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What is the role of art museums in the Anthropocene?

Pau Waelder with Karin Vicente and Diane Drubay

Art in the Age of the Anthropocene, Kumu Art Museum. Exhibition view. Photo by Stanislav Stepashko.

Is there a need for art during an ecological crisis? This provocative question is the starting point of the exhibition Art in the Age of the Anthropocene, currently on view at the Kumu Art Museum in Tallinn (Estonia). The exhibition explores Estonian art history from an ecocritical perspective, addressing how nature, but also the industry and the impact of human activity on the environment, have been depicted in painting, sculpture, photography, and other media, including video art and performance. Such an approach is particularly interesting in itself both for bringing new perspectives to Estonian art history, and for suggesting a reflection on our relationship with the environment from the vantage point of a selection of artworks spanning more than a century. However, what makes this exhibition even more relevant to our present time is that it is the outcome of a three-year-long project debating the role of the museum in the Anthropocene and particularly during a climate emergency. 

What should an art museum do at a time when sustainability is no longer a choice, but a need? What should be the institution’s role in raising awareness about the way human activity fuels the current climate crisis? How can art museums become hubs for reflection, and possibly action, to face a growing environmental disaster? These are hard questions to answer, and we cannot expect a single project or institution to be able to answer them. In fact, this has been an ongoing debate for many years among museums experts, in forums such as the Museums Facing Extinction programme carried out since 2019 by We Are Museums in collaboration with the EIT Climate-KIC agency. However, the exhibition at Kumu offers a good example of how sustainable exhibition principles can be put into practice, and furthermore communicated to the visitors.

This is actually the aspect in which this exhibition stands out, questioning its own museography and drawing attention to experimental solutions for a more sustainable exhibition design with highly visible informative signs. Before entering the exhibition, visitors encounter an unusual sight: instead of using vinyl lettering, the exhibition title has been spray painted on the wall, while the curatorial text is displayed on two large sheets of paper. Next to them, a thin red pole stands on a concrete brick, holding a cardboard label with additional information. These freestanding labels are scattered across the rooms, providing an additional reading of the exhibition in terms of the sustainable practices applied to this particular curatorial and museological project. 

Art in the Age of the Anthropocene, Kumu Art Museum. Exhibition view. Photo by Pau Waelder.

Thanks to them, we learn for instance that clay paint has been used to create the wall texts and labels, and that the labels are UV-printed on leftover cardboard, thus avoiding the use of plastics. Different wall paint solutions have been tested, considering their ecological footprint, price, amount of work required, and efficacy. We also learn that the posters in the exhibition are displayed in frames that have been used multiple times during the last eleven years, or that a painting that has been in storage in the museum’s collection for 78 years is now on display for the first time. Sustainability therefore goes beyond the choice of materials used and involves larger decisions about the management of the museum’s collection or the carbon footprint of an exhibition that includes artworks brought from remote locations. Art in the Age of the Anthropocene does not pretend to solve all of these questions but rather to raise awareness about the challenges that museums face on their path to sustainability. The freestanding red poles and experimental solutions give the appearance of a construction site and seem to convey the idea that it is all in the works. This is actually an honest way to address the issue, and also to involve the visitor, who is encouraged to consider how to contribute to a sustainable museum experience.

Art in the Age of the Anthropocene, Kumu Art Museum. Exhibition view. Photo by Stanislav Stepashko.

An expert’s view on sustainability in museums

To better understand the ideas and the work behind Art in the Age of the Anthropocene, I had a brief exchange with Karin Vicente, the head of the sustainable work group at the Art Museum of Estonia.

Photo by Terje Ugandi

Karin Vicente is an art historian based in Tallinn, Estonia. She works as a programme manager and curator at the Adamson-Eric Museum. She is the head of the sustainable work group at the Art Museum of Estonia. Currently she is working on the project A Model for a Sustainable Exhibition.

The exhibition Art in the Age of the Anthropocene has had a long gestation period of over three years. Can you highlight the main tasks and processes that have taken place during this time? 

The preparation of the exhibition is a part of a research project. It helped us analyze our collections (as well as collections of other museums) from an ecocritical perspective. Beyond the content, the exhibition has also initiated discussions about the green transition in the museum. How can an art museum minimize its ecological footprint? We organized a few seminars and discussions in the museum, involving participating artists and designers.

“We wanted to raise questions among the audience, such as the price of being part of a global art network.”

The exhibition is characterized by a double educational approach, on the one hand selecting artworks that speak about the representation and appropriation of the environment in Estonia, and on the other hand pointing out the sustainable exhibition practices carried out in its mounting. How have you combined these approaches?

The “red flags” indeed reflect the issues we discussed with curators and the exhibition team during the process. However, the selection of artworks was made by curators, following the narrative of the exhibition. We didn’t plan to create a zero-waste exhibition. For example, we invited international artists to contribute to the exhibition and designed a special exhibition layout considering eco-design aspects. We wanted to raise questions among the audience, such as the price of being part of a global art network. The pollution generated by air travel casts a shadow over bringing international art to Tallinn, yet it makes more sense than visitors traveling to the country of origin of each piece to see it. We want to be part of a global arts network, but how do we balance the pros and cons?

The sustainable exhibition practices have involved collaborations with third parties, such as the Tallinn Book Printers, to obtain leftover material. Can this lead to continuous collaborations? Is it possible for a museum to fully transition into using donated materials for purposes such as wall labels or brochures?

We collaborate with many companies, and there is a growing demand and consciousness concerning “green solutions” in the field. In some cases, it might be reasonable to create an exhibition using only reused/recycled/donated materials, but we also need to consider other aspects, like the security and well-being (climate conditions) of our collections. Handmade silkscreen texts and labels on waste paper were playful experiments, but they demanded a lot of human resources. Therefore, I’m afraid we won’t be able to do it every time.

Art in the Age of the Anthropocene, Kumu Art Museum. Exhibition view. Photo by Stanislav Stepashko.

Reusing elements purchased by the museum from previous exhibitions is a good practice both environmentally and economically, and currently most museums have a certain amount of reusable stock. How can this practice be even more effective and sustainable, balancing the specific needs of artists and curators with those of the museum?

The only restriction to reusing more materials is the limited storage space we have. We have discussed with other museums and institutions the idea of a platform that would facilitate the exchange of different showcases and materials between different institutions, but it still needs to be developed.

Wall painting is a major element of exhibition design, as it conditions the visual perception of the artworks. How do you see the solutions you have tested in Art in the Age of the Anthropocene being applied to other exhibitions?

The experimental design decision our team made involved testing different wall paint solutions. We were looking for the most economical and sensible solution, so we have analyzed the properties of clay, casein, linseed oil emulsion, and acrylic paints: their ecological footprints, prices, covering capacities, drying times, scratch resistance and ease of removal, and the required amount of work. The result was visually effective as we also tested different painting styles (using less paint). I think it’s a matter of taste; different wall paint solutions can be used when exhibiting artworks from different periods. There are obviously other methods to use wall paint in a more sustainable way. I think the trick is to find a good balance between the desired outcome (how it looks) and how we achieve it.

“Handmade silkscreen texts and labels on waste paper were playful experiments, but they demanded a lot of human resources. Therefore, I’m afraid we won’t be able to do it every time.”

Video and digital art are increasingly present in contemporary art exhibitions, which demands that museums have screens, projectors, computers, and other equipment that is also commonly used in educational activities. How does incorporating digital art into the museum align with sustainability goals? How would you compare it with traditional formats (painting, sculpture) in terms of shipping, maintenance, and storage, and the need to participate in the global art scene?

Indeed, both digital and traditional art forms have their ecological footprints. Traditional artworks need to be kept in a controlled climate that consumes a lot of energy. Digital artworks require computers, etc., and they have a digital footprint. However, we need both, and I think it doesn’t make sense to compare them.

Climate control is necessary inside the museum, not only to make visitors comfortable, but also to preserve the artworks. How can it be made more sustainable? What are the challenges for a museum in Estonia, where the difference between summer and winter temperatures can be extremely high?

We are updating our HVAC systems at Kumu in 2023; this requires a significant investment. This year, we also initiated a discussion in the museum to form our opinion about the Bizot protocol and weakening the climate standards. These are not easy decisions to make, but we are working on them.

Art in the Age of the Anthropocene, Kumu Art Museum. Exhibition view. Photo by Stanislav Stepashko.

Is there a need for art during an ecological crisis?

Considering the issues raised by the Kumu exhibition in a wider scope, I asked Diane Drubay, artist and founder of We Are Museums, about her views on the sustainability of art museums and a possible answer to the role of art in our current climate emergency.

Diane Drubay is an artist whose work focuses on better futures and nature-awareness and a researcher working towards the transformation of museums and art through various communities, events and programs, internationally since 2007. Founder of We Are Museums and WAC-Lab. Member of Museums For Future.

What is your opinion about the interplay of artworks and information in Art in the Age of the Anthropocene? 

In my opinion, the greatest challenge to overcome when we want to adopt sustainable exhibition practices is taking the first step. There are endless lists of practical sustainable actions, but they are often repetitive and tailored to a global audience rather than a local or personal one. Over the years, I’ve learned that it’s by sharing our personal stories that our actions can resonate with others. So I don’t hesitate to talk about what I do or don’t do any more, and to explain how I do it and what impact it has on my daily life. 

In the “Art in the Age of the Anthropocene” exhibition, we find this very personal way of talking about what has been done and why, but also a very practical one. All the details provided give visitors the chance to draw inspiration from them and apply this mindset to their everyday lives, or even their professions. I would love to see all these practical insights shared online in a global “ressourcerie” for museums on their climate journey!

Also, while museums tend to have the reputation of being large, secretive or inaccessible institutions, showing such openness and sincerity highlights the human beings who work in this museum and who, like everyone else, have moments of questioning and try to do their best to reduce their carbon footprint. Such honest behavior addresses the human being before the visitor. Leaving questions open invites dialogue and shows great humility, while sharing insights can be inspiring.

Art in the Age of the Anthropocene, Kumu Art Museum. Exhibition view. Photo by Pau Waelder.

In a recent article on Art Review, Marv Recinto states that art exhibitions about ecology “often feel futile in the face of real environmental devastation” and calls for “a more concerted effort towards action.” As an artist addressing this subject, how would you respond to this? Is the effort carried out at KUMU a step in this direction?

As there are many different types of disaster, there are many different ways of approaching an environmental emergency. Some people need to feel emotionally involved in order to act, others need figures and scientific facts to speak to their rationality, and still others need to be on the ground, collaborating with others, and so on. What I see is that many artists have several points of action, and the creation of stories or emotions complements local community action or changes in behavior. If we want to make a lasting impact and see behavior change profoundly, the approach must be multiple and complementary. As in nature, it is the diversity of species that makes a land fertile.

“If we want to make a lasting impact and see behavior change profoundly, the approach must be multiple and complementary. As in nature, it is the diversity of species that makes a land fertile.”

Karin Vicente states that both traditional art formats (painting, sculpture) and digital art have their carbon footprint, and that we need both, so it makes no sense to compare them. What is your opinion about digital art and sustainability in museums?

Exhibiting digital art and, above all, preserving it are key priorities for museum professionals today. So now is the perfect time to experiment with sustainable practices in my opinion. Many museums and associations are already well advanced in their search for a sustainable digital strategy. 

Like KUMU did beautifully, low-tech cultural mediation within the museum is a very good way of offsetting the carbon footprint of hosting servers and other carbon costs. But museums can also seek to reduce their carbon footprint by implementing actions in favor of biodiversity, reducing their water consumption, maintaining or creating forested or natural areas around the museum, thinking in terms of slowing down, circularity and renunciation, or supporting the local before thinking global.

“A digital work of art can reach more people in a global and inclusive way.”

And I agree with Karin Vicente that comparing the different media and their carbon footprints makes no sense, because we would also have to add a measure of the impact in terms of raising awareness, encouraging people to act and changing behavior, but also in terms of the number of visitors reached. A digital work of art can reach more people in a global and inclusive way.

Tamiko Thiel: when art augments reality

Pau Waelder

Tamiko Thiel is a pioneering visual artist exploring the interplay of place, space, the body and cultural identity in works encompassing an artificial intelligence (AI) supercomputer, objects, installations, digital prints in 2D and 3D, videos, interactive 3d virtual worlds (VR), augmented reality (AR) and artificial intelligence art. In this conversation, that took place on the occasion of the launch of her solo artcast Invisible Nature curated by DAM Projects, she discusses the evolution of technology over the last three decades, her early AR artworks and her commitment to create art that invites reflection.

Your work is characterized by the use of Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality technologies, with pioneering artistic projects. Which technical challenges have you met over the last decades in the creation of these projects?

My first exposure to real time computer graphics was at MIT when I was a graduate student in 1982. At that point,  writing everything from scratch, you had to program for a semester in order to get a cube that would rotate in three dimensions. Coming from an artistic and design background, I felt that this is not really where I want to create art right now, I’ll have to wait. And then about 10 years later, in 1992, Silicon Graphics came out with OpenGL, an open standard that made it possible to do real time interactive computer graphics on PCs. Then in 1994, I started to work with a company called Worlds Incorporated, which was taking this new potential for doing interactive 3D computer graphics on PCs connected to the Internet. At that time I worked with Steven Spielberg on the Starbright World Project, the first 3d online Metaverse for ill children, a virtual world where they could momentarily escape the space of the hospital. This first Metaverse was running on high end PCs, with fast connections provided by various high tech companies, but it was still unaffordable for people at home. The project ran from 1994 to 1997, and at that time the technology was still unstable.

“It takes maybe 10 to 15 or 20 years to get there instead of the five years that all the evangelists predict.”

So you must jump from that to 10 years later, when Second Life came about and this time people had more powerful graphic cards and ADSL connections at home. Second Life was able to create a much more developed virtual world, which seemed like the next phase of the Internet and all the corporations wanted to move there. Then around 2007-2008, probably due to the financial crisis, but also the rise of Facebook, which allowed people to share photographs on a common platform, the excitement around Second Life fizzled. And then if we jump another 15 years more, we find ourselves with still bigger processing power and faster connections. Now it is much easier to create virtual worlds than it was 25 years ago, partly because it is easier to create 3D objects, or you can buy them online, and also because of the advancements in hardware and software.

So, as you can see, big steps come on later than you think. It takes maybe 10 to 15 or 20 years to get there instead of the five years that all the evangelists predict. People talked about virtual reality at that time in the 90s as being a failure, just as they talked about AI being a failure in the 80s and 90s. And what they don’t realize is that technological change takes longer than you’d want it to. So it’s wrong to call it a failure. It’s more like: “Okay, we have to keep on working on this.” And if you wait long enough, 20 years or so, then you’ll get it.

Video by Tamiko Thiel, Rewilding the Smithsonian, 2021.  Created with the ReWildAR AR app (2021, with /p). Commissioned by curator Ashley Molese for the 175th anniversary of the Smithsonian Institution, in the Arts and Industries Building.

Interactive 3D and VR artworks such as Beyond Manzanar and Virtuelle Mauer have a strong narrative component as they explore historic and political issues. What is the role of the user in constructing these narratives?

Basically, what I tend to do is look for key moments that I think can be expressed and experienced and communicated better in virtual reality than in other media. In Beyond Manzanar, for me that was the moment where you’re sitting in a beautiful Paradise Garden, and  you see the mountains covered in snow around you. This is an image from the book Farewell to Manzanar by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston: the author tells that when she was an eight-year-old and she was imprisoned in the camp, she would pick a viewpoint where she couldn’t see any guard towers, any barracks, nor barbed wire fence. And she tried not to move for the longest time, because as long as she didn’t move, she could preserve the illusion she was in paradise of her own free will. As soon as she moved, she saw that she was indeed in prison, she fell out of paradise back into prison. And so this moment occurs in Beyond Manzanar, where you enter a garden which is framed by the beautiful mountains. But if you go too deeply into the garden, then boom! – the garden disappears, and you’re back in the prison camp. 

Beyond Manzanar (2000). An interactive virtual reality large projection installation by Tamiko Thiel and Zara Houshmand.

My second piece, The Travels of Mariko Horo, has a much more complicated structure with several heavens imagined by a time traveling 12th century Japanese female artist inventing the West in her imagination. In this work there is this moment when you enter the different churches, which are in fact liminal spaces between the prosaic everyday life and the world of the supernatural. When you cross that threshold, Mariko Horo takes you to heaven or takes you to hell. But it is always by your own free will, you’re always making the decision and making the motions that all of a sudden present you with the consequences of your decisions. 

The Travels of Mariko Horo (2006). An interactive 3D virtual reality installation
By Tamiko Thiel, with original music by Ping Jin.

Finally, in Virtuelle Mauer/ReConstructing the Wall, I introduced some characters that take you in a time travel through the history of the Berlin Wall. But if you cross over the invisible boundaries of the former Death Strip,, then you fall back into the 80s, the wall appears behind you. So in all three pieces, it’s really about letting you feel like you have the freedom to go anywhere you want and do anything you want to do. But then you must face the consequences of these actions, which might take you to Paradise or they might take you to prison. But you always feel like it was your decision to go there, or to examine this, and therefore you’re sort of complicit with whatever happens to you.

Video by Tamiko Thiel, Atmos Sphaerae, 2022. Created with the Atmos Sphaerae VR artwork, 2021.

Creating artworks in Augmented Reality offers the possibility of intervening in institutional art spaces uninvited, as you did at MoMA, the Venice Biennale, or TATE Modern, or within a curated exhibition, as is the case with Unexpected Growth, which was shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Can you tell us about the creative process in both cases and your experience with “guerrilla” interventions versus curated exhibitions using the same technology?

Let’s start with We AR in MoMA, an augmented reality project created by Sander Veenhof and Mark Skwarek that took place at the Museum of Modern Art in New York on October 9th, 2010. The iPhone had been around since 2007, as well as other smartphone models, and in the course of 2009 both Mark and Sander had been playing around with the technology and developing AR artworks on mobiles in public spaces. And then they realized they could also geolocate the artworks to have them appear in certain spaces, so they came up with this idea of doing the spectacular intervention at MoMA. I knew Mark from the art circles before we had both shown in the 2009 Boston CyberArts Festival, so he dropped me and many of his artist friends an email saying: “Hey, we’re able to do this now. Send me some content and I’ll put it up and we’ll do a flashmob at MoMA.” They were not asking permission from MoMA. They didn’t know about it, and they couldn’t stop us. At that time, people didn’t realize that location based AR could be used anywhere. But then it turned out that they did find out about it beforehand, because Mark and Sander were doing the intervention as part of a citywide public art festival of psychogeography, so it was publicly announced by the festival all on Twitter. MoMA actually posted a link to the festival and said: “Hey, looks like we’re going to be invaded by AR,” which was very forward thinking and embracing this new development in technology. So, that was incredibly good publicity. It was a really exciting moment, when we realized that there were these possibilities that the new technology was bringing about. I would say this was a path breaking exhibit in the history of media. 

After this intervention at MoMA, the artists who took part in it created the group Manifest.AR. We were thinking about where to do the next incursion, and since I live in Munich, which is a six and a half hour beautiful train ride to Venice, I suggested we go to the Venice Biennale in 2011. It was a group of about eight of us. We created virtual pavilions that were located inside the Giardini and at Piazza San Marco, so that people who didn’t want to spend money to enter the Giardini could also experience the artworks in a public space, because the Giardini, with its walls around it is a classically closed curatorial space. The point was that having your work shown at the MoMA or the Biennale is a sign of achievement, of having been able to enter these closed curatorial spaces, but now with AR interventions that was not true anymore, anybody can place their artwork wherever they want. But then people’s reaction was: “Oh, wow, you’re showing in the Venice Bienniale, you’ve made it!” Then we told them we hadn’t been curated and that we were doing this of our own accord, but people would respond: “Oh, that’s even better.” So we thought we were doing this sort of Duchampian breakdown of all sorts of structures that define prominence in the art world. Duchamp exhibited his famous urinal not to say that an artwork becomes an artwork when an artist says it’s an artwork and places it in an art context, but to state that this whole thing is ridiculous. 

“The point of putting our artworks at the MoMA or the Venice Biennale was that with Augmented Reality anybody can place their artwork wherever they want.”

These interventions gave us a feeling of exhilaration that we could hold our own exhibits anywhere, even though no one in the art world was interested in media art at that moment. And we could also play off site. Because AR is a site-specific medium, you’re always dealing with the site. And that opened up whole new possibilities. Interestingly, shortly after that, George Fifield, the Boston Cyberarts director, arranged our first invitational show at the ICA Boston. This was in April of 2011. The ICA curators didn’t understand how the technology works. They said: “Okay, you can do it on the first floor, but not on the second floor. You can do it in the lobby and outside, but you can’t do it inside of the galleries.” And we had to tell them it doesn’t work that way. The artworks are triggered by a GPS location which has a radius of a mile or so.

As for showing Unexpected Growth at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, it was thanks to Christiane Paul, the adjunct curator of media art at the museum. I have known her for quite a while, I think since about 2002, and she has curated me into many of her shows over the years in different venues, but this was the first time at the Whitney. She had of course done the visionary work of creating Artport, a space for net art supported by the museum, but she still hadn’t placed an AR artwork inside the museum. Then in 2014 she commissioned an AR intervention by Will Pappenheimer, Proxy, 5-WM2A, at the Whitney’s final closing gala for the old Breuer Building. So when she contacted me in 2018 to create an artwork to show at the Whitney, she had already gone through the process of introducing this technology in the museum. She invited me to create an artwork for the terrace, which is 20 by 10 meters in size. Since this was a big show, I needed to make sure that the piece would work properly, so I contacted the people at Layar, the AR app we had used in all our previous interventions, but by then they told me they would shut down their servers, so I had to find a solution. My husband Peter Graf, who is a software developer, told me he could write an app for me. We worked side by side on this project, so I realized he should co-author it with me and he came up with the artist name /p, so now the artwork is in the Whitney collection credited to myself and /p in collaboration. Now the artwork is not officially on view at the museum, but if you download our app and go to the terrace you can still experience it.

Video by Tamiko Thiel, Unexpected Growth (Whitney Museum Walk1), 2018. Created with the Unexpected Growth AR app (2018, with /p), commissioned by and in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art.

There is also the fact that the artworks are invisible, so how did you communicate their existence and solve the technical problems associated with having the proper device, software, and connectivity?

At the Venice Biennale intervention, Sander got in touch with Simona Lodi, director of the Share Festival Turin , and the artist group Les Liens Invisibles, who were together mounting another AR intervention The Invisible Pavilion. We created a common postcard with QR codes to download the app. We also invited people to come to Piazza San Marco and the Giardini on certain days and times and help them experience the artworks. Collaborating with the team from the Share Festival was a huge help, because those of us from outside of Italy had terrible connection issues, and also it was the first Venice Biennale when hordes of people were walking around with their cellphones, overloading the networks. The Vodafone network actually broke down in the Venice area. Gionatan Quintini of Les Liens Invisible loaned me his smartphone to show my work, and this is an example of the kind of collaborative atmosphere that you get in the media art world and that is not that easy to find in the contemporary art world. By connecting our networks with those of Share, we got a lot of publicity for both the interventions in MoMA and in the Venice Biennial, and that put AR in this early time into the media art history books, and therefore into the art canon.

Video by Tamiko Thiel, Sponge Space Trash Takeover (Walk1), 2020. Created with the VR space “Sponge Space Trash Takeover” courtesy of Cyan Planet and xR Hub Bavaria.

The artworks in your latest artcast titled Tamiko Thiel: Invisible Nature all deal with different aspects of our intervention of the natural environment. What has been your experience addressing this subject in terms of the balance between the artistic expression and the message you want to convey? 

Perhaps because I started out as a product designer, with the Connection Machine being what I consider my first artwork, I am always thinking of my audience and how to communicate with them. When I approach political or social issues, such as climate related problems, I know that the really shocking photographs (for instance, a dead bird whose stomach is full of plastic) give you an immediate emotional jolt, and make you realize that this is a serious problem. But I personally cannot look at those images day after day, time and time again. So, balancing my work as an artist with my desire to communicate, sometimes I think that I should be a journalist, so I could write articles that can go into the details in much more depth. But how often do you reread the same article? So I think that what is truly the value of an artist making work about a subject such as these is that the art work can be exhibited time and time again, in different places around the world. And people might see it again, they may be willing to look at it time and time again, but not if it is something horrible and shocking. I’m traumatized enough by what’s happening in the world, so I’d rather create something that is not traumatizing for people, but at the same time it makes you think.

“What is truly the value of an artist making work about a subject such as these is that the art work can be exhibited time and time again, in different places around the world.”

For instance, Unexpected Growth shows a very colorful, bright coral reef on the terrace of the Whitney. And when you look at it more closely, you realize this beautiful coral reef is made out of virtual plastic garbage. So people are confronted with something that is really beautiful, but after a while they realize that they are surrounded by garbage. So my strategy is to seduce people with a strong visual composition that is captivating. And then, when I’ve got their attention, I let them figure out that there is actually something else going on here, if you actually spend the time to look at it.

Video by Tamiko Thiel, Evolution of Fish – Anthropocene Daze #1, 2019. Created with the AR app Evolution of Fish (2019, with /p).

Disrupting flows: Museum of Glitch Aesthetics

Pau Waelder

Mark Amerika’s Museum of Glitch Aesthetics (MOGA), commissioned in 2012 by Abandon Normal Devices for the London Olympics, brings together a series of artworks created between 2005 and 2012 that explore the creative and aesthetic possibilities of glitch through various media. Amerika, with a group of collaborators that included Aaron Angello, Saoirse Crean, Mary Fé, Will Luers, Ruth McCullogh, Chad Mossholder, Julie Rooney, Rick Silva, Joel Swanson, and Steve Wade, among others, set up this fictional institution devoted to the work of The Artist 2.0, an equally fictional character whose oeuvre is profusely described and analyzed in a 73-page catalog that not only elaborates a complete profile of the artist, but also suggests critical reflections on digital culture, the IT industry, and the art world.

Ten years after its creation, MOGA comes to Niio in the form of a selection of six key artworks from the museum, and the following review of the work of The Artist 2.0, which participates in the fiction created by Mark Amerika and his collaborators.

Still from Lake Como Remix (2012)

Image compression

In 2005, The Artist 2.0 presented in an exhibition titled Pixelmash, in the Northwest of England, a series of animated GIFs, a (now lost) internet art work, and a digital video projection, all of which referred to the practice of appropriation and remix, so dear to early net art practitioners. The GIFs, part of the .gif(t) economy series (2005-2006), featured pixelated excerpts of early works of video art, photographs of pop stars, and paintings by Goya in dizzying loops that some would now identify as the work of a post-Internet artist or a cryptoart OG. These works already spoke of The Artist 2.0’s interest in the condition of the digital image in its online distribution: the image as a file that is constantly reused and re-contextualized, and more importantly, compressed. 

Image compression formats were initially developed for the first digital cameras, but became crucial to the development of online content in the 1990s and have been popular ever since. Even recently, in 2021, Beeple’s infamous artwork Everydays: the first 5,000 days, which was sold at auction for $69.3 million, has been criticized for using the lossy compression format JPEG instead of the lossless PNG. While file formats can be said to have become part of our digital culture, they were particularly important for artists putting their work online in the 1990s, as they had to deal with the limitations of a 56kbps dial-up modem and create highly compressed images and 256-color animated GIFs. Pixelated images and fast-paced loops of grainy photographs or video sequences became an integral part of the aesthetics of early Internet art. 

“I was one of the first artists of my generation who self-consciously bought a shitty mobile phone with first generation video recording technology embedded in it and just went, «Wow, that looks totally fucked up and I love it. This is better than painting.»”

The Artist 2.0

Before the dot-com bubble and the fascination for the new millennium brought a fleeting attention to Internet art that had major art institutions such as the Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, or TATE Modern acquiring web-based artworks, net art was identified with a renegade attitude towards the art world. It proclaimed the possibility of bypassing the gatekeepers and hierarchies of the art world 1.0 by using the web as an uncharted territory in which everything was possible and the roles of the actors could be reimagined. However, its proponents knew of the utopian nature of this proposition, as they knew that the art world 2.0 would still be ruled by institutions, corporations, and institutional corporations, and dominated by ever more sophisticated technologies and systems of data transmission. The pixelated image, in this sense, was also a form of rebellion, as well as a nostalgic reminder of a time when the resources were limited and the web was free, as in free speech and free beer.

Mobile Beach, 2007

Better than painting

It is believed that The Artist 2.0 studied art in the Northwest of England, probably at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences of the University of Lancaster. There he created his first mobile phone videos, taking images from his surroundings in industrial zones and the Morecambe bay, and posting photos in a primitive blog. Both the photos and videos presented glitches, consciously created by recording while performing violent movements or riding a vehicle, in order to overwhelm the device with too much data to process. The result, as can be seen in Mobile Beach (2007), presents interesting similarities with color field painting, which The Artist 2.0 surely noticed as they titled some of the photographs obtained with this technique “A Painting that Speaks for Itself.” The Artist 2.0 was also interested in linking these glitched images to street art, as can be seen in several photographs of walls, addressing a reiterated connection between digital art and street art as those rogue practices that do not have a place in mainstream contemporary art. “I was attracted to much lower tech versions of glitch before anyone was really paying attention to it,” states The Artist 2.0, asserting their pioneering role. “I was one of the first artists of my generation who self-consciously bought a shitty mobile phone with first generation video recording technology embedded in it and just went, «Wow, that looks totally fucked up and I love it. This is better than painting.»”

While The Artist 2.0 refers in this quote to the radical and controversial proposition of presenting a glitched image as equal or even superior to a color field painting, there is actually something more interesting taking place in the creation of glitch art. As philosopher Boris Groys once stated, a digital image does not exist by itself, but needs to be performed, to be seen, just as a musical score must be played to be heard. The image file contains information that the device interprets to display it as a visual output, and here Groys points out that “every performance is an interpretation and every interpretation is a betrayal, a misuse.” Therefore, the way we perceive digital images, as the equivalent of printed photographs, celluloid negatives, or paintings, is misleading. The digital image is always the result of an interpretation, and glitched images reveal this hidden truth. Ironically, in this manner the glitched photos taken by The Artist 2.0 do have a lot in common with color field painting, as both types of artworks deny the image its role as an illusory reality.  

Lake District Walks: Code Mosh, 2007-2008

Walk the walk

The Lake District Walk series represents a later phase in The Artist 2.0’s work that stems from their early experiments with a shitty mobile phone. Here the mere recording of a video while walking in the countryside becomes an act of artistic creation as the device is once again overwhelmed by the amount of data to be processed, given the combination of movement and the varied and complex shapes that a natural environment has to offer. Several other elements come into play: the egocentric nature of recording an uneventful moment in one’s life, so much in line with the self-centered attitude that was starting to become the norm in early web 2.0 society; the first-person perspective, made popular by FPS video games; and finally the antagonistic relationship between nature and technology that has lead a growing segment of the world’s population to abandon the countryside and live in cities, where there is abundant wifi and plugs to charge their mobile devices, only to return during weekends to record boring videos and share them on social media. 

“The flow of data, the water of information, is continuous, and I am a multilayered part of the mix. The flow does not ever really need me, but I totally need it. It roots me. It channels my creativity in ways I have no control over.”

The Artist 2.0

Videos like Lake District Walks: Code Mosh (2007-2008) illustrate this phase with a combination of the “color field painting” effect of previous works and a new and more interesting “dragging” effect which takes place when a camera movement forces the device to quickly refresh the image, resulting in a delay that has portions of it frozen and awkwardly dragged to a new position. This effect, crudely achieved in this manner, will inspire future generations of artists, such as Davide Quayola, who has achieved it in a controlled manner through sophisticated image recognition techniques. As will be discussed further, the Lake District walks are by no means a simple method to generate glitches through camera movements and a highly textured environment: the act of walking and the exploration of a non-urban space have a particular meaning that will be made apparent in The Artist 2.0’s later work.

It is worth mentioning in this phase a rara avis, a mysterious undated video whose authorship might be questioned, were it not for its undoubtable similarities with Mobile Beach and its clear influence in the following phases of The Artist 2.0’s oeuvre. Glitch Lake is a separate work that does not consist of recording a walk, but staying put while pointing the camera at a mass of water bathed in the afternoon sun. The gentle ripples caused by the waves and the scintillating reflection of the sun are enough to cause a wide variety of glitches in the otherwise static image. This is a smart move by The Artist 2.0, who finds out that it is not necessary to move the camera around. It is enough to choose a subject that is in constant motion, yet not changing its position: water becomes an ideal generator of glitched videos.

Glitch Lake

Dérives

Before we get to the title of this article, let’s take a detour, or better a dérive. The Artist 2.0 took a turn in his artistic research, caught by the unavoidable appeal that Google products have had on digital artists over the last two decades. Interested in the creative possibilities of Google Earth, he created several artworks, among which the popular Lake Como Remix (2012), a recording of a live VJ session in which The Artist 2.0 explored a road that runs along Lake Como in Italy, exploiting the glitches produced by their erratic navigation. In this virtual dérive, The Artist 2.0 enacts a “walk” in a virtual space composed of a 3D model mapped with photographs and drawn in real time by a software collecting data from the Internet. An obvious, and endless, source of glitches, it becomes an ideal tool for visual experimentation while suggesting a critique of the way our perception of the world is now mediated by the products of a large corporation. Unlike other artworks that address similar glitches, such as Clement Valla’s also widely popular Postcards from Google Earth (2010), the Lake Como video can be logically connected to the Situationists’ practice of dérive, which can be described as aimlessly walking through the city in order to understand its structure and “be drawn by the attractions of the terrain,” as Guy Debord would put it. The Artist 2.0 consciously goes in circles, explores the tunnels and abruptly turns the camera towards the lake to reveal the visual tricks created by the software and the fragile scaffolding on which the whole virtual environment depends. 

Lake Como Remix, 2012

The importance of this dérive, or the act of moving, particularly when comparing this work to those of Valla and others, will be even more relevant in later works by The Artist 2.0. At this point, it is important to mention that Google Earth brings in an even more effective way of using the glitch to question the validity of the image as an illusion of reality. The landscape of Lake Como never succeeds in fooling the viewer: unlike previous videos in which a real image is glitched, here there is no reality to start with. “[T]he image never really has time to become an image in this environment,” states The Artist 2.0, “It’s more like what I call image information or visual codework. It’s something that’s always in process and always being processed by the receiver.” The Artist 2.0 forces Google Earth to veer off its path and participate in a dérive that will never take it to its intended destination. Lost in a cul-de-sac, the software reveals the process behind a simulation that has become powerless.

Disrupting flows

Glitch Lake had shown how water created glitches, but there was more to extract from the idea of flows. The HD Streaming series plays with the requirements of a high definition video, so common in our daily consumption of news and entertainment, which has in turn created the need for higher bandwidth connectivity, wherever we are. The videos are again captured in natural environments and in some cases streamed over the Internet from the mobile phone, conceptually connecting the water streams with the flows of data that enable reproducing the video somewhere else. The Water of Information (Data Flow Capture #36) is an outstanding example of this series: the camera is fixed on a small stream, water flowing down between ferns and bushes. The scene reminds of the view from a public webcam or the fake flowing river photographs one might encounter in certain restaurants. As a video, it is only interesting because the glitches caused by the water disrupt the whole image: it trembles and stretches, and at times it becomes a cascade of pixels, an abstract composition of vertical green lines. As The Artist 2.0 themselves put it, the concept of flow is central to their work: “The flow of data, the water of information, is continuous, and I am a multilayered part of the mix. The flow does not ever really need me, but I totally need it. It roots me. It channels my creativity in ways I have no control over.”

The Water of Information

Adrift in this flow, The Artist 2.0 escapes our gaze and his brief but seminal contribution to the History of Art in one last dérive. Circling back to their origins, The Artist 2.0 remixes a previous artwork, one of the Lake District Walks, which now appears in a split screen next to a virtual recreation of the same video, rendered in a 3D game engine. Titled Getting Lost (The Long Dérive) (2012) this last artwork is an obvious reference to the work of artist Richard Long and the Situationists, in what can be considered typical of a phase of maturity in an artist’s work, when one looks back at the old masters not to kill them, but to acknowledge them. Notably, in this artwork the video is not glitched: technology has now achieved a stable and reasonably well-defined moving image. It is, however, the 3D rendered space that is still glitchy, the camera movements causing a “dragging” effect of certain background elements and simulated objects. It seems, then, that The Artist 2.0 is suggesting that just as digital video has achieved the means to remain an illusion, so will virtual environments, which are currently suffering from a limitation of resources similar to that of online imagery in the 1990s. 

Getting Lost (The Long Dérive), 2012

Getting Lost ends with the camera pointing towards a cloudy sky, as if searching for an answer or a way to continue wandering about. It may also hint at the metaverse, that ill-defined space or accumulation of spaces that seem to reside in the clouds, or nowhere. Notably, online virtual environments are also prone to glitches, as Gazira Babeli, the rogue Second Life performance artist, can attest. The Artist 2.0 has shown that our devices are shaping how we see the world, even before virtual and augmented reality turn real spaces into mere point clouds meant to be covered with perfectly rendered 3D illusions from which we cannot escape. But even then, there will be glitches, and the glitches will reveal the truth.