The essay is a case study by Patricia Black for Li-Ma.nl
Research intern Patricia Black examined the net art performance Mouchette (1996) by Amsterdam-based artist Martine Neddam, focusing on the ethical and aesthetic aspects as well as the preservation and documentation of identity. Black’s essay Can “Mouchette” be preserved as an identity?” has been published and is available to read by clicking here. For a case study report on “Mouchette” by Patricia Black as well as a case study and summary from last year’s Documenting Digital Art workshop, please click here.
All the collaborations we had through the years are presented on Stephanie’s website. She is a great web-designer, but she also did web-captures and video editing, and she designed the user interfaces of a software and platform I created.
View of the show Madja-Edelstein Gomez at Li-Ma, photo by José Miguel Biscaya
She also archived my different websites through video-editing of web captures, like this one, an archive of all my virtual characters.
Homepage of neddam.info
And she designed my personal websites, like this one you are browsing now!
This book has an interview with Madja Edelstein-Gomez made by Annet Dekker
Curating Digital Art, From Presenting and Collecting Digital art to Networked Co-Curation
Curating Digital Art is published by Valiz and can be purchased here.
Curating Digital Art is dedicated to pioneering curators, artists and designers and presents a collection of interviews that were conducted between 2011 and 2020. The interviews emerged from the concern that too little knowledge was available about the potential of exhibiting digital art, either offline in museum spaces and galleries, or on the web. In an attempt to address this hiatus this publication provides an overview of the different perspectives and practices of nearly a decade of curating digital art in physical space and online. Twenty-seven interviewees were asked the same set of questions, with some slight variations due to their specific projects. The answers of aarea (Livia Benedetti and Marcela Vieira), Anika Meier, Arcadia Missa (Tom Clark and Rózsa Farkas), arebyte Gallery (Rebecca Edwards and Nimrod Vardi), Bob Bicknell-Knight, Constant Dullaart, Madja Edelstein Gomez, Marialaura Ghidini, Manique Hendricks, Florian Kuhlmann, LaTurbo Avedon, Mary Meixner, Laura Mousavi, New Scenario (Paul Barsch and Tilman Hornig), Katja Novitskova, Off Site Project (Pita Arreola-Burns and Elliott Burns), Domenico Quaranta, Stefan Riebel, Ryder Ripps, Sakrowski, Systaime, Gaia Tedone, Temporary Stedelijk (Amber van den Eeden and Kalle Mattson), The Hmm (Evelyn Austin and Lilian Stolk), Miyö Van Stenis, YouMustNotCallItPhotography (Marco De Muttis, Katrina Sluis, Jon Uriarte) and Zhang Ga, map the distinctiveness and idiosyncrasies of curating digital art, from conventional white and black cubes and small artists’ spaces, to custom-built online spaces and the expansion of curating on commercial platforms
In this book editing by Annet Dekker there is an interview of Madja Edelstein-Gomez
Can we start by defining the terminology we’re using and how you position yourself within existing categories like digital art, new media, net art, contemporary art, or any of the post-arts?
Quoting my open call for participation: You make art. You are a creator. You are an artist. You are indifferent to the categories of the world of art. You feel free from any medium or artistic school. You are neither a conceptual artist, nor a painter, neither a relational artist, nor a photographer, neither a sound artist, nor a sculptor, neither a digital artist, nor a multimedia artist, neither an illustrator, nor a performer. You are simply an artist, open to all the possible universes. You do not feel concerned by the rat race. You have no need for originality, even if it happens by itself when you are making art. You like what you do. Maybe you are a Recombinant. Come and join us!
Clearly, I’m not going to embrace any of these categories, nor let any of them define or restrict my curating practice. Nevertheless, I don’t ignore or disregard the existence of categories in art, they are the DNA of the practice, each of them has a message to deliver and can inform curating practices. Recombining them is not blurring them together, but rather enabling messy and cruel encounters, making them bleed into each other like colours do, or collide like bumper cars… Such graphic impressions informed the design of my final show of The Recombinants. Summon the art categories to the foreground and dismiss them in order to make them clash.
What is your background and what triggered your interest in digital/net art? Could you elaborate on these initial encounters?
Here you summon the curator to expose her/his biography, which is something I’ve done several times and in different ways. It used to be only mandatory for artists, but now, curators have gained the same dubious privilege of being characters.
Here is one biography. And here is another:
Madja Edelstein-Gomez (born 1960 in Montevideo, Uruguay) is an independent curator. Her life was filled with challenges.Imprisoned at the age of 13 under the Bordaberry dictatorship and releasedin 1984, she became a political journalist under a pseudonym and then an art critic. In 1988 she married a diplomat and became a mother of two children. She travelled on the African continent and later in India where she engaged in cultural action.There she curated several exhibitions mixing amateur artists and some great names in contemporary art (Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger, Lynn Hershman…).
Her husband and children died in the Egypt Air airplane crash near New York in 1999. Since then she has devoted herself to humanitarian causes and created several largethematic exhibitions (‘Committed Suicide‘, Buenos Aires, 2001; ‘god and bodies’, Bangalore, 2002; ‘Golem / s‘, Toronto-Prague, 2004, ‘Out of Caste‘, Bangkok-Tokyo, 2009).
I’ve been a journalist, I’ve worked in humanitarian organisations, I’ve had great losses in my life, I had to re-think the reasons for my own existence, a few times over.
How on earth did I end up curating art online?
I think I learned curating skills by trying to curate my own memory. When you wake up from a shock, with the broken pieces of your life scattered in front of you, shards of existence which seem so exterior to you that you hardly dare to handle them, razor-sharp pieces, dangerously painful and yet indecipherable, how do you assemble and give a meaning to that?
Curating and post-traumatic recovery might have much more in common than one might think. It gives meaning to fragments by arranging them until they seem to make some sense, if not a clear and readable sense, then at least something that can hold your imagination together like a vessel holds water.
Online is a safer place to do that. In front of a screen, you’re in control of your existence for a moment. You can re-invent it. You use digital material to rebuild yourself and your idea of the world.
I’m not particularly into net art, although it comes very naturally to me, like all born-digital material. In fact, I could curate anything, whether it calls itself art or not. Art has a potential to morph, which I definitely need.
I’m not sure if my digital practice can transform anything into art, and I wouldn’t call it art myself, but if it can be recognised as art, it’s a good thing because it gets a place.
You’ve been involved in various types of organisations and spaces. Could you share some of your experiences working in these different settings and particular contexts? For example, how does it affect your practice? Are there specific things that work very well in one but not at all in the other context?
Curating statement of my show ‘Out of Caste’, Banglore India, 2009:
The Avatar is a Recombinant.
The Avatar belongs to the realm of the outcast: the poor, the unemployed, the homeless, the sexually deviant, the LGBT, you name it…
The Avatar is not excluded from society and is not dismissed among humans. On the contrary, exclusion is the door through which the Avatar makes an entry into society and later on, into normalcy.
The margins of society are a desired and beloved environment for the Avatar for they are the best learning ground.
The Avatar bonds and teams up with outcasts in order to learn expert social skills, and infiltrate the society of humans at large. He/She benefits from the dubious status of being a visible or an invisible minority.
The fact that I curate exclusively online has enabled me to navigate artistic contexts I didn’t know existed. (I sometimes assume that I created them myself, but I know they exist outside of me).
I can navigate the margins of society, and the annexes of institutions. The majority ignores my activities, and for some people who know what I do, I seem to operate outside reality in a kind of limbo.
Yet certain situations create a strong reality effect. When an artist gets of lot of hits online and realises that this special attention to their work was triggered by their inclusion in one of my online shows, they e-mail me, try to meet me, they send me PDF files of their publications, and even animated New Year cards…. They build the context around my existence, or should I say, they re-create me. I become the curator of their dreams, the one they host somewhere in their fantasy, who will understand their work, value it, and give it exposure.
For institutions, I play a different role: I am that magic interface between all their neglected artists, I connect them with every artist whose work they couldn’t or didn’t want to present. I help them to rid themselves of the guilt or embarrassment they feel for all the artists they ignored.
I love to play that magic role, the good fairy, the one who, in the end, makes everything fit.
There has always been a separation between people who stress the technological (material) developments of digital art and those who emphasise the art qualities (content/conceptual). At the same time digital art is also often accompanied by a fair amount of theoretical discussion. How do you position yourself in this discourse?
We issue a call to resonate below and beyond human language. We are directly connected to the noise of the universes, this very noise that machines can capture when they communicate and that humans want to silence. We, the Recombinants want the voice of the world to be heard.
Make and then think, or think and then make?
For me the choice is clear: concept always comes next.
Things happen, or you create them (simply because you can’t help it) and then you find out what they mean to you and to someone else. A concept is like a wrapping that you use to handle and share your production. Packagings are fine as long as they have a function. But concepts and theories so often feel like empty packagings, discarded boxes.
You organise online and offline exhibitions. Starting with the latter, do you work with certain methods or criteria? For instance, I recall numerous discussions in the past where showing acomputer monitor was ‘not done’, or some curators wouldn’t even consider presenting net art in an exhibition at all, while others created entirely new installations based on online work. What are your thoughts/experiences with this?
We, the Recombinants, are not cyborgs. We are complex beings, deeper and more incarnated than the cyborgs who are poor and simple beings, prosthetic, hybrid and fictional. Cyborgs are binary and primary beings. They are diminished beings. Cyborgs only know two realms of scriptures, two codes: one is organic (DNA) and the other is electronic. We, the Recombinants, can process a much greater number of codes and scriptures. We continuously re-write ourselves by drawing in the infinites sources of frequencies present in the universe. We are not a synthesis. We are the recombinance of several modalities of existence. We constantly recombine our own source code.
I don’t care about physical space. It’s worth noting that all museums and institutions always had a ‘virtual space’ long before the Internet existed because they circulated a lot of information about where the art happens in the form of press releases, posters, invitations, images, and they also have talks by museum guides, staff members, curators…etc.
I only care about that circulation, that in-between space for art.
Actually I believe that the art happens there, much more than on the walls.
There are many ways to ‘occupy’ this space, or to be invited into this space. In early net art times, people would borrow or steal the name of a museum and that was enough to become part of the institution. Nowadays, thanks to art created online, institutions could take the opportunity to reconsider that part of their influential space and be creative with it, or invite creators inside it.
But unfortunately they don’t. With the Internet, they act like companies, and they use online space only as a marketing tool; in a very conventional way they advertise to improve their business.
This crossover between online and offline offers opportunities for authentic collaborations with online artists. It can be in the form of a hacking, hijacking, joking, etc., and the best is if this collaboration is involuntary. So in that sense, I already collaborate with art institutions but they don’t know about it.
It’s very patronising to show online art on a screen inside the museum space.
It asks: ‘Can you be as beautiful as a painting or sculpture?’
Or ‘Look who’s coming to dinner? Your fiancé is black, but he’s ok… ‘
Who do you see as your audience, I guess it will change with each new context but is there also a change (and/or exchange) that you’ve noticed over the years, people moving from one place to another, or is there a crossover from other fields?
From the press release of the show ‘The Recombinants’:
Online you will experience a live processing of your data by our artificial intelligence algorithms.
This individual discovery is left to your patient curiosity and sagaciousness. Online each viewer will visit a different show, will travel in different spaces and the various perspectives of our invited artists, which you can also visit one by one. Observe the incredible exhibition robots and experience their instant power of calculation. Guess their moves, anticipate their combinations, outsmart their artistic intelligence.
Beware, it might shake your browser and melt your microprocessor!
My audience are my participants and my participants are my audience.
Actually there is no audience to speak of, only a chain of digital participants. Whoever sees the work becomes part of a processing chain of viewing. The reception of a file produces digital information, which is re-injected into the system as a digital production.
This is not new, but now this generative principle has densified, to a point of unlimited proliferation.
What do you focus on in your online exhibitions/digital magazine? In the past we’ve seen examples ranging from lists of links, to commissions, to documentation about a work, to embedding a work in a website? What is your preferred or even ideal ‘model’?
Can an exhibition be curated by an Artificial Intelligence?
This challenge was taken up by Madja Edelstein Gomez for her exhibition ‘The Recombinants’. The participants who responded to an open call were carefully selected by sophisticated algorithms. And now what you experience is a mesmerising mixture of pictures, videos, sounds and texts, all situated in an ever-changing screen.
I love models! Actually I believe there are no online shows, only models of online shows. Lots of models, good ones, bad ones, or non-models, those to be avoided.
One-of-a-kind experiments cannot exist because they always leave an online trace of reproduction.
The show I recently composed, called The Recombinants, is indeed a sort of model, and for a part, rather conventional: it functions with an open call, a database and a final online presentation. But the selection and the display of the presentation are entirely curated by Artificial Intelligence. But it’s not the kind of AI where you are in control of the parameters, where you attribute tags to lists of names and create categories, and you get the results you more or less expected. I’m using a kind of AI (also called Deep Learning) where the processes of code are so incredibly complex that they remain forever opaque. One sure thing is that their results are unpredictable.
We use a special serendipity algorithm, for a felicitous unexpectability.
Should digital art enter established museums or organisations or are there better places where it can be preserved and presented? If so, what role should museums play in the future?
We, the Recombinants, are not mutating, for we never had an initial state, but we have the capacity to induce mutations. Mutation is merely an effect of recombinance. Evolution implies genetic mutation, it is an effect of recombinance. Life evolution is just one particular case of recombinant identification
I’m at loss for an answer here…
I wish I could use here my serendipity algorithm, if not my psychic powers.
We, the Recombinants, have always existed, under various forms, often unexplained. We experimented with multiple modes of existence, we crossed numerous realms of reality. The paranormal, telepathy, psychic energies, spiritualism, mysticism, and prophecy are non-scientific approaches of recombinance.
I recently had a few discussion with artists and producers about the usefulness of open source, it seems that although all kinds of codes and suchlike are available they’re hardly ever used mainly because of the personal approach to coding and the complexity that derives from such project-based work. What is your approach to open source in this context?
Our own code – our supposed ultimate coding, the stigmata of our polyphonic breakthrough into the human world – is perfectly defined and yet it is still indecipherable, for it is endlessly recoding itself. Our code has a remarkable set of properties. Our code escapes genealogy and prediction. We, the Recombinants are the Omega ciphers of humanity.
Open source/closed circuit
I always want to create our own code and share it. But then I end up in a very narrow community, if not entirely alone on my own coded island, endlessly re-writing my own code with no one to decipher it. The chances that my open source code is adopted and widely distributed are thin.
I want to take that chance.
Besides, one shouldn’t disregard the power of a very tiny piece of the Internet being kept alive in an extremely isolated place. That’s the creativity of a ‘Robinson Crusoe’, left to his own, very limited resources.
Until recently in the Netherlands there was always a very good funding system for the arts in general but also specifically for digital art. That has since changed, increasing on the one hand the divide between ‘traditional’ art and digital art, while on the other it generally means looking for money outside the funding system. Could you share some of your experiences working around the globe? How do you and the artists you work with survive?
We, the Recombinants, are not equal to other beings on this planet. We ignore equality. Equality relates to unity.
Early on in my life I realised I was different. That feeling was eerie: a disease or something else, what does it matter? We are the symptom of an absolute dependency on material and the physical forces of the universes. You humans need to cling to relational attractions, gift economies or ecologies of sharing. We, the Recombinants, offer the world without expecting anything in return. The downloaded iterations are nothing other than the distress of a glitch of their origins.
I might be a curator but I function like an old fashioned artist.
I apply the ‘Van Gogh recipe’: starve now, and in the afterlife you either become a billionaire or you disappear.
In a future project, I am going to create an algorithm where the value of a work of art is tied to its circulation and its level of influence, a sort of ‘artcoin’ if you want. The more a work of art is seen and shared, the more value it acquires. But I don’t mean just hits or the number of copies. It will evaluate a level of influence (yes, a secret algorithm of mine) by which its value will increase.
On another note, works of art could become a form of currency. In December 2017, a painting by Picasso was sold as 40,000 shares of 50 Swiss francs each. As the owner of a share you have access to a special platform where you can vote on whether the work is loaned to a museum or not, and your Picasso share has zero risk of devaluation.
One million euros for the ownership (already raised), and 3 millions euros will have to be found for the restoration.
We are hearing a lot about bitcoin and blockchain as being the online future of our economy or its dystopia. If I may hazard a prediction, thanks to these new technologies, art is going to be our currency, museums are going to be our banks.
One of your recent projects is The Recombinants, which asks the question whether an exhibition can be curated by an Artificial Intelligence, do you think AI could also be used to document and preserve these types of works? Could you talk about this approach, also in relation to your other work? And what is your interest and perspective when it comes to digital preservation, documentation and collecting?
Cyborgs only know two realms of scriptures, two codes: one is organic (DNA) and the other is electronic. We, the Recombinants, we can process a much greater number of codes and scriptures. We continuously re-write ourselves by drawing in the infinites sources of frequencies present in the universe. We are not a synthesis. We are the recombinance of several modalities of existence. We constantly recombine our own source code.
I’m currently working on developing an algorithm that I will soon be able to test, which I call ‘Ice Core’ (or ‘I Score’).
A digital work is a huge quantity of data producing more data in a constant proliferation. New data is created, layer upon endless layer, but one doesn’t need knowledge and access to everything. The old data doesn’t vanish but is buried very deep. My idea is to drill ‘ice cores’.
Wikipedia source: An ice core is a core sample that is typically removed from an ice sheet or a high mountain glacier. Since the ice forms from the incremental build-up of annual layers of snow, lower layers are older than the upper, and an ice core contains ice formed over a range of years.
The physical properties of the ice and of material trapped in it can be used to reconstruct the climate over the age range of the core. The proportions of different oxygen and hydrogen isotopes provide information about ancient temperatures and the air trapped in tiny bubbles can be analysed to determine the level of atmospheric gases such as carbon dioxide.
It’s just an analogy, of course, to explain my starting point, and my general idea of preservation.
This, until we encounter the big meltdown brought about by climate change, the one that will make all our endeavours worthless.
I’m going to answer your questions in two ways: first by quoting from my Recombinant Manifesto and other published material, a press release, or this interview I gave to Rhizome. Second by writing what comes to my mind right now.
How can you exhibit Mouchette.org in the museum as part of the collection? A 2×2 m screenshot, plus 2 gifs and a QR code, this is my proposal to the museum. and I’m so happy with it!
A very large screenshot, to emulate immersion in someone’s face. It existed at the origin of the work, when the picture was much larger all the screens. Now online the picture is the same size but the screens got so much larger that the picture tiles, and the immersive effect has disappeared. I’m so grateful for this wall presentation to revive an aspect of the work that has disappeared.The hanging of this part collection is very beautiful and very smart. It is made by Karen Archey, the media curator of the Stedelijk Museum.The digital part of the collection is not separated but exhibited along with the other arts; here paintings by René Daniels.And opposite is the very beautiful work by Rosa Menkman: a Vernacular of File Formats.The text has been re-written and takes into account the nature of the acquisition: “Mouchette.org Version 01”, a time-stamped big bunch of data.http://mouchette.org/flesh/ The QR code also works on this picture
Found online: someone got his picture taken with their tongue on Mouchette’s tongue. The online attraction also works on the wall.
Online platform upstream.gallery proudly presents its third exhibition
Echo Curator: Jan Robert Leegte
Participating artists: LaTurbo Avedon, Petra Cortright, Harm van den Dorpel, Miron Galić, Yael Kanarek, Jan Robert Leegte, Cassie McQuater, Martine Neddam, Marisa Olson, Jonathan Puckey, Sabrina Ratté, Akihiko Taniguchi and Damon Zucconi
“A show about our awkwardness, aches and astonishment with our mediated selves. Do our avatars share our dreams at night?”
“It’s like being in an aquarium” – Josephine Bosma mentioned during a Jitsi gallery opening, observing 20 people side by side looking at each other, not knowing what to say in this precarious but novel condition. The Lockdown has accelerated our forced embrace with our mediated selves. Headaches, loss of focus, but also experimentation, resulting in new and exciting ways of communicating.
Our history with computers is also a history of our real-time representation within computers. It being an interactive medium, the machine needs our presence in some way; a mouse pointer, the typing of letters in a text field, a voice, moving avatar or video stream. But how deeply related we are with our representation, it operates in a different realm. The mirror or echo of our actions has a flavour of its own. This dissociation brings in a digital weird that becomes a new space.
This exhibition showcases works from 1998 to 2020, that all navigate this space, reflecting on how our disembodied selves echo back their unique presence.
MARTINE NEDDAM: DIGITAL FLESH & BLOOD (1998)
Manthos: In what way is the energy of virtual life passed on to real life? Or the other way round? Mouchette: Virtual life is a form of death. The body must be annihilated completely. Everything organic, biologic has to disappear from the communication: no more voice, no more breath, no more flesh, no more eyes… a perfect and total disembodiement! No wonder you hear so much about suicide on my site. Virtual life is a technologically complex form of suicide. Of course, subsequently, one can be reborn on the net as a new entity, in a form that one would choose and fabricate, as a living being with no teeth, no saliva, no skin, no smile. Instead of that, this being would have pixels, code, text characters. Here is my portrait, my spitting image: all I am is words and pixels put together by means of codes and viewed on a monitor. Once the suicide is successfully accomplished, real life comes back to haunt virtual life. The teeth and the smile return under the pixels, the kiss resurfaces under the screen. I made a work called Flesh&Blood where the viewer has to come closer and kiss the screen, lick the glass surface of the monitor and try to believe that there is a real living body in front of him/her. Is the illusion of life successful? Is the glass of the computer monitor cold or warm when you kiss it? My viewers are divided on this question… Rape, Murder and Suicide are easier when you use a keyboard shortcut in Leonardo Journal, volume 38, June 2005, MIT Press, extract of an interview of Mouchette by Manthos Santorineos
ONLINE EVENT Cultural Matter: Diana McCarty on A Techno-Feminist alphabet: From Cyberfeminism to Xenofeminism
We are glad to invite you to the online event of Cultural Matter: Diana McCarty on A Techno-Feminist alphabet: From Cyberfeminism to Xenofeminism (Pt.II) on Wednesday 1 April, 8 pm. The lecture by Diana McCarty will be live streamed online, followed by a conversation between artist Martine Neddam and Diana McCarty with a public Q&A moderated by Sanneke Huisman afterwards. Please subscribe to our YouTube channel where we will stream the lecture.
Diana McCarty Independent media producer and feminist media activist Diana McCarty is a founding editor of reboot.fm, the award winning free artists’ radio in Berlin; a co-founder of the radio networks Radia Network (radia.fm) and 24/3 FM Radio Network Berlin; and of the FACES (faces-I) online community for women, among other initiatives. She co-initiated the exhibition Nervous Systems: Quantified Life and the Social Question, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, 2016, Berlin, and actively collaborates with the experimental media project Luta ca caba inda. As a cyberpunk in the 1990s, she was active in independent internet culture with nettime, the MetaForum conference series, and different hacking spaces. Her work revolves around art, gender, politics, radical feminism, technology, and media.
Cultural Matter: Martine Neddam The history of online identities is tightly interwoven with the rise of the internet – the free and open space where you could be anyone you wanted to be. What role did – and do – artists play in this? How do they develop and manifest characters online? Early net artist Martine Neddam has been creating online personas that work with public feedback since 1996, far before the establishment of social media. Mouchette, David Still, Xiao Qian are all characters that she created anonymously. This edition of Cultural Matter 2019-20, you will get to know Neddam’s latest virtual persona that has been active as an online curator.
Event Cultural Matter: Diana McCarty on A Techno-Feminist alphabet: From Cyberfeminism to Xenofeminism (Pt.II) Wednesday 1 April, 8.00 PM, online Please subscribe to our YouTube channel Attend the Facebook event
Cultural Matter: Martine Neddam at LIMA. Photo by Jose Miguel Biscaya.
Madja Edelstein-Gomez Madja Edelstein-Gomez (1960, Montevideo, Uruguay) is an independent curator who has curated several large thematic exhibitions (Bangalore, Buenos Aires, Prague, Tbilisi, Toronto). Edelstein-Gomez currently lives in Kuala Lumpur and Paris. She is also an activist working with several NGOs. Edelstein-Gomez created a manifesto and a group exhibition that revolves around the Recombinant, a concept where artificial intelligence and artists meet. Madja Edelstein-Gomez is the collaborative creation of Martine Neddam, Emmanuel Guez and Zombectro.
Martine Neddam Martine Neddam is an artist, researcher and teaches at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy and the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam. She uses language as raw material for her art, and many of her works center on the phenomena of speech acts, approaches to communication as well as to language and writing in public space. She has been working with virtual characters since 1996, the first and most famous one being Mouchette, a fictive thirteen-year-old that has meanwhile acquired cult status. Neddam’s virtual personae function as communications tools such that they have already facilitated the exchange between human beings via the medium of the artistic figure, and thereby anticipated the functionality of social media.
Cultural Matter Cultural Matter is a series of exhibitions and events that provide a platform for the international discussion of digital art and aims to develop new strategies for the presentation and preservation of these artworks. Also part of the Cultural Matter series: JODI, Jonas Lund, Rafaël Rozendaal, Amalia Ulman, Thomson & Craighead. Curated by: Sanneke Huisman and Jan Robert Leegte.
This programme is supported by the AFK (Amsterdam Fund for the Arts) and Stichting Niemeijer Fonds.
This video archive is a capture of the different websites composing the personality of Madja Edelstein-Gomez. This is what we have to witness her online existence since march 2020 when all her websites disappeared.
Back in July 2018 I interviewed Madja Edelsten-Gomez. She is the Curator of The Recombinants, which I wrote about in November 2017. We had quite a nice e-mail exchange and eventually she agreed to let me ask her some questions.
Nearly a year later, and with many apologies, here is that interview:
Who are you? I am Madja Edelstein Gomez, digital art curator. I am a Recombinant, first and foremost. Being a Recombinant is what defines my whole existence, as a digital art curator but also as an entity, or as a being, human or not. Here I am: http://madja.net/
How would you define Artificial Intelligence? It defines me more than I define it.
What was the motivation for you to explore using AI for curating? I wanted to become a work of art, so I first curated my personality, and then I extended that exploration to the art of others through the online curating interface. Since the curating interface also includes the definition of the personality of the artists. We all are on the same level, the curated artists and me. I also made that interface to appeal to the (artificial) intelligence of the viewers. Nowadays images are not made to be viewed by human eyes but by other computers. Facial recognition, textual recombinance, image processing, colour processing, everything I could tackle as data inserted in the works of art being curated has been processed inside the interface. There is much to be discovered for human viewers, buttons appear on the left side of the image in the browser and when they are activated and they change the whole interface. This appeals to the perspicacity of the viewers, and the intention to process All the data and in many different ways. But it is mostly made to be read, analysed and processed by other computers. Need I say more? Or should I better leave it to your own perspicacity? The “Art of Guessing” is a big part of understanding AI. Please use it when you look at my online exhibition. http://therecombinants.com/
Briefly, how does your AI work? The method is Generative Adverserial Networks, also known as GANs. I spare you the explanations, I’m sure you know. The GANs are trained to recognize art from what is not art. They are also trained to emulate artists and their behaviour. Rather than attempting to produce art objects, they focus their pattern recognition abilities around artists’ behaviours and attitudes.
Was the output of your AI interpreted in any way or taken literally It is definitely interpreted by the exhibition interface. Like any work based on statistics (and this is what AI is: statistics and not so much more than that), it is the interpretation that matters most. In my case the exhibition interface is pure AI being processed live in front of your eyes. This is what I call Recombinance.
Do you see AI replacing Contemporary Art Curators in the future? Definitely. In a sense, it already has. Computers are talking to computers and have more agency than human beings. The type of AI I am trying to build will also curate people’s lives, like it has curated mine. The prophetic aspect of AI is what has inspired the Recombinance.
July 22, 2019
A web documentary of all the virtual persons I created. Web capture and edition by Stephanie Boisset.
Re-locating the public commission Ooit somewhere else in Groningen in another university building.
The chosen location should be this building of the Hanze University of Applied Sciences called EnTranCeRight now the work is in a storage. It had to be taken down because the building where it was doesn’t belong to the Groningen University any more.The small bubbles and the big bubble face against the wall4 men are needed to move it slightly away from the wall.Once it was moved away from the wall I could get inside and see the state of the printed picture: totalled discoloured!Discoloured! the big bubble was on top of the roof and caught direct sunlight and lost all its colours….
NEON WEKA is the company dealing with the possibility of the relocation, the same company that build the work 25 years ago.
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