Transcript
Speaker: Welcome to Arranging Tangerines, presented by Lady and Stater.
Speaker: Conversations with contemporary artists, curators, and thinkers about the intersection of art, technology, and commerce.
Speaker: Your hosts are me, Alessandro Silver and Joseph Wilcox.
Speaker: I don't know what to do.
Speaker: I don't know what to say.
Speaker: I just know I don't want to be like you.
Speaker: I don't know what to do.
Speaker: I don't know what to say.
Speaker: I just know I don't want to.
Speaker: This week's guest is Laura Splenn.
Speaker: Part two.
Speaker: I wanted to ask you about every single project you have on your website.
Speaker: Wait, before you go, though, can I... No, I'm not going to do that.
Speaker: I don't think I have the time.
Speaker: Go ahead.
Speaker: I wanted to jump over to Web3 a little bit.
Speaker: And I saw on your...
Speaker: history that you had a project that maybe you were the head of called DOS, which was kind of like a artist collective type thing.
Speaker: I don't know if you would have called it a collective then, but it was, correct me if I'm wrong, but it was a platform where artists could sell work and they'd keep 50% and 50% would go to charity.
Speaker: And I didn't know if you were involved in anything like that kind of in the Web3 space or not.
Speaker: And if you are, what is it?
Speaker: And what's your kind of thoughts on that?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So that was Dose Projects, which I started in 2013.
Speaker: And it was originally supposed to be just a website where I would invite artists to sell work, physical work.
Speaker: And then they could choose a charity that they wanted to donate 50% of the sales to, and then they would keep the other 50%.
Speaker: So it was really just...
Speaker: labor of love and like a, you know, just a way to connect with these artists work.
Speaker: And, um, and then it very quickly turned into, uh, a website launch.
Speaker: And then that very quickly turned into a group exhibition.
Speaker: And then that turned into a, uh, I guess kind of like a pop-up gallery space where I was curating
Speaker: solo exhibitions of artists.
Speaker: It's funny how that happens, right?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So that, that, um, that went on for, well, it went on until I moved out of my last studio.
Speaker: So that was five years ago.
Speaker: Um, and then when I moved into this studio, I basically kind of migrated all the sensibilities of that.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: and I guess energy of that into, um, something that's called Plexus projects now, which is, um, a much less, uh, defined project.
Speaker: Um, and it, it basically is whatever it can be at the moment based on my schedule and what I have time and space for.
Speaker: But, um, what it's been most recently is handing over my
Speaker: space to people like Lee Toosman to do like many artist residencies and use the space to make their own work in any way they want.
Speaker: And so I've done that with a few artists.
Speaker: And then I've also had groove exhibitions in the space.
Speaker: And yeah, so that it's, you know, it's basically like an artist run project.
Speaker: The artists, you know, I, my favorite thing about it is just giving a space to an artist without requiring any kind of proposal.
Speaker: And I love like being surprised.
Speaker: I love like walking in and being surprised.
Speaker: And yeah, just kind of giving an artist a level or quality of freedom that they don't get from a conventional art gallery.
Speaker: And it's, yeah, it's, it's taken a lot of different forms.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: And, you know, I've done some kind of like one day exhibitions for Greenpoint Open Studios.
Speaker: And there's a small like art publication, zine, art ephemera collection that I'll pull out and show too.
Speaker: But it's become increasingly focused on
Speaker: digital art, new media art, um, and like the kind of, um, connection between virtual art and physical experience or physical art.
Speaker: Um, and so most of the, most of what I've shown in this space over the last few years has been projections screenings, but I also have, um, I've also done screenings on the street where I have a, um,
Speaker: a little section of my window that you can see from the street that has special film on it so that I can project, um, with a short throw for projector onto the window.
Speaker: And that's been really fun to just like start projecting weird video art onto the window and kind of see how people stop and look at it.
Speaker: And, um,
Speaker: And so, you know, having and actually that was really interesting because I was still doing those at the beginning of the pandemic.
Speaker: So I was able to keep doing those at the beginning of the pandemic because I wasn't asking anybody to come in the space.
Speaker: So I would just come here by myself and set up the projector.
Speaker: And I bet you made a lot of people's nights on their nightly walks during the height of the pandemic by having something on the window for them to.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, it just like activated what was a very sad street situation.
Speaker: Um, then so, yeah, so I'm still, I'm still doing programming around that and it, it always changes and, um, and it, yeah, it was never, um, it was never like a
Speaker: web three um format but it is intriguing and i have thought about it and i actually ask is because of all these dows that are starting and yeah very much in line with that it's just all on the blockchain or whatever yeah yeah i've bought some domain names but i haven't oh okay i haven't fully decided well we all know that's the first step right it really is like if you buy the domain name it means you're kind of serious yes
Speaker: And that's a physical thing almost the domain.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Cause there's a, you know, you have to pay for it.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It costs money.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I'm committed for $10.
Speaker: Can we know what the domain name is?
Speaker: No.
Speaker: It's a secret.
Speaker: It's a secret.
Speaker: But that's where we're giving of you to offer this opportunity to people.
Speaker: Yeah, it's been really rewarding too.
Speaker: And I've met so many artists that I've kept in touch with or that were in an exhibition and then we just like cross paths again later that we realize we have this connection through.
Speaker: And, you know, I have a very deep love for artists
Speaker: moving images and I could just sit and watch video art, animation art all day.
Speaker: So it curating the exhibitions is always a very pleasurable thing.
Speaker: You know, my like I said, I started making I started with video being my first media, really video and photography.
Speaker: So it always feels like a deep dive into the.
Speaker: aesthetics and tools and technologies that I'm not necessarily using in my own work that, um, are just kind of interesting to get exposed to and consider in new ways.
Speaker: And, and I don't know, it's just, it's sort of like a weird form of binging.
Speaker: I can understand that.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That's great.
Speaker: You're bringing the content to, to, you're bringing the content to yourself.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's like you go to these, you go to museums and galleries and you see this amazing
Speaker: animations or moving images and they're not readily accessible, which part of the promise of the NFT is to have the ability to put the thing out there and still be able to monetize it.
Speaker: And so Matthew Barney doesn't have to hide his DVD away from you.
Speaker: You can watch it and he can still make the budget for the next whatever it is that he's going to make next.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, hopefully that's that comes to fruition.
Speaker: But because I mean,
Speaker: I, to my civilian friends that are not in the art world, I can't talk to them about Paul Pfeiffer or anybody.
Speaker: It's like, it's like talking to them about an alien.
Speaker: Like, yeah, but they should probably see these videos, you know?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And if you can send them a link of Paul Pfeiffer's work, you can talk about it, but you can't.
Speaker: I can't.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And it has been nice to have these, I mean, I love like bringing people into the space to see the screenings, but also putting it on the street.
Speaker: There's something even more special about that where, um, you know, you're hoping to kind of bring in an audience that wouldn't normally know about this space or, um, you know, isn't connected by way of people who are already involved in showing work.
Speaker: So, um,
Speaker: I have a funny Matthew Barney story.
Speaker: Oh, please.
Speaker: Of course.
Speaker: I used to work at this place called the Bay Area Video Coalition in San Francisco, which is a nonprofit media arts center.
Speaker: And I was I worked in the control room, like dubbing tapes and I.
Speaker: and operating the different machines for the different editing suites.
Speaker: And Matthew Barney was editing his Cream Master 5 in the main editing suite, which is right next to the control room.
Speaker: And at the time, one of my first curatorial projects was a public access television show.
Speaker: Awesome.
Speaker: That makes sense.
Speaker: And I was kind of doing the same thing I'm doing now, where I was just...
Speaker: I was inviting artists to come on and talk about their work and then I would show their work.
Speaker: This has always been part of your practice.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: And so I was editing, I was dubbing my own public access television show while I was at work, of course.
Speaker: And so I was like making copies of the part where me and my collaborator Jeanne Finley were introducing the videos
Speaker: So we were like on the kind of quintessential public access television set.
Speaker: There were probably two ferns involved.
Speaker: There were definitely some weird lights with like orange gels.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And Matthew Barney walked in and he's like, are you the hostess of a television show?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I was so like confused by the question because I'd never thought about it that way.
Speaker: Like I was just so, you know, it was always about like showing people's work or like curating this project or, um,
Speaker: you know, also just like doing this thing in between 20 other things.
Speaker: So I hadn't really thought about it that way.
Speaker: And I was just like, yeah, I am a host of some television show.
Speaker: That's funny.
Speaker: So you didn't convince him to be on though?
Speaker: No, I should have asked, but I chickened out.
Speaker: Did you see the work called Transfiguration on her website?
Speaker: I'm so excited to see somebody use that title.
Speaker: Since the beginning of when we started this podcast, he's been trying to work in Transfiguration questions into every... Not every, but... Well, you pulled back after I hassled you too much about it.
Speaker: So now there's an opportunity.
Speaker: But even my daughter, she had First Communion recently, and I was talking to her about the whole thing and how... I mean, I'm not Catholic anymore.
Speaker: um but the catholic church literally feels like the bread has become the body of christ like to the point where i wanted to take one and send it to a dna lab to have them i mean i think people have done that before but if they can prove that there's actually uh human dna in that that uh unleavened bread that's why they don't let you take it out of the church you can buy them off market
Speaker: You can smuggle it out under your tongue.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I did see that.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I was raised Catholic.
Speaker: Awesome.
Speaker: No longer Catholic.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's a really provocative notion.
Speaker: And I, you know,
Speaker: to your earlier question about interest in science.
Speaker: Um, I think that's part of it.
Speaker: I think that those notions of, um, the kind of magical transformation of bodily matter is, uh, is very intriguing and also very confusing to a child.
Speaker: Um, so, you know, I think that there's so much imagery in Catholicism and, um,
Speaker: religious art that is, uh, is a different way of, uh, kind of understanding the vulnerability of the body.
Speaker: And, and I think it's difficult to not relate that to medicine and science.
Speaker: And, uh, but yeah, I mean, and certainly in terms of science, the, the, um, possibilities for the transformation of not just the body, but of matter, um,
Speaker: And so, yeah, the host is one.
Speaker: And then what about the wine being the blood of Christ?
Speaker: I mean, what are we doing?
Speaker: We're drinking blood and eating flesh every Sunday.
Speaker: And we're all okay with that.
Speaker: Let's not even touch upon the fact that God is supposed to be the son and the Holy Spirit.
Speaker: Like, let's not even...
Speaker: I, yeah, I never got a good answer about that one.
Speaker: There is no good answer.
Speaker: It's magic.
Speaker: It's just magic.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But I wanted to bring up this Arthur C. Clarke quote.
Speaker: He said that every sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Speaker: Wait, read that again?
Speaker: Every sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Speaker: So you do believe in transfiguration.
Speaker: You just think we haven't figured out how it works properly to say if the DNA is actually in that.
Speaker: That's the most reasonable solution.
Speaker: It's also interesting to, with so much immersive art and remote sensing technologies and interactive art,
Speaker: I often kind of think of that in relation to art as well.
Speaker: Like there is a real, um, I think that art is actually serving that role in many ways of providing a lot of magic.
Speaker: And, um, I think it's difficult sometimes to, uh, to make sure that your work isn't just a magic show.
Speaker: Like Oliver Eliasson.
Speaker: It can be challenging, you know, like you, you,
Speaker: I love magic.
Speaker: I really do.
Speaker: I love magic.
Speaker: I like magic shows, but I, yeah, I think it's tricky right now to, to kind of not let it just sit there as magic and, and, and negotiate that, that balance between, um,
Speaker: seducing the viewer, keeping their attention, and also making sure you're using the technology in a way that when we understand what the tools and technologies are, we still are interested, that it doesn't...
Speaker: completely pull back the curtain that there's still something else, uh, to, to discover.
Speaker: And that might be that other thing to discover might just be how you bring your own subjectivity to the piece and, and how it unfolds uniquely for you.
Speaker: And, um, and hopefully there's some sort of magic to be discovered there that the artists couldn't have possibly experienced.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, nobody's asking about like the technology of painting anymore, but it still has lots to offer viewers.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And I had heard someone say about, so about magic.
Speaker: So I said, let me show you what, let me show you what the thing is and let me show you what the thing is.
Speaker: And it isn't.
Speaker: And you question what else have I been wrong about?
Speaker: Hmm.
Speaker: That's a quote in relation to magic.
Speaker: Magic.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, I actually think that magic and illusion, visual, optical, cognitive illusions are extremely...
Speaker: relevant and like in need of new investigation and exploration.
Speaker: And I think that a lot of that is coming out of how artists are using the relationship or kind of like working creatively with the relationship between virtual and physical experiences.
Speaker: And I'm really interested to see
Speaker: if I can start to create some virtual experiences and, and I actually think that I'm already trying to do this, but, um, how virtual experiences can be used to, um,
Speaker: to challenge our understanding of physical space more and more and more.
Speaker: And not just in like an Easter egg way, but also in a way that relates to ideas of perception.
Speaker: And that, and that's kind of where my interest in illusions lies, like how we can sort of understand how we're perceiving physical space, its potential, its structure,
Speaker: in new ways that are informed by our experiences in virtual spaces.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So you are working on some VR artworks or you have done them before?
Speaker: Yeah, no.
Speaker: That was going to be one of my questions.
Speaker: I'm actually, I'm just starting some work with virtual technologies that will probably be a VR headset type experience, but it will be...
Speaker: Um, very dependent upon and very related to a more conventional experience in a physical art space.
Speaker: Um, so I'm really interested to see how I can, uh, intricately entangle the two and make them, uh, make them rely on each other heavily.
Speaker: Um, so do you mean more of like a, like an augmented reality type thing?
Speaker: Where you're still engaging with the physical space or no?
Speaker: So I am more interested in having a VR experience that precedes a physical experience.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: And kind of teases out what I think of as the virtual residue of a virtual experience.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: And how those residues sort of surface as we move through physical space and we sort of understand that physical space or the objects within it in new ways that we wouldn't have that are completely informed by a virtual experience.
Speaker: But I also think that...
Speaker: A lot of work that I've already done is exploring this in different ways.
Speaker: So like the work I've done with network sculptures where there's either some sort of remote sensing happening or there's...
Speaker: some sort of rematerialization of something happening in virtual space.
Speaker: So I've done some network sculptures that were networked to Twitter activity where Twitter activity was activating these laboratory shakers.
Speaker: This was the llama feces, right?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So, yeah.
Speaker: So that, that to me is also that kind of strange entanglement of what,
Speaker: what our actions in physical or in virtual space, um, how they get rematerialized in physical space, either through, um, government policies about scientific research or, um,
Speaker: you know, how we are relating to the materiality of the pharmaceutical drugs that we buy and how we understand its materiality.
Speaker: So, um, I already think that I'm doing this.
Speaker: I'm just really interested to do it in a more, um, uh, kind of choreographed way, um, that,
Speaker: Plays with all of the problems of virtual reality as material.
Speaker: The annoying experience of putting on a headset and the kind of limited time you can spend in it and playing with how to facilitate that in a performative way.
Speaker: That's the word I was looking for, performative.
Speaker: I can edit that in.
Speaker: Awesome.
Speaker: Just because we were talking about it, though, I did have a question about the Contested Territories piece.
Speaker: And maybe I didn't read far enough into it, but the significance of the llama, is that... Yeah.
Speaker: Is there... Or is it just because you like llamas?
Speaker: Oh, no.
Speaker: There's significance.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: No, it has to do with...
Speaker: extracting um is it dna for for for vaccines um it's blood blood yeah so back to blood um yeah so uh
Speaker: Llamas and alpacas are used to produce blood for biological products like vaccines and antiviral treatments, including the COVID vaccine, because they have unique antibody structures.
Speaker: So their antibodies can be engineered or processed to produce what are called nanobodies.
Speaker: And those nanobodies can be engineered in the laboratory more easily and have other logistical benefits.
Speaker: So I started working with some of the ideas around nanobodies in 2018 when I was doing this residency at
Speaker: a biotech lab.
Speaker: And part of the process of preparing non-human antibodies to be used in human pharmaceuticals is called humanization.
Speaker: So they have to humanize the non-human antibodies for human drugs.
Speaker: Does that mean putting them in front of Netflix for a couple of days?
Speaker: So I was really interested in that, you know, the language around this process.
Speaker: And I even was able to watch what's called a B cell collection where they receive a chicken leg and a test tube in the morning.
Speaker: That chicken's been slaughtered in the morning.
Speaker: And then they are able to scrape the B cells out of that chicken leg to start collecting antibodies from that cell.
Speaker: So many different non-human species are used for the production of biological products in general, but also for antibodies.
Speaker: And so they inoculate the animal with a target, and then that animal starts to produce a ton of antibodies that respond to that target.
Speaker: And that's what they're collecting from their blood or from their leg.
Speaker: And so...
Speaker: Through that curiosity, somehow I ended up with 200 pounds of fiber from laboratory llamas from a vivarium in western Pennsylvania that actually allowed me to come and visit and gave me a tour of their 600-acre farm where they have thousands of animals that are all producing biological products.
Speaker: Um, and so I, yeah, in the back, I can show it to you.
Speaker: I have 200 pounds of llama and alpaca fiber from laboratory animals that produce nanobodies for human drugs.
Speaker: And they just like, don't need the fibers.
Speaker: Cause they don't use them.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: They have to be their business model.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: They have to be shorn every year and just seasonally.
Speaker: And, um, as far as I understand it, um,
Speaker: They don't keep it.
Speaker: Um, anyway, like using alpaca for, for, for knitting and stuff, right?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And so there were two different laboratories that gave me their fiber.
Speaker: I got three very lovely separate bags of alpaca fiber.
Speaker: One was black, one was brown, and one was this really pretty champagne color.
Speaker: in separate bags, very clean.
Speaker: And then I got 200 pounds of llama fiber that was filthy.
Speaker: So I think the alpaca fiber could have been milled.
Speaker: Um, but the mills are picky about how clean the fiber has to be.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: So I have been hand washing and carding all the fiber myself because I wouldn't be able to just take it to a mill.
Speaker: And anyway, they when I've been cleaning and carding the fiber because I wanted to spin it into yarn for some sculptures.
Speaker: I would often find llama feces in the fiber.
Speaker: And so I started collecting it and that feces became part of the material for this sculpture of networked laboratory shakers.
Speaker: And there are different shakers in the series that are displayed together.
Speaker: And each shaker is networked to different Twitter activity based on hashtags of specific words that were recommended by the Trump administration
Speaker: that scientists not use in their applications for scientific research and funding.
Speaker: And they include things like science-based and evidence-based.
Speaker: So when anybody tweets hashtag fetus or transgender or science-based or evidence-based, one of the shakers will shake the shit.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: That's funny.
Speaker: I'm glad I asked.
Speaker: For our audience.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That's all mine, I think.
Speaker: I mean, I guess I'd like to.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: If we can just talk about the stuff you have out.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: Starting with the collages, right?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Because those are.
Speaker: Those are the trends.
Speaker: The earliest in this?
Speaker: Or are they?
Speaker: Actually, no.
Speaker: The lace doilies behind you are the earliest.
Speaker: Those are from 2004.
Speaker: Those are computerized machine embroidered lace.
Speaker: And each lace sculpture is based on a different virus structure.
Speaker: And one of them is SARS-1.
Speaker: That was amazing to me.
Speaker: This is probably how I've seen your work because people bring up your work.
Speaker: in relationship to the pandemic.
Speaker: But yeah, you were doing that very early.
Speaker: It had nothing to do, obviously, with... Yeah, I was already doing work around viruses and bacteria.
Speaker: And it was just part of this larger investigation of scientific and biomedical imagery in relation to culture.
Speaker: Kind of always trying to...
Speaker: connect the two, uh, connect how, um, our relationship to science and technology and medicine emerges in our daily lives and, um, and kind of playing with that.
Speaker: Uh, at that time I was doing a lot of work with like latch hooking and knitting and, um, um,
Speaker: I made a bunch of like oversized pharmaceutical drugs with latch hook as pillows.
Speaker: So there's like a giant Prozac and a giant Zoloft.
Speaker: And so I was, you know, thinking about how these objects could work.
Speaker: speculatively function in a domestic space.
Speaker: And so they're sort of initially recognizable as a doily, but there's something a little bit off about them.
Speaker: But they are actually pretty accurate.
Speaker: representations of illustrations of these different enveloped viruses like HIV and SARS and influenza and herpes and hepatina.
Speaker: And yeah, so those, those have kind of,
Speaker: had a new life emerge in the last couple years.
Speaker: And then the other, you mentioned the Transfigurations, but that's one of the series of collages here where I was actually looking at...
Speaker: Advertising in magazines for beauty products and health products and very meticulously cutting out things like splashes and drips and applicator tips for different products from magazines.
Speaker: And then reconfiguring them into these collages on like a white face.
Speaker: that are not recreating the advertisement.
Speaker: I'm actually like mixing all of these different elements that I cut out.
Speaker: But exploring these ideas of...
Speaker: you know, that are kind of embedded in the, in the advertisements, which is these, um, kind of promises of salvation or vitality or even transfiguration through, through these, these products.
Speaker: And so I was not only collecting, um, all of these pieces, um,
Speaker: And I've, I've made hundreds of these collages.
Speaker: Um, they're all hand cut.
Speaker: They're all hand cut.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, I love the hand and I mean, the hand isn't a lot of the earlier work where you just, it's in all the work, all the work, some of it more virtual.
Speaker: But specifically these hand cut objects.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yes, definitely.
Speaker: So these were very handy.
Speaker: Need a new word there, I guess.
Speaker: They were, yeah, I was cutting out these little pieces with an exacto knife and, and then gluing them onto paper.
Speaker: And, you know, I was really like just enamored of the color in them, but also the really absurd kind of pseudo-spiritual, pseudo-scientific diagrams and imagery in these advertisements.
Speaker: So...
Speaker: these kind of ecstatic splashes and like sensual drips.
Speaker: And then these like total bullshit diagrams of science that I'm just like, that's just a graph.
Speaker: Like there's no legend.
Speaker: It's just bars on a graph.
Speaker: Like, yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, they're completely fabricated and they don't communicate anything.
Speaker: And so I just loved the kind of unabashed, like absurdity of these advertisements.
Speaker: And so I made all of these advertisements.
Speaker: collages and each one of them has a title that is pulled from actual language in the advertisements.
Speaker: So on my website, you can click on each one and see a title that alludes to all sorts of promises of salvation and enlightenment and vitality and eternal life.
Speaker: I have a friend who photographs these things.
Speaker: Oh yeah.
Speaker: And
Speaker: To see the aperture to make that happen, it's just like, it's garbage.
Speaker: It's unbeautiful.
Speaker: The most unbeautiful thing to make this.
Speaker: It's mostly a light box and then whatever the water or something.
Speaker: Or like powder.
Speaker: But everything around it is just detritus and just garbage.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Obviously with editing and everything, it just makes it look good.
Speaker: And I loved like even the design, the kind of overly technologized design of the product applicators.
Speaker: So I was really just enamored of the forms that I was coming across.
Speaker: And then I started to make, and they're very like pristine.
Speaker: And, you know, to your point, there's like a disconnect between what goes into making these things and then what they are.
Speaker: And I kind of wanted to like explore that disconnect.
Speaker: So yeah.
Speaker: There's all these sensual splashes and kind of hygienic piles of powder and these over-technologized applicator tips.
Speaker: And so I started to make them out of hand-built ceramics with white clay, but they're made by hand.
Speaker: And I don't know how to make ceramics, so they're really kind of awkward and a little bit...
Speaker: So I like made some of the applicator tips as white.
Speaker: I couldn't tell what they were, but I like not knowing what they were.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, I was interested in like abstracting them as these kind of like nods to like minimalist art forms.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: In that one, the, where is it?
Speaker: This is a modular systems where you start putting them together and making these like, almost like machines out of like.
Speaker: Oh yeah.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Oh yeah.
Speaker: Is that in Greenpoint?
Speaker: That's right there.
Speaker: That's right.
Speaker: I didn't make that connection, but that's a really good modular system.
Speaker: It's like a retrospective of the hairdryer.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, I, um, yeah, I mean, I'm, I've always been fascinated by, uh, scientific and medical instrumentation.
Speaker: Um, and, and I think part of that comes from like my dad bringing home these like medical devices and implants and instruments and, um, and, um,
Speaker: Yeah, so I actually made a series called Modular Systems that I was constructing these speculative fictional instruments out of parts of everything from beauty products to perfume bottles to hair dryers.
Speaker: And they look kind of...
Speaker: Functional like they they look like they could be something, but they're not.
Speaker: Should talk to our the last interview was with an artist named Matthew Cronin, who pieced together these factory machines that into these like new machines that look like they do something, but they're completely fabricated.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I was trying to like negotiate that line between it being.
Speaker: you know, an obvious fabrication, also kind of like an exquisite corpse.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That's I definitely got that vibe.
Speaker: Which is a domain name that I have.
Speaker: I mean, there's a wonderful nod to, and a lot of your work to art history in the sense like those look like
Speaker: early 20th century paintings.
Speaker: People were fascinating with machines because they were just starting to see them more and more often because of the whole industrial revolution.
Speaker: Oh, yeah.
Speaker: I love that work.
Speaker: And I love the surrealism and the kind of many different forms and approaches that came out of that exquisite corpse tactic.
Speaker: And so actually part of this project is...
Speaker: I do have a domain name.
Speaker: I think it's exquisite hyphen corpse.com.
Speaker: I can't remember, but the real one's probably very expensive.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And so on that, that is actually a, an infinite generative artwork where,
Speaker: I've taken real words from real beauty products, then the adjective, the gerund, and the noun, and made a generative artwork that's just constantly remixing those words into what sound like real beauty products.
Speaker: But it's just constantly shuffling the words into new... Th is is live now?
Speaker: I could go to it.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker: Let's see if I can... You can actually get to it from the...
Speaker: I have to figure out how to spell exquisite.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's unspellable.
Speaker: It really is.
Speaker: Google's got me.
Speaker: You didn't see this one.
Speaker: Joe, I thought you liked these.
Speaker: The text pieces.
Speaker: That's poetic, the spontaneous narratives where you hand draw the text.
Speaker: Oh, right.
Speaker: Joseph has a project where he hand draws receipts.
Speaker: Oh, wow.
Speaker: They're just the receipt tracings from last year.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: This was similar.
Speaker: I was, I was in, I think it was June of 2010.
Speaker: I was getting the weirdest spam.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And I just couldn't take it anymore.
Speaker: I was like, I have to do something with this.
Speaker: It's the weirdest spam.
Speaker: And the thing, I don't even know how, I think I finally, after this project, like I didn't want to solve the problem because I was like so enamored of the spam subject headings.
Speaker: But I think after I finished the project, I finally eradicated the problem.
Speaker: But until then, I was just collecting all the subject headings from the spam and also the date and time that I got it.
Speaker: And then I was like in the linear fashion building these little poems basically out of these kind of like poetic narratives that might emerge from three consecutive spam headings.
Speaker: And just kind of thinking about like what are the kind of –
Speaker: subliminal narratives that our brain puts together while we're reading these spam subject headings and how they kind of infiltrate our psyche.
Speaker: Sneak into our psyche.
Speaker: Yeah, like without us even knowing it.
Speaker: And so then I made an audio piece that was stringing them together.
Speaker: And then I also was hand drawing the little
Speaker: poetic configurations onto paper in a very convoluted way.
Speaker: You have such good instinct.
Speaker: I mean, this is exactly what you did here.
Speaker: I don't know what this data was until you explained it.
Speaker: I couldn't figure it out.
Speaker: I don't know how long it would take me to even conceive to figure it out, but it's like, it just, the fact that it's hand-drawn,
Speaker: Draws me in because it's very beautifully rendered.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And then the data that you're using comes from this weird thing that I would never... We purposely don't want to think about it because spam is spam for a reason.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But yeah, it's wonderful.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And there's like lots of...
Speaker: kind of anxious undercurrent in them that is, you know, trying to sell you something.
Speaker: And so it's trying to either make you feel afraid or sick or less than.
Speaker: And so I was kind of playing with that and amplifying that.
Speaker: those sensations, uh, but also, uh, sometimes just putting a wrench in the gear of their agenda at the end and like adding like the, have a nice day subject heading.
Speaker: I mean, whenever you can take something like that and turn it into something meaningful, it's a win.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Uh, blood scarf.
Speaker: First of all, the title is fantastic.
Speaker: And then I can only imagine.
Speaker: So it is being filled when... This is more of a performative piece?
Speaker: It's a sculpture.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: And it's actually...
Speaker: It's a sculpture that was made for photographs.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: The, the work was always conceived of as photographs of a speculative or even revisionist medical, uh, artifact being, uh, depicted and even demonstrated in photographs.
Speaker: So I was doing, um, a series of, of,
Speaker: large, large format photography with like four by five and eight by 10 cameras that I was photographing different medical artifacts or devices being worn, uh, mostly worn.
Speaker: Um, but also I was making videos as well, like kind of demonstrate, demonstrating these like speculative surgical or medical situations.
Speaker: And, um,
Speaker: So one piece in the series is an exam gown that's hand knit out of water or a machine washable yarn.
Speaker: And so there's like a front and a back photograph, like life-size photographs of me wearing that.
Speaker: And then the blood scarf was actually part of a series of projects where I was knitting with clear vinyl tubing and
Speaker: different fluid through the vinyl tubing.
Speaker: And so it's this paradoxical device where it's filling the user's hand with an intravenous device, filling the user's, well, filling the scarf with the user's own blood through an intravenous device in their hand.
Speaker: And then the
Speaker: The tail of the scarf is open, so it eventually drains them of their blood, drop by drop.
Speaker: But it keeps them warm while it's doing that.
Speaker: It's a hypothetical piece.
Speaker: It's a speculative piece that it's a speculative device that is part of a series of speculative devices that I was making.
Speaker: Another one was called catheter bag cozy.
Speaker: That was a cozy that had blue liquid flowing through it that would sort of hide the urine in a catheter bag.
Speaker: And that also that was actually a sculpture in that was in the gallery, not in photographs.
Speaker: And
Speaker: it was continuously flowing blue liquid through this, uh, pumping blue liquid through this catheter bag cozy.
Speaker: And then the liquid was falling onto, um, this white kind of medical, uh, padding that had hand embroidery on it.
Speaker: Um, that said familiarity breeds contempt.
Speaker: I mean, talk about visceral, your use early on of literally using blood to draw blood as a medium, blood as an object.
Speaker: Can you talk a little bit about that?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That's part of that work that became very object-oriented and intimately scaled and
Speaker: you know, that was probably pragmatic, um, on a certain level, but it also was, I had been doing a lot of work like the blood scarf, like the cat, you know, a lot of work that, um, was visceral or, um, conspicuously medical.
Speaker: Um, so like the blood scarf and the catheter bag cozy, um,
Speaker: the exam gown, photographs, and object.
Speaker: And so I was kind of interested in thinking about a way to make work that was still about the body and social constructions of the body, but without immediately representing the body in form.
Speaker: And so I thought that drawing with my own blood might be a good way to do that.
Speaker: I mean, the...
Speaker: Like with watercolors, you're able to get so many levels of contrast with it, surprisingly.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's very beautiful.
Speaker: Yeah, blood is a great medium.
Speaker: But it's also something that even there's people that even the word...
Speaker: Gets them to the point where they want to not be in the place where you're mentioning the thing.
Speaker: It's such a divisive term for a lot of people.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I was making drawings where I was hand drawing lace with blood, where I was drawing each thread of a doily line by line with a very fine pen.
Speaker: So they're basically like little pieces of lace or entire doilies that are drawn with blood.
Speaker: And those drawings, I feel like most people can look at.
Speaker: Even once they find out it's blood, they can still continue to look at it.
Speaker: I did some other work where I was hand painting wallpaper with my own blood.
Speaker: And that work was a lot more challenging for a lot more people.
Speaker: Um, so once, you know, they could look at it and then once they realized it was blood, they, they couldn't look at it anymore.
Speaker: Also, what does that like, look like?
Speaker: Do you like, you like use, um, a syringe or something to like get blood out?
Speaker: Do you do that yourself?
Speaker: Do you have somebody help you?
Speaker: No, I was drawing all my own blood.
Speaker: Um, most of the time I was just for those very fine drawings, I was mostly doing very fine drawings and I would just collect it from my fingertips.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: It was just a little bit.
Speaker: So I would prick all 10 fingers and then collect that into heparin tubes, which, um, have an anticoagulant in them.
Speaker: And I would store it in my refrigerator so I could use it whenever I needed it.
Speaker: Um, but for the wallpaper, I did a piece where I, I made, um, an installation that had hand print hand block printed wallpaper, um, using my own blood and, and that required more blood that I collected with a butterfly needle.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: The one that's titled Incomplete Retrieval, where you say it's like a metaphor for the formation and degradation of memory.
Speaker: Oh, yeah.
Speaker: So I was drawing, part of the drawings of the textiles were,
Speaker: actually came out of a series of drawings I did of neuroanatomical structures and like these neurons and dendrites.
Speaker: And I was just really intrigued by the fragility of the forms and how that was sort of a metaphor for the fragility of the body.
Speaker: But I started to draw these doily forms with these kind of neurons.
Speaker: neuroanatomical dendrite structures.
Speaker: And, and thinking about doilies as like these nostalgic objects that are handed down from one generation to the next and thinking about the kinds of not just memories that are embedded in these objects, but also the expectations that come along with them and the kind of cultural like
Speaker: standards that are kind of embedded in like the assumption that you will have use for a doily in your home.
Speaker: And so I was, yeah, I was sort of thinking about the, um,
Speaker: the formation of memory and also of self.
Speaker: And so incomplete retrieval is a term from neuroscience and another one is elaborative encoding.
Speaker: So I think that piece is actually... Does that just mean that the data wasn't completely...
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And I was more intrigued by elaborating, elaborative encoding, which is a term to describe how, um, the formation of new memories is, um, reliant on, um, the, the simultaneous formation of memories or related knowledge.
Speaker: So, um,
Speaker: So how, you know, how we form a memory is not this like isolated phenomenon, it's contextual.
Speaker: And so I was really interested in that connection between these neuroanatomical forms and this kind of intricate lace materiality being interwoven.
Speaker: And so I was creating these drawings that were pieces of lace or doilies that were not completely tatted.
Speaker: And at some point, instead of using the hand, you used data to create like the embodied objects where the data from the reading from... Oh, yeah.
Speaker: Actually creates the...
Speaker: the complicated weave-like structure.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: So that work really came out of the same sensibility where I thought that blood might be a good solution to kind of make work about the body without having an image of the body.
Speaker: For sure.
Speaker: And so I really kind of thought the same thing about data.
Speaker: I thought, oh, I could make work that is using data from the body, but the works themselves don't immediately
Speaker: as either visceral or corporeal or anatomical or medical, um, or even scientific.
Speaker: And, um, so really that work came out of the same, um, desire to, to see how, and if that could be done.
Speaker: And so I started, uh, collecting data from my own body, um, using a Arduino microcontroller to, um,
Speaker: to collect electromyography data, which was measuring changing levels of electricity in my muscles as I moved.
Speaker: And so I would perform bodily movements or even facial expressions to generate data sets.
Speaker: And then I would use those data sets to create computer generated
Speaker: Images or compute and then those computer generated images also became a series of weavings.
Speaker: And I also created some forms for sculptures for 3D printed sculptures.
Speaker: That's what that's what these are here.
Speaker: I love those, by the way.
Speaker: So those are.
Speaker: Those are a series of sculptures called Manifest, where I was invited to be in an exhibition at the Beale Center for Art and Technology called Objects of Wonder.
Speaker: And I wanted to make an object of wonder that was related to the
Speaker: corporeal experience of wonder.
Speaker: And so I was thinking about like scale and form and again, this kind of like white minimalist form that I was like previously trying to make by hand with ceramics.
Speaker: You know, kind of thinking about a similar scale, something that you could hold in your hand and sort of look at and then even more like start to compare it to other sculptures that were similar but different.
Speaker: And the reason they're different is because each sculpture in the series has a profile of.
Speaker: That is a waveform that is an electromyography measurement of a different facial expression as I performed an experience of wonder.
Speaker: So I would perform delight by smiling or perform confusion by furrowing my brow or perform, um, frustration by frowning, um, or surprise by gulping and like measuring my, I, the electrodes on my throat as I was swallowing.
Speaker: Um, and, uh,
Speaker: Oh, and then putting them on my eyes as I was blinking twice.
Speaker: That's what this one is.
Speaker: You can see the temporal quality of the... They're absolutely gorgeous.
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: Also, to me, they quoted the Italian futurist, the...
Speaker: Oh, yeah, yeah.
Speaker: So it has a wonderful art quote.
Speaker: It says it has everything.
Speaker: I like an art.
Speaker: It's just like the full Monty.
Speaker: But yeah, they're beautiful.
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: I have to think that they come from these gestures that you're...
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So I was really interested in like this, you know, notions we have about scientific data and biomedical imaging and their veracity and, and also thinking about the, you know, the kind of complexities of affective labor and how, like, what does it mean to measure a performed smile with a scientific process or instrument?
Speaker: And, um,
Speaker: So it's not a smile.
Speaker: It's a fake smile.
Speaker: Is that different than a real smile?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So I, yeah, so I was thinking about this experience of wonder and how our body expresses it.
Speaker: And then also thinking about, um, as early as Charles Darwin, um, people theorizing about, um, how our performance of emotion actually enhances emotion.
Speaker: The more you smile, the happier you will feel.
Speaker: And then the print, the digital images and the weavings came out of that same process.
Speaker: So with that work, I was just using, I was just basically writing a piece of software to generate a waveform.
Speaker: And then I would take that waveform into Rhino to make a 3D sculpture.
Speaker: And then with the recursive expression series, I was
Speaker: taking a measurement of squinting and then taking that data to create a computer-generated image that kind of looks like a fabric swatch.
Speaker: It's very thin lines that compel you to get very close to see the detail and maybe even squint to see the detail.
Speaker: Well, that one really stuck out to me because squinting is something that photographers and painters do often to judge contrast.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Was that on purpose or just?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, my favorite thing to do when I go to an art gallery is to get this close to something and like look at like I. Without being yelled at by the guard?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, I can't look at any piece of art without putting my face like two inches in front of it.
Speaker: Squinting was the like best advice that an art teacher ever gave me was to squint.
Speaker: I like couldn't see light or shadow before I learned how to squint.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, that's interesting.
Speaker: I hadn't really thought about that connection to.
Speaker: squinting is something that shifts your perceptual understanding of what you're looking at.
Speaker: It closes off light.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And it like removes surface.
Speaker: It removes everything except for light, light and shadow.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, I thought about it in terms of like, it's going to bring into focus these very fine lines.
Speaker: Um, and you'll be sort of as a viewer embodying the process that was used to create it and embodying the process that was used to generate the data.
Speaker: And then with that piece, um,
Speaker: It was a computer generated image.
Speaker: I wrote a program to repeat and rotate and colorize the waveforms over and over and over.
Speaker: So it created sort of a square image.
Speaker: And it looked like that.
Speaker: I mean, I was trying to create weavings.
Speaker: It looked I was trying to make a weaving like a woven drawing.
Speaker: They look like wearing.
Speaker: So I was already thinking about this with a textile sensibility, which I tend to think about everything with a textile sensibility.
Speaker: And so I wasn't really satisfied with the edges of the lines, just endings.
Speaker: So I took a, um, a stylus pen and teased out the manually teased out the ends of every, what I was thinking of as thread.
Speaker: And, um, so there, which I would totally argue was done by hand.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And then those quickly led to making actual weavings.
Speaker: So that's where the computerized Jaccard weavings came from.
Speaker: And one of those is called Undo.
Speaker: And it's made with data from my arm as I was unraveling another weaving.
Speaker: So I was...
Speaker: just, it was a pulling gesture.
Speaker: Um, so I was measuring the, the electricity in my arm muscles as I was doing that.
Speaker: And, um, and those, yeah, so those are like 50 by 70 inches.
Speaker: And, um, and then I'm working on some new weavings now, um, that are not done with electromyography.
Speaker: Well, Laura, thank you so much.
Speaker: for being so generous with your time.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I have so many more questions.
Speaker: I wonder if you would be up for a part two sometime in the future.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Then we can just maybe wrap up and maybe even have questions from audience people who listened to the first podcast.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Awesome.
Speaker: Cool.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Awesome.
Speaker: Well, thank you.
Speaker: Thanks for having me.
Speaker: Thanks.
Speaker: Arranging Tangerines is recorded, edited, and produced by Lydian Stater, an evolving curatorial platform based in New York City with a focus on the intersection of contemporary and crypto art.
Speaker: You can learn more at lydianstater.co, find images at lydianstaternyc on Instagram, and follow us at lydianstater on Twitter.
Speaker: Thanks to Loris Bland for taking the time to speak to us this week.
Speaker: If you'd like to learn more about her work, visit our website at lauraspland.com.
Speaker: Big thanks to Tall Juan, who graciously provides our intro music.
Speaker: His albums are available at tallwan.bandcamp.com.
Speaker: And thank you to you, listener, for spending your valuable time with us.
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