Pre-NFT
Paul Kneale and Eugenio Re Rebaudengo discuss NFTs and the artist’s history of making art online
Eugenio Re Rebaudengo:
How and when did you start creating digital works alongside your paintings and sculptures?
Paul Kneale:
Really my whole life. There’s a photo of me as a toddler in the late 80’s printing an ASCII image from a Commodore 64 computer. I think it’s a lobster. Digital and not digital were never really a sharp line for me. But at a certain point I started to think of what I was making as “art” probably because it just didn’t fit anywhere else, and presenting it like that. I was in the first generation to grow up entirely with the internet, so it was natural to have a foot in both realms.
Eugenio:
Did you ever imagine that something like NFT’s would exist to make it possible to buy and sell digital works?
Paul:
No. I thought the concept of the original, which is so fundamental to how art is valued, meant that something that could be easily copied could not become valuable. I couldn’t have predicted that digital culture would evolve to the point where people would have the opportunity to actually prove ownership in virtual space. And that a community would reinforce that value. It’s a new frontier for how digital art can be viably produced.
Eugenio:
Do you think it’s taken the traditional art world a long time to come around to understanding and appreciating digital works and projects?
Paul:
Yes. But I think this is mostly because of the complexity. Most really good painters are saying something about the history of painting through their works. Maybe not didactically, but through their choices of medium and how they are deployed. My paintings are made with digital tools, but then take physical form through a multi-stage process (I’ve written about how this thought and process evolved elsewhere⁹). So I think many viewers of paintings are well educated in the history of the medium, so they immediately understand why a work is doing what it does. And that really means understanding the artist too. Because these digital technologies are so new, and don’t have the centuries of criticism built up around them, there is less familiarity amongst preexisting art viewers. Which is why you are seeing a lot of people new to art in the NFT space, who understand the tech. I think part of what I want to do in the space is be part of a bridge between understanding Art History, and understanding the technology. When you have both of those elements, the possibilities for the works come alive. Sometimes you’re doing something that’s so far out ahead it actually ends up behind people’s understanding. What I would call the Apres Garde.
Eugenio:
What is your earliest digital work that you think is significant or related still to your current practice?
Paul:
An early example is a 2007 piece called Excess Capacity¹. I made a high speed recording of an old tube style TV turning off. There’s a flash of light that collapses into the centre of the screen and fades — its less than a second. But when slowed down at the high frame rate you can see quite an intricate pattern. I had recently been in someone’s house where they had an enormous flat screen TV (which were new at the time), and they had a painting with a special clip that mounted onto the front of it, so that when it was off they didn’t have to see the ugly black plastic rectangle, the TV became a painting. I thought it was really funny, but also why not just have something interesting that acted like a screen saver? So I created that video to do just that. At the time there wasn’t an industry for those placeholder images yet. People turned off the TV if they weren’t watching it. I sold it as an “unlimited multiple” for $5 at Art Metropole in Toronto. There was no real concept of making profit from work like that at the time.
Eugenio:
This idea of excess media experience also makes me think of your SEO+CO. — which is kind of complicated almost operatic piece. Can you explain that work, in its variations?
Paul:
SEO+Co. was an exploration of how digital translation was creating new realities². Kind of like Metaverse 1.0. I participated in a panel discussion at Art Basel one year, and the video was uploaded to YouTube. At the time, the automatically generated captions/subtitles were really still in Beta, so combined with a low quality audio from the live event, and a lot of big art jargon being thrown around on stage, the script it created was so inaccurate that it became trippy. Like flow of consciousness poetry generated by a machine. I took this script and turned it into a script for a play, simply by adding line breaks, and introducing characters that were then speaking the lines. The setting was in and around the squat I was living in South London. I filmed the scenes, and presented it as a multi-channel video installation at TANK in London, with the environment and screen architecture made from items removed from the building — a 1970’s library. So I was really interested in this folding of the machine poetry into real life, and then the folding of real life back into this presentation, that became a whole video and object environment.
There was another variation of the work where the script became a hybrid live performance at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin³, and explored the connection with the building’s architect to a postmodern bank skyscraper in New York that almost collapsed. The digital connections became like endless conceptual tunnels.
Eugenio:
And within this interest in how digital life is both shaped by, and pushing the evolution of language, there are some darker, and even political sides? For example your Cryptogif works?
Paul:
Yes, the Cryptogif project came out of the Lunch Bytes series organized by Melanie Bühler⁴. She had connected me with some Chinese curators who I was able to visit with while in Zurich. Our conversation ended up touching on the state censorship of the internet that was happening (and continues to happen). They told me a great story about a video that had become very popular that had a refrain about a “grass mud horse” 草泥马, which in Mandarin sounded quite similar to an explicit insult that reflected the frustration with censorship.
Because the scale of the censorship was so vast, it relied on automated scanning of pages, videos and chats. So in the thin grey area between what a human could read but a machine could not, there was room for disruption. I had the idea that if you created an animated GIF that had a busy background, and animated a handwritten text on top of it, that it would be nearly impossible for automated software to read the message. Because no one frame would contain all the text. Kind of like a really intense CAPTCHA. But not at all hard for a human to read.
So I made a number of these as examples, and also produced a tutorial style video on YouTube that gave instructions about how to make them. These could then be sent as texts, or even the body of an email without the fear of their content being read by the state security.
Eugenio:
It seems that with the tutorial showing how they can be made, really making them useful — you have a relationship to the Free Software series? The idea of the work as almost a kind of tool for the viewer to participate with?
Paul:
With the Free Software series that I’m presenting for the first time as an NFT, I had an interest in the crossroads between a classic mode of conceptual art — the “instructions” based work — and the distribution potential of digital. At the time, I was getting a lot of requests to do group shows, and while I usually wanted to do it, it was also expensive, time consuming and distracting from other main projects. So I came up with the idea that I could just offer them a Free Software that they could create themselves.
The name was inspired by the same concept in programming, like Linux. Make the source code available and let people build innovative things themselves. And the new version of this is Web 3.0, which is why it felt like a good fit for my first NFT. So the actual Free Software is a PDF that tells you how to make the work. They were free downloads on my site, and hosted in other places. They’ve been staged at public Museums like La Friche de la Belle de Mai⁶, in Marseilles, in David Lynch’s private nightclub Silencio in Paris, and also in student degree shows. I did a show in Berlin at Import Projects where a whole group of them were shown together, all created by the curator and gallery staff. There are a few dozen different Free Software instructions floating around. And most of them deal with digital subject matter. The Free Software that I’ve made into this first NFT collection is a riff on a YouTube genre of putting non-food items into microwaves. The CD was one of the coolest, because it creates a miniature lightning storm inside the microwave, and then the burned disk has this crazy fractal pattern. Each one is different like a snowflake. So the instructions just tell you the materials you need (blank CD’s/DVD’s, Microwave), and how to set it up at the venue where you want to display the work.
There are others that riff on unboxing videos, or how to paint over the generic art you can buy at Ikea. Some of them have digital assets, like a PDF of my poems that connects to instructions for a live performance.
It’s been interesting to see how these works have had a crossover effect. They’ve had full page splashes in high brow art magazines like Frieze, but also been popular on social media. Hopefully that’s a kind of sweet spot that the NFTs can occupy too.
Eugenio:
I also wanted to touch on your Twitter — it’s another digital project that seems to weave in and out of many of these concerns. How long have you been working on that, and how does it differ from a typical user’s account?
Paul:
My twitter, @paulkneale is a project that’s been ongoing for 13 years now! I got the app at the same time as my first iPhone in 2008. Before that, I had always carried around notebooks to jot down ideas and thoughts that came at random times out and around the city. A few times I’d been really heartbroken when I lost one in a cafe or after a night out. With Twitter and the iPhone I realized that I could stop using the notebooks, and just upload my notes to Twitter’s servers. So I never really used the platform how it was intended. My account is just one way posting. The act of making the notes public changed the way I was jotting them down. It made me turn them over in my mind a little more, polish and condense them, so they almost become dense little bon mots, aphorisms or abstract slogans. I’ve got nearly 4,000 of them posted to date. They come in and out of my other works in a number of ways. Sometimes as titles, sometimes as the kernels of a concept that gets developed further. And all are stored on a server that I don’t even know the location of! Which to me is kind of an exploit of web2.0, like digital squatting, at the same time as being vulnerable to its centralized powers.
Over the years I’ve also experimented with exporting the account’s content into other formats. For example in 2014 I was asked by Hans Ulrich Obrist to participate in the First Biennale Online. A conceptual event taking the framework of the Biennale, but hosted it on webpages. For this project I created two ebooks with images created from my twitter messages, that were available for download via the Biennale. In the future I’d also like to publish the whole collection as an unwieldy 4000 page book.
Eugenio:
And you have been writing longer form pieces that also focus on the digital, or are distributed there? And as a subtext of that a lot of your projects seem to piggyback or even parasite off platforms…
Paul:
Writing has always been a part of my practice, and also a space where digital distribution was an early option. For example in 2013 for Frieze Projects at Frieze Art Fair I was asked by Ben Vickers to contribute a text to a publication that was distributed on custom USB keys at the fair. My work was a short fiction imagining how a young artist was trying to take advantage of the real estate market in post-2008 crash Las Vegas, in order to start a project space in an abandoned strip mall on the edge of the desert. A kind of Second Life type fantasy.
I’ve also used Craigslist as a place to host content. I wrote an essay called New Abject⁷, that explores how abjection can now be experienced in clean, new, even technological contexts, creating a short circuit within our ancient monkey brain. It’s kind of a pop philosophy. It was originally posted in segments to Craigslist, so the text disappeared after a certain time. Later I also released it as an ebook, through a platform George Unseworth was running called dreamingofstreaming.com, that was also an early experiment in digital editions — something of a direct precursor to the concept of the NFT. And also hacking these web2.0 platforms, using the free space on their servers to host the projects.
Eugenio:
And finally can you say something about your very recent project engaging with Instagram?
Paul:
For a few years I had been noticing a trend on Instagram away from the simple gallery installation shot, which had been king in the era of the blogs like Contemporary Art Daily etc. Now it seemed the trend had shifted to show works as they appeared hanging in their collectors homes. A number of instagrams dedicated to this type of image had amassed large followings. I also began to notice that several images of my paintings that had been taken in this format (collector homes), got 1000’s more likes on these accounts than anything I posted on my own.
I think on a basic level, people like to see the work in a home because it makes it easier for them to project their own home onto the fantasy image. It’s the climax of the ownership desire, to see it also surrounded by your good taste in furniture and large rooms. But also I knew that 3D renderings were becoming so realistic, I didn’t need to wait for a collector to have Architectural Digest photograph their house to get these images. I could simply have them created. So I commissioned 3D artists to place images of paintings that were still in my studio into hyper realistic environments. I then circulated the images to a number of these accounts, who reposted them. At that point, I thought they had really blended in imperceptibly with reality⁸. When people looked at these accounts they would assume they were real interiors. The fantasy had been consummated without the work leaving the studio. The “metaverse” for paintings. And then also in a small side room of a solo show at a museum in Canada last year, I showed a screenshot of one of these posts — complete with the likes and a few comments, presented as a print. So it starts to wink back at you a bit, that maybe the screenshot is the real work. The infiltration. Putting garbage in the smart fridge. I’m obsessed with these cycles and various manifestations the works go through.
As yet another layer, this past fall I was invited to do a collaboration with Versace, at their flagship Versace Home store in Milan. When the images circulated online, in Vogue and on their Instagram account with 26 million followers — they looked just like the renderings I had been making. A few months earlier the renderings project had been discussed in the mainstream news in Canada, so my cover was blown. But now these Versace images (that are actual photographs), could probably being interpreted as renderings.
On the more absurd end of the scale, we also experimented with creating an AR filter for Instagram together with ARTUNER for a virtual exhibition we organized early in the pandemic. The filter allowed users to superimpose one of my paintings over their story. I loved seeing the absurd scenarios people created — paintings flying out the back of speedboats, hovering over the NYC skyline, sitting on top of horses.
Eugenio:
Will you make more NFTs?
Paul:
Absolutely yes. I’m interested in translating more of these past projects into an NFT format, and also to create new ones. The possibilities are endless. And I also want to create links to the collectors, through aspects of the NFT such as the unlockable content being offered with this first collection. The top collector of the project will have the chance to do a collaboration with me, via zoom or in person, where we will workshop their own Free Software concept that will be formatted as a PDF and added into the circulation loop.
References:
1. Excess Capacity at Art Metropole https://artmetropole.com/shop/8628
2. SEOandCo. Documentation http://paulkneale.net/SEOandCo.html
3. Lunch Bytes at HKW Berlin in Frieze Magazine https://www.frieze.com/article/lunch-bytes
4. Lunch Bytes talk at ICA with Boris Groys and Wendy Chun https://youtu.be/07N0DuLb4VM
5. Interview with Melanie Bühler in “No Internet No Art” http://paulkneale.net/PaulKneale_LunchBytesAnthology_Cryptogif.pdf
6. Par Hasard at Friche la Belle de Mai https://www.lafriche.org/evenements/par-hasard/
7. New Abject in Frieze Magazine http://paulkneale.net/AAAAAA.pdf
8. The Instagram Turn on CBC https://www.cbc.ca/arts/canadacouncildigitaloriginals/what-makes-an-art-showing-real-artist-puts-his-work-into-hyperrealistic-renderings-of-wealthy-homes-1.5808331?fbclid=IwAR3_J4ZMhfgK465n2vsZQBKLDHeRBlyi-wj2s0-hPcRi-UsRpJwdXfYLKUc
9. Image Ageless in Spike Magazine https://www.spikeartmagazine.com/?q=articles/image-ageless