Insights: Régine Debatty
On the occasion of our participation at Lift15 in Geneva on February 2015, we asked Lisa Ma, Regine Debatty (We Make Money Not Art) and Nicolas Nova (Near Future Laboratory) to tell us a bit more about their works, methods and share the experience and insights they get from them. This is the first piece of a series of three interviews crossing the themes of thinking, activism and speculation through design.
Hi Régine, can you introduce yourself?
My name is Régine Debatty and since March 2004, I have been writing a blog called We Make Money Not Art. This blog is covering what designers, hackers and mostly artists are creating in connexion with technologies, sciences and social issues.
What is your expertise and background?
I would say that all my past expertise has completely disappeared. I used to teach Latin and ancient Greek, but I had never really been interested to work in that field. I worked for a number of years in the media such as for Belgium National TV, news program in Spain or in Italy. In 2004, I have started to blog on the topic of mixing art and technologies. In the beginning, I felt pretty ignorant, but I had 11 years to learn about, not only technologies and science, but also about art.
Can you describe your activity as blogger and curator?
As a blogger, a lot of work is done almost “organically”. Nowadays, people who know about my blog, and are interested in it, invite me to their festival to cover it or to participate. I might give talks, take part in a panel or do a workshop, mostly around Europe.
I like to observe and reflect on what students or artists are doing and I will write about it each time I find something that is meeting my interests. These last ones really fluctuate, right now I am more and more interested in political related works.
Actually, I have a similar practice when I work as a consultant. Clients come and tell me that they want to organise a talk or a festival. They often ask my expertise: “could you write about this topic, or could you recommend works, who should we contact, who should take part in the discussions or who should be displayed in the exhibition”.
On one hand, I have this online life, which is revolving around my blog and sources I follow, and on the other hand, my blog allowed me to have a life outside the Internet and meet interesting people.
Why do you think designers and artists are interested in science and technologies?
Because they are curious, they are smart and they know that science and technology have a really important role to play in society!
They also know that newspaper, politicians and scientists don’t necessarily communicate enough on what could be the ethical, social or political impact of technological and scientific innovations they are working on.
I feel that designers and artists have different kinds of mission.
One of them is to investigate technologies by throwing away the user’s manual to do their own things with them. Another one is to communicate all types of impacts that sciences and technologies might have in a near future. This mission goes with the fact they have to communicate on these possible impacts in a way that could it be related to our everyday life.
Doing so, it might shock us or annoy us and we might find it a bit brutal, but it allows us to connect with these mundane but important stakes related to sciences. This kind of close connexion doesn’t necessarily happen when reading a mainstream or even specialized newspapers, neither with scientific papers.
How do you think that this kind of creative practice are influencing sciences and technologies? Can designers and artists really influence them?
There are specific cases where artists are working and dialoguing directly with scientists. Actually, those are cases pointing out that scientists are interested in having someone to confront their ideas with; someone who is not one of their peers. Meeting and then discussing with an artist allow them to collect opinions and feedback about their work. In most of the cases, it triggers conversations that they are not prepared to have or used to.
This said, I’m not sure artists have an impact on science itself. They might have an impact on the way science is perceived by the public and then on what science can bring to our everyday life.
Don’t you think visions and perspectives offered by newspapers or the scientific institutions are kind of repetitive? Has everything been quite explored nowadays through science fiction?
How do you think designers and artists can shake this and push the visions further?
I can only talk about my own experience. I know that before being interested in the world of art and technologies, I was happy with what I could read on newspapers or see on TV, but I was never going deeper. So this is why being in contact with what artists, designers and hackers are creating nowadays makes me realize the full potential of what is going on in science and technology. I realise unexpected implications because designers and artists are exploring areas that are not always highlighted in the media.
Regarding the repetitive visions, I would say there is also a lot of repetitions in the art and design worlds. If you study mainstream contemporary art, there is a strong tradition of knowing their history of artwork. I don’t know the design world so well, but in the world of what is called media art, and, there is a lot of awareness about what has been done before. I know that if I go to a graduation show of an art and design school and I see works of students interested in art and sciences, I am going to see so many repetitions. I’m not saying it’s their fault, it could be the fault of their mentors because it’s not mandatory in their courses to show to the students what has already been explored. Still, I’m not saying it’s bad to repeat things; especially if you build on it and bring a new dimension to the original idea.
Do you think about one repetition in particular?
A few years ago, everybody was interested in RFID (Radio frequency identification), with all these artists and designers exploring RFID-related questions in the same way and denouncing the same issues, sometimes in a superficial way. It was about surfing on the wave since the idea of attack on privacy was looming with the deployment of RFID technology.
Another good example would be this period around 2008 when everybody was talking about sustainability and climate change. Nowadays, people don’t care about it anymore, as debates are moving on money and finances related controversies.
I am playing devil’s advocate since I am only showing the dark side of the repetition status, but still, there are plenty of works rising consciousness and inviting us to think about new topics.
As you were showing earlier, in your talk, with biotechnologies for example…
When you think about digital technologies, when we think we all are in contact with them, we might think we understand them. But when it comes to biotechnologies, it is quite different. Biotechnologies remain very abstract and very far away from our everyday experiences.
What artists are doing is to bring them at our own level, in our home for example, to make us realise what our everyday life could be if these innovations were going to be largely implemented tomorrow.
Do you think playing on the everydayness is useful to make people think about it?
I think it works well with people, or at least with me. I am someone with very little imagination, so I am happy when designers and artists do this work for me. If I get to read in some scientific newspaper that there are real breakthroughs, I feel I am going to be informed, but not I won’t necessarily be able to reflect on the consequences this research could have in the near future.
I am really grateful, designers and artists are helping me to envisage this.
How do you think it’s impacting the thoughts of the people: just making them think about it or could it raise involvement, making them stepping into action?
In my case, it makes me more critical. I don’t take things for granted. If I read about a scientific exploit in a newspaper, I will suspect that the whole story is not there and that only some aspects have been explored and others have not been revealed because they have to be kept secret or simply because the journalist hasn’t enough space in the article to explain it, or because the scientist didn’t get a chance to talk about a particular aspect of the research. Artists and designers are really good at digging and finding what is really behind technological and scientific discoveries.
Aside this method of using everydayness in the artistic process, we have been talking about critical artwork which should leave museum to engage with new public. How could artist can achieve this encounter?
First of all, I think it is crucial to go out of museums and galleries since not everybody goes there. For example, I think about the work of France Cadet. She is a French artist and a few years ago she made these copies of Korean dog robots. She customized their behaviour so they would look like animals with diseases, such as mad cow disease or genetic diseases. There was an exhibition of these robots in Paris, in a gallery, and I have seen several people stopping in front of the windows and looking at the robots because they were weird and looked sick, helpless. But nobody dared to enter and it was really fascinating to see how people were staying outside, far away from the robots, as if they needed some authorization to enter in the gallery.
As for the strategies used by artists to make their work reaching the public, I remember this exhibition “The Interventionists”, showing how artists could bring critical work in the everyday life. The Yes Men are a good example. They impersonated official representatives during the Bhopal disaster and made people believe they were part of corporations, appearing on TV. They were posing as member of the company responsible for the disaster in Bhopal, saying that they have finally decided to take their responsibility and refund the people suffering from the tragedy. As it appeared on the main news, on the BBC, everybody started to talk about how they impersonate corporation representatives and become aware of the social duties of corporations.
Another artistic tactic could be to go in the streets. I love the example of Conflict Kitchen, in Pittsburgh. Artists have created a takeaway place only selling specialities from countries the US is in conflict with. They served food from Afghanistan and recently Palestine, inviting people to eat and reflect upon the international relation of the US and the current situations in those countries. They recently received death threats when they started to serve Palestinian meals. Still, I think it’s a way to talk about war in a way that is less frightening. It was building on the opportunity of eating as a moment to have discussions about this topic and to show sides of these countries which are not shown on CNN. The food was wrapped in paper printed with facts about the country, the culture, the lifestyle, entertainment or literature, to help people to get to know more about these places their country is at war with.
It’s a clever way for artists and designers to bring their work in the public space.
As designers, we are evolving in a world of metrics where evaluating our work is mandatory, to know if it’s working or not.
Should we measure the impact of a critical artistic work? How should it be evaluated?
I like the fact that art has not to be measured. You don’t have to put another weight on art.
I had a similar discussion when doing a parallel with hacking. Hacker’s prototypes have to be fully functional and being robust when the artists don’t necessarily have a working prototype. Their prototype could work for two minutes and then disintegrate, artists would still have made their point and started a discussion.
You were talking about artists making their point and starting discussions. Are artists making follow-up on the debates they triggered?
A lot of artists try to push the discussion in a certain direction, or at least to raise the debate and see what is coming out of it. I think they follow the discussions.
The work I’m interested in, in technology and science, artists are genuinely interested in seeing what the public and media are making out of their ideas. Even if, sometimes, it is leading to a lot of misunderstanding.
Getting back to your previous question, I don’t know if artists have to measure the impact of their work quantitatively as designers do it. However, in some cases, I think that the institutions who pay for their work, could it be an installation, a performance or a sculpture, kind of force them to measure the feedback they get from the public as a part of the funding conditions.
Régine is blogging on We-Make-Money-Not-Art.com
