Paul Slocum

By Claire Ruud

Kristin Lucas, 5-Minute Break, 2001, digital video with sound, 4 minutes, 35 seconds. Courtesy the artist and And/Or Gallery, Dallas, TX.

Paul Slocum is a new media artist and the owner of And/Or Gallery in Dallas. He's co-curator (along with Marcin Ramocki) of Reset/Play, an exhibition about contemporary art and video games, which opens tomorrow at arthouse in Austin. Recently, we picked his brain about the exhibition and new media art, more broadly.

…might be good: You just recently made the transition to representing artists at And/Or Gallery. Can you tell us about that decision?

PS: We were already pretty much running the gallery as if we were representing artist anyway, so we thought, let’s make this official. We had work on hand, we were doing the local art fair and we were selling stuff after our shows were over. I want And/Or to be somewhere between a commercial space and an artist run space. I feel like a lot of artist run spaces have a lot of issues—they’re just too beat up. I want And/Or to be little more cleaned-up, a little more professional. Also, I feel that commercial spaces are taken more seriously.

…mbg: Do you have a collector base in Dallas?

PS: We sell some work to Dallas people, but not much. Actually, most of our sales are to a new media collector in Belgium and recently a collector in D.C. started buying work from us. We’re just breaking even. That is, we broke even last year.

…mbg: So if people in Dallas aren’t buying much from you, how do you see the gallery’s role in this community?

PS: The people who are really interested in the gallery are artists, professors, writers and curators. Collectors, we don’t get as much. There’s a huge divide in Dallas. We have huge collectors like the Rachofskys and others, but they don’t tend to buy locally, they tend to buy from New York. None of the big collectors have even been to the And/Or space, which is a little frustrating.

…mbg: What kind of reaction do you get from viewers to the incredible line-up of extremely important new media artists you show at and/or?

PS: Most people here don’t seem to know how big these artists are. In a way, they’re not that big—I mean they are big, but they’re big amongst a very small group of people. We get a lot of attention from new media artists. And/Or Gallery makes it into Rhizome pretty regularly and people in New York sometimes seem to know who we are.

…mbg: So why do you stay in Dallas, when you’re getting so much more attention nationally and internationally than you get in this city?

PS: I’ve always lived in Dallas and it’s cheap here. I’ve been tempted to move to New York and I almost moved to Austin as well. But really, Dallas works the best for me.

…mbg: You’re about to curate a show at Arthouse, Reset/Play, on contemporary art and video games. How did that come about?

PS: Elizabeth [Dunbar] just contacted me and asked. Originally, she thought about me and Cory [Arcangel] curating the show. [A while back] I had hoped he and I would create an updated version of a show he curated in New York, The Infinite Fill Show at Foxy Productions. But he has a ton of other stuff going on right now and curating isn’t really his passion. So I suggested Marcin Ramocki, who runs a space in Brooklyn called vertexList. I’ve shown there several times and Marcin and I work well together.

...mbg: What kind of work are you including in Reset/Play?

PS: Mostly, we went with work from the formal visual art circuit by artists we knew, like JODI, Kristin Lucas and Cory Arcangel. But one unusual piece we’re including in the show is the [commercial] video game, Katamari Damacy. We’re just going to have it set up for people to play in the gallery. That game is one of the most beautiful things I’ve seen in a long time. Have you ever played it?

…mbg: No. Explain what makes it so beautiful.

PS: It’s difficult to explain. It’s for Playstation 2 and the graphics are very simple and blocky and very colorful. Conceptually, the game is centered around a ball, a sphere. The ball is very sticky and you roll around collecting things—getting them to stick to the surface—till you have a really big ball. The back story for the game is that a king got drunk and knocked all the stars out of the sky and your job is to create balls of things on earth that will become stars. The last "star" you have to create is the moon. At the beginning you can only pick up very small things, but as the game progresses you can pick up larger things, like people. By the end of the game you’re rolling up clouds and it’s just amazing. The guy who created the game [Keita Takahashi] came out of nowhere, but if you look him up on Wikipedia, his influences include Picasso, Miro and all these Japanese sculptors and illustrators.

…mbg: Any other unusual pieces in the show?

PS: I’m helping Mike Smith restore a game he made in 1983. The game is about building a bomb shelter but no matter how fast you build it, the game is set up so that you can’t finish before the nuclear bomb goes off. I read in an interview that Mike had made this game in 1983 and now he didn’t know how to work it. It stopped working and he couldn’t figure out how to fix it. So I looked at pictures of the game and I thought that had to be either Commodore or an Atari, both of which I’m an expert at. So I asked him about it and it turned out to be a Commodore 64. I brought my Commodore over to his house, we loaded up the disks and I was able to read them. So I took the disks home, messed with them for a while and managed to archive the game on a modern PC so it could be backed up. So we’re going to be able to have the game working in the exhibition.

…mbg: A while back, we talked to Chris Eamon [Issue #93], the curator of the Kramilch Collection, about the work he’s doing to establish a set of best practices for institutions and collectors dealing with video art. Are you working on best practices for new media art?

PS: Only informally. I’ve been thinking about archiving a lot. In my opinion, the best way to archive a game or web page is to make a video of it and then take the [DVD or BluRay] disk image and put it on a modern PC so you can back it up on a hard drive. With games, you can run them in an emulator—there will probably be emulators for a long time that can run this stuff.

The problem is, web browsers change constantly. But video formats are pretty solid. If something’s in Quicktime, for example, you’ll always be able to play it or convert it to the newest format. The standard archival format is still Digibeta, but I think it really has problems. I think the future of archiving is a hard drive and off-site backup. It’s the cheapest and most reliable way to back up data. I mean, your house burns down, you still have an offsite backup.

I’ve talked to the director of EAI a little bit about what they do. They’re also starting to shift toward digital archiving of videos, but right now their official archiving format is still Digibeta.

…mbg: In Show #17 at And/Or, you transferred a web page by Olia Lialina and Dragan Espenschied to video in order to present it. We’ve never seen that format for exhibiting web pages before, have you?

PS: I don’t know. In New York, they showed that piece as a web page. But when you show it as a web page, it’s really difficult to make the piece full screen and make sure the mouse doesn’t pop up. To show the piece at And/Or, we modified the animations on the page so they ran at 1/10 of the speed and then I used a screen recorder to record the screen at 3 frames per second. Then I set the piece up to run at 30 frames per second on the monitors in the gallery, so it ends up being identical to the original page. Because we slow the animation down to record the animations, we don’t have any problems with the recording missing a frame.

…mbg: We also talked at length with Chris about the distribution of video and new media work. What’s your approach to distributing work?

PS: I actually talked with Cory, Dragan and Olia about this a lot when they were here installing their show. At this point, there’s no technological limitation on distributing video. All of us could easily distribute all our videos at full resolution on our websites. But there’s an unwritten rule that you don’t post your editioned videos at full resolution on your website. So we’ve been brainstorming new ideas for distributing videos—alternatives to the standard edition—but we haven’t really come up with a good solution yet.

…mbg: What ideas have you come up with?

PS: We’ve thought about ideas like a patronage system in which a collector buys the right to display a piece publicly, but also the credit for supporting the public exhibition of the work online. Another alternative is making unlimited editions, which is what EAI does, and I’ve heard that artists can make a good amount of money from EAI. Right now, it’s too hard to sell new media art. Artists like Cory, at the level he’s at—if he were a painter he would be very wealthy, but because he does new media, he’s not.

…mbg: How do you maintain that balance between a more democratic distribution of your work and supporting yourself?

PS: Well, sometimes I feel that artificially limiting distribution is at odds with the concepts in my work. In fact, I feel that way increasingly. I feel limited in what I can say in a piece by the whole economic system. Among new media artists, we’re just at the very beginning of figuring out how to negotiate the art market.

…mbg: What is the next generation of new media artists up to these days?

PS: I think Kevin Bewersdorf and Guthrie Lonergan are two of the strongest cutting edge artists. They are part of a new wave of very conceptual new media art. Most of the people I work with would consider new media art to be art about technology—the subject, not the medium is technology. For example, Bill Viola, we don’t consider that new media, even though it’s using new technology. He’s using the medium to do something that’s more like a painting. That’s not really what we’re talking about.

…mbg: When you say "cutting edge," what do you mean?

PS: "Cutting edge" work takes the most recent developments in the web into account; it comments on how the web is changing. For example, Guthrie Lonergan did a great piece on twitter about vvork, the conceptual art blog. vvork posts images of work with almost no commentary, so Guthrie created a vvork twitter feed. Every time vvork posted a piece, Guthrie would write a single sentence describing it and that was it—something like, “a plywood board in the center of a white room with a staple gun resting on it.”

…mbg: The kind of running commentary that twitter allows.

PS: Yeah, the twitter feed reduces the whole vvork project to almost nothing—a series of simple sentences. It’s tongue and cheek, because you obviously can’t capture a whole piece in just a sentence. But then again, with some of the pieces, you can, because you read Guthrie’s description and you realize it’s really kind of a dumb piece.

…mbg: What’s coming up for you this year?

PS: I have a solo show in L.A. at Angstrom Gallery early next year. But recently, everybody’s been telling me that I need to take a vacation because I look like I’m about to pop, so I’ve been joking about getting an artist’s residency just to play World of Warcraft. I felt like as a new media artist I needed to be familiar with WoW—there are 10 million people playing it and it’s an interesting phenomenon because it’s a game but it’s also like myspace. I started playing it this summer because Alex Galloway told me that once you play the game a lot and get into it, you’ll understand more about what’s going on in the world.

…mbg: Do you?

PS: It’s been really eye-opening. I’m currently at level 25 after like four or five weeks. The depth of the world is crazy. There’s this massive community playing the game and the program itself has an open architecture so that players can add onto it. So there’s a massive community of people writing tools for WoW and the number of plugins is just overwhelming. The amount of the world that I’ve explored compared to how much there is—it’s baffling.

…mbg: How does WoW's massive open architecture help you understand our world?

PS: Well, the world exists in large part in the virtual world now. It’s changed our world so dramatically. One of the things I’m really interested in is the idea that Andy Warhol is not really relevant anymore. I mean, the pop culture world that he was describing doesn’t exist in the same way anymore. Technology has really shifted things. Before technology, there were lots and lots of content generators—village musicians, for example—with only a hundred listeners each. Technologies that allowed broader distribution created the world Warhol was talking about, in which there were like 10 bands with millions of listeners each. But recently, because of the internet, we’ve moved back towards the way it was before, with a million bands with only 10 people listening to each one, but listeners are no longer limited by geography. And I feel like WoW is really a part of that.

Claire Ruud is Editor of ...might be good.

Carolyn Sortor

By Kate Watson

Guy Ben-Ner, Stealing Beauty, 2007, single channel video with sound, 17 minutes. Courtesy Postmasters Gallery, New York.

The Program, the newest addition to the Dallas Video Festival, provided an incredible opportunity to actually take time with video art in a way infrequently seen in a gallery space. The breadth and depth of work shown was on a scale rarely seen anywhere and the turnout was remarkably strong. During my visit to Dallas, I had a chance to sit down with curator Carolyn Sortor, who worked with curators Dee Mitchell and Bart Weiss on the project, and chat about the process.

…might be good: Can you tell me a little bit about your background— specifically, how has your interest in video art and your relationship with the Dallas Video Festival evolved?

Carolyn Sortor: I've always been interested in art and literature, but for most of my adult life, I've worked as a commercial real estate lawyer.

After my first Dallas Video Festival in 1991, I believed video was the most powerful art medium yet invented. I'd begun doing pro bono work for artists and arts organizations and Bart Weiss, the Director of the Video Association, asked me to become a board member and then to serve as the first Chair of the Board who wasn't Bart.

All the while, I wanted to see more video art—it still isn't easy to see. As you know, there's been a lot of resistance to video as an art medium. Just a couple of weeks ago, I overheard a collector wonder out loud, “does anyone actually buy this stuff?!” And of course, exhibiting it is a challenge; you have to assemble all the hardware and software and get it to work together and most art venues were originally designed to let in lots of natural light, without any concern for access to electrical outlets or acoustics.

Of course, each year, I immersed myself as fully as possible in the Dallas Video Festival. But although the Festival has shown some great video art over the years, Bart is more partial to documentaries and other varieties [of film and video]. I kept bugging him to show more video art—I'd already begun compiling lists of artists and works that sounded interesting. Four years ago, he finally gave me the OK. Since then, I've programmed about 2 hours of video art at each Festival, but I knew that was just a tiny portion of what was out there.

…mbg: Is that when The Program was born?

CS: Based on the surprise success of the I Heart Video Art series at Conduit last summer (curated by myself and Danette Dufilho), the Video Association asked me about the possibility of breaking most of the video art out from the rest of the Festival and presenting it as a separate series at Conduit, with me co-curating.

We started working on the series in February. By May, it had become a full-time job for me and from there, the workload escalated dramatically. We installed a mostly-new exhibition each week for five weeks; we had to re-configure hardware, software, pedestals, and sometimes furniture, do new labels, set up and take down chairs for the seated screenings and host an opening reception. Danette and Nancy Whitenack [both of Conduit] were also extremely helpful with their expertise and advice, and we are deeply grateful to them for their terrific generosity and hard work.

…mbg: How did you decide which works would be screened in the gallery space and which would be in the screening room?

CS: The decisions about what would be shown in the seated screenings versus what would be shown in the installations were largely determined by the works themselves, although a few of the pieces we included could have been shown either way. Most of the work shown in the installations either was specifically designed to be viewed on the internet, a computer or TV, or else the artist requested that it be shown the way we showed it, or else I had seen it installed that way elsewhere. These decisions seemed fairly easy to me, for the most part. If there's one choice I felt somewhat torn about, it might have been with respect to Ryan Trecartin's A Family Finds Entertainment. It's a gorgeous and challenging piece of work with lots of visual detail that looks great projected and should command full, focused attention from start to finish. However, Trecartin's only requirement was that there had to be a couch and my co-curators were skeptical about including Family in a seated screening. So we put it on a good-sized TV in front of a couch.

…mbg: How did you group videos for the seated screenings?

CS: The curators agreed that we should include a variety of pieces in length and tone each evening, for the sake of watchability. We also agreed that each week's programs should be organized around coherent themes, although we didn't completely agree on what those should be or at least on how best to formulate them.

As for what I thought those themes were, much of the media-based work I've seen during the last few years digs deeply into questions relating to personal identity, social governance and control and issues relating to time and history (how we manage our time and our collective memories, and how those choices shape our selves and our future). I tried to group works together around these types of themes.

These concerns have been around forever, of course, but they've become newly complicated because of such recent developments as extreme plastic surgery, genetic modification, cloning, virtual identities (avatars, etc.), psychotropic cocktails, computers as brain prostheses, our increasing immersion in and dependence upon media-based technologies, the replacement of the physical public square with virtual facilities owned by private corporations (one result being that our data, personal pages, opinions, even our collective history, can be sold, deleted or modified with a keystroke), the growth in the sheer volume of historical and other information we're now able to store and accumulate, the potential obsolescence of borders, technologies for identifying and tracking individuals, etc.

…mbg: What is the future of The Program? I know that the scope of this project is massive and certainly exhausting... What are your upcoming projects?

CS: The future of The Program is under discussion. For one thing, I hope never to work so hard for negative income again. Also, I need a break from curating (although I'm already thinking I'd like to curate an exhibition of media-based work focussing on the "medium" of time [including history]).

But at least for the rest of this year, I'd like to get back to making my own work. Earlier in the year, I'd begun working on a triptych of short video works that I think of as relating loosely to myths involving whales.

I also have a couple of major, earlier projects to complete. (Until recently, that's been difficult because of my day job.) One is a three-part performance and video piece called Intrajection that explores questions relating to property, the marketplace including the art market, our immersion in media and digital communications—much of which is uninvited but some of which may, intentionally or unintentionally, be helpful—and the kinds of interactions and interrelationships that arise more easily now despite distance or other barriers.

Another body of work in progress is The Cressida Project, which will include an approximately 25-minute video and related prints or paintings and sculptures. The video will involve two main, quasi-narrative storylines influenced by Shakespeare, Homer and other sources. The main scenes take place in or about the year 2056. A young woman is abducted and finds herself in a low jail cell in a remote nation called the United Democratic Islamic Emirates (U.D.I.E.)—an imaginary, future federation comprising the nine countries that now combine the highest-percentage Muslim populations and the greatest estimated oil reserves. The piece will deal with issues of power, interpretation, identity, reproduction, transmission of knowledge, transformation and escape—through succeeding generations, if not within a single lifetime.

I also have some smaller pieces and writing projects in the works.

Kate Watson is Coordinator of testsite, ...might be good's sister project, and an editorial contributor to ...might be good.