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Arranging Tangerines Episode 33 - A Conversation with Carlos Franco
6 Plays2 years ago
On this week’s episode, we are joined by artist Carlos Franco.
Carlos Franco Maldonado is an artist based in Brooklyn, New York. Maldonado holds a bachelor's degree in Philosophy and Visual Art from the University of Puerto Rico and a master’s in New Genres from the San Francisco Art Institute. His works and projects have been presented at the Lab, SOMArt’s Cultural Center, and The Thing Quarterly in San Francisco; at Lvl3 Gallery in Chicago; Nikolaj Kunshal, Copenhagen, DK; Quinta del Sordo, Madrid, SP; and Universidad de Medellín, Medellín, CO among others.
Links:
post industrial digital dysmorphya
InstaLive artist talk about the show
00:0_ “HUMOR IS A WAY TO COUNTERACT FEELING HELPLESS, NO?”
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Transcript
Podcast Introduction: Hosts and Themes
00:00:03
Speaker
Welcome to Arranging Tangerines, presented by Lady and Stater.
00:00:05
Speaker
Conversations with contemporary artists, curators, and thinkers about the intersection of art, technology, and commerce.
00:00:10
Speaker
Your hosts are me, Alessandro Silver and Joseph Wilcox.
00:00:13
Speaker
I know what to do.
00:00:14
Speaker
I don't know what to say.
00:00:16
Speaker
I just know I don't want to be like you.
00:00:19
Speaker
I know what to do.
00:00:20
Speaker
I don't know what to say.
00:00:22
Speaker
I just know I don't want to.
Guest Introduction: Carlos Franco
00:00:34
Speaker
This week's guest is Carlos Franco.
00:00:36
Speaker
All right.
00:00:39
Speaker
I think I'm rolling.
00:00:40
Speaker
Okay.
00:00:42
Speaker
Can you say this?
00:00:45
Speaker
This week's guest is Carlos Franco.
00:00:49
Speaker
I have the unfortunate pleasure to say that this Wix guest, see, I can't even pronounce Wix, is Carlos Franco.
00:00:56
Speaker
It's this podcast in Spanish.
00:00:58
Speaker
You know, I've been making an effort recently.
00:01:00
Speaker
Forget I asked.
00:01:01
Speaker
Yeah.
00:01:02
Speaker
I've been making an effort recently to talk more Spanish and to practice in this exercise of, wait, what does it mean?
00:01:08
Speaker
And now my brain is doing...
00:01:10
Speaker
because I was just in France.
00:01:12
Speaker
I was just in France.
00:01:13
Speaker
I'm refreshing on my Python.
Multilingual and Programming Challenges
00:01:15
Speaker
So I was like speaking French, refreshing on my French, doing Python lessons.
00:01:19
Speaker
And then I'm working with C Sharp.
00:01:22
Speaker
And so I have like, and then saying like, oh, I'm going to stop speaking English and I'm going to start my brain in linguistics right now.
Digital vs Physical Worlds: Lego and Roblox Analogy
00:01:29
Speaker
It's like Legos trying to play with Roblox and you don't know if it's digital or physical or if it's like a blockchain or whatever you want to call it.
00:01:38
Speaker
So yeah, there you go.
00:01:41
Speaker
Yeah.
00:01:41
Speaker
Yeah.
00:01:42
Speaker
That's a good intro.
00:01:43
Speaker
Oh boy.
00:01:44
Speaker
This is going to be a MacBurk podcast.
00:01:48
Speaker
No, no, of course not.
00:01:50
Speaker
Well, also, like you can smash Legos and Roblox together.
00:01:52
Speaker
It just like turns into something else, right?
00:01:56
Speaker
I know that Lego, the company has been pivoting towards making digital assets like Amiibos and Nintendo and like trying to pivot that like space between
Lego: From Play to Collectible
00:02:05
Speaker
physics.
00:02:05
Speaker
I don't know what they're doing, even though I should know because I have my cousin and my nephew and my niece.
00:02:11
Speaker
So around that age and they love Legos, but I don't know what's the recent development in the gap between digital and physical building blocks.
00:02:19
Speaker
Makes sense for marketing.
00:02:20
Speaker
Yeah.
00:02:21
Speaker
My daughter just finished with Legos.
00:02:23
Speaker
Yeah.
00:02:23
Speaker
It's really sad.
00:02:25
Speaker
Why are you going to do with them?
00:02:27
Speaker
I don't know what we're going to do with them, but it's like underneath our bed is a huge bag of Legos and it's just unused.
00:02:34
Speaker
Plus a bunch of other ones that are built.
00:02:36
Speaker
Well, the funny thing in my family is like my brother-in-law is the big Lego fan in some sense because he collects like the Star Wars Legos.
00:02:43
Speaker
So if you go to my sister has like a huge collection, like there's no art.
00:02:48
Speaker
There's like Lego Star Wars.
00:02:52
Speaker
So it's like funny that I don't know if I'm buying them sometimes for my niece or am I buying for my brother-in-law for their purpose, especially if I get a Star Wars themed one.
00:03:03
Speaker
But yeah.
00:03:04
Speaker
Yeah.
00:03:04
Speaker
Are we?
00:03:05
Speaker
Is this part of the podcast?
00:03:06
Speaker
Yeah, of course.
00:03:07
Speaker
It started.
00:03:08
Speaker
We're in.
00:03:08
Speaker
We're in it.
00:03:09
Speaker
Okay, damn.
00:03:11
Speaker
I also like the idea of Legos being like artwork that's not made yet that people want to put on their walls, but they like have to put it together, which I feel like is like a huge chunk of the people who buy Legos.
00:03:25
Speaker
Yeah, and the specialty sets, people typically buy, if they're collectors, they buy two and they keep one unopened because that'll be a lot easier to sell way above what the cost was.
00:03:37
Speaker
You can actually recoup the cost of the second kit.
00:03:40
Speaker
Oh, like if you sell it when it goes up in value.
00:03:42
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
00:03:44
Speaker
Yeah, that idea of collectors, I used to do that with, and I guess I still do to a certain degree when I didn't have any money and I still don't have like money at all in the greater scheme of North American having money.
00:03:56
Speaker
But I used to collect just video games and this idea of like, oh, like physicality, digital and cultural assets.
00:04:02
Speaker
So I have a huge video game collection.
00:04:04
Speaker
Well, huge is not as big as other people, but especially in my mother's house.
00:04:08
Speaker
And now if you go into my apartment, I do have like a nice little
00:04:11
Speaker
between, but I never play it because I just don't have any time.
Video Games and User Experience Evolution
00:04:14
Speaker
But I like the idea of like spending at least five minutes or two minutes with a game, seeing like the general mechanics and like what is the trajectory of this cultural artifact?
00:04:26
Speaker
I'm thinking of user experience and usability, especially as now a lot of people don't start thinking about that gap between us and opposable Tom's and iPhones and controllers and that kind of evolution.
00:04:41
Speaker
And it's almost like the missing link.
00:04:43
Speaker
A lot of people don't make the connection of arcades.
00:04:47
Speaker
from our case into iPhones, usability, UX experiences, how do people react to buttons and whatnot.
00:04:54
Speaker
I guess one of the other things I can think about is cameras at one moment and certain TV controllers.
00:05:00
Speaker
But I think that it's directly required for video games is kind of like thing that
00:05:06
Speaker
especially as we're going into conversations about the metaverse and the transition about world design and architecture and interactivity and embodiment digital assets, I think it's something that people don't take a lot or not a lot of theoreticians take into consideration.
00:05:23
Speaker
Maybe Alexander Galloway.
00:05:25
Speaker
Yeah, Alexander Galloway does talk a lot about, or he used to talk about metal use solid and kind of like postmodernism and whatnot and trying to create like a
00:05:36
Speaker
Robust history of the importance of this cultural artifact.
00:05:39
Speaker
That being said, yes, collecting video games and
Art and Urban Planning: The Grid Concept
00:05:43
Speaker
pretty sweet thing.
00:05:44
Speaker
And now it's like a little bit of a nostalgia and change factor, the idea of having digital CDs and all the CDs because everything's going into cloud streaming and the physical aspect of it.
00:05:56
Speaker
Yeah, I guess lost.
00:05:57
Speaker
The idea of having a CD with data inside is starting to be weird.
00:06:01
Speaker
Right.
00:06:02
Speaker
Like you have like or like a cartridge that has like so much packed inside of it that has become an object that never was before.
00:06:09
Speaker
It was a thing that you shoved in so you can play a game.
00:06:12
Speaker
And now it's like this.
00:06:13
Speaker
It's become something like totally so much back into it.
00:06:16
Speaker
54 megabytes.
00:06:21
Speaker
What about so the lead in from that conversation would be what about the collection of digital assets via the blockchain?
00:06:29
Speaker
Before we do that, before we do that, because because that's too quick and it's too easy.
00:06:35
Speaker
I did want to talk about graphics because I'm not like a current gamer anymore, but I definitely was when I played video games when I was a kid.
00:06:42
Speaker
And so it was always better.
00:06:44
Speaker
Everybody wanted better graphics, right?
00:06:46
Speaker
So I think I bowed out during the 64-bit days and 64 came out.
00:06:52
Speaker
And now from what I can tell, it seems like there is a sect
Tech Industry vs Traditional Art Market
00:06:57
Speaker
of gaming that wants really, really incredible graphics.
00:07:00
Speaker
But there's also like Ben...
00:07:02
Speaker
like a resurgence of like bad graphics, right?
00:07:07
Speaker
Quote unquote bad graphics.
00:07:07
Speaker
Is that true?
00:07:08
Speaker
Well, I think we reached a moment where Call of Duty and all of these shooters, how much realism can you get?
00:07:14
Speaker
And then a couple of things happening.
00:07:16
Speaker
And I am like, I'm not in the video game industry, although I'm developing with Unity platform.
00:07:21
Speaker
I'm like always like on the edge, like everything that I do.
00:07:25
Speaker
But I can do it reading about it, about the development tools like Unity and Unreal Engine becoming so accessible and quote unquote,
00:07:34
Speaker
democratize that you have a lot of indie developers.
00:07:36
Speaker
You don't need a big team like Nintendo 30 persons or 15 persons doing video games.
00:07:41
Speaker
You can just do it by yourself.
00:07:44
Speaker
So there's a part of it of like having more freedom and not necessarily pandering to a kind of like, oh, I'm going to create a video game and then I need Nintendo to pay licenses, fees to Nintendo and then publish the cartridge.
00:07:57
Speaker
I can just put it in HIO or Steam and as an indie developer so I can get away with doing more creative stuff.
00:08:04
Speaker
And I think there was like a pivot of like people just saying like, okay, uh, you know, kind of like video game theory and like, uh, video game theory, like development, uh, practices of like, well, does realism make better gameplay?
00:08:18
Speaker
What is the definition of like good gameplay?
00:08:21
Speaker
And I'm pretty sure like there are more nuanced conversations to this and whatnot, but that's my general reading from the outside.
00:08:27
Speaker
And for a while I was really into video games, but then
00:08:31
Speaker
uh for a while i did move to san francisco and then i basically saw now i saw another fan um and then during the pandemic i really started coming back and one of my projects right now i'm working with the unity engine and uh mba project that i joke around with you guys um it's kind of like oh holy shit like this has developed to such a degree and especially the engines to work with
00:08:56
Speaker
like object-oriented programming has reached a certain level where oh you don't really don't need to know all of the c-sharp libraries or whatever like really go that deep into it you can actually create something that's feasible at a really high tier like uh low knowledge level and just have fun with it so i think there's a lot of that happening where basically the process of democratization of like the tools and what does it mean and
00:09:21
Speaker
all of the development programs becoming really powerful.
00:09:24
Speaker
Actually, this links up to the weirdness about processing power and graphic engines and links to the blockchain and all this NVIDIA GPUs basically.
Metaverse World Building: Pros and Cons
00:09:34
Speaker
I like my horsepower.
00:09:44
Speaker
I've mentioned that before.
00:09:45
Speaker
I'm like, yeah, Carlos will get into a thing and then when he's actually about to talk about the thing, he just skips over it.
00:09:51
Speaker
It's like the yada, yada, yada.
00:09:56
Speaker
So this is Borgian thing trying to replicate the natural world one-to-one.
00:10:01
Speaker
I mean, how can you...
00:10:04
Speaker
Is there a point where you would get to that point where you replicate everything as is or beyond?
00:10:09
Speaker
The map as the territory.
00:10:12
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know.
00:10:13
Speaker
I think that's the conversation about the metaverse.
00:10:16
Speaker
And that's like a whole conversation about processing power, development tricks and whatnot.
00:10:22
Speaker
And that's like its own field.
00:10:25
Speaker
And because I've been digging, because of my own project, I've been telling you so much into this space.
00:10:32
Speaker
It's like such a deep dive.
00:10:34
Speaker
I don't know if you can replicate it.
00:10:35
Speaker
I don't know if you want to replicate it.
00:10:37
Speaker
I don't know if we should replicate it.
00:10:38
Speaker
Like that funny picture of Zuckerberg in the Horizons.
00:10:43
Speaker
Yes.
00:10:43
Speaker
It's beautiful.
00:10:46
Speaker
Well, yeah, is that your best attempt with all of these billions of dollars that are replicating this or trying to create a feasible user experience?
00:10:53
Speaker
So I don't know.
00:10:55
Speaker
I think that goes into my message, into this idea of representation and why do we, which is always one of my questions, I guess I brought up when we were talking about the
00:11:04
Speaker
project of leader starter like, oh, why do you want to replicate a physical space in Dorito?
00:11:09
Speaker
And then we're so bound to this like railroad of thinking of architecture and right angles and gravity.
00:11:16
Speaker
And sure, we need to do that because it's recognizable and we're assimilated to it.
00:11:20
Speaker
So you want that smooth transition in the user experience.
00:11:23
Speaker
But then again, what are the other potentialities that haven't been explored?
00:11:29
Speaker
So replicating, yes, no, like, I don't know, like, yeah,
00:11:32
Speaker
Well, also, like if you're going to replicate it exactly right, if we like if this was whatever, a simulation, the reasons for doing that would be so that you can like have fake experiences that feel like real life as opposed to experiences where you like know you're in a virtual world or something like that.
00:11:52
Speaker
So I think there's like value in both.
00:11:53
Speaker
But I think when you the idea of like being able to travel is like a really like fun idea.
00:12:01
Speaker
It feels like real travel and you can like go places for much cheaper.
00:12:05
Speaker
But I think there's like much darker psychological paths you can go down if you start living in fantasy worlds like and it feels totally real and it looks totally real.
00:12:15
Speaker
Right.
00:12:16
Speaker
Yeah.
00:12:16
Speaker
I recently went to Niagara Falls.
00:12:18
Speaker
Not I hear not because of.
00:12:21
Speaker
It is.
00:12:22
Speaker
Long story.
00:12:22
Speaker
But anyway, we rode.
00:12:23
Speaker
He's wanted to go since he was a kid.
00:12:24
Speaker
It was like such a big.
00:12:25
Speaker
This is the third time I've been.
00:12:27
Speaker
It gets worse.
00:12:31
Speaker
Nothing I guess in Anger Falls, but it's we rode the Maid of the Mist.
00:12:35
Speaker
And then right now I have the the Oculus at home and I was checking out to see if there was any 4K video of the actual.
00:12:41
Speaker
And I actually found I enjoyed the the virtual version.
00:12:46
Speaker
First of all, I wasn't getting wet.
00:12:47
Speaker
Yeah.
00:12:48
Speaker
Yeah.
00:12:49
Speaker
And you didn't have to be in Niagara Falls.
00:12:50
Speaker
And it was like the perfect day.
00:12:51
Speaker
They shot it.
00:12:52
Speaker
It was a beautiful sun.
00:12:53
Speaker
I think ours, it was really hot.
00:12:55
Speaker
And it was like, you know, so it was like, this was nice.
00:12:58
Speaker
This is, but I don't know if I would have felt the same way if I had experienced the real thing.
00:13:01
Speaker
Right.
00:13:02
Speaker
You know?
00:13:03
Speaker
Well, it's like director's experience.
00:13:04
Speaker
So someone's curating your experience in the VR and directing it and
00:13:10
Speaker
And I think that's the whole thing.
00:13:11
Speaker
Maybe the problem is this idea of mimesis.
00:13:13
Speaker
We are so stuck within this idea of... It's almost like we're monkeys still in the caves.
00:13:17
Speaker
Kind of like, oh, look, a deer.
00:13:19
Speaker
Oh, I'm going to paint a deer on the wall.
00:13:20
Speaker
I made it.
00:13:20
Speaker
I made it.
00:13:20
Speaker
It's almost like you can basically enclose human evolution in this whole tradition of us trying to re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-
00:13:39
Speaker
reality and reality reality again and again and maybe it's like the saddest thing for me but uh or like one of the saddest things especially when the cryptocurrency thing happened i think this is like the first conversation that we had like when you guys came to the studio like wow like look at human evolution and we're in the art art world quote unquote and um
00:14:00
Speaker
We have these amazing tools, meaning like hyperledgers without calling into blockchain that can
Blockchain and NFTs: Speculation in Art
00:14:06
Speaker
have the memory.
00:14:07
Speaker
Imagine the implications of that for democracies, for all of this stuff, and the best that we can do is, oh, I'm going to own that JPEG, and it's mine.
00:14:17
Speaker
That's amazing.
00:14:18
Speaker
Yeah, it's like the weird, like, okay, so we're repeating the behavior that a lot of us are criticizing from the art role of speculative markets on the one, which I think that's one way to look at it.
00:14:30
Speaker
I can take also the other position of like, well, artists now can, the artists can now get paid and compensated for like gifts that they made on the one, which is like also like the good part.
00:14:40
Speaker
But just to make devil's advocate on this, it's kind of like the sad thing about this idea of like,
00:14:45
Speaker
What does it mean to reality replicate and what kind of experiences can you actually create or affordances can you create during the Niagara Falls?
00:14:57
Speaker
Having that experience, why are you like a steel camera?
00:15:01
Speaker
What happens if I start moving the camera, maybe a little bit up front?
00:15:04
Speaker
I'm sure it may make you throw up, but then there may be moments or
00:15:10
Speaker
future designers or designers that are working right now and like rethinking how those experiences or new kind of experiences that we still don't have any notion of happening within this like um this quote-unquote spaces and i even hesitate saying like the world spaces because that's another re-re but then how do you break out from these linguistic uh parameters or the map to go back into the map that we already have this cartography and then kind of like we can see reconsider reality we
00:15:40
Speaker
rearrange, reformulate, reset.
00:15:49
Speaker
Have you ever played Killer Queen?
00:15:51
Speaker
No.
00:15:52
Speaker
Are you familiar?
00:15:53
Speaker
No.
00:15:53
Speaker
Killer Queen?
00:15:54
Speaker
It's a video game.
00:15:55
Speaker
Okay, I'll book it on.
00:15:56
Speaker
It's it's the it's the best game I've ever played.
00:15:59
Speaker
It's like a head to head game, but the it's an independent video game and they have them at arcades now across the country.
00:16:06
Speaker
But the the graphics are like whatever.
00:16:09
Speaker
They're like pretty old school.
00:16:11
Speaker
But the gameplay is like the funnest thing I've ever I've ever experienced.
00:16:16
Speaker
And so it was making me think about like when you're saying like
00:16:21
Speaker
like trying to reproduce things that we already do here and it's like why would you do that because the only things that add value are things that have like new that is not the guy no but it's probably what it was named after
00:16:38
Speaker
But, you know, like
Gaming Evolution: Graphics vs Gameplay
00:16:39
Speaker
there's like opportunities.
00:16:40
Speaker
And we talked about this with like, you know, with with blockchain technology or whatever, that it has the opportunity to present new experiences that people have have never had before or have never like thought of or can even like imagine what it can be.
00:16:53
Speaker
And I agree.
00:16:54
Speaker
It is sad when it just like retracts back to the same old.
00:16:58
Speaker
Yeah.
00:16:59
Speaker
It becomes like market speculation, again, which I get.
00:17:02
Speaker
And again, it does help to scale the technology and make it more, if you have like those kind of user use cases and people understand what does that mean, meaning like the layman, then you get like more technology adoption and then blah, blah, blah, and then it scales up.
00:17:17
Speaker
But then from the other side, it's just like, you know, oh my God, I want to do something more radical or like thinking to that.
00:17:24
Speaker
And it becomes a little bit,
00:17:26
Speaker
sad because along with any first wave of technology like dot com crash and whatnot then it comes to crash and then you're like something that we talked about before like what are the projects that were actually interesting and that could be able to pivot and then how do you position yourself or your projects within this complex landscape that is like fast shifting so yeah yeah because tricky tricky thing you can force
00:17:54
Speaker
humanity to a paradigm shift just because of a random project and whatnot.
00:17:59
Speaker
But then those random projects in the future are the ones that Tesla, not Tesla's machine, like Nikola Tesla's guy.
00:18:06
Speaker
Oh, OK, we're catching up with whatever this madman was doing, which is like a good and a bad example.
00:18:11
Speaker
But I guess those are the visionary things that crash.
00:18:14
Speaker
And then you're like, oh, holy shit, that could have been.
00:18:17
Speaker
We're doing that 120 years later.
00:18:19
Speaker
We're catching up right now.
00:18:21
Speaker
Yeah.
00:18:21
Speaker
Yeah.
00:18:22
Speaker
There's a theory that he was from the future and he went to the past just trying to recreate things he saw.
00:18:28
Speaker
I mean, I can see it.
00:18:29
Speaker
Sometimes I read like random.
00:18:30
Speaker
He's like the dumbest guy in the future.
00:18:32
Speaker
He's not very smart.
00:18:35
Speaker
Sometimes I see those Instagram, well right now I'm taking my Instagram vacation to my serotonin and my synapse, as we said, but sometimes I see those Instagram posts like, oh, did you know Tesla invented this?
00:18:47
Speaker
Like 100 years, like okay, quantum computing, like he invented quantum computing, I'm obviously exaggerating, but yeah, you never know, I don't know, I don't know, it's like this, also like there's this weird thing about humanity, it's like
00:18:59
Speaker
projecting this behavior like Da Vinci with flying machines and whatnot.
00:19:04
Speaker
Like, whoa, Da Vinci embedded in the flying machine.
00:19:06
Speaker
Like when you actually read like his diaries or like do some research, he was actually doing theater props.
00:19:12
Speaker
So it's not like, oh, yeah.
00:19:14
Speaker
It wasn't out of nowhere.
00:19:15
Speaker
Yeah.
00:19:16
Speaker
Well, yeah.
00:19:16
Speaker
And it's also like it worked under a specific condition.
00:19:20
Speaker
He wasn't trying to be an invention of a theater machine.
00:19:23
Speaker
If I'm not mistaken, somebody may come on the internet, most of the five people listening to this, like, no, you're wrong.
00:19:29
Speaker
I read this bio.
00:19:31
Speaker
But I'm pretty sure until his mid-30s, he was doing theater props and whatnot.
00:19:35
Speaker
And all of those drawings really come from trying to generate this kind of
00:19:41
Speaker
theater play stuff so it wasn't like trying to be functional impressive by itself but yeah how much more project can do the fast it's like 30 people by the way 30 people damn too many people yeah I haven't looked at the stats recently but yeah it's more than it's more you would think oh boy for sure but yep I mean there's so many ways to go but we're going we're going
00:20:08
Speaker
I think one thing that kind of touches all of it, and in particular the show that we recently worked with you on at the Living Stair Space.
00:20:17
Speaker
Yeah.
00:20:18
Speaker
The grid.
00:20:19
Speaker
The grid.
00:20:20
Speaker
The imposition of... It sounds like a quote from Trump.
00:20:22
Speaker
The grid.
00:20:22
Speaker
The grid.
00:20:27
Speaker
Because you talked a lot about it and the imposition of the grid and the...
00:20:30
Speaker
artificial nature of it trying to impose category and space and can you kind of talk a little bit about that?
00:20:38
Speaker
Well, it's just like in a lot of sense, it's like efficiency.
00:20:44
Speaker
It's almost like they're like in my head, a lot of Easter eggs with aggressive kind of like this idea of the grid from the promotion and whatnot.
00:20:52
Speaker
And
00:20:54
Speaker
I wish I could talk more about this with one of my current projects.
00:20:57
Speaker
And you guys are like, oh, okay.
00:20:58
Speaker
Now it makes sense why you're talking so much about the grid.
00:21:01
Speaker
But it's just about thinking about efficiency and the whole narrative of human history and scientific thought and linearity and mathematics and blah, blah, blah, blah.
00:21:13
Speaker
And going into Web 2.0 and a lot of things.
00:21:17
Speaker
And I hate saying Web 2.0 because it's such a generalization for a couple of things happening out there.
00:21:22
Speaker
But like...
00:21:24
Speaker
Just UI design, how do you present images within like this small space and effectivity and that.
00:21:35
Speaker
I don't know why not just thinking about the grid in general.
00:21:37
Speaker
And I know I'm not answering your question.
00:21:39
Speaker
I'm being really ambiguous around it.
00:21:40
Speaker
And I'm trying to grab a hold to it because in one sense, I'm thinking over here of
00:21:45
Speaker
the history of mathematics, going back into perspective, Brunelleschi, blah, blah, blah.
00:21:50
Speaker
And then on the other side, I'm thinking about, I don't know, like binary thinking, which is something that I really thought about in the show, especially with the artists and how I selected them and also the conversations that Jordan asked within the work and how all of those mixed to create like a complex landscape.
00:22:07
Speaker
And why I'm not being really clear about it.
00:22:09
Speaker
is part of the problem.
00:22:10
Speaker
Part of the problem right now is me thinking of linear thinking.
00:22:14
Speaker
And this idea, oh, let me explain to you as A is B and B is C and C. Yeah, what's your thesis statement on the grid?
00:22:21
Speaker
That's it.
00:22:23
Speaker
That linearity, multiple lines create a grid.
00:22:26
Speaker
That's it.
00:22:28
Speaker
So yeah, it's just about efficiency and whatnot, how big it disrupt that.
00:22:33
Speaker
And one thing usually as I approach my projects is overthinking these kind of things in multiple models of like the average layman
Disrupting the Grid in Art
00:22:42
Speaker
that comes to the space.
00:22:42
Speaker
So I'm just going to see a spectacle of images and whatever this is so overwhelming.
00:22:48
Speaker
thinking about interior design, kind of like within interior design, the body that also can be parallel into the idea of performativity within our discourses and agency of the spectator.
00:23:02
Speaker
And the fact that the user moves around the space is almost like a user experience, but you're not dictating what the user is going to share, the connection that he's going to make.
00:23:10
Speaker
So there's a lot going into it in how I approach disrupting the idea of the grid while also engaging and
00:23:16
Speaker
repositioning, uh, uh, uh, repositioning or, um,
00:23:22
Speaker
in relation to it as aesthetic values and conceptual values.
00:23:26
Speaker
I don't think I have an ideology of the grid, except pointing and history and then washing my hands and being like, oh, yeah, because I'm seeing also the grid interrupted back there.
00:23:38
Speaker
I'm seeing the spacing between the images.
00:23:41
Speaker
I'm like, is that mathematical accurate?
00:23:43
Speaker
Is it like a recurring or?
00:23:46
Speaker
I may have used a ruler.
00:23:47
Speaker
I tend to use I.
00:23:51
Speaker
I feel like my eye is accurate though.
00:23:54
Speaker
Yeah.
00:23:54
Speaker
Your eye is intuition, bro.
00:23:56
Speaker
Right?
00:23:57
Speaker
Like I can get those measurements.
00:24:00
Speaker
But I was...
00:24:03
Speaker
Thinking about the grid in New York City and Manhattan, right?
00:24:11
Speaker
That was a new idea when they did that, correct?
00:24:14
Speaker
And all the cities before that were like mishmash.
00:24:18
Speaker
I'm thinking of Boston and it's like a total mess of streets that go in all kinds of directions, right?
00:24:24
Speaker
So there's things that you gain from the grid, but there's also things that get lost when things are gridded, right?
00:24:33
Speaker
Um, and it's probably like too big of a jump, but it makes me think of kind of like, uh, collective and collaborative models always end up being so messy because they're, they're not organized hierarchically or they're not like organized, like, um, linearly.
00:24:50
Speaker
And so the reason why people like them and why I think a lot of artists like working that way is because they like,
00:24:55
Speaker
they're unexpected and they bring up new things, but they're also like they fail a lot and they they don't work, quote unquote, work half the time because like it's messy because like when you don't have an organizing principle, things are messy.
00:25:09
Speaker
But also like that's when like things can happen.
00:25:11
Speaker
So I don't know.
00:25:13
Speaker
I mean, yeah, it's almost like it's like I like Derribe.
00:25:18
Speaker
I like the situation.
00:25:19
Speaker
I like the idea of like getting lost in the city and you can
00:25:23
Speaker
have that in Paris for example the situation is international at one moment because also you have this tradition of housemen and also the whole idea of like city development and city development and planning towards specific ends
Identity and Language: A Puerto Rican Perspective
00:25:36
Speaker
being like military or avenues and whatnot and then how did you offset that and oppose it that it's um
00:25:43
Speaker
And where it becomes interesting because it's almost like right now as we're talking and one of my neurotic things, as I was talking about language earlier in the conversation was about, oh, I don't want to think through English.
00:25:56
Speaker
And it's not like necessarily an ideological thing.
00:25:59
Speaker
I don't have a political like, oh, my God, Anglo-Saxon language.
00:26:01
Speaker
I'm going to only speak in Esperanto and like whatever, like go like in this ideological.
00:26:07
Speaker
Sorry.
00:26:09
Speaker
Do you dream in English or Spanish?
00:26:11
Speaker
I don't talk in my dreams.
00:26:15
Speaker
When people speak to you.
00:26:16
Speaker
I only see brown people when I dream.
00:26:20
Speaker
Even if your wife, I see Joseph, you're completely brown-faced in my... But Spanish was your first language.
00:26:29
Speaker
Problematic.
00:26:30
Speaker
Spanish is definitely my first language.
00:26:31
Speaker
But you think in English?
00:26:33
Speaker
I don't even... I can't do that exercise of thinking because my mom was born in Rizizikawa and then my family, it was like completely Spanglish, a mix.
00:26:43
Speaker
So that's why I said I don't have any ideological issue.
00:26:46
Speaker
And just as a matter of fact, it's just like...
00:26:49
Speaker
Sure, I can say that I'm opposed to speaking in English and without losing track of what I was originally going to say just because of the, for those that don't know, I'm from Puerto Rico for political reasons.
00:27:02
Speaker
But then again, I know that the picture is a little bit more complex than that.
00:27:06
Speaker
So simplifying everything based on my language is like this kind of like thing of like Borges, I think it was like Borges and Garrega Siamarquez, them being sad and
00:27:19
Speaker
the comparative literature major that's listening to this.
00:27:23
Speaker
I'm sorry if I'm getting this.
00:27:24
Speaker
This is awesome.
00:27:26
Speaker
But they say like, oh, like, I'm so sad that we didn't start writing and reading in English because Spanish is such a bad language to write in.
00:27:34
Speaker
So it's like this funny because in Latin America and Hispanic culture, we already went to this conversation on this century and now in North America specifically.
00:27:43
Speaker
as we're talking about certain communities, Spanish speaking communities, that they kind of like simplify these conversations and not me aggrandizing the whole idea of like,
00:27:54
Speaker
English or Spanish in the one, it's just tools.
00:27:56
Speaker
So you can learn, although obviously a relationship to quote unquote identity and have a lot of problems with the word does come embedded with language and blah, blah, blah, blah.
00:28:09
Speaker
But also thinking beyond that, that you're not necessarily a hammer, that it's way more complex and more nuanced, blah, blah.
00:28:16
Speaker
That being said, one of my things about saying like, oh, I'm not going to speak in English is like going back to the grid.
00:28:21
Speaker
So if you have a language, it's like a tool and you're only talking in this way in language.
00:28:26
Speaker
I used to like a long time ago, I used to jump from
00:28:30
Speaker
say random words in French.
00:28:32
Speaker
I knew some rudimentary German because I studied philosophy.
00:28:36
Speaker
And, you know, you grab a word over here that can explain something.
00:28:40
Speaker
You grab a word over here that can explain something and you're not losing anything from your identity from it.
00:28:45
Speaker
I think challenging the whole idea of like, oh, sorry, I'm speaking too much English.
00:28:48
Speaker
It's like,
00:28:49
Speaker
knowingly not wanting to stiff yourself a little bit too much especially where the conversation politically over here becomes really specific and really in context and in situ and acknowledging oh wow there are like so many micro political environments all around the world like so it's like weird like just being stuck especially someone that's a quote-unquote immigrant I'm a United States citizen but like obviously I don't come from over here originally I don't
00:29:17
Speaker
you know, I don't live in this complex of level of assimilation that I can only think through North American terms.
00:29:22
Speaker
And because it's really specific how they see the world, the aesthetic value that they project, the political values that they project.
00:29:29
Speaker
So it becomes like kind of tricky, kind of like not losing perspective.
00:29:33
Speaker
So that being said, it's kind of like ideological, not ideologically.
00:29:36
Speaker
It's kind of like, oh, how do you unstiffen yourself and retain a certain kind of like
00:29:43
Speaker
plus the ACP because you always want to kind of like, you know, grab a new game and know that you can readapt to that game and kind of like play around with it.
00:29:53
Speaker
So I don't know.
00:29:54
Speaker
I don't think, like, I don't even think if I think it's Spanish or in English when I dream.
00:30:00
Speaker
I think that's a complicated, complicated question.
00:30:03
Speaker
Like as someone that grew up with North American television,
00:30:08
Speaker
speaking Spanglish and then being like, I don't have... okay, you know, it is what it is, I guess.
00:30:14
Speaker
I don't know.
00:30:15
Speaker
I don't know.
00:30:19
Speaker
That's a great illustration of... I did see that you had studied philosophy.
00:30:25
Speaker
Language is inability.
00:30:27
Speaker
Just like the grid is this thing that is man-imposed, but it's not perfect and it leaves a lot to be desired.
00:30:37
Speaker
Language is...
00:30:39
Speaker
not exactly the, the inability to, to precisely say whatever you're trying to say, or to describe something with precision.
00:30:46
Speaker
I mean, a lot of what philosophy is, is like trying to pare down words to try to,
00:30:53
Speaker
equivocate something there and they spend pages and pages and pages and pages of spelling out like what they mean.
00:31:00
Speaker
Yeah, pure madness.
00:31:02
Speaker
Like German philosophers creating their own traps.
00:31:06
Speaker
Like I make this three words together and now I need to spend five books making sense of it.
00:31:11
Speaker
And you're like, dude, dude, I read all your shit and I saw the moment that you created that concept and only you.
00:31:19
Speaker
understand what you meant and then you're telling me five books later that you didn't understand what that meant so forget about it it's not a thing like what are you doing what are you doing right now um but i think that's like oh actually originally um and this is my my relationship with language if we're gonna go a little bit deeper into
00:31:40
Speaker
personal neurosis that when I was a teenager, I had a big question and it was like, I was obsessed when language becomes a chemical process.
00:31:48
Speaker
So as I'm talking to you, when does that become a synaptic and how can you do something that comes through your senses and essential experience of like, there's nothing here.
00:31:57
Speaker
It's just music and the meat slap creating like intonations.
00:32:03
Speaker
creates something embedded and becomes a memory.
00:32:05
Speaker
And that led to a lot of weird behavior as I was a little kid.
00:32:09
Speaker
But one of the things is kind of like, originally I was starting to be a neurobiologist and I ended up in philosophy because I noticed like, well, if you can study neurobiology, which I may be wrong about that right now, seeing how
00:32:21
Speaker
where the research is right now, but then I didn't think that I was going to reach really that answer.
00:32:26
Speaker
And not that I was looking for something more spiritual, but then I started studying philosophy.
00:32:29
Speaker
And then at one moment they told me, oh, well, if you have 12 more credits, you have a philosophy major.
00:32:35
Speaker
Like, okay, I guess that's the thing to do.
00:32:38
Speaker
And then it's me just thinking more aggressively.
00:32:40
Speaker
Well, if you're doing science, you're always looking towards the past in the sense of like, you're doing research about things that have already happened and the nature of the research
00:32:49
Speaker
phenomenology and experience and whatnot.
00:32:51
Speaker
And then what does it mean to create new ways or new potentialities of rearranging the future and doing this thing?
00:32:59
Speaker
So, oh, what is going to give me access to do that?
00:33:01
Speaker
Obviously becoming a quote-unquote artist, I still don't know what the fuck that means, in all honesty.
00:33:06
Speaker
But this idea of like, oh, yeah, where do you get a license to do whatever the fuck you want and work across disciplines and become just like a big weirdo that I was like, oh, let's talk about language on a podcast.
00:33:17
Speaker
LAUGHTER
00:33:18
Speaker
Language on the grid.
Language Limitations in Expression
00:33:20
Speaker
So yeah.
00:33:20
Speaker
But again, going through a conversation about language and discuss a lot of people think and again how it is something about us and it's going into city planning also and the map and whatnot.
00:33:30
Speaker
But then it's like we understand each other because somebody said it already, right?
00:33:34
Speaker
Somebody used this word and put it upon us and you know, the structure of the sentence and then it may or may not make it, but if I may, but I'm not, okay, it doesn't.
00:33:43
Speaker
But then being divergent does frame, it's like neurodiversity.
00:33:48
Speaker
So how do you break up from like the pattern and reframe the pattern?
00:33:52
Speaker
How do you, I don't know, like anything.
00:33:54
Speaker
Well, there's fringes too, right?
00:33:56
Speaker
Like you can operate on the fringe of what language should be.
00:34:01
Speaker
Or it makes me think of music and visual art also.
00:34:04
Speaker
Like I feel like abstract painter is...
00:34:06
Speaker
are always like creating their language and as like a consumer of that person's work or whatever you have to like learn the language before you can like see or like understand what they're doing and i think music's the same way which is something i was like kind of obsessed with when i was a kid was like understanding like you can't appreciate or enjoy certain music until you understand the language of the things that they're doing and there's a history there but then they're like they're like pushing up against
00:34:33
Speaker
um the like limits of what people understand that to be uh and so i don't necessarily know how that happens with language itself like the language we're talking about like speaking but it does right it's like people like change words up and they like and it happens you know like on macro levels culturally uh but it also i think there's people who like play with words and and like change how we understand language in general um
00:34:59
Speaker
I think that's the thing, like, well, like, there's a lot of, like, 20th century writers about talking about the necessary of a poetry and this kind of, like, the approach of breaking the theme.
00:35:11
Speaker
But I don't know, something gets lost, obviously, because nobody cares about poetry anymore, even though I'd say, well, we're living in a poetic golden age.
00:35:19
Speaker
It's just, like, hip-hop artists or, like, musicians and whatnot.
00:35:22
Speaker
But then again, the conversation starts, well,
00:35:25
Speaker
what is the market determinant that is like forcing them into a kind of behavior and kind of like oh okay so stiffening up the creative use and whatnot I guess that's where it becomes interesting uh the state of the arts if you will and then the art world market is there like recently you know uh what's it Josiah Citradella uh whatever how you pronounce his last name
00:35:50
Speaker
I was listening to a podcast, and I think I mentioned it to you guys once, with Rachel Wilson, if I'm not mistaken, and him making this claim, which is pretty fucking obvious.
00:35:58
Speaker
Like, oh, there's no real original, the original thought happening in the art world right now.
00:36:01
Speaker
It's just like Mark and the one, he implies that there may be more happening in the tech industry or tech adjacent practices.
00:36:10
Speaker
And I don't quite agree with that, but I can see how that integrator says may be the point in the sense of challenging this idea of like, as if the art world itself has a,
00:36:21
Speaker
I don't know, like a dominance over what is creative behavior, not creative behavior.
00:36:27
Speaker
Well, also, yeah, it's like it's the stuff you see isn't fresh or new or different because that's like what the market wants you to see.
00:36:33
Speaker
But there's lots of artists doing weird shit all over the place.
00:36:37
Speaker
Right now we talk about the blockchain.
00:36:45
Speaker
But this relates to your work as well, because...
00:36:47
Speaker
you consume a lot of social media and some of those kids are making amazing work.
00:36:52
Speaker
Yeah.
00:36:52
Speaker
And whether they call it art or not, the intention isn't art.
00:36:55
Speaker
The intention is to just do this thing quickly because they have these tools that allow them to edit really quickly.
00:37:01
Speaker
Tools that were never, these are tools that weren't accessible to people.
00:37:04
Speaker
Like 20 years ago, you would have to have like a degree or you have access to a editing suite or something.
00:37:10
Speaker
And now you can just pump out professional looking footage like nothing.
00:37:14
Speaker
I teach in college and one of the first things I teach into the computer are digital imaging and digital video for the last year.
00:37:22
Speaker
Well, this is my presentation, digital video.
00:37:24
Speaker
And then one of the first things that I do besides presenting my work and like leaving them confused as fuck.
00:37:33
Speaker
They're like, why is this guy teaching?
00:37:37
Speaker
Basically, but then one of the things that was like the big question, which is pretty obvious, of like, what is the differentiation for you between art and content?
00:37:46
Speaker
And then one of the framing that I do is like, you're not going to get any from me.
00:37:50
Speaker
You're going to, I mean, we're going to do the whole suite, like the whole suite, like Adobe and whatnot.
00:37:55
Speaker
I can teach you all of this technical shit.
00:37:57
Speaker
But to be completely honest, like, for example, the show that I recently had at ICP, Kira had like the most complicated thing was like the custom media player.
00:38:07
Speaker
but besides that those are videos that i do with my iphone and kind of like okay i just shared them on social media so this kind of value that you put or this idea that you're going to uh higher education to learn how to something the best thing that you can do is get a weirdo like me to make you think a little bit as maybe on the fringes and push you towards like reframing what's happening within the city as an outsider meaning like
00:38:30
Speaker
the greed, I hate that word, the greed and whatnot, and how do you frame that and how do you open that conversation in the anomalies and the neurodiversities that are happening to history, which is always like a reactionary to the current trends, or at least what we traditionally know as like
00:38:51
Speaker
quote-unquote the avant-garde or like whatever and then what is the position of the artist and being the artist artist whatever that means I hate that word but of being like someone that lives or reframes that social dynamics or reframe from the outside of the lens or like brings a new lens into it because it's like we're like you know kind of like digital imaging I'm pretty sure you guys are already producing
00:39:14
Speaker
photographs.
00:39:15
Speaker
So what do you want me to show you how to properly color grade like in Photoshop?
00:39:19
Speaker
Like, sure, we can do that.
00:39:20
Speaker
But what are you going to do with your life?
00:39:22
Speaker
Like, sure, we can do that.
00:39:24
Speaker
Here's a YouTube link.
00:39:27
Speaker
I have more comments on that.
00:39:31
Speaker
I feel like to like a manual Photoshop and I try to make it really a PDF that
00:39:37
Speaker
It's out there in the web, which is like making fun and kind of like my hacks with Photoshop.
00:39:42
Speaker
But yeah, again, it's just like, yeah, you know, all of it is online.
00:39:46
Speaker
Even Adobe, you can put the link and I do put it on my syllabus, kind of like go to Adobe and kind of like this is it.
00:39:53
Speaker
Like you don't need to get, I don't know if they're getting loans or anything, but you don't need to go into debt or anything.
00:40:00
Speaker
And it's weird because that's one of the paradigm shifts right now happening, right?
00:40:03
Speaker
Like this kind of idea of,
00:40:05
Speaker
culture, higher education, what does it mean to have a gallery?
00:40:09
Speaker
What does it mean, again, going to the conversation of like cultural agents, NFTs, blockchain podcast, democracy for those 30 people listening to this.
00:40:21
Speaker
40 now.
00:40:21
Speaker
40.
00:40:22
Speaker
It's going up.
00:40:24
Speaker
Yeah, that was my mom and her friends standing.
00:40:28
Speaker
A heavy chair, heavy chair.
00:40:29
Speaker
Yeah.
00:40:30
Speaker
But yeah, it just becomes interesting.
00:40:32
Speaker
And I hate
00:40:33
Speaker
Oh, well, I hate saying the word like paradigm shit like that, but at the end of the day, you know, there's a lot of happening right now and reacting to the contemporary media, contemporary technologies and conversations about the metaverse and so on and so on.
00:40:46
Speaker
Yeah.
00:40:47
Speaker
Well, what I was going to say about the comment about the tech industry being like more avant-garde than the art market, that's also because like the tech industry puts money into that stuff.
00:40:59
Speaker
There's like money to be made.
00:41:00
Speaker
And so there's money put into...
00:41:02
Speaker
Avant-garde practices in tech.
00:41:03
Speaker
I want to clear up that I did not say that the tech industry was avant-garde.
00:41:07
Speaker
You're on it.
00:41:11
Speaker
It has been stricken from the right one.
00:41:13
Speaker
I'm just saying, right, the market drives what gets to happen and what shows up in the mainstream kind of culture.
00:41:22
Speaker
And I think it probably is true that tech is funding more innovative things right now than maybe the art market is.
00:41:29
Speaker
One of my rants in 2020, I had a conference or whatever, like pandemic idea-like thing.
00:41:39
Speaker
You had your own conference?
00:41:41
Speaker
I do my own, everyone has their own conference call.
00:41:44
Speaker
No, it was like, it was with ISDP.
00:41:47
Speaker
And then one of my rants was like, well, the artist quote unquote of the 20th century is not a content producer, but a network generator.
00:41:58
Speaker
So how do you pivot that shift into rethinking what does it mean to be a,
00:42:06
Speaker
agent of, I hate this word originality, but an agent of something, or having an agency culturally.
Artists as Network Generators
00:42:14
Speaker
But then also that's tricky because what is culture?
00:42:16
Speaker
Everything's culture.
00:42:18
Speaker
But then what does it mean to create and to create new potentialities or future readers?
00:42:24
Speaker
And it's funny that, again, we're still just into this paradigm about like, oh my God, like, you know, kind of like, for example, NFT is content producer, yes.
00:42:34
Speaker
But again, I
00:42:36
Speaker
We have different tools right now, so what does it mean?
00:42:38
Speaker
Maybe, and I hate that I'm saying this because it's not necessarily a good example, but Satoshi or maybe Vitalik, and Vitalik is not necessarily the developer of Ethereum, but him as a visionary of maybe pushing this forward and becoming the front face for this stuff, maybe more interesting as a creative agent than...
00:42:59
Speaker
any of the people creating dApps or whatever they're doing or like NFTs or decentralized within their network.
00:43:08
Speaker
One of the things for me when people ask me, which is always like the great question of like, what are these inspired?
00:43:13
Speaker
You know, like in the traditional art, I just usually say like Thomas Chase Horn and a weirdo like that that's just like out there doing whatever madness is doing.
00:43:23
Speaker
And I don't know how to get away with it.
00:43:25
Speaker
And then I really sincerely say like,
00:43:28
Speaker
and this is uh uh guys i'm i'm gonna put my sexy voice right now and say i'm sorry that i'm gonna say this but i'm being really sincere and vulnerable um then
00:43:40
Speaker
When I think about Tinkins and artists, I always think about Einstein.
00:43:44
Speaker
And not because he was like a thing or something, but like how his brain works.
00:43:48
Speaker
So the whole idea of visualizing when he was a little kid, what does it mean?
00:43:52
Speaker
Or if I was riding at the speed of light next to a next to like a light wave, I guess, I don't know the exact wording for it.
00:44:01
Speaker
Why would I?
00:44:01
Speaker
And I look to the side.
00:44:02
Speaker
Why would I see?
00:44:03
Speaker
And then the whole idea of having this obsession and then figuring it out through mathematics and like, oh, holy shit, and now we have general relativity.
00:44:11
Speaker
Or if two trains are going at the same speed and they're going on opposite, what would you see?
00:44:16
Speaker
Oh, yeah, obviously.
00:44:18
Speaker
And the whole idea of thinking visually and solving a problem, that for me is fucking amazing.
00:44:23
Speaker
And that's usually one of my kind of like, oh, yeah, like, you know, like, art world, like images, like, sure, but how do we make it weirder?
00:44:31
Speaker
How do we create...
00:44:33
Speaker
Recently I wrote, I was sent like this application, which I hate doing applications at all.
00:44:40
Speaker
I like being on the fringes of the fringes.
00:44:42
Speaker
But then one of the things is always like, I don't know, what artist statement?
00:44:45
Speaker
I usually do live, live, live.
00:44:47
Speaker
That's my artist statement.
00:44:48
Speaker
But then at one moment I feel like
00:44:50
Speaker
another moment of vulnerability?
00:44:58
Speaker
I was like, you know what I'm doing?
00:44:59
Speaker
I think I'm doing philosophy without the knowledge or love part.
00:45:04
Speaker
So no love to knowledge.
00:45:05
Speaker
It's just like, I'm just trying to raise questions and kind of like, what does that mean?
00:45:10
Speaker
And how do you become, how can you get away with it?
00:45:12
Speaker
It becomes tricky as the economic realities of New York.
00:45:15
Speaker
But yeah, how do you?
00:45:16
Speaker
I think you're supposed to answer questions too, as a philosopher though.
00:45:19
Speaker
No.
00:45:21
Speaker
Not right.
00:45:24
Speaker
But your point before about... Just to clarify, your two biggest inspirations are Thomas Hirschhorn and Einstein.
00:45:32
Speaker
This is... Nice.
00:45:33
Speaker
False claim.
00:45:36
Speaker
We have it on tape.
00:45:36
Speaker
Are the only one that came to mind at the moment.
00:45:39
Speaker
So...
00:45:43
Speaker
long, long time ago, before the imposition of academia, the scientist was an artist.
00:45:51
Speaker
They were allowed to expand and do alchemy and do this and question, just go beyond scopes.
00:45:57
Speaker
Some might say the priests were as well.
00:46:00
Speaker
Well, that's a funny thing, right?
00:46:01
Speaker
Like the idea of the parliament.
00:46:03
Speaker
Like in Latin America, you have this whole tradition of the poet as the revolutionary or the politician.
00:46:08
Speaker
Even going into Paulo Neruda,
00:46:10
Speaker
Gilberto Hill right now in Brazil and whatnot, Ruben Blades, and it's still kind of like active.
00:46:16
Speaker
Pablo Duarte, the Dominican guy.
00:46:18
Speaker
There you go.
00:46:19
Speaker
So it's funny how, and again, that brings to the question of academia, professionalization, and almost like a crisis in democracy, right?
00:46:28
Speaker
Because we're in the United States, we're so embedded within this media ecosystem, losing perspective in like neurodiversity in other countries, what's actually happened,
00:46:40
Speaker
political diversity uh political ideology all that's happening out there in the world and worse and it becomes tricky because over here is so loud because we have so much media and the channels are basically owned by north american corporations we do have legacy media now working within social media channels so that becomes through a whole conversation about the power of hegemony global globally but then over here the simplification uh the conversation is just so simplified in so many levels or at least in the for the mass audience that we have a two-party system that's basically
00:47:08
Speaker
stiff as fuck and whatnot and really you don't have like actual political conversations because everything seems like too radical or too other almost impossible to think about like there but then again we have donald trump as president which in another sense is like a reality tv star and that's like the weirdest shit uh about it so maybe there's hope not that donald trump is not hope at all i'm just saying that maybe there's space for it's indicative of of something yeah something happening yeah which may not be necessarily in this uh
00:47:40
Speaker
Because I was just talking about artists and then me talking about a con artist as kind of like an artist, still an artist, I guess.
00:47:47
Speaker
I think that's more indicative of the whole evolution of media culture going from tabloids in New York to reality TV.
00:47:53
Speaker
So you can trace a history of media or legacy media in the United States and then social media with Donald Trump.
00:48:00
Speaker
But yes, the whole idea that there's a, and I've been trying not to say this word throughout this whole conversation about disruption, because it's such a strange word from like the West Coast, but that some disruption happened over there because of media and social media.
00:48:18
Speaker
Synergy is another one.
00:48:19
Speaker
I love to throw on some synergy.
00:48:24
Speaker
Also, when you're talking about scientists being creatives way back when, right?
00:48:29
Speaker
I mean, like painters weren't artists back then.
00:48:32
Speaker
They were historians or whatever you wanted to call them, right?
00:48:35
Speaker
So it's like the actual lineage...
00:48:38
Speaker
should probably be rewritten in terms of like creative practice.
00:48:42
Speaker
Um, a little bit.
00:48:43
Speaker
Cause I think it, I mean, I know people like to like throw art history references into their contemporary artwork, but to me, it doesn't really make any sense, except if you want to like support that lineage and that Canon, which, uh, is problematic.
00:48:56
Speaker
Right.
00:48:56
Speaker
It just like, yeah, I feel like there's a lot more in common with, um, uh, a scientist or a politician or whoever.
00:49:04
Speaker
I had a very, um,
00:49:07
Speaker
astute art history professor who said that the the idea of art school was a right-wing idea because he's like where do we put a bunch of lefty militant radical thinkers together to kind of expend that energy and just like so they don't ever actually do anything i know put them in art school it makes sense i'm not kidding like it just makes sense like it's weird that the art industrial complex um um
00:49:37
Speaker
It's just such a big thing in North America, especially when there's not an economic system to sustain because there's no public funding over here.
00:49:47
Speaker
It's just so weird and interesting itself as a phenomenon.
00:49:51
Speaker
And this discourse of art was just a bunch of boomers and hippies that started opening up art departments in all these universities because art and freedom and self-expression.
00:50:02
Speaker
And so it was just weird.
00:50:04
Speaker
And then the boomers were trying to make money
00:50:06
Speaker
out of all these young students coming into there and have like a stable career.
00:50:10
Speaker
I don't know.
00:50:10
Speaker
Like it's just the implication of like, even like the whole concept of art is obviously like a really recent invention, just like art for art's sake, or then art as research or art is kind of like really weird.
00:50:23
Speaker
And that's one of the interesting for me I love.
00:50:25
Speaker
And I've had a lot of projects that are based on research, not necessarily all my, I will never call myself like a research based artist, but obviously research is important.
00:50:33
Speaker
But
00:50:34
Speaker
I do find a lot of interesting how the word research became kind of, I don't know what to call it, but like so many artists that say that they're doing research and then you see like, well, what's your research?
00:50:44
Speaker
Oh, I read a book.
00:50:45
Speaker
And like, oh, well, I read a book also last night.
00:50:48
Speaker
I guess I'm doing research.
00:50:52
Speaker
And it's weird because you can see how it's academia.
00:50:56
Speaker
and making artists trying to sound so the scientific and then kind of like, I'm not, I'm not being a creative, I'm doing research and I'm creating this other artifact based on the research, which is like two levels of alienation from the original research and the fact, but now invest time on my weird little artifact and connection that I made, even though it's not necessarily related to the important research and historical artifact that I had originally, it's kind of like,
00:51:21
Speaker
That's hilarious.
00:51:22
Speaker
And then the gallery show, the solo show, is the paper that's been submitted to the Scientific Journal.
00:51:31
Speaker
Well, the wall test.
00:51:33
Speaker
And then you have something weird happening in the gallery.
00:51:36
Speaker
What does this have to do with exploitation of migrant laborers in New York in the 19th century?
00:51:43
Speaker
And you're like, well, did you read my research?
00:51:54
Speaker
Again, but it's interesting.
00:51:55
Speaker
Maybe I'm sorry.
00:51:57
Speaker
There's a bowl of potato chips in front of me.
00:51:59
Speaker
Potato chips is probably not the best thing to have for a podcast.
00:52:02
Speaker
No, no.
00:52:03
Speaker
At least if we acknowledge it, we can actually.
00:52:05
Speaker
This is an ASMR.
00:52:06
Speaker
That's true.
00:52:07
Speaker
I haven't.
00:52:08
Speaker
I mean, some people hate hearing other people eat.
00:52:11
Speaker
No, this is good.
00:52:12
Speaker
But some people really like it.
00:52:14
Speaker
This is really...
00:52:18
Speaker
good ASMR moment.
00:52:20
Speaker
I want to thank the audience for being over here with us.
00:52:24
Speaker
As we think, as we talk, and Chinese talk with us.
00:52:29
Speaker
You're a Frank Zappa fan, correct?
00:52:31
Speaker
I'm okay with Frank Zappa.
00:52:34
Speaker
This is why we shouldn't give the guests the headphones.
00:52:38
Speaker
He wouldn't be doing that if he didn't, if he couldn't hear himself.
00:52:40
Speaker
Good thing he didn't bring like an effects pedal.
00:52:43
Speaker
delay and flange and reverb.
00:52:46
Speaker
You guys need to spend the podcast for, man.
00:52:49
Speaker
I'm okay with Frank Zaba.
00:52:54
Speaker
Why Frank Zaba?
00:52:55
Speaker
I haven't listened to Frank Zaba in a long time, but yeah.
00:52:58
Speaker
Oh, I was just going to say one thing about, so the touching about the, the
00:53:05
Speaker
The academic model is the European art model versus the American art model or the Western art model on this side of the globe.
00:53:13
Speaker
Like how different they are.
00:53:15
Speaker
There's public money in Europe.
00:53:18
Speaker
There isn't any money here.
Economic Model's Influence on Art Education
00:53:20
Speaker
And the outcomes, I saw it best when Catalina, when Tuca told us about her experience in grad school.
00:53:29
Speaker
She's like, everyone I...
00:53:31
Speaker
was in contact with, was a painter.
00:53:33
Speaker
Whereas back in Chile, everyone was making video was making sites with epic, um, installations.
00:53:39
Speaker
It almost determined the economic model of the West determines that you have to kind of make object-based things because if you don't make object-based things, you can't sell them and you can't sell them.
00:53:49
Speaker
You can't recoup the price of the college tuition that you paid an extraordinary amount of money for.
00:53:55
Speaker
Um, anyway.
00:53:57
Speaker
No, but like, especially in North America, because it's all, you know, it's all for profit, like, and that's the system that we decided to live in.
00:54:06
Speaker
So it's okay.
00:54:07
Speaker
How did you, but again, like the absurdity of like going into student, it just seems so obvious looking at it from the outside, going into student, student debt for a market that's not really there.
00:54:17
Speaker
Even when you're educated, and I do believe in the, I do believe in going into students,
00:54:24
Speaker
cool to read and to just have space for doing whatever and just having like that kind of like social context of like almost like a playpen in the good sense of the word of like yeah like no pressure but then again yeah obviously they're saying
00:54:40
Speaker
there's an at odds happening, especially given the amount of schools that are out there and that are closing.
00:54:45
Speaker
For example, I did do my master in New Genres in San Francisco in SFAI, and now that school is completely closed out.
00:54:52
Speaker
And that's one of the oldest schools in our schools in the United States with a great legacy.
00:55:00
Speaker
So, yeah, it's just like reframe like the whole conversation on kind of like, what is the point?
00:55:05
Speaker
And I'm not saying that our
00:55:09
Speaker
artists should become developers or like kind of like but again like i don't think there's any answer to it like yeah like given like myself as a quote-unquote artist i don't know yeah but it's it saddens me to think that it determines in a certain sense the kind of art you're kind of like pushed to do yeah and you may not think about it yourself as being something but it's like
00:55:31
Speaker
I mean, I think this is my lead into the NFT conversation.
00:55:34
Speaker
If you're coming from a more European model where you're allowed to kind of experiment and do things that are more immaterial, then you can do more things that are in the digital realm or do things outside of the marginalia objecthood.
00:55:46
Speaker
Yeah.
00:55:47
Speaker
But then now to bring it all back, there's this vehicle that you could possibly use to kind of recoup or utilize it to fund your practice or
00:55:54
Speaker
Yeah, it may be that the United States model won at the end because we're talking about NFT market, and individual agency for anyone being their own collector.
00:56:04
Speaker
So it becomes like even like bringing that into conversation even complicates the whole conversation because it may be a thing, oh, like did the United States model for profit won at the end and now we got to understand every asset that we put out there digital or not as like an economic exchange and ownership.
00:56:21
Speaker
So yeah, maybe like the thing, I don't know if I,
00:56:26
Speaker
Oh, I just had a weird Deja Vu looking at the icing.
00:56:30
Speaker
Thank you, Nando Álvarez Perez.
00:56:35
Speaker
So yeah, like it's complicated.
00:56:36
Speaker
I'm trying to find a way because I started thinking about the history about
00:56:42
Speaker
New York and mid 20th century artists moving over here after the world wars in Europe and how it became actually a hotbed for culture, blah, blah, blah, or like the center of the art world and the market being over here, meaning private collectors, but so on, so on, so on, so on, so on.
00:56:59
Speaker
I think I hesitate talking about the NFT thing because of where it went.
00:57:08
Speaker
like relatively recently how it's crashing or like reassessing itself so it's kind of hard to talk about that landscape in that case now i do believe where it becomes tricky is like world content generators or content i have a potato chip in my mouth in a second uh
00:57:31
Speaker
Okay, so if we're all content producers and we're all putting images on the internet and all of these closed gardens like Instagram and whatnot, then the question besides artists doing art and art not being content or whatever value you're putting into this, then why are not all content generators being compensated for their content?
00:57:51
Speaker
or the productivity that they're generating within this platform, especially once their data and the same content is using to aggregate value for that same
Future of NFTs: Automatic Application
00:58:00
Speaker
company.
00:58:00
Speaker
So besides the NFT thing, let's say that in the future, NFTs become the hyper ledger, the blockchain, whatever you want to kind of because optimized to a degree.
00:58:11
Speaker
that every content that I produce and every picture that I make automatically becomes an NFT.
00:58:17
Speaker
It's not even like questionable.
00:58:18
Speaker
There's no main thing.
00:58:19
Speaker
There's no anything.
00:58:20
Speaker
Automatically I hit share.
00:58:22
Speaker
That's my NFT.
00:58:23
Speaker
And then every time that gets re-shared, I get paid like, I don't know..000 something.
00:58:28
Speaker
Yeah, exactly.
00:58:29
Speaker
So it gets re-shared and then value generation.
00:58:31
Speaker
So that's why I'm not trying to think NFT in the paradigm that we're at right now, but thinking maybe 10 years in the future when kind of like,
00:58:39
Speaker
the technology has reset the map, and we're almost like the norm, and probably we're not going to be talking about content, blah, blah, blah, or maybe there's going to be a different consideration of that, or maybe new words for that.
00:58:53
Speaker
And that's where I'm at with this whole conversation.
00:58:55
Speaker
And I think I take a little bit from this from a couple of writers or
00:59:00
Speaker
There are teachers like Jaron Lanier and whatnot, and then how do you actually create more fair internet, which may or may not have to do with Web 3.0.
00:59:09
Speaker
But doesn't the idea of all of your activity that happens on the internet being monetized sound terrible?
00:59:16
Speaker
Because then everybody just becomes a 24-7 content producer to try and pay their rent.
00:59:21
Speaker
Well, the problem is it's already being monetized.
00:59:23
Speaker
You're just not making any money out of it.
00:59:25
Speaker
Well, I know, but as soon as you actually see the paycheck, then all of a sudden we're all YouTubers and we're trying to get clicks.
00:59:31
Speaker
And it's just... I mean, I don't know what that would look like.
00:59:35
Speaker
Yeah, me neither.
00:59:36
Speaker
I don't think... Yeah, I don't know.
00:59:38
Speaker
I think where we're at right now is where it becomes a weird thing where...
00:59:44
Speaker
where when you become aware of how the system is operating, then it's kind of like, oh, what the fuck is this about?
00:59:49
Speaker
Why do I have a shadow profile that I don't have an access to and it's being sold around?
00:59:54
Speaker
Why am I getting like this kind of ass?
00:59:57
Speaker
Why am I, for example, in the art world, there's so much pressure.
01:00:03
Speaker
In the most obvious picture, you guys go through it of like, oh, you need to be on Instagram and whatnot.
01:00:07
Speaker
Or if you're into NFTs, you need to be on Twitter chilling and whatever.
01:00:12
Speaker
It's kind of like weird, but then you're going over there basically to work.
01:00:17
Speaker
And there may not be generating the traction that you want, but then there's actually someone with the company or the third party aggregating their data and they're actually getting a revenue off.
01:00:29
Speaker
And I think Daryl Lanier put some samples in his book, Who Owns the Future, about if somebody just like a trace of your DNA, 23andMe,
01:00:40
Speaker
to fix traded drug down the line, then you get compensated for each one of those drugs.
01:00:47
Speaker
It's almost like a maximized DAO, kind of like where you're not literally signing anything, you're just participating in it because your data belongs to you.
01:00:54
Speaker
And then that's one of those examples that, oh, when we're talking about the blockchain or hyperledges and Web 2.0, that may be interesting and it may be featured that it's not so obvious right now.
01:01:05
Speaker
But then actually when I generate a content,
01:01:09
Speaker
What does it mean that actual ownership or actual DNA, your DNA cultural dress?
01:01:15
Speaker
So I don't know.
01:01:16
Speaker
I don't know.
01:01:16
Speaker
It's too much speculating.
01:01:18
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
01:01:20
Speaker
I think the current system and model is not fair to consumers.
01:01:25
Speaker
I just wonder... I would prefer that all of that money that gets made go to funding social welfare programs or something.
01:01:34
Speaker
So that I don't see the money, so I don't have to feel like I'm working for it.
01:01:37
Speaker
But it's not like...
01:01:39
Speaker
paying some CEO.
01:01:40
Speaker
So do you believe in UBI?
01:01:42
Speaker
I mean, I don't, I think I do, but I'm not really sure.
01:01:45
Speaker
I mean, I like, I like the idea of UBI.
01:01:47
Speaker
Yeah, definitely.
01:01:48
Speaker
Me too.
01:01:49
Speaker
But you know, like who knows what something looks like when it actually happens.
01:01:53
Speaker
Yeah.
01:01:54
Speaker
But I don't see why not, I don't see how it could not be good.
01:01:58
Speaker
Yeah.
01:01:59
Speaker
Especially right now.
01:02:00
Speaker
Right.
01:02:00
Speaker
And there's so much money being generated that we are helping to generate.
01:02:04
Speaker
So it would be cool if I got a check every month.
01:02:07
Speaker
I think if everybody got a check every month, not just me.
01:02:13
Speaker
It might be the equivalent of what like artists get for their Spotify.
01:02:17
Speaker
Yeah.
01:02:17
Speaker
It's like you're getting like 30 cents, 40 cents, you know?
01:02:21
Speaker
Yeah.
01:02:21
Speaker
I would like it if it was like a thousand bucks, which like based on how much money is out there, that is how much it could be.
01:02:27
Speaker
Right.
01:02:27
Speaker
Right.
01:02:28
Speaker
Um,
01:02:28
Speaker
I think the important thing about this conversation is thinking about, as we're talking about the United States, that the Discord becomes so stiffened and not looking at the word talking about politics, artists being politicians, this kind of idea of polymen, that over here the Discord becomes so stiffened.
01:02:43
Speaker
And there's so much noise that even the idea of ideating any other possibility becomes completely radical.
01:02:49
Speaker
And I think that's one of the interesting things for me when...
01:02:53
Speaker
like the conversation about blockchain cryptocurrencies, that there were actually so many utopian projects and all these ideas emerging that was like really exciting and refreshing.
01:03:02
Speaker
And then it became all crumbling down because of market speculation.
01:03:06
Speaker
And then all of these other projects that were out there,
01:03:10
Speaker
uh yeah like basically disappeared one way or another or this point one of the price that i was participating in in puerto rico was a coin community base that businesses could use among each other and basically can to shorten the us dollar in puerto rico and there were a couple of businesses doing it uh and using the coin and then obviously it all came crashing down but it was like one of those uh exciting examples of like oh yeah an alternate future may be out there and like
01:03:37
Speaker
We are so bound into this shit, not to sound like too much like anything, but it was like refreshing for one moment being like, oh, holy shit, yes, let's all believe that the blockchain is going to change the world and democracy and blah, blah, blah, it's going to disrupt all this shit.
01:03:54
Speaker
And then NFTs.
01:03:56
Speaker
And ICOs and so on.
01:04:01
Speaker
Sure, sure.
01:04:03
Speaker
Well, you know, it's still early.
01:04:04
Speaker
No, yeah.
01:04:05
Speaker
Again, Latino technology.
01:04:08
Speaker
ASMR.
01:04:09
Speaker
And like it has to come crashing down, right?
01:04:11
Speaker
Those people who are speculating weren't in it for the quote-unquote utopian ideals or any kind of like social good, right?
01:04:19
Speaker
So they need to be gone for that stuff to actually happen.
01:04:22
Speaker
Well, wasn't that Vitalik said that it would be like a second time that I mentioned Vitalik, but that it would be a disaster if Ethereum is only like become like an expected coin, like the only application for the
01:04:35
Speaker
for the blockchain itself, would be like economic speculation.
01:04:39
Speaker
Right.
01:04:39
Speaker
Because like, yeah, it's like pretty fucking obvious, especially once we're going and just doing this conversation into more broader conversation about cultural manufacturing as we're going and you have these conversations and I think also, but Neil Stephenson is the one that created the word like metaverse.
01:04:55
Speaker
And I know that Facebook is trying to hijack that, but as we're going into this kind of like spaces of interoperability, I think it's like one of the great examples that
01:05:04
Speaker
NFTs are going to bring any value because if I, as a designer, I design a cape for me to wear on mediated reality glasses and whatnot, and then every time you have the glass, you can see two different glasses.
01:05:17
Speaker
For example, you have the Samsung glass, you have the Apple glass and blah, blah, blah.
01:05:20
Speaker
And then in all of those,
01:05:23
Speaker
In all those glasses, my Nike shoes or my cape is also selling or reselling and whatnot and having that interoperability within different platforms is basically one of the great, or probably will be one of the great use cases of the blockchain.
01:05:39
Speaker
automatically knowing that it belongs to you and this acceptance of ownership and then obviously a smart contract throwing revenue at you if your designers are selling within the platform and obviously oversimplified the whole thing but in the future we're talking about cultural production the metaverse and the one it doesn't have to do with where necessarily virtual reality but interoperability and how do you have an agreement about value systems in which you can actually get paid for assets or as cultural producer being sold in all these different platforms
01:06:09
Speaker
So again, it's like talking about it in the space that we're in right now, it's almost like talking about it.
01:06:15
Speaker
And it's this in relation to, I don't know, it's like, it's like really weird because we're right now or like doing this space is selling avatar pictures for Twitter, which is like, okay, you know, kind of like profile pictures, it is what it is.
01:06:30
Speaker
But then again, it's kind of like, you can see how, oh, okay.
01:06:33
Speaker
When you actually read into the technology, then
01:06:36
Speaker
what's going to be cool in the future and whatnot and what's going to be interesting especially with the other things on the annex kind of like being figured out right now and whatnot so if i can wear my nike shoes
01:06:47
Speaker
My Nike shoes, my Tenki.
01:06:50
Speaker
Tenki is my design firm.
01:06:52
Speaker
Thank you very much.
01:06:54
Speaker
You have shoes?
01:06:55
Speaker
Well, I've been thinking of doing some like digital renderings in the morning just to have fun with it and drop it.
01:06:59
Speaker
Actually, one of the projects that we're doing right now or I'm doing is creating, which is probably going to be the first drop that I do under the company's name.
01:07:09
Speaker
uh i thought it was gonna be like the big project but that's like a whole development cycle that we're going through right now but i'm gonna drop like a font which is like based on a a american sign language but it's all kind of like the i don't know if you saw the branding which is like hands and whatnot so it's all like little uh hands so basically that's finished i'm going to the refinement right now i'm gonna do like
01:07:29
Speaker
probably an NFT around it, like a hundred or something like that and just like drop it.
01:07:34
Speaker
So I'm just thinking like a little bit more outside, just doing like a JPEG, what is a normal care about the digital asset and so on.
01:07:42
Speaker
But that means going back into the conversation of like, if I design a 2 and I drop it into Call of Duty and you're wearing my 2, but then
01:07:53
Speaker
the user wants to resell that shoe just like a Nike these days and that's like an NFT and the other user is only playing Fortnite or whatever Destiny, whatever game is in the future, then that interoperability and value exchange, that's where a perfect example of an annex blockchain
01:08:09
Speaker
managing these transactions and then being accepted through all these multiple platforms.
01:08:13
Speaker
Obviously, you have the problem between different software, which is like the game, different hardware.
01:08:18
Speaker
So Apple, PlayStation 5, Xbox and whatnot, then there's an agreement, a new constitution that needs to be written.
01:08:25
Speaker
But if that happens and then you have transactions,
01:08:27
Speaker
happening to smart contracts and whatnot, then that would be a great example for this kind of idea of cultural production in the future and what would that mean.
01:08:36
Speaker
So yeah, just thinking a little bit outside of that field.
01:08:40
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know.
01:08:44
Speaker
Well, I think we've talked around all of Carlos's artwork, which I think is what he would prefer rather than actually talking about it.
01:08:53
Speaker
So if you connected to any part of the conversation, you'll hear his website address at the end and you can go look at the work after hearing the research.
01:09:01
Speaker
Do you have a website?
01:09:03
Speaker
I do have a website.
01:09:03
Speaker
It's hard to find.
01:09:04
Speaker
Yeah.
01:09:04
Speaker
It's very difficult to find.
01:09:06
Speaker
I like being Anon at the stream.
01:09:08
Speaker
Oh, man.
01:09:09
Speaker
No, you really need to know the URL.
01:09:11
Speaker
Okay.
01:09:12
Speaker
You like typing Carlos Franco artist?
01:09:14
Speaker
Nothing.
01:09:14
Speaker
There are a bunch of Carlos Franco artists that are not him.
01:09:17
Speaker
They're not him.
01:09:17
Speaker
They're men.
01:09:19
Speaker
There's a gopher.
01:09:20
Speaker
I was going to do a project about this.
01:09:22
Speaker
Oh, yeah.
01:09:22
Speaker
He's very good.
01:09:23
Speaker
There's a Bolivarian artist, if I'm not mistaken.
01:09:25
Speaker
There's a famous Spanish painter that a lot of people confuse me for him, Carlos Franco.
01:09:30
Speaker
That actually sells pretty well.
01:09:31
Speaker
You should all meet.
01:09:33
Speaker
That was part of the project.
01:09:35
Speaker
Or at least you should sell some artworks to someone who thinks that you're this painter.
01:09:40
Speaker
I think he sold with David Swinburne at one moment or something like that.
01:09:43
Speaker
So it may be a thing that there may be a market over there.
01:09:46
Speaker
No, I met in Anon and I've been in a couple of
01:09:50
Speaker
I'm going to call it personal litigation between people that even post my photo online.
01:09:54
Speaker
Like you need to take that down.
01:09:55
Speaker
Like, and I just keep it really neurotic.
01:09:58
Speaker
Part of it being the conversation about identity and not being paid for being a data set and whatnot.
01:10:04
Speaker
Another thing just being neurotic of like, I like, I'm okay with not being,
01:10:09
Speaker
And recently I'm in a couple of shows and I was with the people.
01:10:13
Speaker
I just saw the bio for Lydian Statter.
01:10:16
Speaker
It's kind of like, yeah, yeah.
01:10:22
Speaker
There was this there was an artist that I did a proposal with forever ago that was from New York, and I actually don't remember his name now, which makes sense because he was a filmmaker and he would use like a different iteration of his name for every single project that he ever did.
01:10:38
Speaker
So he like gave me a CV as part of this proposal and he had all those things.
01:10:42
Speaker
But like after everyone, it was like as X, Y or Z as X, Y or Z. And they were all like just like little tweaks or like different spellings that like if you saw them all, you're like, oh, these are a grouping of the same person, which I thought was kind of fun.
01:10:55
Speaker
I like Fernando Pessoa.
01:10:56
Speaker
It's like one of those, like, you know, like all personas and then writing a complex book about all these personas having their different perspective and kind of like maddening and oscillating, but you know, it's- And it's also this thing where like, if the internet is about being able to be found all the time, what happens if you can't be found?
01:11:13
Speaker
You have to like do it in order to see how it feels or what it's like.
01:11:18
Speaker
What happens to be off the grid?
01:11:21
Speaker
Well, it's also funny that if-
01:11:25
Speaker
Wow.
01:11:27
Speaker
The best way to not be found on the internet is to be just ubiquitous.
01:11:31
Speaker
Like to be a John Smith or to be something that's like completely.
01:11:36
Speaker
And like we went to school with Andrew Yang.
01:11:39
Speaker
He had to give him his dot com.
01:11:42
Speaker
He did?
01:11:42
Speaker
Yeah.
01:11:42
Speaker
He probably sold it.
01:11:44
Speaker
He said specifically he didn't take any money for it.
01:11:46
Speaker
But for a while his Instagram was like Andrew Yang.
01:11:50
Speaker
Not the politician.
01:11:52
Speaker
Or something.
01:11:53
Speaker
He had to like specify.
01:11:54
Speaker
Oh, okay.
01:11:54
Speaker
It's like an actual Andrew Yang.
01:11:57
Speaker
He wasn't Andrew Yang.
01:11:58
Speaker
He is.
01:11:59
Speaker
He is and he was.
01:12:01
Speaker
Is he an artist?
Creativity in Science and Art
01:12:02
Speaker
Yeah.
01:12:03
Speaker
And a scientist.
01:12:04
Speaker
Scientist first, I think.
01:12:06
Speaker
Yeah.
01:12:07
Speaker
Similar.
01:12:09
Speaker
I am not a scientist.
01:12:10
Speaker
No, you're a philosopher.
01:12:13
Speaker
I do not agree.
01:12:18
Speaker
Well, Carlos.
01:12:21
Speaker
Yes.
01:12:23
Speaker
Thank you for being on the podcast.
01:12:25
Speaker
If you call it a podcast.
01:12:27
Speaker
It's just a bunch of ones and zeros.
01:12:29
Speaker
Yeah.
01:12:32
Speaker
Any closing thoughts here?
01:12:34
Speaker
I mean, I was going to ask questions about the show, but I think if anybody wants to hear Mr. Carlos talk about it, we have an excellent hour-long Insta Live.
01:12:45
Speaker
Yeah, the Instagram Live's there.
01:12:47
Speaker
The essay for the show is on the exhibition page.
01:12:51
Speaker
It's all at our website.
01:12:53
Speaker
I feel like that's better than forcing Carlos to suffer through talking about
01:13:00
Speaker
his work or the show i did have one tiny question though el yunque yes sir that's junk that's the jungle in uh puerto rico yeah yeah um from from the little the work i've actually seen of yours in physical life i saw the very interesting
01:13:18
Speaker
Having to like growing your own jungle inside a studio.
01:13:22
Speaker
It's a waterclercidra with a growing platine tree.
01:13:26
Speaker
I love the idea of having your own jungle.
01:13:28
Speaker
Yeah.
01:13:30
Speaker
It's like a waterclerc, guys, for those.
01:13:32
Speaker
We're still going to try and get one of those in the gallery.
01:13:35
Speaker
We have a solo show for 2023.
01:13:38
Speaker
I mean, I think we're still doing that.
01:13:40
Speaker
I guess so.
01:13:41
Speaker
I need to get a new studio before.
01:13:43
Speaker
I just came back from a long trip.
01:13:45
Speaker
So I need to resettle back in the United States.
01:13:49
Speaker
The whole thing could be about making that work at WeWork spaces and getting kicked out.
01:13:54
Speaker
That'd be fantastic.
01:13:59
Speaker
The weird thing about working for those that don't know, like for the last month, I've been working at WeWork.
Post-Pandemic Workspaces: A WeWork Experience
01:14:05
Speaker
Don't tell anyone he doesn't have a studio right now.
01:14:07
Speaker
It's a big faux pas, you know.
01:14:10
Speaker
People, don't be insecure.
01:14:12
Speaker
Yeah.
01:14:13
Speaker
um but it's funny because it's like it's funny that curating this show which is called post industrial digital dysmorphia and then being in these spaces because they're also empty and it's weird as fuck and it's weird kind of like okay uh i do it for my sanity basically just to not be in my apartment oldness but yeah i start teaching and then finally get a studio again but
01:14:35
Speaker
Yeah, it's like really, really, really, really weird.
01:14:38
Speaker
Like there's nothing happening there.
01:14:39
Speaker
There's nothing and nobody.
01:14:42
Speaker
Sad, weird.
01:14:43
Speaker
It's like these spaces, they have like full coffee bars and like nobody there.
01:14:48
Speaker
Nobody, nobody, nobody.
01:14:50
Speaker
Not even at the height because we used to do functions in those WeWork spaces.
01:14:55
Speaker
Yeah, I was surprised how little...
01:14:58
Speaker
Pre-pandemic, I went to a lot of spaces in New York and there were some that were pretty packed up.
01:15:03
Speaker
They had pizza Fridays and it was actually really cool to work in a space with a bunch of people, but it depended on the space.
01:15:10
Speaker
Some of them were very empty.
01:15:13
Speaker
Yeah.
01:15:14
Speaker
It's interesting how everything's starting to get redefined or what does it mean to be remote work and
01:15:22
Speaker
I was in Tulum in the middle of the pandemic for extra wide reasons that I'm not gonna go to.
01:15:30
Speaker
But yeah, looking at all the quote unquote, D2NOMAS and whatnot,
01:15:36
Speaker
Just like breaking down of the jungle for all this Airbnb.
01:15:40
Speaker
And it's just like weird as fuck.
01:15:41
Speaker
But again, it's like a new landscape.
01:15:44
Speaker
And it's complicated.
01:15:45
Speaker
I know a lot of people talk about gentrification and so on and so on and so on.
01:15:48
Speaker
Very important.
01:15:49
Speaker
Don't marginalize communities.
01:15:51
Speaker
Immerse yourself within the communities.
01:15:53
Speaker
Respect cultures.
01:15:54
Speaker
But yeah, I don't know...
01:15:57
Speaker
you know like do we go back or how do you put the genie back in the bottle of like just like having a so the globalized economy with a lot of people having access to mobility and other people do not having access to mobility and how do you start closing down borders or uh passing laws that protect local interests uh and it's something that i think about a lot with my uh i have a couple of friends that are lawyers and the one and then what does it
01:16:25
Speaker
For example, in Puerto Rico, there's so many in the capital buildings that are historically protected, that are owned by people that don't live over there and they just turn into Airbnb.
01:16:34
Speaker
I've had the experience of renting out from someone that lives in Boston and I don't know if it's actually ever been there.
01:16:42
Speaker
And it's just like this really weird, beautiful colonial style building and it's kind of like, oh, okay.
01:16:48
Speaker
And I hate using the word colonization because it's like a trope by itself and it oversimplifies many dynamics.
01:16:55
Speaker
It just brings to the board like a similar conversation about what that means.
01:16:59
Speaker
That being said, like, yeah, like post-industrial digital dysmorphia, guys.
01:17:04
Speaker
For sure.
01:17:05
Speaker
Fantastic show.
01:17:06
Speaker
We'll have links in our show notes to the documentation and the essay and the Instagram live.
01:17:12
Speaker
And thank you so much, Carlos.
01:17:13
Speaker
Thanks, Carlos.
01:17:19
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.
01:17:29
Speaker
You can learn more at lydianstater.co, find images at lydianstaternyc on Instagram, and follow us at lydianstater on Twitter.
01:17:36
Speaker
Thanks to Carlos Franco for taking the time to speak to us this week.
01:17:39
Speaker
If you'd like to learn more about his work, visit his website at cfrancomaldonado.com.
01:17:45
Speaker
Big thanks to Tal Juan, who graciously provides our intro music.
01:17:48
Speaker
His albums are available at talwan.bandcamp.com.
01:17:52
Speaker
And thank you to you, listener, for spending your valuable time with us.
01:17:57
Speaker
I know what to say.
01:17:58
Speaker
I know what to say.
01:18:00
Speaker
I just know I don't want to be like you.
01:18:04
Speaker
I know what to do.
01:18:05
Speaker
I know what to say.
01:18:07
Speaker
I just know I want to be.