INTERVIEW #2 - BEN STOPHER
There’s quite a long history of artistic procedures - of people setting up systems to make things - there’s loads of fluxes work that deals with that. Which is art that happened, really in the late 60s early 70s, and it was very concerned with setting up or engaging systematic processes. That is probably worth looking at, lots of interesting work.
[Structuralism?]
Yes, definitely structuralist thinking, but setting up things - a bit like you have done - to foreground ‘thinking’. So the creative artefacts are a scaffolding to think about the thought processes behind. I think the action is interesting, isn’t it - because you have a table with small bits of paper on - it might be worth thinking about whether there is a system at the action end that causes you to do something in a particular way? I’m thinking, like, apparatus that makes you draw on the wall or something. Do you want things to be on a normal scale for you to work on, or maybe you could do something that makes you work in a different way, that kind of takes you out of your comfort zone, so your action is less innate or less natural to you, so it makes you think a bit harder.
And then I’d think about working with apparatus might be interesting. There was a project where James Goggin - he’s really interested in graphic design, a kind of image maker, he is good at designing processes to make things - where illustration crosses over with graphic design. It’s an interesting crossover. He did workshops which made tools - bits of wood that had pivots on them - and there was a pen on one end and you held it at that end, so you’d draw here and whatever you traced was exaggerated massively at this end, so it made your mark-making really different.
You could make a drawing machine that amplifies what you’re doing on a small scale and makes something collaborative, or bigger. Amplifying the action; putting a small-scale action in a bigger, display context.
It’s really simple to make, you can get these in a hardware store, and you could make something that, I don’t know, has random actions in, or an apparatus to translate something small to something big. Those are my initial thoughts; there is a moment at the end where you are all individuals but you are making something bigger together, and it’s about how to bridge that gap. You’ve got a funnel - the film is the big space of ideas, and then it funnels down to you as an illustrator, wanting to give you something big and experiential at the end.
We look at the world - that’s something that’s individual - but we’re trying to collaborate, to synthesise something through the same stimulus, drawing comparisons between how we think and how that adds up to something more than any one of us could have made.
What is your process for data collection?
It depends what I’m doing. In terms of research, my methods of data collection are really what my research is about, and I build things that listen to people and track, map their gestures, and translate their speech, and get them to query cultural data sets that I’ve curated and give feedback. So I actually do quite an instrumental thing where I look at people, and I look at the interaction between people, so haptic, gestural, verbal, as a source of data that can give you some insight into what they’re thinking, what they’re trying to do in terms of design.
And that’s a really literal way of thinking about that. I think it’s based on the idea that technology is a kind of stack of stuff, it’s not one particular piece of machinery. Like knowledge, it’s layered, and you make use of the top layer, but that rests on loads of other stuff, and I think in the future people will rely more heavily on embedded intelligence in the world. This is the start of that, but a very intermediate part - we will be presented with prompts through ambient systems in all parts of our built environment, and how machines read us and give us useful things and help us augment our ability to do anything we want. In my research - it’s creative work: what does that mean for us, the sense of being creative?
If I am heavily reliant on Google image search, does that allow me to remain individually creative, or does it destroy the idea that I’m a creative individual? Does reading books allow me to be a creative individual - because all that knowledge is someone else’s, right?
Some technology presents itself as cheating somehow, or as a shortcut, or it’s not pure genius if you’re relying on technology which is really things other people have thought about and objectively decided are interesting. But then all knowledge is received from the past, you know, you’re building on the work that everyone’s done. The language you use is given to you by generations of people - that’s how any kind of expression is really the product of lots of things that have happened in the past. Technology is no different, it just somehow seems closer.
So I am interested in what an increasingly technologically mediated world means to your sense of individual creativity - to your potential to be innovative - or unique. And I am positing that actually all of created culture is an intense collaboration, and always has been. Technology makes it more measurable and that somehow makes it less magic, and that upsets people.The idea that you are creative, and that you are a unique person, building something of unique value. I don’t think these things attack that but people mistake systems that help them with systems that allow them to be easily repeatable or copyable, and actually the thing that is unique in those situations is you.
Your project is not far off this because you’re all going to respond to one thing. That piece of media has things encoded in it, and you’re going to make something from the experience of that. You’re all using the same thing, but you’re all going to make something different, but you’re also going to make something together. You all add something uniquely valuable to that process and that doesn’t devalue the thing you’re making does it?
Maybe what people are really talking about is - is something genuinely interesting? Where is the line between something being new and it being interesting; because anyone can do something not very new in the same way.
If the action isn’t very inquisitive, or it’s not very sustained, then it isn’t very deep. No matter if it came from the same place; if it’s cursory, then it will all be very similar, but you could all engage with the same thing in a way that’s deeper and the result will all be different. Mistaking a process for something that doesn’t get you very deep, when actually a good process should get you somewhere deeper — that’s where something like time is related to this. That says you have achieved some depth, some cognisant effort.
I think all cognition is collaborative, and it’s collaborative with culture, with the past and with the present. It is made in the system of language, with visual representation that we have grown up with and we’ve had a cultural journey - lots of different cultures involved in that. All art is a collaborative process.
Something like outsider art is outsider because it is supposedly outside the canon of visual thought, and so art brutes, and all that kind of art that happens in mental institutions is supposedly free from a visual tradition, it comes from somewhere else. And that’s why it’s called outsider. It has an aesthetic that is quite different and quite immediate actually, less self-aware because it’s not about engaging with the idea of visual art at all, but creating visuals.
I think that’s interesting, because it’s less collaborative in terms of the world of visual art, but it’s just as collaborative, I think, in that it’s made up of how people in the world feel about the world. It’s just absent of any kind of visual art trend; it’s more like a strange dialect of a language. Any piece of fiction is judged in relation to all the other fiction that’s come before it, the archetype that in Hollywood there are eleven scripts, and all films are a variation of one of those eleven films - The Heist or the Tragedy or whatever.
Visual process has lots of re-occurring themes you build on, lots of things that you borrow, lots of things that are given to — that doesn’t devalue your use of them, but means it’s an intensely collaborative process from the very start - from the moment people started drawing in caves.
Do you think that the process of collecting data from your surroundings will be affected by technology?
I think your ability is not that dissimilar from anybody else’s, and not that different from someone who might live in a hundred years time or a hundred years ago, I mean, there’s individual ability to take in your surroundings and understand things, but I think technology will allow you to record and playback, like a microscope. Before the microscope, you could look at your eyebrows and think they were nice and clean - after, you realise your eyebrows are full of weird little animals moving like sheep wandering around. That’s the reality of it, but that understanding of it did not exist before the microscope and there’s a whole other world underneath a certain visual threshold - a whole other structure that we can’t see, and I think technology exposes those structures.
Now, you can think about how crowds move through cities in a completely different way from how you could fifty years ago, because there’s lots of CCTV data that shows you. You can map, you can visualise people flow or traffic flow. Something like the wind a hundred years ago, you would not think of a swirly graphic, but now that’s entirely our idea of wind because we have computer graphics on weather forecasts that show us wind in swirls and patterns. We’ve developed a visual language through technology to give us a different sense of what wind is, and that visual shorthand is now embedded and something you can use. It’s not real - a line of wind isn’t a real thing - it gives you some access to what wind is (it moves in a direction, velocity is kind of described by the lines, but that is given to us by technology).
All technology is part of your sense of perception, whether you’re using it or not. Once you get a heat map, you can now imagine a dark room with people sleeping in it and you can imagine the red bits. It is now a part of your perception. Even knowing about what it does and how it relates to the world changes your perception of the world.
Technology changes your sense of the world - like the cave. Technology can be thought of as tools for perception - the ideas of slow-mo and freeze-frame - those are things you only understand if there’s film and television, they’re not real things, and so before the 20th century, the idea of things happening really slowly was something people may have sensed but they had no access to it the way you do, because they’d not seen it. It wasn’t real to them in the way it’s real to us.
We exist in a world where we don’t need to know lots of detail about something, we need to know a language of how to find out about those things, and that’s a really different world. It’s why school used to be about learning your times tables and learning your dates in History and through amassing stuff - and while there’s still a place for that stuff there’s a lot we don’t need. We just need a language to ask the questions at any given moment, and that language is informed massively by technology. The things I might want to know about and how I might acquire that knowledge - if I wanted to learn about medical things, I’d ask Google about ‘scans’ - and that’s a technological idea, and I can hold it as a really abstract idea, but I can evoke it when I need to know about being scanned in a medical situation.
Two hundred years ago there was no assumption that you could just know about these things - there might actually have been politics involved in finding out about anything because knowledge was power. You might have to go on a quest to find out anything - it’s really changed human relationships and all sorts - it’s hard to say how much technology has changed the experience of being human and it’s been profound. It will be in the future, too.
How important is it to have a clear awareness of thought process when creating images?
Again, that’s an interesting one because I think it can sometimes be absolutely fine to have no awareness at all and to just do something. I think part of studying at MA level makes that feel like a problem, when we’re asking you to sit and think critically has an effect on your ability to do that. And I think that’s not great, actually, I think you should just be able to sit down and make work and that should be part of the process. But I think it’s not essential to have a clear awareness. It’s a bit like mindfulness - so it’s nice to be aware of the things you’re thinking about, but it’s also fine to make things, have a cup of tea, look at them and ask ‘what is this?’ afterwards.
Going back to the idea of collaboration with all the ideas that have gone before you, there’s no way that’s a conscious process - that’s a very unconscious process. And so, you always have awareness even if you’re not consciously focused on the idea that ‘I’m aware of the thing that I am doing’. Your awareness is built in; it’s in the movement of your hand, it’s in the sense of the piece of the paper, it’s in everything. Awareness is embodied in you in the world.
Whether you want to understand what you’re doing, a lot of that doesn’t happen in the moment. It can happen in the moment, but a lot of it is reflecting and looking and saying ‘ah, actually I can see what I was interested in here’. And I think it’s probably important to give yourself a space to work at an instinctive level, and that’s particularly true of image making, because you’re trying something where you’re building up a sense of process and practice that is about your engagement with the world. You don’t need to be able to describe it to other people necessarily - yes, you need to have conversations about it when you’re in an educational institution, but I think the question is born of an anxiety about making work that I entirely understand at MA level, and I think it can be a massive distraction, because it’s important to give yourself time to make things without being worried about them. Give yourself - ‘I’ve read a brief, I’m going to make some work out of it’. It’s like when you’ve set reading to do, and the idea that all you have to do is read it seems like cheating, somehow.
I still feel sometimes that reading things isn’t like knowing things, but it is. This is the same thing, it’s like all the things you’ve looked at and seen and done before are present in you - you have to give them the chance to come out when you’re making things. So relax is my answer to this question.
Collaboration isn’t always about doing all things together. It’s about doing some things, and giving up control of others as well. A collaboration machine that you’re putting together - that’s good.
