What Simon Denny can do for us
2020
Interview with Simon Denny
Photo: Nick Ash
Born in Auckland in 1982, and based in Berlin Simon Denny’s works are vigilant social lubricants uni ng technological pathways with cultural references and interac ve environments. From ‘Thatcher,’ to ‘EU Parliament’ and ‘Parco Polo Airport’ in Venice, Simon Denny extrapolates, re-orders and imposes structure upon the chao c fabric of our experience in works that infect our modes of behaviour in an a empt to hold complex poli cal, and cultural themes in check. What follows is an account of his intellectual provoca ve recent output.
Joi Ito head of MIT Media Lab once pointed out that one hundred years from now, the role of science and technology will be about becoming part of nature, rather than trying to control it. Because science plays such an important part in your work, can you tell us how you see the new technologies and their impact on our lives?
Simon Denny: Technology has always been part of nature though, right? In some formations, it invents the term ‘nature,’ and then aims to categorise and control it. It depends on which epistemological traditions scientists are in dialogue with as to how this is presented. My projects have often focused on exactly the cultures that invent technology products in the ‘categorize-and-control’ mode, and the actors who promote them. There is a strong tradition of this; in this tradition, technology and nature are presented as distinct and often opposed, even as they employ metaphors that suggest otherwise (cloud, mine etc). I have worked on exhibitions that have tried to foreground the fact that the impacts of these kinds of technology products often diverge from the claims of the rhetoric that surrounds them. A broad understanding of the full effects of things like the Internet and other consumer tech is usually not prioritized by those who promote and profit from their proliferation. In fact, treating technology as separate from nature helps this obfuscation. This information asymmetry is leveraged for profit. I enjoy using technology products like many do – and there are incredible things that these products enable. But their existence can come at a societal and environmental toll which is often hard to cost, especially for those who are not developing the products, which is most of us.
Installation view T293, Rome, 2019
Installation view Bozar, Brussels, 2017
Your puzzle-like works are layered with technical, scientific and political texts, charts, and diagrams. In ‘Regulation,’ your exhibition held at T293 gallery from late 2019 on the future of the internet inside the European Parliament moves in this direction. In a straightforward performative manner the viewer is invited into a very dense mesh of sketches from inside the Brussels parliament topped with syntagms and slogans which activate recent social and political debates. I wonder if you can give our readers a hint about this particular work and the way it is performed.
SD: The artworks in ‘Regulation’ are sculptural responses to the European Union’s attempts at influencing governance and regulating data practices on the Internet. I see the EU’s attempts to push back on the power of major platforms like Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple as unique – with no other meaningful attempt by foreign state entities. Both bodies of work perform poetic interventions into the EU parliament’s regulatory activity. The artworks utilize drawing, performance and print.
A series of felt tip drawings simultaneously documenting and critiquing debate sessions inside the European Parliament in June 2017 are displayed throughout the gallery on a series of tension-like railings. Produced inside the Parliament’s ‘Next Generation Internet Summit,’ the works were collaboratively composed with NewModels.io co-founder Caroline Busta, datasociety.net researcher Matt Goerzen, artist Daniel Keller and illustrator and imagethink.net founder Nora Herting. They use a genre of live drawing common to session documentation at tech conferences, yet question the parliamentary talks presented rather than simply illustrating their key themes.
Production at the EU Parliament
Production at the EU Parliament
How do you see the role of the artist in today's multifaceted culture? Are you harvesting data by yourself or going to labs or research centres for collaborations, as was the case of the above-mentioned work produced inside the Parliament?
SD: I think the role of the artist is to communicate life as visceral, that create particular expressions that can be shared, that move other people. I’m reminded of a quote from Kate Crawford, an AI ethics researcher who I follow work of, from an essay she wrote with the designer Vladan Joler called ‘The Anatomy of an AI System,’ they say when talking about how the task of speaking about technology today, that: ‘It’s necessary to move beyond a simple analysis of the relationship between an individual human, their data, and any single technology company to contend with the truly planetary scale of extraction […] Thinking about extraction requires thinking about labour, resources, and data together. This presents a challenge to critical and popular understandings of artificial intelligence: it is hard to “see” any of these processes individually, let alone collectively. Hence the need for a visualization that can bring these connected, but globally dispersed processes into a single map.’ Here they were describing a graphic they produced, but I think this is the kind of thinking that could apply to the task of artists’ work in general – the call to synthesize complexity (maybe aspects of the political, social, emotional, technical and aesthetic) into an experience or material.
In scientific research, the scientists are on the lookout for what is missing to round up their formulas. Sometimes for an invention to acquire a consensual public meaning, it might take years. Do you think that technological meanings are unstable? Can you rate a few inventions that have stayed with you longer than you expected, and maybe have influenced you?
SD: Yes – if I get your assertion here – I do think that the meaning of artefacts of technology is dynamic. I think the meaning of all products or cultural artefacts is dynamic. And if we are talking about technological objects, the internet of course – as much as I am weary of its undeniable military use and origins – has enabled so many things that are just essential to my life. As a learning and communication tool, it is just unparalleled. This cluster of technologies will be forever transformational in my social and intellectual life. But it is also dynamic – and my projects have also tried to reify let’s say a moment in discourse or cultural reception of parts of this cluster – a bookmark in the dynamism; a snapshot of ideology, rhetoric and aesthetics.
Details of artwork by David Darchicourt and other unattributed NSA authors, interpreted by me Simon Denny
Details of artwork by David Darchicourt and other unattributed NSA authors, interpreted by me Simon Denny
What if technology removes all constraints on our lives? Do you think that there is no limit to the economy of imagination, technology and desire, or will there be a technological ‘glass ceiling’, below which our desires will hang?
SD: Hmm that one is maybe a bit above my pay grade. I think that these things are epistemological and cultural also. I am not sure I find the concept of ‘limits to desire and imagination’ useful, or rather they are dangerous. We are part of communities and ecosystems. I think that we need to recognise context and our embeddedness as a part of the material world, and things that are beyond our agency, of our formations of self and community. I think that using technology to ignore or circumnavigate the need for awareness is a mistake.
At Marco Polo airport you took the art of print to the next level. The site-specific approach of inserting reproductions from the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana (Marciana Library) into the airport’s arrival, transfer and departure is unparalleled in its capacity to superimpose habitats, artefacts, infrastructures which include people into a powerful choreography of contact between the passengers and the indelibly solid/and flat at the same time — with representation of carvings, paintings, ceilings. How did people react to this work? What was the general tone of those months when this installation was in place?
SD: Well amazing, that artwork is still there. The Airport kept the work, as installed, and it is still seen by millions and millions of people as they travel across the political borders of Italy and Venice. So that is a reflection of how much the director and marketing staff of the Airport liked it. I negotiated that work very carefully – I had to work with their advertising installation crew, the local incarnation of Clear Channel, for security reasons – and the negotiation and installation of it was a joy. The airport directors Clear Channel project managers and installers were all really into the work. I had to take a special security test and pass an exam so I am licensed to be in the “airside” beyond security for an extended period. And we documented travellers and how they looked at the work in the first few days – but also since. Every time I pass through, somebody is looking at these incredible reproductions (which we also had to find a way to produce). I negotiated a deal with this amazing startup called arounder.com (which I don’t think is active anymore), to produce these incredible photos of the ceiling and walls of the Marciana. We have some great documentation of people staring at the floor, a child lost in the power of the reproduction of those masterpieces that are usually so far away when you are in the Marciana. I think it worked very well – to recontextualise rich, complex and beautiful imagery that considers the power of knowledge in a space where it is politically asserted while crossing borders.
It seems that in your Venice Biennial installation — ‘Secret Power’ the aesthetics of the PowerPoint slides leaked by Edward Snowden and legal papers protocols were of major interest to you. In the Guardian, in an article of that time, you were quoted: ‘I’m trying to contextualise this material from my tradition, which is the history of conceptual art.’ From the artist's point of view, how do you see ownership, thinking in particular to the visual materials of David Darchicourt, who worked for the NSA for 17 years which you co-opted for New Zealand’s 2015 representation at Venice?
SD: What the quote refers to is that I am drawing on methodologies and techniques from parts of a canon of art-making that I love and that was educated in. In this tradition, remixing and re-presentation are tools available to the artist from sub-genres like collage, appropriation, installation art and institutional critique. In this way, Darchicourt and the other artists are the authors of their illustrations, and I am the author of mixing them with material, scale, the way they overlap and interact and presenting them in the context I did. Of course, power dynamics and who one appropriates images and objects from is always a part of these kinds of practices and techniques. Who’s work recontextualizes and how is important, and a part of the consideration of how to do this.
My gesture in using these tools was to make artworks that to me mirrored what felt important about the power relationship that the US military has over internet users, enabled by their initial development of the internet, of course. One is aware that all things that happen on the internet are trackable, and quantifiable by the US, with things generated by the labour of many people translated into strategic advantage and economic value by the US Government and its domestic and international commercial partners who administer most of the web. I was lifting illustrations from Darchicourt, many of which were made for the NSA, (and many others by unknown authors that were not possible to attribute, as they were lifted from the Snowden-leaked documents) and monumentalizing them, making sculptural collages from them and posing them to New Zealand, and other artworks, objects and imagery present in the venues I worked within for the pavilion.
In an interview on The Daily Show of 2019, Snowden argued that ‘it’s really about what you see rather than what you are’ implying that facts are the ultimate, undisputed representation of truth. Do you agree with his point?
SD: I haven’t seen that snippet, but if the implication is as you interpret it then, no, I think that cultural/ political life and sociality frames, interprets and applies facts. I also believe in material and physical realities, in matter and its entwined interrelationships beyond human agency. But between humans, I think political/cultural/social forces construct ideas of what facts are – so I guess I would say that what you think you see is influenced by what you are.
Toni Giuliano and Paula Hertel developed the concept of ‘transactive memory’ which looks at the mechanics not of remembering facts but of knowing where to find them. What facts and data are you taking in consideration to best direct the viewer's attention towards a comprehensive idea? After all, you are an artist who asks questions more than tries to answer them. Can you please take as a case your most recent show ‘Security Though Obscurity.’
SD: I read this as a question about shared references and how viewers recognise and access them – I hope that’s what you intended. This idea of hyperlinked storage replacing memory is something I can relate to. I forget a ton of things the minute I’ve read them, and assume I can recall them at any time via Google. But in terms of how I arrange references or materials to suggest a connection between particular forms and materials and what I hope viewers can draw on from those cues and construct, I can walk you through the decisions I made in the preparation for ‘Security Through Obscurity,’ sure. I combined relics owned by the figure of Margaret Thatcher, an icon of the spread of the ideas of a financialized world, with forms typical of ‘tech bro’ rugged adventurism. Thatcher’s patterned silk scarves were sewn into Patagonia ‘power vests’ and sarcophagus-like luxury sleeping bags. So I guess the cultural information from the legacy of Thatcher, embedded in her scarves, then can lead a viewer into experiencing and interpreting its form in dialogue with this outdoorsy frontierism x advanced fabric technology signifier of the Patagonia brand and its symbolic appeal to tech business actors. They hopefully recall and arrange ideas – connecting what I see as a continuity of rugged individualism meets global finance.
Thinking of the concept of global finance, Blockchain as the collective database behind the cryptocurrency Bitcoin, and of its self-sustaining with no overseeing third parties policy… can you talk about the coding behind such systems which in theory belong to us all in antithesis with other systems of gathering information such as the social credit schemes, implemented by high-tech Chinese companies, which attach value to overseeing and supervising everyone, making everything visible.
SD: I think blockchain systems are not always the antithesis of top-down or centralized systems they claim or aim to be. They are designed in a particular context, which has a history, and are technical systems about avoiding single points of failure, that come out of a military framework of robustness and a particular kind of technical solutionism. The context has to be taken into account here.
One main attribute of information is the surprise factor which is derived from a sense of randomness of bits of information not from a predictable ordinary string of bits. Can you talk to us about the space of interpretation that is preset in your work despite tight contact with real facts and historical fragments?
SD: That’s an interesting formulation. I think in my work, the parts – as you say, the facts, historical fragments and sources – are configured in a way that is not about conveying a particular evaluation of the relationships I present. They present a cluster of things that have poetic associations and effects as well as information. Or rather the information is a flavour in the broth of textures. For me the aesthetic tools work in the way that composition works with colour in a painting – there is tone and presence and weight and emotion that is carried by the constituent parts, but those parts involve an effect that is not generated only by colour in a frame. That is at least the aim of the work. So although one can name the parts and their origins, genres, and historical and material contexts, what I am trying to do is to arrange these into an experience that is about conveying a feeling rather than an argument.
