Interview 8 // Steve Miller

Hello, hello. Hey, Roz. I'm here today with, hello, Steve. I'm Roz Dimon. Today is March 1st. I can't believe it's already March 1st. Yay. And I'm here with Steve Miller, a really very exciting artist and designer. And we're going to be talking to Steve today about his work. I'm an artist who's been in digital media really accidentally for about 34 years, pitting the sacred with the secular and all things American. And I am now going to read you just a few paragraphs about Steve before we get into our Techspressionism, Techspressionist interview series for today.

Roz Dimon

Steve Miller. Steve Miller has been working with art, science, and technology since 1980. He has collaborated with the 2003 Nobel laureate in chemistry, Rod McKinnon, in a project about human protein. He has worked at Brookhaven National Labs and at CERN in Geneva, where he lectured to the theory group. For a decade, Miller worked on a photographic project about the Amazon. Miller proposed to give Brazil, our planetary lungs, a medical checkup by taking X-rays of the fluid. It was as if it was a The project is called health of the planet. It was published as two monographs, radiographic and surfskate, published by Glitterati edition. His work has been presented as solo exhibitions in Paris, Bordeaux, Marseille, Hong Kong, Rio, London, Boston, New York City, and most recently, at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington.

Roz Dimon

Washington, D.C. Miller has a continuing interest in fashion, both as a designer and as an artist, making x-rays of his mother's luxury collection. He has designed clothing for Asclan Brazil, Art Multiples, Katmandu Project, Princey's Art Rug Projects, James Paul Chung, and under his own label at healthoftheplanet.art.

Roz Dimon

Miller designs one-of-a-kind custom surfboards and skate decks, available at stevemiller.art, and edition skate decks for Always Timeless. At CERN, C-E-R-N, Miller understood the importance of data as a cultural paradigm shift, which led him to co-found the software company, Arternal. The art business lacked the technology and statistics that Miller discovered in advanced physics, and new software was needed to drive the business of art. Arternal is an ecosystem of digital tools which makes the art world more sustainable and brings it up to current standards. Arternal brings Miller's history of insider experience to understand the fundamental needs of the industry, complemented by art.

Roz Dimon

Arternal is an ecosystem of digital tools which makes the art world more sustainable and brings it up to current standards.

Arternal is an ecosystem of digital tools which makes the art world more sustainable and brings it up to

Current standards. Miller introduced new technologies such as cinema and NFTs that enable ARRE and VR tools that enable ARRE in larger dawn spaces and collaboration through lifetime interactions with VR assets and VR presentations to enhance VR analytics and presuplegeness for ARRE projects to enhance VR productivity

And presuplegerve capabilities for ARRE projects and VR analytics capabilities for ARRE projects and work and it was a different time and the albright knox was not hugely attended in those days and I could just wander around all the guards I mean I had no idea I was quite young I had no idea that I had this freedom and permission they were sort of watching out for me and I had the ability to just wander through this place and it was a life-changing experience and

One

Short story the which I've shared in other interviews but they had this grand stairway that went from the old museum to the new museum and they would usually hang a gigantic painting on the landing the midpoint of that stairwell and when they purchased jackson pollock's convergence they hung it in that stairway and so you're looking up at it right you know and I'm a kid and I'm looking up at this huge painting of incredible splatters and color and I remember my first reaction was to burst out laughing because I mean I couldn't believe that these even though I was at the gallery I couldn't believe these paint splatters was a work of art and then at the same time I saw the joy in it you know and it was just like I want to do this yeah so that was I would say that was the you know the earliest you know the earliest cultural influence and then I was lucky enough to be brought up in a family where we went to museums we traveled we always went to you know I went to the louvre when I was in kind of like junior high school and went to the ufiti I mean had the lucky, lucky life that let me see that stuff in a different kind of world, you know, long, long time ago.

Steve Miller

And, and I just, it just fed me like, what is this stuff?

And I mean, we used to go places. Yeah, I know.

And those, and it was just another kind of travel. It was so free and easy. So it was, that was sort of my, my sort of inspiration. And I, my, my family tried to I had a real interest in architecture and I worked for an architect for a couple of years in high school in the summers doing drafting and doing the kind of grunt work. And that was done by hand. Right. And with the sort of, you know, transparent sheet overlays where you'd sketch out and move things around and analog world. But as much as they pushed me towards architecture, I got to college. It was like clear. I threw away the physics and the math. I said, screw it. I just want to do mud pies and finger painting.

So here we are. How great. Had you always I mean, was your mother also an artist or she was?

Yes.

Oh, I see.

And so she's still with us. She's not a practicing artist, but she taught art. And, you know, I remember seeing a portrait that she did of my sister. And I'm like, wow, cool. Really good for my, you know, childhood perspective. So, yeah, we and my family collected art. It was mostly fine art prints, you know, that she would get at the members gallery at the Albright. But it was Brock.

Steve Miller

And, you know, I'm thinking of Soutine. You know, those are prints. And then she started getting more kind of we had a family friend that ran the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York. So we ended up getting like a San Francis watercolor, you know, a tapis drawing. So these are things that we had in the house.

And, you know, once you start, I'd like to say sorry for you, Steve, but it sounds like starting at the top. I mean, that's pretty nice.

Yeah, well, it was, you know, it was the incredible opportunity to have the engagement with great art at the Albright and also to live with art. And I just remember the Soutine was like this really weird guy with a mustache. It was kind of a fuzzy, grimy lithograph. And it was part of the Vincent Price collection at Sears Roebuck. Right. My mom started buying art at Sears Roebuck. And Vincent Price, the actor, you know, sort of brought me to the Albright. And I was like, well, I'm going to have to put that into the public realm. But, you know, the Brock was a real simple curiosity of those like, you know, simple birds over a kind of an abstract geometric background. But, you know, you just look at that stuff and you go like, like with the Pollock, like, what is this stuff? And you just start asking questions and you keep looking at it and you get engaged.

Steve Miller

So I think that's the long version of like how I got sucked into this whole art thing.

All right. Well, that's a wow. That's a really interesting, cultural background that you come from, you know, looking at artists like that and seeing that other world as a young child. There's another world, you know, outside of yours.

You know, we knew it was different because people would come to the house and they, you know, they would come to the house to see this is a modest, I mean, art collection. Yes. But I mean, but we had modern art in our house, you know, and people would come look at it and go, oh, they have modern art. So I knew that there was something.

Steve Miller

Special about it as well, as modest as it was.

So and you've been making mud pies ever since.

Yep. So great. Well, I got to school. I thought I was going to be an architect within one day. It was like, you know, I went to one physics class. I walked out in the middle of the class, one math class. I sat through the first class and I just said, I'm doing the wrong thing. This is I don't enjoy this. This is not what I want to do.

Interesting. Did you go to art school or?

No, no, actually. Well, OK, I went to Middlebury College in Middlebury, Vermont. I was an art major. It's a kind of a small time art department. And then I went to the Skowhegan School one summer and then I was at a place called the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, which gave you kind of a two year residency. So I was there for a couple of years and then moved to New York.

Great.

And now I'm in second. So this studio is in Sagaponack, New York, and it was formerly the studio of Frank Stella. And I was fortunate enough through mutual friends to start writing it and then eventually bought it.

Yeah, I don't know if you remember, I actually came by with a friend years ago, curator Kathy. I don't remember Kathy.

Gontaroff?

Excuse me?

Was it Kathy Gontaroff?

Maybe. She's a curator out in, you know, I live very close to you for explaining to the audience. I'm also out here on the East End. There's a lot of artists out here. But we came by and saw your studio and your work was, you know, exemplary and interesting. And you were in the middle of pulling some prints and you had a few assistants with you working at the time. But also the house itself is a beautiful home. Frank Stella's place.

So this used to be this is, you know, this is on the on the railroad tracks. And this used to be a factory for sorting and grading potatoes. Right. Because Long Island used to be a potato, you know, I don't know, growing area and Long Island potatoes. They since got pushed out by Idaho potatoes and the potatoes here had too high of a water content to be fried commercially for McDonald's. So this potato, kind of potato, this Long Island potato kind of went out of favor. And but the there's a railroad siding on the other side of the building and they would grade the potatoes, load them onto the railroads. And actually they went to Puerto Rico and they still shipped them to Puerto Rico, but not by rail anymore.

Yeah. Wow. That's interesting. So, you know, you also you've been working digitally either before we look at your work or whenever you want to show us. I'm just curious where that and I don't want to speak for you. Maybe you weren't working digitally, but I'm.

Well, I actually was. OK, so I guess you're telling me a screen share and, you know, I will do this much, which is, you know, we had talked about this the other day. But this piece, I don't know when it's from. I think it's around 1980. Let's see if we get. OK, 1982. And I was aware of a shift that was going on. And the awareness of that shift had to do with a lot of reading. I was doing by Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, the Frankfurt School, you know, Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse. And they were all kind of looking at the changes that were going on in culture. And, you know, like, you know, it seems stupid, but the universal barcode in 1982 was like, you know, it's not going to be the same. Like, what the hell is that and how are they going to use it? Right.

Steve Miller

And, you know, it's something that we just really take for granted. So, yes, I did get interested in, you know, this is just a really simple, simple digitized eyeball on a computer. But that's how, you know, different it was in those days. You know, the moves that you can make took a long time, something that might have taken a few hours. And it takes the press of a button now, you know, in any Photoshop program. But so, yeah, I did have this interest in technology. And this is actually the first painting I sold to a museum. It's in the Museum of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery.

Steve Miller

And I was looking at kind of power relations and symbols of power and communication and how the value of labor had been transformed. And this is getting more into the digital space. I'm going to go. This is I think this is around 1986. Let's just see.

I don't know why, but I think of the futurists, the constructivists.

Yeah, this is 1983. And I'm looking at video games and also primitive cultures and the sort of collision of history that was, you know, that I was being aware of. So, you know, in the 80s, I was, you know, reappropriating digital stuff.

Tell us what medium. I mean, is that output to something or is it in your.

This is this is a large scale. Painting. Let's see if we get the size of it. It's 168 by 240. Oh, it's 66 by 97 inches. OK, so it's fairly good sized. And I'm taking mapping systems. And that is actually that white grid is drawn using like a squeeze bottle. I had done done the grid by pencil and then I went over the grid with a squeeze bottle and poured out white paint.

Steve Miller

And I think you can see that I'm actually doing that with the

Black color.

And I'm really trying to get the color in the red to not just be on the black's got the black that is not that pretty. And I'm really trying to get the color in the black. And I'm really trying to get the color in the black. And I'm really trying to get the color in the black. And I'm really trying to get the color in the black. And I'm really trying to get the color in the black. And I'm really trying to get the color in the black. And I'm really trying to get the color in the black. And I'm really trying to get the color in the black. Other kind of, this was actually a mapping system from an intercontinental ballistic missile in the warhead as this, you know, it was like going over the map to figure out where it was going to its predetermined target. So yeah, I was interested in a lot of this, you know, technology concept.

Steve Miller

And then I just eventually started actually using computers to make the work. So that's what, that's what this is about. So this is actually a Rorschach blot. So to get into emotional content, you know, the idea of what I loved about the Rorschach blot was that the idea is that, you know, you have this piece of paint and there's a, you know, people see as a certain kind of imagery in this paint and how you see the imagery has you fall into a psychological set theory that says something about your mental health.

Steve Miller

And so I really liked the idea that I could use this blob of paint that was created by somebody else instead of this Pollock, you know, psychic, you know, kind of, of, of release. And I liked the idea of stepping back and understanding that these, these, you know, blobs of paint could actually have a real interpretation tied to set theory. So that's just the start of getting used to this computer stuff. So I've, I've been into it for, for a long, long time.

It's like you were painting with a data set. Even then in a way, weren't you?

Yeah, no, absolutely. Absolutely. And then I got into the body. That's a cross section of a heart on top of a Rorschach blot. And I started getting, you know, deeper and deeper this, you know, I was also interested in the, you know, the conceptual nature of a work of art. This is two, two Rorschach blots, multi-screened. And then the red image is Duchamp's Roto Relief, which he called anemic. Anemic cinema. So just the, I don't know what I called this painting. Let's see if it has a title.

Is this, are you actually creating it in the computer or at this point, where are we in time?

They're in the computer and then they're being silkscreened. Okay. So I actually called this anemic cinema after the, the Duchamp reference.

And do you, by any chance, remember the, it don't, I don't want to interrupt you too much, but I'm just curious, the software or hardware you were using at that time, or, you

Know. It was really primitive. There wasn't any Photoshop in those days.

Yeah. It's like Amiga or Atari.

No, it was called a Chiron and a Dubner. They were ABC graphic computers to output computer graphics for ABC Worldwide of Sports. And a guy named Peter Caesar, Caesar Video was doing those outputs. And so I went to Caesar Video and these were done on a, they're just huge computers that take up a room. And one was a Chiron.

And one was a Dubner. Oh, I see. Yes.

So that, that's how I got into that, you know, that space.

I think it's kind of, I'm interrupting for a second only because I think it's interesting for our audience. And we can stay in your work if you want, but I think it's interesting for our audience that is now going out beyond to Expressionism to a public audience to, to know that there were artists like myself and you and others who were actually making digital art, responding to a new kind of world that was coming. And there was, and the internet was, internet was not even there.

There was no internet. I don't even know if there was ARPANET at that point. There might've been. But, you know, it was clear from what I was understanding about culture that massive changes were coming. And there's a book by Foucault called The Archaeology of Knowledge. And he was talking about what was going on. And he looks at scientific development and, and how that causes, you know, changes. And how that changes the relationships, just like we understand, you know, social media is the thing that we experience. Like when

I was. It changes the power, you know. Right.

It was television. It was movie. It was photography, you know, in the late 1800s. Then it was film in the early part of the century. You know, then it was television. Then it was basically computers, computers into social media, social media into data analytics, data analytics into NFT. You know. So there's this. Non fungible tokens. So there's this. There's this journey into immateriality, which is kind of going on in culture now. And I think that's the journey that started a long time ago when the photograph replaces the still life. Right. Or the portrait. And so all of a sudden the thing that's just lush, big painting that you pick up is now like this piece of paper. Right. And. You know, now we've gone from that to pure digital transactions on the block chain. So that's the kind of journey.

But the data analytics

Side is something that, you know, I learned at CERN and understanding that it's not what I thought it was. Right. It's this whole other world of understanding of parsing information and understanding which parts of the information chain are important. So anyway. That's I think I'm getting lost here. So bring me back.

The CERN. That's very interesting. Can you tell us a little bit about that when you were at CERN? I mean. Yeah.

So what happened was I had been invited to go to Brookhaven Labs and that journey started with a guy named John Marburger, who was part of the E.A.T. Art and Technology Movement in the sixties.

Yeah. Right.

Then John became head of Stony Brook and then Stony. And then. Then, you know, Brookhaven grabbed him because they needed someone with some PR and managerial skills. They brought him in to run the lab and then Bush grabbed him to be his science advisor, the only Democrat in his administration, which was. And so John invited artists to do Brookhaven.

Steve Miller

To kind of help them with the PR.

The first Bush, which Bush? George W.

George W. Okay, thanks.

I just want to put it in time. Yeah. Yeah.

It was George W. Not as not as dad. Yeah. So he invited a bunch of artists and with the opportunity to work there because I think he thought we could help kind of reframe the perception of what was going on at Brookhaven. And he knew through E.A.T. That artists could maybe be a part of that process. And what do we do? Right. We always go to the worst neighborhood and, you know, and. And. And. And, you know, first it was like lower Manhattan and Soho. Then it was like, you know, Williamsburg. Then it was like Bushwick. Now it's like far Rockaway. I don't know where it is now, but.

Yeah.

You know, we go into a bad neighborhood because the rents are cheap. You know, there's a coffee shop and then, you know, there's a boutique and a bookstore and, you know, that's kind of what artists do. And I think he wanted to bring that to Brookhaven. And it ended up that I was the only artist that decided to work. There. And so I did a project about.

Steve Miller

Quark glue on plasma. And Chinese Neolithic pottery. I'm just thinking about this now for the first time.

It's like it's going really.

Yeah. So it's like that image that maybe I will go to that. Yeah.

Let's go back.

You know, it's sort of this same concept which I maybe will go backwards because that'll get me. I'll just go in and get us there faster. Can I go backwards? No, I got to go forward.

Oh, I don't.

Oh, it looks like it's backwards arrow.

Yeah. It's this. It's the same moment. Right. So, you know, with this, it was like, you know, a, you know, American Indian native culture up against this bookend of the future, which at that time was these, you know, video graphic computer games. And what was going on. It. You know, the reason. Okay. So then we'll, we'll go to, we can go to something that'll explain this better.

Steve Miller

So what I realized that was going on it. It's certain. So they were looking at something called cork glue on plasma so they were colliding protons at the speed of light at a temperature of absolute zero, in order to see if they could get the courts and glue ons, which is the strong force, they hang on to. They're really tight these particles. If they could get these.

Steve Miller

Particles to leave and become a plasma state which was the state of matter at Big Bang, so they were actually verifying that the plasma state was possible. And I'm thinking like well what's the first thing that people make in civilization. It happens to be, you know, pottery, right they make it from the earth. And certain is thinking. About the nature of matter so there's this timeline between when you know humankind make something out of clay, which is, you know, the earliest stuff that we make. And then there's this consciousness about how we got there because we now understand that all of the clay that we come from starts out at a plasma stated Big Bang. So it was this kind of like crazy timeline. So, these are the cables it's certain. This is one of the chalkboards or drawings it says physics here if you could see this.

Steve Miller

These are some of the calculations to start up the collider. These are the wires and a piece of Neolithic pottery it's happens to be a Banpo M4 from 4000 BC. And this is the startup code. So this is the code to start up the clock I let's see if I can see anything here it's in C. I think it's written in C++. No, it's written in C++. It's written in Java. And this is the startup code written, I think by Steve Miller, along with the chalkboards that you see here. And, you know, the Neolithic pottery in the. So it's sort of like the timeline of human endeavor. And from the, you know, the earliest things that we make to the like incredible remove sense of, of being that we have now to understand that all of this started out with Big Bang. So I guess it was an ambitious timeline but that's what I was thinking.

Wonderful.

So these are actually, you know, stuff that I picked up at CERN, and putting this in the context of human history.

Yeah, eat for a lot of people out there who may not have heard of it was a, you know, you can maybe explain it better Steve but I know it was a project between corporations and artists in, it's like emerging artists technology or something like that. I don't

Know. It was experiments in art and technology and people like Jasper Johns, John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, they were all involved with Bell Labs. So it was this idea that introduced these artists to high technology and opportunity. And you know, imagine what they would do with it.

Yes. Yeah, I think has continued that a little bit you know in recent times but yeah, go ahead. This is so interesting.

So that's sort of like the journey, you know, from Brookhaven. I went to CERN, and what I learned at Brookhaven was. So, I thought it was about cork glue on plasma, but really, it was about the next event was the Higgs boson. And without getting into a lot of heavy physics. I'm at Big Bang there was corks gluons and bosons Higgs boson, and they were, you know, they're always looking for a unified theory, right equals MC square that's one kind of unified theory. Another unified theory is something called the standard model, which incorporates mathematically all the particles, but in order to unify the forces in the universe. The strong force, the corks and the gluons that needed to be torn apart of, you know, to be cork glue on plasma the weak force radiation, and then electromagnetism, and they were trying to figure out what would put these all together in one place.

Steve Miller

And they thought well, if there might be a part of it. Well, there's a particle that put, you know, Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism, with the notion of the degrading beta particle which is radiation. And if there was, you know, there must how do you connect all these forces, and they figured out well, they hadn't come up with a particle that gave all other particles mass. So they theorized I think in the 60s Peter Higgs and a bunch of other people figured out well there's another particle that gives all these other particles mass. And they get this mass. And their inner interaction in the Higgs field was it which is a field that permeates the universe. And that's

Who they are calls at all. Is there anything. I don't know why it makes me think of that invisible.

Well, what's interesting about the black hole conversation, so they, they understood in the standard model they could see these particles and quantum I think we're getting way off topic here, but

They

Could see, could see these particles, you know, understood the presence of these particles, and, you know, quantum mechanics, they could observe them, they could measure them. And, but what they understood was this represented only, depending who you talk to you let's say the visible universe which represents 6% of the energy in the universe, and they knew that the universe was expanding, but they didn't understand why, what could be the forces that were expanding the universe so they understood that it would be dark matter and dark energy. Dark matter and dark energy which are at the same time I think it's just we're just going to get there. Of course, can't be measured as of yet, can't be seen. The first window into something that we can't see is now that they've started to measure gravitational waves that come from explosions of, you know, black holes, right?

Steve Miller

So it's this whole world of data analytics, cosmology, and it just seemed to me that this was an area that, you know, culture and creativity and art could start to look at these sort of new sources. So that's kind of how I got into

It. I wanted to ask is your part in it as an artist and as a visualizer, obviously you understand physics and science, but can you talk a little about that? I mean, your visualization, what was, if you would like to talk about it?

Well, I mean, the thing that I... I learned, you know, at CERN and, you know, then there's this whole NFT conversation, but, you know, I understood that the product to be looked at was information, right? It wasn't pictures. I thought it was going to be, you know, I'm an artist. So I'm thinking, oh, it's all about pictures, boom, collisions. And, you know, they go off this way and that way. When I got there, it's like, oh, it's not about that. It's about something that I clearly don't understand, but that it's about this new world that you are able to make decisions by understanding data better. And I think I've mentioned this before, but the most depressing thing was to, well, I wanted to know like, okay, if the world is data, if that's a framework, how does that intersect with creativity?

Steve Miller

Right? Because in creativity, oh, it's about my emotions, you know, Pollock, it's the subconscious, you know, revealed through action. And, you know, and now we're getting to something, you know, then it's like, okay, tech, tech, technology and expressionism, which we talked about earlier. Okay. It's now there's a new expression to technology, but data doesn't seem so expressionistic, right? You know, it seems kind of very hard, cold, doesn't have to do with our psychic intuition and our romantic visions or understanding of, of classical reality. And so that was a real kind of paradox. And that's how I started a data company, which, you know, you mentioned, which is Arternal, which is a data company to understand how data moves through the aesthetic and commercial space of culture. And that's,

That explains Arternal a little better for me. Yeah.

Well, the real downer was when a dealer said to me that they chose their artists by looking at the number of followers on Instagram.

Oh, right.

But, you know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know. It doesn't bug me as much anymore, you know, because I realized like these dealers are running businesses.

They want to, I mean, we could make pampers and you could have thousands of followers. I mean, you know, you have to, yeah, yeah. Right.

It's not, I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's one way that maybe we might initially see as negative, but where data becomes the downer of culture, but it always has been a measure of value to everybody else. Like if something goes for a big number at auction, it's a big number of followers. And so I think it's, it's, it's, it's, oh, wow. It must be really valuable, you know, and it's not necessarily any more valuable than a lot of work. I mean, people like, I think Vito Acconci died penniless, you know, same with, oh my God, I'm going brain dead. But the sculptor David Smith, right. You know, there's a lot of these guys and women.

Steve Miller

Yeah. Unrecognized and, and broke, you know, so we don't value their work during their lifetime that it didn't sell for a lot of money. We have a value system, but what, what happens is that value is inextricably tied to money and to date and to different data sets. How many people own it? Who owns it? What museums? Those are all data points. What books are they in? And, and so that's how culture gets measured for better for worse. And so I think it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's the data points that are going to make things worse through all of these different data points that there was a, I had a German dealer who valued the work. It was, there was an algorithm, not an algorithm, but a series of like how many museum shows, you know, what collections and how many reviews in art forum, New York times.

Steve Miller

And he, and he valued them as data points and he aggregated that together to figure out what he should charge for the work. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. So here we are. We're in the world of as much as we like to throw paint around, we're in this, you know, digital world. And I think that the whole Techspressionism thing is, is that the romance of expressionism collides with the production, with digital production.

Absolutely. I mean, we all know there are pieces that stun you for life or things that happen in an elevator that between you and another person, some kind word or something that happens that is in the realm of whether it's called the spiritual or the mystical that goes beyond numbers. And to bring that together, that kind of art with data and have discussions about it, I don't know, could lead to another place.

But well, it's like the thing is, you know, the curiosity thing, each thing leads to another. So like I, I was I was curious to understand what the larger picture was, you know, just and that got me to read. And, you know, and struck, you know, the sort of post Frankfurt School structuralists, French theorists. And that led me to. The early work, you know, looking at the universal barcode and going like, whoa, this is the future. And of course, you know, we don't even think about it now. And then, you know, then there's another new thing. Now I'm all involved. And I think Colin is looking at the space, Colin Goldberg, who's even, you know, when we were discussing it together, I've learned a lot from Colin about technology. But he's now into this, you know, non fungible token like what, you know, like I got to sell them to.

Steve Miller

It's fascinating, actually, a digital file. That's completely immaterial that gets traded on the block chain. And so in my company, my partner and I, Sean Green, we're talking to other people. There's a whole class of collectors. Whatever you want to call them. They don't want to own the physical object. They don't want to ensure they don't want to move it around. They're happy to look at it on their phone or on a screen frame on their wall. But that's as close as they want to get to actually owning it. So where we think the data is a dematerialisation of something that was once solid collisions?

Steve Miller

And you know, and now we're getting to this. We're moving towards this immaterialization. World. And that's also, even though you're looking in the studio, I love to make paintings, but I'm really interested in investigating this space more.

Me too. And yet it reminds me, like, remember when computers came, people said we wouldn't use more paper. Well, we use more paper than ever. And even though digitally, you know, I know when I work, it's inside the screen and there's thousands of layers and the data and amounts that it can hold in this space that is not physical at all, is the mindset, is the idea. And now we can have provenance and it's, instead of a painting going out and making the ideas, the ideas are there and you can go out to make a physical piece.

Right. You can just have the idea.

The thing

Is, you know, like with this, when computers first came on the scene, I was one of the early adopters, obviously, and everybody thought that computers were gimmicks. And that if you're using a computer, a lot of people do use computer, you know, kind of very, but. As a gimmick, but I was really looking at it as a shift in culture. There's another friend of mine who may be part of that. I think Joseph Nequital, I don't know if he's been a part of it, but, you know, we moved to France because there was no audience in the U.S. For anyone that was using computers. And there is also this whole dialogue about fractal imagery, the Mendelbrot set. And, you know, so we moved to France because there was reception there and the computers were, you know, considered a gimmick. Nobody thinks computers are a gimmick anymore, obviously.

Steve Miller

And, you know, everyone's looking at the NFT space and thinking like, this is a gimmick. It's not a gimmick. You know, if you can have an idea and represent that idea in the digital space and it's as fully realized as any other way, it's completely valid. So it's just hard for a lot of people that are, you know. Used to the physical object to make that transition to something immaterial. But what's interesting is obviously we're all reading the paper and seeing artists like Beeple selling for $6 million for a digital file, you know, in cryptocurrency.

Steve Miller

And we realize that there's a whole world out there that's not part of the traditional fine art world that recognizes a different value system of what... I don't even... I can't find the right words because I don't know if it's culture. I don't know if it's art. I don't know if it's trading stocks and bonds, you know, because we trade a stock. We never like hold the... We never hold it.

True. Yeah.

It's just a number on a ledger that we assume that we own. Right. So we're in a, you know, it's just a really interesting time right now to, you know, technology once again, you know, like boom, crashes up notion, traditional notions of aesthetics. Right. Right. Right. That's always where my curiosity has driven me.

Well, yeah. Yes. And it also, you know, it always democratizes things and it's messy and...

Well, that's, you know, that's a... It'll grow. It'll mature. That's a really interesting point because the notice, you know, the concept of democracy, because the art, traditional art world, you know, you go to a museum, anyone could go there if they're willing or curious enough to go into the museum. But it's always been wrapped up in the around gatekeepers, you know, judgment, elitism, lack of transparency, you know, a very opaque world and where trust is, you know, kind of held together, you know, with a small group of people. And now we're in this new world where you don't have to have a gatekeeper to enter this space. All you need is... Creativity. Right. And, you know, and an idea. And you could make that idea at a pretty reasonable cost. You can't make ideas. Nothing is free. But now there's this conversation about why even make, you know, you know, some of the crypto people say, well, I mean, this is a complex conversation because the crypto space uses massive amounts of energy.

Steve Miller

But there is this discussion. Well, why should I chop down a tree, make a stretcher, you know, half canvas materials and use up all of these physical resources when I can do it, you know, on the blockchain?

Well, it's true. And yet, you know, I have pieces that are over a gig in terms of weight is now size. It's a different kind of acreage in here, you know, in this box.

Well, in the crypto space, most of these files have to be half a meg.

Or either under 30 megabytes. Yeah. Just teeny for a big amount like nothing. Right.

So when you're like... Yeah. You're like a 3D and you're working with gigabyte files and you got to compress that to half a meg.

I mean, that's... If you're not going out to a 72 inch painting, you know, at 3D, you can do it. It can be a different beast.

So that's the world we're in, Roz. It's kind of cool.

I think it's fascinating. And I love that it's finally giving provenance to the stamp of something that is created inside the machine. You know, I mean, yeah, I don't know. It seems like to me that a computer is just our brains that we put out on the desk and that's where it all happens.

Part of the continuation of that democracy concept is that on the blockchain is built in a resell for the artist as part of the contract.

I like that.

Yeah. And now it's automatically set at 10%, although you could change it if you want to figure out how to rejig the contract. But, you know, the artist now can put the work out without a dealer, put it on a platform, market it, do whatever they can to bring the art out. And then, you know, that's the that's another reason why people are gravitating towards this space, because there seems a bit of equity and it gives the artist a little bit more power than previously being beholden to the gatekeepers.

So it's a real gallery. I'm in a gallery in New York right now. And I'm sure you're in several. But it's you know, it's you know, it's 50 percent always 50 percent. And, you know, of course, we know New York real estate. But, yeah, things are changing. And I think it's in an exciting way and kind of have the ups and downs. But it's been fascinating to talk. To you I saw some of your work recently in southampton some of your work that you did in the amazon with oh

Yeah I

Was in their beauty

To

Me it's still about art and beauty you know people may laugh at that but no there still is something about a visual image that yes holds information but makes sense out of information in a way that is poetic and beautiful and inspiring and it's I think there can be a new call for artists like for the new cave wall here where we can that whole data health

Of the planet thing was taking x-rays you know the amazon so this happens to be in someone's office in new york so it's overlooking times square so it's just great to get these you're lucky to get these shots but this was the first sculpture and it was the idea that you in a show at longhouse reserve where you had to make a planter put sculpture in it there's a more sophisticated way to talk about this but and I decided to well I can't go maintain you know this thing over the summer and I said okay so my thing is going to be this x-ray that's you know in a this happens to be another version in broadway I've

Seen some of these so

You

Know

This was just a way to kind of look at the floor and understand through technology that we could really get another view of this fragile and beautiful and awesome natural you know environment that's being decimated so I started to make a series of sculptures this

Is

Actually a bush in brazil where I on the beach that and I just looked at the way it looked and these are leaves from the amazon that I did just embedded in glass and then I silkscreened a book about leaves and put it in the sculpture about leaves and these are just kind of a few details from the book in that sculpture yeah it was just really fun to make these so you know I'm a book obsessed person and you know again you know maybe you're not like you're not it's not for me and it's not for you and it's not for me and it's not for Meryl we're all in the dialogue I don't know where my place in it is I see the beauty and I see the complexity this idea was that with the book you could pull the book out and change it every day right and have kind of a different composition so I was you know silkscreening into the books and this sort of gives you different ways you know that you can look at it and it's not so good it.

Steve Miller

So this is that same branch two years later, the same beach. And I decided to do it in color. The branch got a little bit bigger. I got a bird. A bird would come every day. I was like five feet from this and sit right there. So eventually I photographed it. I called this piece Branch Manager.

Oh, I didn't even see that bird. Hold on. It takes a minute. It's such a part of the piece that I just didn't focus on the bird. Oh, that's a great title too. So, and

Then just another book, you know, a nature book and these wires are the wires in the slums of Rio where they're sort of like, you know, the natural resources are being, you know, taken and we're all using them. And I thought these wire sort of crazy wire drawings, these illegal tapping of the electrical circuit was an interesting way to discuss the sort of completion.

It also was a little like a Chinese sort of, landscape in it somewhere.

Well, it might've been, this is this book. You can see the word Amazon right there. I don't know if it shows up on your screen. Yes, but this is an Amazon plan. I'm in the Atlantic rainforest in the background of this photo is this palm tree and then a book about the Amazon.

So multi-layered.

And this is just, this is a book that, Al Gore, won the Nobel prize for, and I, I photographed on, you know, I silkscreened on every it's called the earth and balance, which you can see there. And I just silkscreened on every page of the book, you know, kind of different kind of environmental messages. You've got the rat in the stomach of the snake, you know, it's some kind of, you know, understanding of like what's going on in our culture and what's going on in the environment. So the stuff you saw this summer, I don't know that those are actually two shark and an Osprey that flies to the Amazon, right? We have Osprey out here. And after the first year, you know, at the end of the season, they fly down to the Amazon for a couple of years and they, they come back after they've had, you know, reached sexual maturity, you know, they hunt for a couple of years down in the Amazon, they, they grow, and then they come back North and they stay North.

I didn't realize they, they went that far. I know the birds do, but I didn't know.

Yeah, they go to, they actually go to the Amazon. So it's crazy. And then they fly back, right? This in the background, that, that, sort of like river is actually a land stat aerial view from a satellite of the Amazon river basin, right? So you've got the Amazon river, the snake, you know, the monkeys in the forest. So it's, it's just sort of this beautiful story that I liked it. You know, you've got like a leopard, swimming in water, just the story about how magnificent, the environment is, I guess I chose this page. It says snarled, right? You know, if you could read that. So it just shows you this complex world that we live in, right? The wires, you know, silkscreen on top of an orange x-ray of an orchid in a book with a, with an alligator that's swimming in this river that we're seeing from a satellite.

Steve Miller

And so I'm just trying to kind of put this together. So I'm going to stop here and I'll see you next time. You know, whole story together in different ways. Let's see if we can get to the bigger sculptures. You're powerful. Yeah. Thanks. This was a book about, you know, the Jamaican Rasta culture that's disappearing. And, and I called the book gold Rasta. It's the book that Richard Prince used that he got sued for called yes Rasta. And, I just, you know, again, like the hand grabbing the snake, it's like all of these, like, horses in conflict. And this was actually one of the very first ones where I took one of the alligators that I x-rayed in Brazil and the Amazon. I took actually a live alligator to, a hospital. And that made me think about these kinds of possibilities. Oh, this is in front of a museum, a Zaha Hadid building at Michigan state university.

Steve Miller

It's called sloth Pieta.

And it's just, where's the Zaha Hadid? Where are we?

It's Michigan state university in Lansing. Eli Broad built the museum. He's, you know, there's a Broad museum in, Los Angeles. It's called, I think, and this is a museum that he built for his alma mater. He had Zaha Hadid, you know, do the building. And then they put me in a, a sculpture commission, this for the, for the entrance.

Steve Miller

And that's, another version where actually shot the sloth, right? Which is, this is a closeup of the, of the bullet hole through the heart of the sloth. It's just another way to sort of start telling this, this Amazon story. But if I can, so that led me to kind of move out. Let's see. Oh, I do have surfboards here. So it, it, it, you know, I started thinking about these trophies, that first alligator on a, on a piece of sheet of glass.

Steve Miller

These are piranhas from the Amazon river. And I just love the trophy value. And the idea of getting this story out into the world in a different kind of way, which is how I got involved with all of the designing fashion and scarves and, you know, different versions of this sort of trophy.

Steve, because I'm recording to my, hard drive here, it's starting to pulse up and on, and I don't want us to get caught.

We've done enough. We've done enough.

Fantastic. And I want to just talk for a minute before we, in this particular session, if you can just. You know, a little bit more about your interest in Techspressionism and, and where, where you see the future of art, what you're working on now and how you see the future. I know that's a large question.

Well, we've, we've kind of talked about it. I mean, I think the Techspressionism and his ideas that something that we, that we previously thought like computers and NFT, like we, we have this idea, Oh, this is really cold. And this is without humanity and this is very mechanical, right? So it's something that very distances you from what we think about is like, let's just say Van Gogh, because that's obvious example. It's very tactile. It's physical. It's like a Carvel. You go up to one, you want to lick the painting. You want to touch it. You know, they're like, oh, you know, it looks like ice cream. And that's the sort of physical response that we have. And then, you know, you start to get these kind of emotional responses through something that's more impersonal. For example, Eve Klein, a long time ago, took some gold dust, threw it into the sand, and then the collector bought a contract that says, you know, Eve Klein through this, you know, so now you're holding, owning something, but that ownership tells you there was this physical gesture.

Steve Miller

There was this precious thing that you flew. And so there's a whole lot of emotional content. You're throwing away gold and you, you know, so there's a lot of emotional content. And so you're throwing away gold and you, you know, so there's a lot of emotional content. You're this piece of paper that said that it happened.

Steve Miller

And then the same way with computers and, and even more with NFTs, it's like, well, there's, it's so mechanical, there's nothing material. And then you, you know, you start to understand an early Techspressionism, which might be like with me and Colin, where you have a computer image with a lot of paint splatter. It's trying to put these two worlds together in some way that understands there's a conjunction, and there's a collision that's happening. And, you know, so, so with, you know, with Techspressionism, it's obviously that there is emotional content with technology and with Techspressionism, you don't have to have splattered paint, which was, you know, we have all sorts of people that make purely digital stuff. And we would say that digital file has emotional content. And then you, and most of the, I think the Techspressionists are just the majority of them actually use.

Steve Miller

Yeah. Printers and stuff. I know there's some people, I saw someone that used performance, you know, that's also going towards that notion of immateriality. But I think the whole future of art, there will always, will always be object makers. You know, it's just someone wants to take a totem pole, a piece of wood and carve a face on it, or an animal that's, that's never going to end. But I also think that there's this idea that you could do something that's purely digital, and it could really, you know, it could really, you know, it could really, you know, it could really touch you emotionally. So I think that's kind of where the future is going. There'll be a whole new world that can introduce total immateriality into the emotional space, into the culture space.

And, you know, Your visual language, and you have just been wonderful to talk to. Thank you so much for your time. If you want to add something, now's the time, but otherwise, I'm Yeah,

No, I think we kind of like, what else? Just a really, I think the point is how rich this territory is, and

How

Anyone can enter, has an opportunity to enter the space now. And I think that's the whole beauty of the idea that there can be a more democratic sense of opportunity, and that you can enter the creative space and be able to do it. You know, anyone can do it anywhere in the world from any place.

And, you know, honestly, Steve, speaking of emotional attachment, and here we are, we're on both on our computers, we're and look how much we've learned about each other without our bodies present. So that there is an emotional intimacy, I think that can be made through the space that gets gets beyond the body in a way. So it's, it's, it's curious. Thank you for letting us into your world.

Yeah, thanks so much for taking the time. I appreciate anyone that has the ability to sit through 50 minutes of, of this time space. But I really enjoyed the conversation.

Fascinating. No, thank you.

Absolutely fascinating. What you're doing is interesting. And your work is beautiful. Thank you so much. I'm going to turn off the recording. Thank you, Steve Miller.

Okay, Roz, I appreciate it.