I would like to start our conversation by asking what inspired FANTASY.JPEG  and The History of Meaning?

 

My project began in a class I was assigned to teach. Honestly, I was not looking forward to it—it was an extremely elementary college course on Adobe programs. It was challenging to go so far back to basics, there was even a student who didn't know how to use a mouse. However, this class was an incredible experience because everyone was so curious about things you don't ever question as an artist or as someone fluent in computers. It made me rethink digital structures I had never given much thought to. One day, a student asked why it wasn’t working for her to upload a PSD file to a website. I told her to upload it as a JPEG instead, and she was like, "What’s a JPEG?"

 

I had never really thought about what a JPEG actually was and could only provide a vague answer, so I looked it up. I immediately discovered JPEG actually stands for “Joint Photographic Experts Group.” So naturally, I went into a research hole, and attempted to learn as much as I could about their organization. Their algorithm determines what information is visible and what gets lost in compression in most of the images we see online—a significant power to have. There's so much going on behind what we experience on screens, and we take their inner workings for granted. We forget that they are created by other humans. So this discovery is the starting point for my film. What about you, Kim?

 

It’s funny, this project came out of teaching for me as well. I was newer to teaching at the time, and I would have these conversations with students that would follow me into the studio about all kinds of different imaging technology history. A big one was about Vermeer’s use of curved glass to visualize space in his work—essentially proto-lens technology. I think it is still kind of controversial (among art historians) that Vermeer and earlier painters used a camera obscura to make paintings. I asked a class about whether using a device like a camera obscura made painting less masterful, or that the device diminished the “artist’s hand”, and resoundingly they did think it demystified the ‘artistic genius’—they were scandalized! Those kinds of conversations would resonate with me, and I began building these disordered tabletop still lives in the studio to work out my ideas.

 

I started with one set idea, such as the Camera Obscura. Initially I was just researching in traditional ways, using academic resources or intuitively placing objects in the frame that I thought had a relationship. Later as I started making more of these, I started thinking of them as an analog to the Internet, and I began to use Wikipedia to build material lists. I'm following hot links in Wikipedia that start with a ‘darkened chamber’, for example. A lot of the materials are related, but other ones are arbitrary because they're hot links that someone went into Wikipedia and edited. I'm building these compositions that are researched, but also absurd in nature. I think the objects can allude to cached information, but they also reflect an Internet search. I know that an Internet search is not arbitrary. I know algorithms run searches, and I know it's exactly what Lily is saying in terms of a powerful, hidden system that is preferencing corporate or monied interests; but sometimes as a user, the internet search seems like an arbitrary kind of constellation, rather than an academic linear search that one might traditionally engage in.

 

In our media-heavy culture we are surrounded by lenses. Why did you choose the medium of film/photography for your projects?  Could you talk about role the camera plays in the work, as it seems that it is referencing itself.

 

My background and training is in photography, so even when I work in other mediums, actually instead of sketching, I work through ideas with a camera. For me, it's not even a question, it's just the intuitive way that I work.

 

In this case, because I'm thinking a lot about different kinds of imaging technology in the photographs, it's important that I'm using a camera or thinking about the photographic viewpoint. Particularly, for these works, I'm standing over them to maintain a human perspective. I tried to make some where I had the camera on a tripod at a parallel to the still life. The parallel view almost looked like it was tilting overboard—in some ways it was nice that the viewpoint is disorienting, but it’s not naturalistic. It is intentional that these photographs have a natural viewpoint because it gives the illusion of standing over this ‘work table’—but it’s still a constructed viewpoint. So the camera seems like an obvious choice on both levels. It’s intuitive, and it circles back to some of the ideas I want to talk about in these photographs.

 

It’s hard for me to distinguish the mediums of film and photography. I chose to create a moving image to portray a story about a still image format, partially because most videos are just a series of JPEGs flashing. Even though my video is about filmmakers, this photo format is still the heart of it, even on a technical level.

 

In both Kim’s and my work in this show, the camera becomes a character. In Kim’s, the camera gives the viewer the sense of someone watching or spying on an intimate space. In my work, cameras are extensions of every character—they are worn as weapons.

 

In terms of its relation to our media-heavy culture, FANTASY.JPEG calls attention to the overlooked bias that exists within digital image production. This bias extends to the fact that only 4% of the one hundred top-grossing films in Hollywood were directed by women. Even though we all celebrate the Me Too movement, or Ava Duvernay directing A Wrinkle in Time, or the box office success of Greta Gerwig’s film, or things like that, this is not substantial enough progress or a real movement yet. I spend most of my time surrounded by amazing female filmmakers, so this lack of progress or representation is frustrating. I wanted to boost their visibility by casting them into my work.

 

Lily refers to the feeling of a Digital Déjà Vu in her film, and Kim suggested it as a title for the show. What does Digital Déjà Vu mean to you?

 

I used to get migraines for entire months at a time, so I have notebooks that are really scary looking because they were written in total darkness. During one of these migraines, I was sleeping and dreaming a lot. You probably all get this too, like where you dream “in computer.” There’s an interface to control reality with—I could press control Z to undo something that happened. I was dreaming digitally.

 

And so I wrote down the term “digital deja vu” in my notebook. I was thinking about how to remember the dream, or what it would be like to experience this power in my future waking life. Then while writing FANTASY.JPEG, I came across this note and wove it into the film’s dialog. I think it's just about how, right now, we are at this really exciting point in time where our brains are changing so fast because technology is evolving so rapidly. For me, it represents the fact that my dreams are a totally different format now.

 

Well, I'm so glad you let us use it! I really love it. For me, the phrase conjures image fatigue. We are consuming so much media. Many times we look at images that we have never seen, but that we think we have seen, or images that we have seen over and over, and they start to become unrecognizable or lose meaning.

 

I want to add that I watched The Matrix a couple of weeks after our opening and I hadn't seen it since like 2000 or something. One of the ways that they know a glitch or change in the matrix has occured is when experiencing a déjà vu. This relates to what you were saying about recognition.

 

The Matrix makes me think of this idea of technological acceleration. In Rebecca Solnit's book, River of Shadows, her book about Eadweard Muybridge, she talks about these letters written soon after the invention of the steam engine. The first riders on passenger trains are writing to family about how the world is flashing before their eyes, but really, they were only going like, 30 miles an hour. That stuck with me because acceleration is something that we continue to experience. I imagine we will look back in a hundred years and think, “Oh how quaint the internet once was”.

 

I gave a talk at Pioneer Works last week, which came out of a vague notion I've had while training as a hypnotist. As an image maker, there clearly is a big connection between your subconscious mind and making pictures. In my talk I connected all of these major points in the development in hypnosis that I intuited to be correlated with the development of image making. I was surprised at how perfectly they aligned. For instance, in 1839 photography was invented. Then several years later the word hypnosis was coined by someone who studied eye movements. Of course the development of our minds is affected by technology, but it's still so profound, and it’s hard to fully grasp the effects. We all know it's not good to endlessly scroll through our phones, but we do it and we are all changing and evolving together. We quickly forget what we used to be.

 

I do think there is research about the emotional health detriments of technology, but not exactly in the way that you are talking about. I wonder frequently about what you are saying, about the evolutionary effects of technology.

 

Within the healing field, I've heard a lot of people just say that their business is booming because everyone has so much anxiety from being on their phone.

 

The behavioural changes are mind-boggling. Many of our everyday experiences are reflected in your work and can easily be missed. When experiencing the work what are the subtleties that the viewer might fail to see or understand?

 

There is no way that anybody would come to my work without a conversation or a context to know that I'm using Wikipedia to make these photographs, which I have thought about as maybe a missed opportunity, perhaps that could be resolved through titling. I actually just like having a conversation with people more. The title of the project is, “The History of Meaning”, and it's taken from George Kubler’s book, The Shape of Time. In it, he's talking about classifications of tools versus art. He posits that we adhere meaning to objects differently, which alters our perception of function or ideology. For example, the blue photograph with the Magic 8-ball is called “Counting Table”, which is an early name for an abacus. The title does give some clues about content, but there's no apparent way to connect the images to an Internet search.

 

Early on I thought subtlety was a weakness in the work, now I think it’s a strength. When I started making these, I didn't think about them as having narrative potential. I didn't think about the characters at all. The more I started considering: ‘Who might be at the table?’, I started imagining that these are the people that didn't get recognized for these technological inventions, that they are shut-ins in one extreme or just didn’t have power or influence. All of these technologies are either invented by or attributed to men. For example, in my photograph “Marks”, I am thinking about mark-making from cave painting to Wacom tablets. Historically, ancient cave painting has been attributed to men, but in the last five years or so, archeologists have gone back and used specific hand measurements, and they have discovered that the bulk of cave painting—like three-quarters!—were actually made by women. It’s contested though, because it dismantles history. Primary history is written by men, so what is the motivation to change it? Or: even if everybody got on board, and we culturally decided to change this, how long would it take to get into history books, and then how long would it take for these history books to get disseminated into schools? So the outmoded idea remains the dominant one.

 

I did not know that! Thank you for disseminating.

 

Everything I read about this recent discovery in cave paintings tied back to one piece of research, and the response was ‘Yeah, well it could be true that women made these, but we have no way of proving it’, which is technically true, but the archaeologists are using biological hand measurements to support their research. Before this hand discovery, the prevailing idea was: ‘men were hunters, and the cave paintings often depict animals, so therefore men made the pictures.’ This seems less scientifically provable to me than the biological observation that men’s ring fingers are longer than their index, whereas women’s ring fingers tend to be equal to their index—which is what was found represented in the caves.

 

Most of my work revolves around feminist history (aka lost history) or around marginalized figures. I also work at The New York Times, where they recently launched the Overlooked project, which writes obituaries for significant women who weren’t acknowledged during their time. In talking to the editor of that project, she told me that so many amazing women are recommended to the project. But to publish something in The Times, it has to be thoroughly fact-checked. So this inhibits a lot of women being included, because sometimes there are only loose anecdotes from someone's grandchild, and that's it. I recently saw the film The Favourite. Afterward, my friend Kirby and I were trying to figure out how much of the romance was based on a true story. She found an article that said, “It’s possible but lesbian affairs don't really leave a trace.” I guess because there's not going to be an accidental pregnancy. Haha. In my experience with looking for feminist history, I find it’s often passed on through storytelling, myths, or as a casual aside to a male history. It wasn’t archived with the same precision as patriarchal history. What is sometimes missed with FANTASY.JPEG, is that it’s a combination of real facts, the Amazon warrior myth, and speculative fiction.

 

Luckily both of you are represented in your work. Lily the director and protagonist and Kim the photographer discreetly hiding in her photographs. Could you talk about your choice of self representation?

 

I am in my photographs accidentally, initially anyway. I could have edited myself out, but I'm not doing any real retouching.

 

I sadly don’t have an interesting answer. I mostly appear in my work because I didn’t have a budget for an actress, and I have unlimited access to myself.

 

To loop back to the idea of representation in the cave paintings, or to what you talk about Lily, the idea that feminist history is often passed on through storytelling or myth, literally reflecting myself in these photographs is inserting myself into the narrative. I am creating these fictive spaces, but by reflecting myself, I am revealing a tiny portal outside of this constructed space. I'm always a secondary character in the work.

 

I would like to come back to the “Counting Table” and the Amazon warrior myth. It often times feels like we are in a time loop—endlessly revisiting the past trying to piece the fragments together in order to make sense of the present. Shifts in time and perception are an important part of your work. Could you speak about your understanding of the past and your vision for the future?

 

Sure. I like how you phrase this, as a time loop. In “Counting Table”—and in all of the photographs—I am considering variable timescales in this work. When looking at a visual timeline, it is often a linear depiction of time, that moves left to right (Western). I’m thinking about how I can fit that timeline in the picture plane, sort of smashing it vertically. In each frame I'm trying to include objects that represent different timescales: geologic time, cosmic time, historical time, biographical time, and technological time.

 

Each of these timescales has a rhythm, and an acceleration. Going back to the idea of déjà vu, I have the expectation that each era, from agrarian to industrial and now technological, has a loss of nuance. As time moves more quickly, perhaps we don’t pick up the same details, or know people as intimately. But the positive view of technological advancement doesn’t reflect that idea: technological advancements can improve mobility or accessibility, as well as giving access to a diversity of voices. We all have cameras in our phones, so we can all share our viewpoint. In effect, there are more nuanced perspectives being shared; I think that digital natives will shape the future of integrated technology in an impactful way. Right now we are still straddling both an analog and digital existence without a clear roadmap.

 

We are all facing the effects of our view of the world as us versus technology, seeing technology as something outside of ourselves. This brings about so many issues, our interaction with technology doesn’t account for our bodies, chronic pain develops out of this. Clearly, we cannot have this current situation continue for much longer. What I see in the future is a more integrated world. Not wearables, but something more seamless and bodily. I also hope for technology that it simply grows out of the ground and doesn’t damage the ecosystem.

 

A holistic approach to our networked world—I’d second that. I only hope I will live to see it. After all, we are in a very exciting moment as a society re-examining the established structures and the bias with in them—politically, socially, culturally, etc.

 

When the Cosby Show and Oprah's talk show were shot, they had to like literally add an extra sensor to the videos camera to be able to pick up darker skin tones. The extra sensor is kind of like a cyborg arm sticking off the side, it’s an add-on to the original camera design. And I feel like that's also where weare headed, to account for our changing ideals and identity politics, to undo design mistakes from the past, technology needs to get messy for a while.

 

This relates back to your starting point for FANTASY.JPEG, Lily. I think we overlook the systems and motivations of the companies that shape how we see images. For example, Kodak films were developed to preference lighter skin. The technology was applied based on focus groups—so while the scientific measurement might reflect a color one way, the preferences or biases of individuals shaped how the materials were produced. Digital camera sensors are similar; the way color is represented is specific to the camera manufacturer. It’s about having proprietary technology on the one hand, but still preferences how color is processed.

 

I guess all of us have our preferences to how we envision the world we want to live in and how that world should be translated back through lenses, which bring us to FANTASY. Let’s talk about it.

 

I hadn’t really considered fantasy in my work, though it’s apt. I do consider this work to be speculative, so there is a relationship to fantasy. I am imagining alternatives to this world, the world I want or how I want to be reflected in the world. In some ways, I am thinking more about troubleshooting: written history is too monolithic. I am trying to piece together, and crowd source via Wikipedia, a more pluralistic view of the world.

 

Disassociating can be part of a mental illness diagnosis, or seen as a negative thing. However, in learning more and more about pain management, the number one way to feel less pain is to disassociate from it. So that to me kind of goes hand in hand with like, okay, this situation sucks. So let me project this fantasy. And then quite literally your body feels better.

 

With that in mind, fantasy is a great place to do feminist work. It doesn't need to use measurements from the Enlightenment to exist—anything is possible. My film ends in a fantastical space, the source of all digital images. In this space, female filmmakers determine the future of image making while experiencing joy and freedom. Perhaps there's a longstanding relationship between science fiction and feminism because the world changes slower than it can in our minds or visions.

 

There's a term I recently learned, which Columbia has an entire master's program in, called “narrative medicine.” Perhaps that's a more useful term than fantasy. I just finished my hypnosis training, so I can’t stop referencing hypnosis, but you can heal a huge trauma just from fantasizing about it and writing a new story.

 

From what I understand we are the only species with the ability to imagine the impossible. Thank you both for the conversation. I look forward to your future projects.

 

 

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