Equitable Technology and Cultural Production, or: How I learned to start worrying and write the (NY)Times.

The following is a letter written during the summer of 2018 to the NYTimes culture dept., op-ed dept., and as a letter to the editor after seeing the glowing review of an over-funded, unimaginative collaboration between the Martha Graham school and Google labs.

While it’s not shocking that the content machine is running at full, banal tilt, this one hit close to home, as the work seems to have been nothing more than the uncanny, zombie-like and luxe version of a piece I had been developing for years with collaborators on no budget using borrowed equipment after having been turned down for support by similar organizations.

Above, see an image of the Martha Graham/Google collaboration next to an image of our work, done nearly two years before.

Below, find the letter to the NYTimes, which was (un)surprisingly not published or acknowledged.

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — ->

Dear NYT-

As an artist working with VR and dance for the past several years, I was greatly discouraged by Gia Kourlas’s article covering the Martha Graham Dance Company’s residency with Google Arts and Culture. The closing passage quotes artistic director Ms. Eilber asking “Why us?…Why Martha Graham dancers?”, and I feel compelled to echo that question: Indeed, why them?

With all due respect (I of course appreciate their place in ‘the canon’, and have had the privilege of composing for members of the company), I take extreme umbrage with this article and Google Arts for framing the work developed at this residency as indicative of anything ‘forwards thinking’ or ‘revolutionary’.

Given access to prohibitively expensive technology, specialized technical support, and a public platform in the Times, Google and the Martha Graham Company managed to sidestep almost every interesting creative possibility and instead (of all things) make a self-indulgent piece about the Martha Graham Dance Company itself.

Marshall McLuhan taught us that we conceptualize the new through the metaphors of the old, and it seems that this still holds true: Turns out you can “dress up or decorate Graham’s work in a variety of ways” and be lauded as breaking new conceptual ground. While the organizations involved could have used this opportunity as a chance for creative or critical inquiry, we are instead presented with a high budget, middle-of-the-road spectacle packaged as something noteworthy.

I wouldn’t typically write with such vitriol, but as an early career, ‘experimental’ artist who has been doing stronger work in this field for years with zero budget or platform, this stings, especially after pitching similar ideas to these organizations but being turned down from these opportunities in favor of low-risk, bite-sized art made as clickable content.

Now, it would be naive to think that these organizations aren’t incentivised to produce ‘branded’ collaborations or easy projects like this, but I can’t help but question the creative monoculture that follows from the current conditions of access.

While we see lip service being paid to ‘the arts’ by tech organizations and pay-to-play creative incubators, vital and under-funded voices are working themselves to exhaustion on the losing end of a logistical and technical arms race. Rather than self-congratulatory coverage of projects like these, I would be thrilled to see reporting on the role of grassroots organizations working to create access, or the problematic disparity between PR materials and the actual experience of contemporary artists attempting to contribute to the conversation. At the very least, could we see more reporting on stronger works actually dealing with the vital questions regarding the embodied self and immersive technology?

How can dance help us understand the friction or overlap between physical and virtual space? What are the problematics of performer and audience inhabiting separate (dis)embodied spaces? What would Cage & Cunningham do with VR? What would Anna Halprin do with VR? What would a generation of young artists who have inherited their legacy but are shut out of the conversation due to lack of access do?

If Google wants to find a blank check to dress up a piece from 1930 after that discussion has been had, I suppose that’s fine, too.