--- type: roundtable number: 1 title: Curators in Conversation date_recorded: 2022-10-03 date_published: 2022-10-09 video_id: -8Glurhxyms url: "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8Glurhxyms" duration_seconds: 3114 moderator: Colin Goldberg speakers: - name: Christiane Paul country: NYC, NY USA start: None - name: Helen A. Harrison country: Sag Harbor, NY USA start: None transcript_source: whisper-large-v3 languages: ["en"] flags: - speaker_index_missing --- ## Colin Goldberg [00:14](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8Glurhxyms&t=14s) Hello, my name is Colin Goldberg and today is Monday, October 3, 2022. I'd like to welcome you to the first Expressionism Roundtable discussion entitled Curators in Conversation. To get started, I'd like to introduce my guests, Helen A. Harrison and Christiane Paul. Helen A. Harrison is a former New York Times art critic and NPR arts commentator. She's the current director of the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center in East Hampton, New York. A specialist in modern American art, Harrison has served as the curator of the Parish Art Museum and Guildhall Museum and was guest curator at the Queens Museum. Her books include Hampton's Bohemia, Two Centuries of Art. Artists and Writers on the Beach, as well as monographs on Jackson Pollock and Larry Rivers and three mystery novels set in the New York art world. Christiane Paul is professor of this in the School of Media Studies at the New School, as well as curator of digital art at the Whitney Museum of American Art. She is a recipient of the Thoma Foundation's 2016 Arts Writing Award in Digital Art. Her writings include A Companion to Digital Art published by Blackwell Wiley in 2022. A Companion to Digital Art published by Thames and Hudson with editions in 2003, 2008, 2015, and 2023. Context Providers, Conditions of Meaning in Media Arts published by Intellect in 2011 with a Chinese edition in 2012. And New Media in the White Cube and Beyond published by UC Press in 2008. At the Whitney Museum, she curated exhibitions including Programmed, Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in Art 1965-2018, Corey Archangel Pro Tools in 2011, and Profiling in 2007. Ms. Paul is responsible for Artport, the museum's portal to internet art. It's an honor and pleasure to have you both here today for this conversation. Thanks so much. Oh, you're welcome. And welcome. Welcome to you both. To provide a bit of background on myself, my practice explores the relationship between technology and technology. And personal expression, bridging multiple disciplines, notably painting and digital media. I'm honored to have been a recipient of grants from the Paul Krasner Foundation and New York State Council on the Arts. And currently I live and work in the Green Mountains of Southern Vermont with my wife, Donna, and our daughter, Aya. I first used the term Techspressionism in 2011 as the title for a solo exhibition in South Hampton, New York. Techspressionism, which is the topic of our discussion today, is defined in Wiktionary as an artistic approach in which technology is utilized as a means to express emotional experience. Some of the philosophical framework around Techspressionism is outlined in the Techspressionist Manifesto, which I first published on medium in 2014. This text was inspired by artistic manifestos of the past, including Marinetti's Futurist Manifesto and Breton's Surrealist Manifesto. Techspressionism was first described as a movement in the Wired article of Picasso had a MacBook Pro in 2014. It was then received its first television coverage in a 2015 episode of the PBS show Art Loft. The use of Techspressionism as a hashtag on social media has allowed technology-based artists to self-identify with the term. Since the summer of 2020, there have been over 49,000 posts published on Instagram using the hashtag Techspressionism. The use of the hashtag has functioned as a primary research mechanism in the curatorial process of developing an artist index, an online community for artists using technology in their work. Over the past two years, Techspressionism has developed into an online community, including artists from over 40 countries. The project's development was inspired in part by the concept of social sculpture invented by the artist Joseph Beuys. Techspressionist artists meet in regularly scheduled online salons to share work and discuss ideas. These recorded meetups are conceived of as a modern counterpart to the surrealist salons of the past. Anne Spalter, artist and author of Computer and the Visual Arts, is a famous artist and designer. She has created many books that cover each young artist's style tofully. She has brought her works to the audience in many ways. She has added newனheets to her pieces and shows them in new ways. She has learned from many latitudes of digital design and among her works. She has written more than 200 books that cover each English language. She has written more than 115 books that cover each language. She has written more than 114 books that cover each language. She has written more than 116 books that cover each language. She has written more than 116 books that cover each language. Artist rather than the product of a corporate studio is what connects expressionism to his predecessor expressionism. Expressionists presented the world from a subjective perspective, distorting it radically in order to evoke moods or ideas, seeking to express their emotional experience rather than physical reality. This past summer, I had the honor of curating Techspressionism's first large-scale physical group exhibition, Techspressionism Digital and Beyond, which opened at Southampton Arts Center in Southampton, New York in spring of 2022. Techspressionism Digital and Beyond included the works of over 90 artists working with technology from more than 20 countries around the world, including Afghanistan, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, the Canary Islands, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Iran, Italy, Netherlands, Peru, Puerto Rico, Russia, Taiwan, Turkey, Uganda, Ukraine, and the United States. Notable contemporary artists featured in the exhibition, as defined by Wikipedia, included Victor Acevedo, Suzanne Anker, Frank Gillette, Clive Holden, Patrick Lichty, Chalda Maloff, Paul D. Miller, aka DJ Spooky, Steve Miller, Joseph Neckfatal, Michael Rees, Christine Schooley, Nina Sobell, Anne Spalter, and Nina Yankovic. I'm going to close this monologue by saying thank you to all of you who participated in this event. I hope you enjoyed it. I'm going to end this monologue, hopefully it wasn't too long, with a short drone fly-through video of the exhibition shot by my friend Joanna Steidle, who's a drone artist and fellow Techspressionist. ## Unattributed [06:34](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8Glurhxyms&t=394s) And then I'm going to open the conversation with ## Colin Goldberg [06:37](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8Glurhxyms&t=397s) An introductory question for each of our guests. ## Unattributed [07:06](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8Glurhxyms&t=426s) If you're playing this your phone you're still live. This is your phone. This is your phone. This is your phone. This is your phone. This is your phone. This is your phone. This is your phone. This is your phone. Thank you. Thank you. ## Colin Goldberg [08:24](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8Glurhxyms&t=504s) Thank you. ## Helen A. Harrison [08:54](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8Glurhxyms&t=534s) I thought about the history, being a historian, of course, I looked back and thought about how artists had adapted technological change for their own personal purposes, rather than being sucked in by the technology itself as a means, as an end in and of itself, that it became a means to an end that was already a subjective approach, a subjective desire on the artist's part to express himself or herself. And then find the appropriate technology or the appropriate means by which to do that. And of course you can think specifically of Jackson Pollock, who learned how to use liquid material in very expressive and inventive ways. But of course, he didn't invent it. It was a technology that he adopted through his exposure in a workshop run by a Mexican muralist, David Alfaro Siqueiros. And he was a great artist. Siqueiros came to New York in 1936 and opened what he called an experimental workshop with the aim of using modern materials and unorthodox techniques to express whatever subjective intent he had. And there are numerous examples of work that were done at that time using primarily industrial materials. Especially, notably liquid. Liquid paint. And the fact that this unorthodox material suited Pollock's needs is the paramount thing. As he himself said in an interview, it doesn't matter how the paint is put on, as long as something is being said. Technique is just a means of arriving at a statement. So the statement is paramount and the means are the end, are the ways of achieving that. And I think that when I saw your work and how you were approaching technology in this very expressive and personal and subjective way, that was the appeal for me. Thank you. I appreciate that response. ## Colin Goldberg [11:10](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8Glurhxyms&t=670s) And so now I'm going to have a question for Christiane, who sort of this came about to some degree because after the exhibition, there was a panel discussion. That was organized by the exhibition's media sponsor, James Lane Post, about Wub3 and the blockchain. And Christiane Paul was a moderator on a panel called Art and Web3. And some of the panelists, or actually all the panelists were artists in the Techspressionism exhibition. So I was very pleased that she had gotten to see the show. And I've been to the shows that she curated at the Whitney and was very happy to be able to, you know, have this conversation. And I think that's a great way to end the conversation. So my initial question for Christiane is, having had a chance to experience the Techspressionism digital and beyond exhibition, can you provide your initial thoughts on the term Techspressionism and specifically how it may relate to art historical movements of the past, as well as digital art at large? Thanks so much for the great question, Colin. ## Christiane Paul [12:17](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8Glurhxyms&t=737s) And also big thanks to you and Helen for your statement. And making this conversation possible. I am going to share a few slides. And I really want to get to the term of Techspressionism in relationship to art historical terminologies and medium specificity and what it means to curatorial practice specifically. So I just randomly threw a question in. So in this slide from Tate, Helen already gave great definitions of expressionism, as did you. And both of you highlighted that expressionist art tends to focus on the emotional expression of subjective ideas. It was a break with representationalism. It was also deeply tied to abstraction. And if you look at this list that Tate gives here, then it also becomes clear that expressionism covered broad, broad territory and styles, ultimately. You have anyone from Max Beckmann and Paul Klee to Francis Bacon and Giacometti in here. So very, very different approaches. And I want to keep that in mind. And then coming back to your manifesto, Colin, and to the definition of Techspressionism. You state that this is an artistic approach in which technology is utilized as a means to express emotional experience. And here I have a few questions. Of course, it's always so difficult to draw the line between art that is or is not expressing. Expression being used in étoile art? Expressing emotional experience. Most artists tend to be deeply involved into their work and into what they're doing, you know, there's always emotional investment. Whenever people ask a writer about whether their work is autobiographical or not many of them would say, well, you know, it's not really events but all I write is autobiographical, because it's me and my emotional experience here. So I want to tie this a little bit to the definition of digital art and that actually differs quite a bit from the one you quoted from and sponsor, whose work I really deeply admire and she's a great colleague, you know. So in its narrow definition. Digital art is art that is created, stored and presented by means of digital technology. So, created by means of the technologies then stored on drives, presented on screens, etc. Not quite overlapping with what we've seen in the Techspressionism show. And art that is created by means of digital technology. The Techspressionism show's art is art that means it military κnowledge of YouTube then absolutely It then uses outside US media and digital technologies and uses characteristics of the medium once again that applies to the narrower definition, it would be computable interactive real time generative, and a few of the works in the Techspressionism show are but not all of them. And it could also be seen in a broader definition as art that is created by means of digital technologies and presented as an object that reflects on the digital medium. This is a more recent material term that we have seen often described as the post digital. Younger artists in particular have been using digital technologies to create, let's say, sculptures or paintings that never could be created in any other way. But they present themselves as an object we may be used to in terms of art historical references, but that work also reflects on the digital medium. And that to me is a crucial distinction. And cut off line that I think conflicts a little bit with expressionism. So I think the main distinction we need to make in digital art is art using digital technologies as a tool for the creation of an art object. And I would argue that most of the work you're seeing in galleries today uses technologies as a tool, be it a digital printer, be it CNC milling or CAD models for a sculpture. Frank Stella. Yeah. That's really great. We know that working with digital media is very important. It's very important to think about what we're seeing in art in terms of how we would sound as important as this work. It's very important to think about what we're seeing in art in terms of how we would sound as this work. It's very important to think about what we know as art and what we would sound as if we were working on this new issue of art. It's very important to think about what we know as art and what we would sound as if we were working on this new issue of art. Technologies as a tool. I'm using a few screenshots from the virtual tour of the Expressionism show here and one thing I also would like to highlight is that we're seeing so different media. So in the center here we have Michael Reeve's augmented reality work relating to sculptural work and then we have many many different forms of print screen-based work etc. Here and I think that work does not always necessarily make a statement about the digital medium. It goes beyond it. So one of my questions as a curator would be where do we draw the lines here because medium specificity is so important to me as a curator in making crucial distinctions between works. I am all for building art historical connections and I think it is very important to see abstract digital work in the context of Expressionism. I tried to build some of those connections in the exhibition you mentioned program rules codes and choreographies in art from which was mounted at the Whitney Museum in 2018-2019. The show which I co-curated with Karine Mancusi-Ongaro and Clemence White was basically looking at two art historical trajectories. One of them conceptual art and you see here one of Solowitz structures in the foreground, Donald Judd in the background and towards the back you see work by let me go back Casey Rios. I'll talk about it in a second and then the other part of the exhibition focused more on the algorithmic or programmed rearrangement of moving image sequences and messing with signals and resolution and I just want for a second to stay with casey rias which is yeah kind of interesting to consider within the concept of expressionism casey is one of the artists who from the start has drawn a lot of attention to the coded back end of digital art and build connections to conceptual art so we have here on the right solowitz wall drawing and on the left work by casey which was originally shown on the web a commission for the artboard website so two software structures here that start with written instructions and of course there are abstractions they are highly conceptual work but I think they would also be by your definitions a form of Techspressionism because there is a lot of emotional content expressed here so I just want to problematize the term a little bit and see where the boundaries of it lie and finally I also want to talk a little bit about artboard and the work I'm doing there once again I would say that by your definition so many of the works would qualify as expressionism and the artists may not necessarily align themselves with the term so as part of artboard which features a lot of commissions we also do the sunrise sunset series and that is work that every morning and every evening at sunrise sunset time in new york so this is an example of an including an items work with some questions not only with something but also with some material like play elements like self and story like black lives matter as well as otherchaise stuff so at this point this was all talk about everything was again done at this point so there was not really like of any left or right view at all so just like my words my eyes were always looking at this into the picture with this almost defiant aff smoke but my eyes were still looking at it so there was no outside view so there was no outside view So I think that's it for this webinar and I hope that you enjoyed it and I hope that you enjoyed our experience during the pandemic questioning the thresholds here between. The online and offline world so you're not quite sure what you're seeing through this mirror are you looking into someone's apartment or could it be seen as a reflection of your own space so I'll stop sharing here. Into that I'm really interested in dive into this. ## Colin Goldberg [22:45](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8Glurhxyms&t=1365s) Awesome well, thank you so much for the slides and the discussion so far, so that pretty much leads into my next question, which is a solicitation of questions. So I wanted to open this up to the two of you would either one of you have any specific questions for each other or for myself on the topic of expressionism to expand our dialogue and then what we're going to do. I figure we can just sort of let the conversation develop organically from there. Well I think Christiane really hit on a crucial point which is where are the boundaries? ## Helen A. Harrison [23:20](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8Glurhxyms&t=1400s) Should there be boundaries? Is there a some way of determining how much subject subjectivity is injected into the ultimate image or the ultimate work of art whether or not the technology is contributing to that. I mean you could think of certain well like for example in your exhibition Colin you had printmakers. Printmaking is a technology it's not a digital technology but it could be but the kind of technology that was I guess primarily the foregrounded in the show was digital technology and some of it animated as well. In fact in your fly-through you showed Nina Jankowicz's two-panel animation and you could only do that digitally. That there's no other way but could she have achieved the same kind of image result using a different technology? That's also another question is this technologically specific or can it be translated into other media? Yeah I think you raise a little ## Christiane Paul [24:31](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8Glurhxyms&t=1471s) Bit of the field of conversation that's also part of it. We think that as an artist lot of great questions helen and that was precisely what I was trying to get to so first of all just reiterating your important point of course all art is technological ultimately paint is a technology photography of course printing so artists have used technologies for centuries but then those technologies also have very different qualities obviously one thing I like about expressionism is that as a term it could also transcend boundaries and in terms of the question of whether we need to clearly delineate things I'm all for openness and I think text progressionism already fulfills an important function if there are artists who are not sure of how to use that term and then they can also use that term to find a platform to discuss issues about their work and that's always you know I think a function that makes a term valuable in terms of digital art curation I also need to make a set of other distinctions I mean paint of course is a medium painting is a medium that I think can have that design at an affordability level as well as this art one thing there's some interesting between both maybe even two before as well as I got from your earlier interview there's an opportunity in big parts of the community to come up with these types of pattern works so these two types of techniques all need to have some sort of context for their use so these two types of techniques can want to take more time and also first of all also kind of I think I need to introduce more distinctions into that umbrella of texperationism. Well, what kind of distinctions do you foresee? ## Helen A. Harrison [26:36](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8Glurhxyms&t=1596s) Well, first of all, coming back to what I said, one of the main distinctions ## Christiane Paul [26:42](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8Glurhxyms&t=1602s) For me is that between the tool and the medium. And I don't want to belabor any form and content distinctions. To me, those, of course, always collapse. You know, you use a specific form or medium to express conceptual issues, and the two of them ultimately cannot be separated. An artist has a reason why they make their work as a sculpture and not as a photograph, because the sculpture is a photograph. The sculpture best expresses what they want to express. That being said, there are artists who use digital technologies as a tool in the creation of a work that maybe speaks to abstraction. It speaks to maybe expressionism in some ways, but it is not a statement and not conceptually engaging with the nature of the works. The aesthetics of the digital per se. To me, that's a major distinction. So you could have a photograph that is deeply digital and that it gets to issues of the digital and plays with a representational spectrum within that framework. And others where clearly the technology is predominantly a tool. Isn't that the distinction that sometimes the ## Helen A. Harrison [28:17](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8Glurhxyms&t=1697s) Technology can overwhelm the content, that the technology becomes, it kind of sucks all the oxygen out of the image. Oh, absolutely not. So this is precisely what I do not mean. ## Christiane Paul [28:31](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8Glurhxyms&t=1711s) That would be accusing Pollock of sucking the oxygen out of paint because what he's doing here is putting so much emphasis on the process itself and what that is. Good digital art by nature is not techno fetishism. But I think most augmented reality pieces make a statement about their representational status. How do they interact with the real world? Michael Rees's work is a perfect example of that. And I would not say that he's overwhelming us. No, he's getting to important points. He's getting to the core issues within what he's doing. So I wouldn't want to collapse the distinction I'm making into technological overwhelming. I'm talking really about engaging with conceptual issues related to the medium versus using it as a tool. I mean, a lot of sculptures that are created, I think, are not conceptual. It's all based on how we use them. So in my sense, is about different elements of not being based on one single object. It's about only one single object. So it's like we're talking ## Helen A. Harrison [29:55](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8Glurhxyms&t=1795s) About spares in the skin. Over with an image of this whole case. It's like we're talking about here in Ιabwe ## Christiane Paul [30:06](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8Glurhxyms&t=1806s) Like the structure of this whole world. So a photograph in a gallery that has been digitally printed, to me, is not digital art. The same as, you know, a scan of the Mona Lisa on the web is not digital art. Here we're dealing with a remediation or with a tool and that functionality. Yeah. Well, it's a reproduction. That's a reproduction of something else rather than original. ## Helen A. Harrison [30:37](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8Glurhxyms&t=1837s) Yeah. So the I mean, the Mona Lisa was another example because that gets to remediation. ## Christiane Paul [30:44](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8Glurhxyms&t=1844s) Yeah. But using the technologies just as a tool. And I don't mean that in any discrediting way, but using it as a tool to create a more traditional art object that's possible. Yeah. And I think that speaks more to painting, photography or sculpture than it does to the digital. That to me is a dividing line for digital art. I would not include a work in a digital art show just because it used some digital process in its making. And I'm arguing here purely art historically and aesthetically. I think there's a different set of aesthetic vocabulary that I would apply to one versus the other. Yeah. ## Colin Goldberg [31:32](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8Glurhxyms&t=1892s) I mean, I could speak to that a little bit in terms of the sort of origin story of the term for me, which kind of came about, you know, it sort of started when I was in graduate school before the term was anything that I had used when I saw that, you know, as I was doing my MFA in computer art and the undergraduate program had already been renamed to digital art. But within the sort of realm of academia, the concerns of many of those younger students enrolled in digital art program was really to be a practitioner of commercial digital art that is to go out into commercial studios like Pixar, work in video game studios and apply their skills. And, you know, then that was sort of the way that nomenclature was used in some settings, say, in an academic setting. And I, you know, I felt strongly. You know that I was there for a different reason, you know, I was there creating art objects and like the work behind me, you know, as you were speaking, it made me made me think that, you know, the work I really consider to be painting in that it's work on linen with acrylics that has a digitally drawn component that's overprinted and then over painted so much in the way that the pop artists like Rauschenberg might have used photo silk screen. I'm employing. I'm employing digital printmaking. I'm employing digital printmaking in sort of an abstract expressionistic way, and the term expressionism was invented because I felt that digital art wasn't an accurate descriptor of my own work in the sense that, you know, it didn't feel comfortable to me to call a digital art when it's a work on linen that involves digital processes. But, you know, that being said, the two paintings behind me the larger pieces are part of a series called my wireframing. So and it's like I think it's just like you know it's like you know it's like you know it's like you know it's like you know it's like you know it's like you know it's like you know it's like you know it's like you know it's like you know it's like you know it's like you know it's like you know it's like you know it's like you know it's like you know it's like you know it's like you know it's like you know it's like you know it's like you know it's like you know it's like you know it's like you know it's like you know it's like you know it's like you know it's like you know it's like you know it's like you know it's like you know it's like you know it's like you know it's like you know it's like you know it's like you know it's like you know it's like you know it's like you know it's like you know it's like you know it's like And you know the definition of expressionism as far as work that has an emotional component that is extremely difficult for anyone to determine externally, you know. So part of what I think has been really interesting for me over the course of this project is finding those moments where people have literally come to me and said like, like I feel like I found my tribe here like this is this word speaks to me. It describes what I'm doing. There was one artist. Davonte Bradley Davu who came in and he was the moderator of most of our early salons and you know, my interaction with him, my initial interaction with him was pretty much of that nature and when we corresponded and then spoke over the phone. It really gave me a feeling that there was something, you know, important here to be working on. Done in terms of the fact that artists were self-identifying you know with the term and that you know gave me sort of the you know the fuel to keep it going so to speak I remember when anne was speaking at one of our salons ## Helen A. Harrison [35:08](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8Glurhxyms&t=2108s) She was talking about how taking her work to a gallery and offering it for exhibition and everyone was very thrilled with it and really loved it but when they found out that it was digital that it was you know done in a reproductive medium so to speak they weren't interested because print making and things reproductive technologies in general are devalued in the art world or certainly have been for up until now although with the rise of nfts I don't know it could be a whole game changer as far as attitudes go but the fact that reproductive technology is not considered serious in the art world is a real detriment because it doesn't take into account the actual the actual image the you know what the artist is trying to say if you want to go back to pollock's definition of that art has to make a statement that the statement is really the primary thing and not how you got there but what you achieved in the end yeah I think this discrimination ## Christiane Paul [36:18](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8Glurhxyms&t=2178s) Against reproductive technologies is changing and has been radically changing at least for younger generations now over the past couple of decades of course we're also still dealing with institutions where those categories are deeply inscribed you know but I think that is definitely eroding over time and I think colin you also perfectly captured it as I said if people really find their term in technology expressionism and something that really deeply captures their practice that's wonderful and that also means that a term like that needs to exist and to your prior description of your work I think that was a beautiful example for the distinctions I'm trying to make you know and once again they are distinctions that are more geared towards approach other ways of thinking about work as well as different types of energy could have been used in other ways as well as different types of development can be used on their own as well as other ways of thinking about work so I think that's really important for me and I think it's very important for me to start really thinking about when with the help of all of those technologies, you know, that to me falls a bit more on the tool side while the other paintings that you referenced in the back really speak much much more to the digital and its framework and once again that's not a classification in terms of value of work, it's really more about literacy and making distinctions because ultimately all of the boundaries would vanish. I'm by no means in the Greenbergian camp of, you know, being hard set on medium purity and medium specificity but in order to have literacy in media we also need to see the differences and the range of expression and ways of writing in these settings you know and we have always had that for painting and I don't think it should vanish with the digital. When Helen ## Colin Goldberg [38:39](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8Glurhxyms&t=2319s) Said a reproductive technology, my knee jerked because generally what I print on the linen I would consider drawing in the sense that I draw it digitally on a tablet but you know I think digital technology it's sort of unique in the sense, well maybe not so much that it's very unique in the sense that it's very unique in the sense that it's very so much so. I mean, in terms of it being a creative technology as well as a reproductive or potentially creative technology as well as a potentially reproductive technology in the sense that things originate, you know, digitally. And like some of the work that I did back in the 90s, the late 90s and 2000s, they were digital drawings. And I thought of the actual work as the file, you know, like the output, the print was sort of a manifestation or a physicalization of the work. And now I've sort of resurrected those pieces and started animating them into NFTs because I feel like finally there's, I don't really know, I would say, you know, an NFT is a distribution mechanism or I've sort of described it in that way. I recently was, you know, in a Twitter sort of back and forth with curator John Ippolito, who actually is the son of my undergraduate painting professor, Angelo Ippolito, who I studied under at Binghamton. And I thought it was really interesting. And he had posted something about NFTs. And there's, you know, NFTs could span a spectrum of things that are conceived of as art to collectibles to all sorts of a variety of things. And, you know, to me, the term NFT describes a delivery mechanism, not even necessarily a medium per se. So, you know, I think that the timing of NFTs and their rise in popularity sort of aligned with the development of this project into a group. And I thought it was really interesting to watch that happening. You know, you say if it's simply a delivery mechanism, then ## Helen A. Harrison [40:53](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8Glurhxyms&t=2453s) It's a delivery mechanism. And I think that's a really interesting thing. And I think that's a really interesting thing. And I think that's a really interesting thing. And I think that's a really interesting thing. And I think that's a really interesting thing. And I think that's a really interesting thing. And I think that's a really interesting thing. And I think that's a really interesting thing. And I think that's a really interesting thing. And I think that's a really interesting thing. And I think that's a really interesting thing. And I think that's a really interesting thing. And I think that's a really interesting thing. And I think that's a really interesting thing. And I think that's a really interesting thing. And I think that's a really interesting thing. And I think that's a really interesting thing. And I think that's a really interesting thing. And I think that's a really interesting thing. And I But the idea that these things have monetary value, apart from expressive value, that kind of convergence is very interesting because that really has not been the case up till now. I want to build on that a little bit. I know we could spend the next ## Christiane Paul [41:43](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8Glurhxyms&t=2503s) Three hours talking about NFTs and we definitely do not have the time. But once again, I just wanted to make some distinctions here. NFTs per se as non-fungible tokens are certificates of authenticity with smart contract and metadata and also a sales platform. So to me, also interesting that to some extent in the lingo, the sales mechanism. Itself has been commodified. That being said, there are distinctions to make between NFTs that consist ultimately of hanging JPEGs on the blockchain, which I'm not interested in. So JPEGs, which once again could just be images remediated of a physical artwork, for example. And to me personally, that is not. I also find it frustrating that digital art gets conflated now very often with JPEGs or little animated clips. But there are also artists and there have been artists since 2014 who have been really using the blockchain as a medium. That to me is interesting about NFT art. And that is when NFTs and the blockchain becomes a medium. So within that. In that spectrum of NFTs, we're once again looking at the pure certificate of authenticity and sales mechanism for a JPEG and then really work that uses the blockchain as a medium. So the kind of commercialization ## Helen A. Harrison [43:38](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8Glurhxyms&t=2618s) Of digital art or things that are created technologically really expands not only the market, but also the audience. I mean, it's not just the audience. I mean, you could not, Colin, you could not have put together the exhibition that you did and presented it the way you did without the internet and access to people all over the world who were able to send in their work because much of it was physical. But you didn't necessarily get a physical object. You got a file and you were able to create the physical object from that file. So this is a whole new way of putting together exhibitions. So I think that's a really interesting question. So it's about how this process is happening and how we're working with people and how we're learning from all of this and presenting the work and making it accessible to people, collecting it and disseminating it. Yeah, I totally agree, Helen. ## Christiane Paul [44:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8Glurhxyms&t=2670s) Also, that has been going on, of course, when it comes to the internet as a platform for distributing art since the 90s, of course. So net art came about in the early 90s. And we have seen representation of art and the wider media. Of art audiences and web-based art for the past 30 years. Definitely digital art also has been collected for decades and decades, but the market now has really changed through NFTs and that attention that has been brought to it. I also want to make very clear, looking at the statistics of it all, that there is only a relatively small overlap in the Venn diagram of NFT collectors and the collectors who become really invested into and interested in digital art. That's only a certain segment and a relatively small segment of that whole group. But certainly, it's been a big advantage that digital art, whether understood or not, has been all over the press. You know. ## Helen A. Harrison [45:52](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8Glurhxyms&t=2752s) Well, if it provides a platform for artists to get their message out, and even if it doesn't result necessarily in sales or in the kind of art world, quote-unquote, success that a traditional art expression would, I think that it just really opens up a whole new avenue for people to connect and to, as I said, as Colin said, you know, people say, I found my people. This is where I was kind of shooting in the dark and now suddenly I'm with a whole group who agree with what I'm trying to do and who are sympathetic and supportive, even if that support doesn't translate into money. Yeah, I absolutely agree. ## Christiane Paul [46:37](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8Glurhxyms&t=2797s) And not only money, but also understanding of the work, you know, because once again, many of the NFT collectors are not necessarily interested in art or the aesthetics. And you see a lot of flipping, which you do not see when it comes to art collection per se, you know, like the serious art art collectors, sure at some point they might put their Matisse on the market, but many of them are holding on to the work because they feel a deep connection to it. And that's actually been the same with NFT collectors who are deeply invested into the artist and connected to the work. They're not going to resell to make a 200% profit. Absolutely. ## Colin Goldberg [47:37](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8Glurhxyms&t=2857s) And as an artist myself, I find that just the ability for a visual artist to receive a royalty payment on a secondary market sale is a pretty big deal. I couldn't really wrap my head around it until I had my first secondary market sale. And it was a small royalty, but it happened completely automatically when the work was resold to another collector. And that... And that illustrated to me how powerful that is in terms of... It sort of has changed the model, I think, in many ways. And it seems like the art market and the NFT market, they're definitely two very separate spaces. Oh, yeah. They tried to do that. ## Helen A. Harrison [48:26](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8Glurhxyms&t=2906s) I think it was in California, if I remember correctly, that when an artwork was sold, that the artist... A painting or a sculpture, a traditional painting. A traditional artwork, that the artist would get a cut. And it was unenforceable. Yeah. But we also have to be aware of the fact that this is a US ## Christiane Paul [48:46](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8Glurhxyms&t=2926s) Issue. It is legislation in other countries. And it seems that in the US, it was only possible to achieve this through the market itself and through the NFT landscape. This is also what motivated Kevin McCoy and Anil Dhani. What did you think of it? In fact, that this was not about people bestodes. We had an official conversation with someone about this and he said, then it was really much more interesting to see what was being done in our country. It was really interesting to see what ## Unattributed [49:28](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8Glurhxyms&t=2968s) Was being done in our country. ## Christiane Paul [49:29](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8Glurhxyms&t=2969s) The reason we were able to get this done this year is because we had an international chat It was about people now who would like to start doing an artwork and then what they would do it for and by what why. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. ## Colin Goldberg [49:36](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8Glurhxyms&t=2976s) Because I mean, as an artist and not identifying as necessarily curator, even though I have this limited experience or an art historian, you know, I'm often reminded that when I look through an art history book, there is really no work in there that isn't, you know, there because it has become, you know, valued. That is, you know, it's achieved and sustained value over time. And that's, you know, a component of its, you know, historical relevance in some way. I wouldn't say that's why it's there, but I think it's hard pressed. It could be the other way around. It could be that the reason that it's valuable is because it's in the book. Right. That's how you built the canon. That makes ## Christiane Paul [50:28](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8Glurhxyms&t=3028s) Sense. Well, this has been. ## Colin Goldberg [50:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8Glurhxyms&t=3030s) I think we're coming up on time here, but it's been a really fantastic conversation. And I really want to thank you all, the two of you for coming today. And yeah, and if either of you have any last thoughts or. Well, I just want to say I really appreciate hearing Christiane's insights because this is ## Helen A. Harrison [50:52](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8Glurhxyms&t=3052s) A realm of media with which I am personally not terribly familiar. And I come to it from a different point of view. So. You know, we know that this is the art that we know is first of all for any American art and so on. So I think it's really important that we ## Christiane Paul [51:12](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8Glurhxyms&t=3072s) Had that conversation and that we had that conversation on that point in time to say. ## Helen A. Harrison [51:26](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8Glurhxyms&t=3086s) Which I know was a real labor of love and a very complicated, many, many moving parts, but it came together brilliantly. Thank you so much, Helen. ## Colin Goldberg [51:37](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8Glurhxyms&t=3097s) And thanks for all your guidance and advice through the years in the project's development. So, all right. Well, I would like to, once again, just thank you both and I will stop our recording now.