Esc Artist
Mat Dryhurst on the artist’s need to forge into new territory without compromise.
Mid-summer 2016, Mat Dryhurst and I talked about the tension between art and capital, funding non-traditional art projects and artists as advisors among other topics. Mat Dryhurst is an independent artist and musician releasing music on the PAN label. Mat co-runs a studio with Holly Herndon, is the creator of the self-hosting video and performance platform, SAGA, lecturer at NYU’s Clive Davis Institute, meme-maker and advisor to the music co-op, Resonate.is. Despite hearing his own voice from mic echo for nearly an hour, Mat provides some great insight for entrepreneurial-minded artists dabbling in the post-contemporary. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Hey Mat, thanks a lot for joining me. Actually, thank you for letting me join you on your recording equipment since mine failed out.
[Sound of vape pen]
I do sound a bit like God in a theater production.
To start off, 2016 has been really busy for you and I’d love to hear what’s been going on.
Yeah, so my partner, Holly [Herndon] and I have been touring pretty much. We released a record last year that went pretty well. The nature of our business is you put that out and then you have to go, you know, play it to people. That’s kinda how we make our money. It’s been really fun [opening for Radiohead during their Moon Shaped Pool tour]. We’ve been touring all over the spot. We saw you in St. Louis with Colin [Self]. It’s been amazing to be touring with Colin. We’re just coming off that right now and trying to settle into some kind of domesticity or normal work schedule. I can imagine it was far harder 30 years ago. Now you’re still on email and there’s this conceit that you’re still participating in regular life but you’re not really. So it’s quite nice to come back and start thinking of other projects and you know, talk to people, cook food, go to bed at a reasonable time. Before we have to do it all over again. We’re structuring our lives around these kind of album cycles which is a very idiosyncratic thing.
You also did some speaking this summer.
Yeah totally. I’ve done quite a bit of speaking when I can go to festivals to talk specifically about decentralized publishing and a few other things that we’re interested in. And in many cases it’s become this kind of thing where we’ll often play a festival that also has a discursive angle to it and so you can kind of kill two birds with stone. You play a show and then you can go and nerd out with someone.
Like 3HD? Is that what you’re talking about?
Actually, I’m not involved with that. It’s a really cool festival and is definitely and example of that discursive, performative platform and that’s happening in Berlin in a month or two time. But that’s definitely an example of a trend that’s been emergent in the past five years or so where you kind of get your meat and vegetables in the same place.
In addition to that you’ve also become an advisor to Resonate.is.
In the past couple of years, there’s another artist, Lars [Holdhus], who presents work as TCF. He and I have been nerding out, agreeing and arguing, on wanting to build some kind of a decentralized alternative for independent musicians. And we’re coming at it from different angles. [It] kind of came together through a shared interest in the topic and kinda also came to this conclusion that we’re really in such a fringe minority for active musicians that care about this stuff that it’s useful to work together and share perspectives. Lars met Peter Harris, who started Resonate, and recommended him to me. Peter’s vision, which I think is really quite great, is to build a blockchain-based platform cooperative for music streaming. The idea being that it provides a better deal for the artists and labels than Spotify or any of these major competitors who largely — unless you come from a really strong bargaining position — don’t really offer negotiation on the rates that you receive. With Resonate the idea is that it’s a really sweet deal and, also being a platform co-op model, stakeholders who are promoting their music through there or pushing their label have some say in the future of the platform. For both Lars and I, independently it made a lot of sense to try and get involved. Peter asked us to be involved on an advisory level. For us the interest is that one — none of us individually are going to solve this problem. The scale of the problem is huge and there’s a lot of money there and we’re really on the margins to even be thinking about this. And so it helps to work together. And two — Peter and a lot of the team that are working on Resonate have a level of technical aptitude available to them to really do some exciting things. It’s very useful to be able to talk to him about some of the ideas that we’ve been incubating and think of ways to take them to scale quicker through that infrastructure rather than just trying to work on projects separately.
The big opportunity is when it comes specifically to decentralized hosting platforms or these kind of platform co-op models. I see this as a huge opportunity for a new kind of independent music. A new kind of independence in how much control you have over the releases, how much discrete control you have over pricing, how much control you have over releasing work atypically online. Resonate is taking on the challenge of streaming first, which is already a considerable challenge. But what also gets me excited is that once these labels and artists are somewhat familiar with participating with the blockchain all kind of applications can be built on top of that. And in a fair way that doesn’t feel exploitative. It’s a group of sympathetic and smart people at this point and the spirit of that is really wonderful.
It’s cool to see you and Lars on the advising side. Are other musicians or artists advising tech companies like this?
In the case of Resonate it perhaps makes more sense given the scope of what they do. Their reason for being is to provide a fairer deal for artists. Years ago I put on a hack in Stockholm. There was a festival called Visions of the Now, a recreation of the original Visions of the Now festival in Stockholm in the 60s that predated EAT — the Experiments in Art and Technology — and actually it was very closely related to it even though they had their disagreements. Part of the idea of that hack was simply to say, “Why is it when exorbitant amounts of money are being spent on these platforms that are reportedly in the interest of artists; that are determining the terms of how artists are viewed, experienced, whatever; Why is it that so few artists are involved in that ideation or creation process?” And I think that the blame falls on both sides, right? In many cases you want engineers behind those projects because they kind of know what is possible and are in a better position to raise money and all this kind of stuff. But on the other side it’s also the challenge of encouraging artists to see these platforms as something they have a vested interest in. And remove yourself from this kind of role of simply participating in platforms as a user and [instead] seeing them as something that’s fundamentally important to your practice and also to your financial future. Perhaps it’s easier in the case of someone like Lars or I. We’re coming from a doggedly independent music infrastructure. Particularly myself, every job I’ve ever had, or in music at least, has been dyed in the wool, kind of indie. Like OG indie, puritan kind of approach.
For me it makes a lot of sense to look at these things and be like, “Where is the Discord for streaming?” It’s a rough analogy but I think it’s a really, really relevant analogy.
Is there apprehension to bring artists on as advisors because they may not want to be involved in the business or capitalistic side to running and launching a startup? I’m trying to figure out what the general attitude is for artists now. What you’re seeing in Berlin versus here in the States?
Totally. I mean you’re always up against it in some ways. We’re weirdos in a way. We’re predominantly involved in music but we deal with people and characters and subjects in the contemporary art world, or the design world or the tech world in some ways. In doing so, or having this breadth of practice we’re kinda ****** whichever way we go. There’s this special corner for these inter-sectional practices. They’re not considered as pure or authentic as the artist who practices with no consideration for the means by which they push the work or fund the work. This is the mythology of the great artist, right? I think in some cases without having a really strong passion for these topics as an artist you’re disincentivized to really pursue that stuff because it’s not considered very sexy. But, I think that is shifting more and more.
And on top of that you have a scenario where you used to be able to be oblivious or naive to these topics because the system was working, right? That system, at least if you were invited into that very rarefied system, that worked and you were getting paid. It wasn’t lucrative for everyone, but there was a degree of investment or faith put into that system. Of course that system has changed so radically and those protections have depleted so radically in the past 10, 15 years that [it] behooves you as someone looking to have an artistic practice to start looking into infrastructure and to start taking the reigns on your own career. If I look at the people who are thriving, whether they would concede it or whether this is something that is happening subconsciously, people are organizing themselves into business entities. They may not describe it as such, but art studios, musicians, touring musicians, you look at the ones who are operating on a level and they’re companies. I mean they really are. The way they work, the way they share resources, the way they interact with their agents or their labels. These are negotiations that are occurring between business entities and you do lose something in that.
But my argument would be that your only choice is to be creative with it, pragmatic with it and find ways to participate in that without making ethical compromises.
Which is why for example, with Resonate, a lot of people, most people don’t know what a platform co-op is. And if they were to approach it with a degree of cynicism because it seems like a business entity… the reason for platform co-ops to exist is exactly to combat that kind of cynical engagement with capital and with business. It behooves artists to look into this stuff more. There’s a lot there and you can feel ethically and creatively sound.
The pathways that are coming out are: Engage and experiment with this new model for artists in a way that works for you or pursue what has traditionally been happening i.e., isolate yourself from that industry or go headlong into the hyper-professionalization of the art world. Is that what you’re thinking it looks like? Are all artists tech companies/publishers?
I mean, I wouldn’t say all, but, well actually, in some ways yes. Perhaps they all are but I don’t think people perhaps realize it. If I talk about visual arts I’m far less experienced with it so I’ll stick to music but I think it probably applies across the spectrum. If you have a young musician…the way in which they approach their practice — and this is not necessarily by choice and I don’t know if it’s necessarily conscious — is you have access to such research and such knowledge of who is who, who’s doing what, where’s the place you need to be, what’s the fashionable thing at this point in time, where your place may be in relation to that. You join Twitter and you see the journalists, the curator, the editor. You can follow these people and there’s ways to enter that conversation. Unfortunately, it’s heavily weighted to Western, English-speaking countries but generally there are ways to participate in that conversation so much more. It’s important to consider…when you create something now you’re doing it with access to so much more information than this kind of fantasy or mythology of the autonomous artist, you know? And yeah, there are opportunities in that and there are huge potholes you can step into. But whether you like it or not the approach has shifted and now it’s really a matter of trying to distinguish between a good approach and a bad approach.
This particular space that you, Holly, Lars and all these other people that are operating in is a really weird space in general. It kind of came piggybacking off the early new media or post-media art world. Music got involved alongside of it and with the integration of tech and startups becoming more of a mainstream concept it’s just a weird community with a lot of overlap with different communities. It seems like a very new concept to the outside world, and surprisingly to me, even the art world. I’ve never been that involved in the traditional art world and I guess I’m shocked by how surprised they are. Something that was interesting, I think it was a Red Bull interview last year, you talked about the art world in general having trouble with art doing something. Did you discover that in response to what you were doing with SAGA?
Yeah, we’ve had criticisms in the past, like you know, in the art world the bogeyman is the concept of didacticism. If you go through any art school program there’s this concern that you’re too concerned with educating people about things. And we run into it quite a lot. The issue for me is, yes, I’m often incredibly shocked by how discrete or siloed these worlds are. In music we run into this all the time where the vast majority of music is people who just listen to music and they don’t really check out much else. There’s this kind of curiosity gap about what’s happening in the world currently. As a result you find yourself in this kind of frustrating position where if you’re trying to talk about an issue — decentralized tech in a musical context — there’s very little ground you can break. And that’s happened a little bit with Holly. It’s like, “Holly makes music on a laptop.” And that’s like the coloring book story of what Holly does. But there’s a lot of ground to cover to open up the discussion within each field. And again you also get into this hairy scenario because of how reviled the concept of educating people is or the concept of functionality or something being designed to actually live in the world in a certain way. You get into a position where you either have to educate people or have to contextualize your work yourself in order to make your point. Or [else] participate in the more pop economy of things and just accept that the nuances of the points you want to make aren’t going to be communicated. I think for some people a lot of their practice is in that universe of playing with those themes and I think that’s great and there’s really smart things you can do in that context. But for us it would be just quite boring.
But specifically on the function thing we did run into that. And I did run into that with SAGA.
I joke with people, like if I just made a film about hypothetically making SAGA I’d probably have a stronger response from the art world than building the ******* thing.
I don’t think the art world knows how to deal with that. That’s not their universe. And I guess it’s fine, but it’s frustrating for me because in my experience, I mean part of the reason I’ve always gravitated toward creative universes, is that’s where you find the freaks. And in my mind the real freaks are characters like Lars. Lars is a very skilled artists, he’s a very skilled musician. He chooses to show work in a certain way because that satisfies his curiosity and his intellect. And it’s those freaks that I got involved in music. That’s the reason I’ve been interested in contemporary art. But they’re not really facilitated by the industry.
Are you seeing this kind of work happening elsewhere? Is there anything interesting happening in Berlin? Do you see a line drawn in the sand or a convergence?
There’s kind of two parts to it. There’s an awesome theorist and curator, Suhail Malik, who did a long series of lectures on the Necessity of Art’s Escape from Contemporary Art. He defines Contemporary Art as a period of time, a genre of art that you know. Some of his criticisms go into the idea that Contemporary Art exists on critique that circulates amongst itself but there’s never any exit from that. I was joking last night… it’s like, “Oh well, next year will be the year that digital arts has a breakthrough.” It’s like every year there’s a panel at some prestigious institution talking about how this is going to be the year… it kind of repeats on itself because it has a really hard time escaping or exiting that perennial, naval-gazing discourse. I mean, there’s so much benefit to reading things in a artistic, musical, philosophical, theoretical tradition. The most exciting thing is with access to money (that’s really one of the crucial things), talks and communities you can just build something that doesn’t try and appease that conversation. And what you’ll find over time is that if you’re successful in doing it the art world will acknowledge you. They kind of have a habit…once something’s a success they will appreciate it. And so if anything, in my mind, it need not necessarily be a negotiation with art history. People like Adam [Harvey], for example. He’s very skilled, he’s very thoughtful about what he does and he just started a business. I can’t say definitively if Jonah Peretti’s BuzzFeed was an art project, but you have someone who was working, or in concert with the Fat Lab community, which I think was an awesomely influential project. And you see BuzzFeed and the tone of it… I don’t even necessarily think it was a source of good in the world, but you have a quite clear thesis there that seems synonymous with a lot of the Fat Lab experiments. And I’m like, well that’s a remarkable art project. And the impact it’s had on the world is pretty undeniable at this point in time. So why would you — if you’re a smart person who cares about something, whether it be aesthetics or whatever — why would you not just disentangle yourself from some very stringent expectations and also a very stringent and also unethical art market? When people talk about capitalism and you know, “You don’t want to get involved in the startup world and venture capital,” and I’m like why are you participating in the gallery system? This is one of the most shady, opaque, capitalist environments you can talk about it. Where is this high ethical standard that people are hobbling themselves to?
It’s like the art world version of venture capital.
Yeah, totally, with less transparency. And again, I like a lot of people who exist in that world, but there’s this kind of strange false binary.
For me, as well those same characters, would argue [that] art is a fundamental. Like an ether that exists in the world. [But that] it’s not tied to institutions or any particular legacy. And I’m like, absolutely it is.
So many smart people are going to try and find ways to navigate their own way in the world and find their own audiences and exhibit their work or push their work through different creative means and that’s wonderful. And of course there’s going to be a lot of bad work but there’s going to be a lot of great work. I don’t personally think that the contemporary art infrastructure, the gallery world, the museum world, as venerable as aspects of it can be… I don’t think they have a monopoly on art whatsoever.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but when you were doing the Artup project in San Francisco with Barry Threw, was that more related to the business aspect in the art world or more the art and tech angle? What was the goal there?
At the time there was kind of this emergent politic in San Francisco specifically that was parsing or stretching our loyalties a little bit. You had this accelerated gentrification occurring and Holly and I were playing weird autonomous rave spaces and noise shows and felt huge loyalties to that community that was being pushed out by the influx of capital in the city. You saw a lot of tension occurring. At the same time I was going to work and was hanging out with people who were being characterized as the gentrifiers, the weird tech bros who were taking over the city. And our experience of them was not quite as simple as that. You had some very thoughtful people who were very smart and were also concerned about what was happening to the city. And so the opportunity with Artup was really to start super informal — that’s always been my style — like very informal hangouts. We definitely invited some cool people to speak and discuss issues. We kind of pretended it was a formal environment by announcing it as an event but the real function of it was to invite speakers and just anyone from the community to freely hash out some of the emergent problems in San Francisco. I think it was quite successful at times because we invited good people, we had it very open access and we did bring in a lot of people from a money/tech world and a DIY musical/artist background to just have a go at each other. In most cases what you end up finding is that the archetypes and the stereotypes that were purportedly dividing people don’t apply when you’re in the same room with people. Most people are quite nuanced and also just trying to take care of themselves. So from that there were opportunities that came up. At the time it felt like a very necessary intervention because this was the pre-monthly thinkpiece about what’s happening to the soul of San Francisco. At the time it did do some good to at least create some relationships and try and parse those issues.
We were talking about your project SAGA earlier and I’m curious if that’s a project you’re still working on. Or are you onto something new?
Yeah, I mean, honestly, it’s tricky. I think we spoke about this a little bit in St. Louis. Initially, I put it out. I had a pretty good response to it. I still think a lot of people didn’t get it which is partly my bad. But for those people who got it they saw the opportunity and how cool this was. The challenge to pushing SAGA further is you’re really talking about a level of technical aptitude to build this network that can host people stably, quickly and adhere to the same philosophical principles. It requires funding. And so, initially I’d applied to a number of grants thinking that I’d be a pretty good shot. But a friend of mine who is used to writing these type of grants came back to me like, “Well it’s tricky because you’re kind of falling in between the cracks. It’s a functional project so it’s not really in this category and it involves video and performance and visual stuff but it’s not really in that category.” There aren’t really the resources available at least that I could find to fund that project in the spirit of how I wanted to work on it. There are potential opportunities to go through more traditional funding mechanisms for starting a business and crowdfunding [but] it’s that return on investment aspect that specifically around SAGA I didn’t want to push. First off because my first job is working here with Holly and it really would conflict with that on a day-to-day level for me. Trying to start a business is a really hard thing to do. I have lots of friends who do it and you’ve got to really be all in. And specifically in music there’s something like a 3% success [rate] for music, tech-based projects. So for me to best develop this was to facilitate my own experiments and my own work. You see people developing their own proprietary technologies more and more in the contemporary art world. SAGA of course wouldn’t be proprietary because everything’s open-source. But I have some projects in mind where I’d like to use SAGA and further illustrate some of the capabilities of it and develop the platform a bit more. It’s not dead yet. I think people still haven’t caught up to the logic of it. I still think it’s relevant and I think it might well be relevant in five years time so I’d like to continue working on it. Hopefully, maybe, there’ll be a point where I can find some support for it so I can focus on it a bit more. I imagine there’s hundreds of remarkable projects on Github now that maybe in 20 years time we’ll look back and be like, “Whoa that person was really onto something.” But without that funding source and support infrastructure it makes it very hard to pursue and I’m not about to be a martyr for that. It was basically either I found some way to do it feasibly or I take another path, which is to develop it as a personal project with the explicit purpose of producing more artwork with that logic.
Do you think for projects like this there needs to be a new funding model?
I think that would be cool. I totally understand that when it comes to investment, people want a return. I did explore some monetization ideas that I thought were pretty cool but it’s finding the right person to support and finding ways to charge people in a way that you think is feasible. In particular with music where people expect everything to be free. And SAGA is anti-advertising, which was one of the points of it. I’ve seen some cool foundation models where they will fund these kind of nascent, experimental projects. They’re not so much explicitly focused on art and technology, but naturally a lot of the projects that end up seeking that kind of alternate funding will come from that universe. But I do think it’s an opportunity, because as you know, you have people going through the school system or the arts school system, the design school system are thinking more and more about these issues. I’ve gone to a lot of MFA shows and pretty much every MFA show is concerned about platform politics or networked dynamics. You have generations of students coming through thinking about these things who perhaps don’t feel like their skillset would work jumping directly into a tech job but perhaps do have wonderful ideas. Having some ability to fund the best of those ideas and just see what happens seems in the best interest of everyone. Culture is not going anywhere; art and music isn’t going anywhere and there’s such a rush to try and solve problems within those worlds. There are people who are from those worlds who are thinking about it and it would be beneficial for everybody to have more support and visibility to those ideas and projects.
So at this point it’s just a matter of time?
I don’t know. I takes a special person. It appears to me to be a philosophical thing. I was watching Vinay Gupta [who] has just started a venture capital organization called Hexayurt. He’s coming at it with a very particular philosophical stance which seemed to make some sense to me particularly for his outcomes. He was talking about Paul Graham and how Y Combinator has this particular philosophical stance about supporting a large number of projects and investing in the future of these very speculative ways that ultimately do produce a return but it’s a very peculiar return. It’s not like a 1:1 return. Y Combinator will accept that 90% of their projects aren’t going to return them money, but the few that do compensate handsomely for the ones that don’t. And so using that as a mechanism to push things forward. But in all those circumstances you have really visionary people. Visionary people who have access to money. Those are two very special things. And same with the art world. We’ve dabbled a bit [in] the field of sound art. And when you talk to people, friends of ours, who sell works in that world and are part of that conversation and that legacy I mean, there’s like five collectors in the world who keep that system running. But the point being that entire conversation and infrastructure and discussion is facilitated by a few visionary people who have access to money that are pushing in that direction. The good thing about the tech and art discussion is — you’d think — a lot of very smart of people with a lot of very new money who have interest in this stuff will begin to emerge to start supporting this kind of work. It seems like there’s a higher likelihood for that than supporting sound art honestly.
I’m pretty hopeful, [but] I could spend 10 years trying to find that one person, you know? So, up until those opportunities exist you’ve gotta be pragmatic and [find] different ways to work.
We are not necessarily concerned about finding investment from an angel. We work in the music industry. It’s actually a very kind of honest craft where [Holly and I] make music and try to put on a show and a bunch of people show up and they pay. I’m really grateful because that allows us the flexibility to work on these speculative projects on the side without fearing for our bottom line. That gives us a degree of conceptual freedom also.
What’s happening in this space we’ve been talking about that’s interesting to you?
I’m particularly interested in crypto projects. It’s an easy answer because there’s just so much happening in that world and so much changing. And the politics and the machinations and the transferal of money occurring it’s such high drama that it’s wonderful to watch. Blockchain-based, crypto currency conversations are super interesting to me. There’s a friend of ours, Galen [Wolfe-Pauly], who works on a project called urbit. They’re basically trying to build a different operating system for the web. It’s one of these wonderful, but also incredibly convoluted concepts. They managed to raise $200K in a two-hour crowd sale. The ability in that world to find funding sources who are down and are open, and in many cases, highly intelligent, well-read people… that’s exciting to me. We’ve done a lot of work with the design group Metahaven who are wonderful and they’re kind of emblematic of this shift that’s happening across the board.
Our friend Britta Thie [made a TV show] similar of it’s trajectory. I’m like, “God, I wish TV was more like the Otolith Group.” This idea of people who were participating or are participating in the art world, creating works that are looking for wider audiences and not being afraid of that. [Like] producing film with the intention of having [it] distributed like a film or producing television with the intention of that distributed like television. I think there’s a lot of people who are taking advantage or really trying to push for wider audiences for what previously would have been considered fringe or marginalized works. Whenever I see a project like that I punch the air a little bit. It gives me spirit to think that people are being ambitious. This goes back again to that conversation about exiting the contemporary art paradigm. There are limitations and I’m the first person to say that the mythology of the internet being this great equalizer is kind of bull****. But there are new opportunities and I think there’s a lot of room for people to be ambitious. When I see people being super ambitious in what they do, particularly in a way where philosophically I would agree with them, I get really excited and that’s happening at a greater frequency.
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