very exciting opportunity to start a new program at the University of Maine. And Maine is fabulous. I love living here. Fortunately for me, I had really wonderful colleagues at the Guggenheim who kept things going when I wasn't there in the office. At the University of Maine. It was a rough time because I had to bootstrap a new undergraduate program in new media, and that meant things like writing your own tenure criteria and, you know, kinda imagining what a curriculum is. And with something like new media, you have to rewrite your curriculum every two years. You know, students complain if something is two years old in the program. And there's a lot of kind of heavy lifting required at the beginning of that, especially when you were trying to get tenure at the same time. You're writing the criteria for it. I think that the, one of the things I'm proud of is the digital curation graduate program, as you mentioned, which is all online, and that makes it easy for people of all different stripes and geographical locations to participate. And that started in 2012. I'm working with wonderful people like John Bell, who is a alumnus of my new media program, who now teaches at Dartmouth and runs their augmented in Virtual Reality Lab. He teaches our metadata class, Craig Dietrich who's created Scaler, is teaching our digital collections and exhibitions class. Kendra Bird, who's got a lot of experience with anthropologies co-teaching classes. We have these really interesting teachers, but even more than the teachers. I think the students themselves are just remarkable. We get people who are doing things all over the place. Last year alone, one guy was head of patient relations at Walter Reed Medical Center, you know where presidents go when they get sick. Another woman is in charge of the digital programming at the University of South Africa. Another woman is the collection manager for the US Naval Under Sea Museum, which I didn't know was a thing, but they have like unexplode torpedoes and like videos of sea lions with spy cameras on them. And Shelly Lightburn just had come back because she's an alumna who is now head of archives at the International Court of Justice at The Hague. And we asked her about digital evidence and how those standards and forensics have changed in the world of where the evidence you gather on war crimes and genocide comes from cell phones instead of, you know, something you might find on site. So it's a remarkable range of people, but what's cool is that for someone like me coming from the arts, I'm seeing the same problems and many times the same solutions like, emulation and so forth, proving valuable in many of these different areas. And that's what's really exciting to get to talk to a completely diverse group of people and yet feel like, oh wow, we're all having the same trouble, and we could all share a solution that might work for everyone. 

[00:42:09] Ben: So I'm curious, you know, you got your start at the Guggenheim so long ago when these ideas were, just beginning to be a glimmer in the eye of institutions and museums and art collections. I guess what has it been like to see this, flourishing of this field of time-based media conservation? And what are some of the ways that you've seen the practice evolve over the years?

[00:42:33] Jon: Well, I say that for me, it's been gratifying to see some of the directions the field went because there was a fork in the road, right. And things could have gotten more conservative or they could have gotten more open. And I think in general, they've gotten more open. Lena Stringari wrote an essay called Beyond Conservative, and it was talking about how conservators can be more open in their thinking. And I think that's what we've seen happen. And I've been super encouraged by the guests on your program who seem to sort of take this as granted. Like of course we would think about the idea of migrating or emulating or reinterpreting works. So the one thing is definitely that variability. And at first I was like, hey, you know, I built this whole variable media questionnaire and yeah, there's a hundred people use it, but why doesn't everybody use it? And then I realized like, everybody's got a questionnaire. Every museum has some kind of, you know, accession document that they go over with, with artists and when they're introducing the work, both on a material level and sometimes on a conceptual level. And that's great because okay, they're not using mine, but they're making their own. And it will vary in respect the differences of each institution. So I'm, very happy to see things like, questionnaire protocol percolate through the museum world. Another thing I think is a good direction that the field has been going is to accept that software is increasingly important. And, you know, in Silicon Valley they say software is eating the world and it kind of is. We need to accept that things that we used to think of as contained elements are increasingly not anymore. And I know that lots of people with, you know, single channel video collections and you've got your tape and you've migrated it to MPEG-4 or whatever, and that's fine. But if you look at the direction, the moving image has been going for a while. We're looking at things like streaming media where there isn't a tape, there are packets, or we're looking at, TikTok, where yeah, you could save the 30 second MPEF-4 file, but that's not what makes it important, right? That's a little bit of the equation. How are people using it? Who's forwarding it? Who's liking it? How is it being remixed and stitched, and using all the clever tools that people use in TikTok to add new audio or respond to the video with the green screen? And that whole network of associations cannot be subsumed by a single video file, you've got on a hard drive somewhere. So you've gotta think about software, you've gotta think about networks, APIs, data coming in from the world. Gps, none of this stuff can be stuck on a file in a box somewhere. And you have to think broadly about that. Emulation isn't gonna solve it by itself with those external links, but it's a good trend to see people thinking in those terms of like, if I'm gonna be a media conservator, I'm gonna have to deal with software. And I think the third trend that I'm happy about this, I sort of see glimmers of now is a resurgence, or I should say surge because I'm not sure there was ever a big interest in the past interest in reinterpretation as a preservation strategy. And I don't mean in traditional cultures and genres of reinterpretation like when you have music covers or you have theater productions, but I mean in more like works of installation art, or works of sculpture. Lima and Gabby Wijers who's I know has also been on your show. Has taken the lead on bringing artists into dialogue, new artists and older artists with how works by the Vasulkas and other artists who are well known. You know, OG media artists can be reinterpreted for younger audience and in technologies that work now, especially when the older ones fail. Even the most recent ISEA conference on archiving new media art from couple months ago, it was amazing to me how many presentations were about reanimating archives by finding ways to reinterpret them and having artists do work specifically to kind of bring out new insights from those archives. So variability and focus on software and reinterpretation, those are all things that were kind of possible early on, but now they really seem to be gaining ground and becoming more important in the industry.

[00:46:58] Ben: Mm. Yeah. So I guess coming back to you do you still make work? We began with your, career as an frustrated astrophysicist then as an artist are you still making work?

[00:47:11] Jon: So I spend almost all my time that's creative, trying to reanimate dead works. I've kind of been cursed with being a, you know, OG net artist, I guess. And so there's a lot of stuff that I made with collaborators sometimes that just doesn't work anymore. And so three.org was the original website, and I decided, you know, I've gotta figure out to represent these in a way that makes sense to a modern viewer, even though they're like, you know, ancient technologies and protocols and even things like, you know, the resolution, like, 800 by 600 pixels was sort of like a good size to make a website back then, right? So how do you deal with that? Just that simple size factor in today's internet when everyone's got a 4K or an 8k screen. So I've actually been spending a fair amount of time to sort of try to revive those, Frankenstein them back into existence. But I gave a talk at Yale recently about one of these examples, a work called the Unreliable Archivist. And the short version is that there was a very well known probably the most important artist's internet site in the late nineties was called Adaweb and it had sort of mainstream brand names like Jenny Holzer and Lawrence Weiner, but it also had newer net artists, like John Simon and others who had joined all together to create these experiences online. And my collaborators and I were supposed to be the next featured artists on the site, and then AOL pulled the funding and the site died. And thankfully Steve Dietz, then curator at the Walker, who's a adventurous and very thoughtful guy said we'll take it on. And he created a sort of study collection from Adaweb. And on the occasion of the archiving of this site said, well, John, why don't you do the thing you guys were gonna do anyway? And so we created this interface to the site that sort of respects more the internet norms rather than the sort of standard older pictorial norms in that it. Grabs all the images and scripts and styles and so forth from the original, which all come to you over separate sort of channels to get to your screen over the internet and then appear on your page, on your browser. And we allowed you to recombine them in new ways. Anyway, this artwork was called the unreliable archivist, and the original one died. It was based on a Netscape protocol called Layer Tag that was later superseded by the div tag, which came along with the then very exciting new shiny browser called Internet Explorer. So it died when Netscape died, and I recently revived it by migrating it all to W3C standards, the new web standards, and it was a pain in the ass, there's still things that, you know, don't quite work, right? But I realized Dragan Espenshied has been working lots, as you know, with emulation and he had created a emulator that was used to access a work in the Rhizome Artbase and I said, you know, I bet I could repoint that emulator that's just accessible via web browser at my old files. And sure enough, boom, I could suddenly see this project from 1998 that I had spent years reconstituting by migrating and here in an instant was it working in its original form in under emulation. And it showed me things that I forgot oh, fonts weren't anti alias back then. And oh, colors were different cuz there was a different color gamut and things that I had lost, if you will, in the process of migrating, were returned to me in emulating. So that was a little bit of a, of a kind of a shocker, even though I was a big advocate for emulation. 

[00:50:39] Ben: So, Jon you have taken us through the amazing story of your life and your professional evolution. But I'm curious, what are you up to these days and what's coming next for you? Other than being a net art custodian?

[00:50:52] Jon: Yeah, that could be a full-time job. Well, you know, it's interesting because I was writing a book, about all the problems with the web and in particular the way that social media platforms from Facebook to Google to you know, Netflix and the way that they have a stranglehold on creativity in the sense, not that they don't allow you to upload things, but the limits that they inherently create for the format and how the early web was so much more open and less constrained. You know, every time I go to a website now and I see another, you know, scrolling page with 100% wide pictures periodically punctuated by texts that, go from side to side. I think, like, my God we've all, using the same WordPress theme, and I just think back to like 1997 when there were so many different kinds of design on the web, and it was so exciting to see, wow, the navigation's on the left or what's on the bottom, or it spans from the top and it was just such a more exciting time for me. And so I had written this whole prospectus and working on this outline for this book saying how bad web two was compared to web one. And then NFTs came along and the idea of Web three and the blockchain and everything being tokenized and you getting to pay for everything that you do online. And so that everything would be a big financialized sort of layer on top of the old web. And then I thought, you know, I shouldn't be really criticizing web two if web three is gonna be even worse. So I really am rethinking that whole book thing. And probably depending on what happens in the next few years, trying to figure out how to resurrect some of the really great things about Web one, how to accept web three's, critiques of web two, which I think are trenchant, but also how to avoid the dire unintended consequences that Web three could have for our internet. Although I have my misgivings about NFTs, I also recognize that many artists are doing interesting work on the blockchain now. And so another project of mine working with Regina Harani is to create a set of questions for the variable media questionnaire that have specifically to do with ownership. And again, the whole idea of variable media is not to talk about a specific technology. So there's not gonna be like a question about Ethereum or Bitcoin or whatever, but instead, thinking about the ways that artists are using these that make an interesting use of the constraints on selling, reselling, merging, modifying the concept of ownership. And I think that's a better way to think. One of the good things about variable media is it's ask you what's really important about this artwork? Is it that it's some crypto token? Is it that it uses this particular distributed ledger? No, it's that it's creating a new way for people to own things or define things online. And it also hearkens back to then think about Oh, what about older artworks that changed the definition of ownership. What about Sol Lewitt's democratic drawings that were always supposed to be sold for a hundred dollars each. What about Lawrence Wiener's work in public freehold? What about Joseph Kosuth's piece that he had in his show on the border of Italy and Switzerland where there were poor Italians coming and rich Swiss coming where he said the value of this work is a hundred units of your own national currency. And then later works like for example, auction art where Keith Obadike auctioned off his blackness or where Eric Salva said, I'm gonna create a MySpace page where each of my body parts has a different page and they all communicate with each other. So thinking about the current moment and, what some creative artists are doing with blockchain, and kind of expanding beyond that and saying like, Okay, if blockchain dies, can we still have this artwork? Can we still consider it part of the history And then personally, I'm revising my university tenure criteria for my department to take into account a bigger preservation question, which is really can our culture be sustainable among climate change? And thinking maybe we don't need as many peer reviewed journal articles in publications that 12 people read. Maybe we should actually be using our technical skills to make websites and mobile apps to preserve local ecosystems. We talk about sustainability in our archives and, you know, they could be underwater if we don't address the bigger sustainability of our planet. And I'm, this is something that, you know again, I mentioned Jolene Blais before she's a colleague of mine up at the University of Maine, and she is a permaculture designer. And permaculture is inspired by nature and has all these principles. And it's really interesting to try to apply those principles from a garden, into a digital space. Like what does an ecosystem need to thrive? And one of the, common metaphors that Rick Reinhardt and I use in the book recollection is the idea of preserving a butterfly. Do you preserve a butterfly by pinning it to the wall, or do you preserve it by creating an ecosystem where it can thrive and breed? And I think that's a literal metaphor. Like we need more butterflies, right? Monarch butterflies are dying outlets. I've discovered recently that they like parsley, so I'm growing partially for them. But also, what about the digital world? How can we keep our culture alive in a place where, you know, flash, had a limited lifespan. Internet Explorer is dead at this point. We're constantly finding this need to sort of reanimate older protocols. Well, maybe instead of storing the files on a disc, if we thought about nourishing the ecosystem, the media ecosystem and the, ecosystem of people that made this happen, then we'd be able to keep culture alive for longer.

[00:56:34] Ben: Well, Jon thank you so much for coming on the show. You know, you have played a really important role in the history of this field, and it was just really great to get to know your story better. 

[00:56:46] Jon: I appreciate it, Ben. It's really been fun and so much insight I have squeezed out of the interviews that you've done on the podcast, especially from the younger people, cuz it really does highlight how much the field has evolved and gives me hope for where the field's going in the future.

[00:57:03] Ben: And as always, thank you, dear listener for joining me for this week's show. If you want to help support our work and mission of equitably compensating artists that come on the show, you can join us over at patreon.com/artobsolescence or if you are interested in making a one-time tax deductible gift through our fiscal sponsor, the New York Foundation for the Arts, you can do so at artandobsolescence.com/donate and there, of course you can also find the full episode archive, including full transcripts and show notes. And last but not least, you can find us on Twitter and Instagram @artobsolescence and reminder no new episode next week, but we will be back on the 18th with new episodes. Until then have a great two weeks my friends, my name is Ben Fino-Radin and this has been Art and Obsolescence.