What does it mean to make work?
Barry Threw on the intersection of art, tech and entreprenuership
I spoke with #NEWPALMYRA director Barry Threw over a dubious Google Hangouts connection discussing his projects and unique insight into the communities overlapping art, tech and business. Barry is also a curator for Gray Area Foundation and has helped incubate organizations such as Recombinant Media Labs, Obscura Digital, Fabricatorz, the BEAM Foundation and worked on projects like Artup among others. This is a shortened and paraphrased transcript from our time talking.
TL;DR What does it mean to make work and what does it mean to be an entrepreneurial artist? We’re still figuring that out.
You’ve been involved with a lot of worthy projects but I actually want to start by asking why you and Mat Dryhurst decided to create Artup?
San Francisco is this interesting epicenter of these huge cultural changes that have global impact and new forms of cultural expression but at the same time we surprisingly didn’t see any sort of connection with traditional fine art and [technology] which didn’t make a lot of sense to us. Artup was a kind of an exploration…why are these two communities so balkanized? Why isn’t there more natural overlap between them and can we do anything to catalyze some new relationships between both of the spaces that will produce some new works? You have these strong cultural and technological impulses so why aren’t there more organic collaborations? The hypothesis we were testing was, is it because these people aren’t even in the same room together? And what if anything will come out of that?
We did a series of events and brought in guest speakers and local artists from San Francisco. We brought in Julia Kaganskiy who’s the executive director of NEW INC in New York; they’re doing stuff that’s in line with with the kind of things we like to see. We did this in various formats to get this dialogue going and see if anyone could start speaking the same language.
What did you discover from that?
It spurred a lot of discussions but what became very clear is that there are a lot of strong opinions and entrenched interests that made these conversations difficult. One of the things was the discussion of what art even is, is changing. There are a lot of entrenched economic and cultural norms adhered to in both of these communities, particularly in the art world. The whole conceit around contemporary art is open to indeterminacy and viewer interpretation. They exist in this transcendental space and ambiguous art language and this is the way they maintain this cultural cachet and expect art to be in this separate space. And on the other side you have this technology community that’s — and I’m generalizing about all of this — very solution-oriented and creating work that by its very nature is to have impact in society in a very direct way. There’s also a language barrier there with what’s spoken in startups and technical culture that’s also esoteric in its own ways. So we’re built on these two different pillars of what it even means to make work.
There are a lot of similarities between the two worlds but in my oversimplified view it’s that in business you have to make something people want, but not necessarily with art… unless you want to be a sustainable, working artist.
You’re testing your art and whether it’s good or not and how can you really measure that? Whereas with technology, either your code works, your business survives or you get users. There are a lot more metrics to test. It’s a lot harder for artists to say well, actually, my whole series of work failed because there’s a lot more personal expression involved in that.
It’s still early, but there seem to be more artists who are successfully navigating this new environment like Adam Harvey’s Privacy Shop, which leverages the familiarity of ecommerce to convey complex concepts around privacy.
Right and Mat Dryhurst is kind of a master of this functional creative inquiry. He makes these sorts of projects that have strong conceptual, philosophical mooring, are definitely presented as art projects, but also are functional tools that other people can use that create dialogues.
There also people who make different types of tools that bleed into becoming an art project like creative coding tools and practices, data-driven civic projects and visualizing data.
The role of this art isn’t just transcendental anymore it also has function so we end up having to reconceptualize what art even is in a manner that gets us away from a purely aesthetic experience without utility.
There’s one conversation which is, I’m an artist and I make art; the economic models are changing and we have to be entrepreneurial pragmatically. But the other is that there are these creative practices now where you find the entire role of art is changing. It’s function is changing.
Regarding entrepreneurial approaches. Something interesting I noticed is that the failure rates of MFAs and startups are very similar. Nine out of ten MFAs fail to go on as working artists just as nine out of ten startups fail.
The interesting thing about that point of both having the same sort of success rate… I don’t feel like both of those cultures present accurate pictures of succeeding in a big way. What does it mean to have a viable career in art? What it does it mean to not work inside art anymore? One of the interesting things is if you put artists inside technology development processes. And I’m not talking as designers necessarily either, I’m talking about as people who are looking at technology, making work and providing speculative prototyping that explores pathways that no one could have figured out otherwise. That’s valuable to a technology development project. Also having it be ok for artists participating without feeling like they’ve sold out and that they’re not really artists, that they didn’t make it in the gallery world. There’s a cultural gap that we need to overcome.
Like you mentioned earlier there’s this language barrier on both sides that prevents understanding but from the technology standpoint I think it’s difficult to communicate the value add of an artist in a tech company.
There’s enough partition to go around on both sides but at the same time the technology community has to learn that art is important and that the cultural milieu in general is important. This is one of the problems we have in San Francisco right now. I think what people forget is that there’s a reason why this technology community is here. It’s not just because the weather’s good — although that is one reason. No one is talking about creativity, everyone talks about innovation (and disruption but mostly innovation). But all that means is incremental improvement on the last thing that was here. Let’s make the next better chair.
But when the Apple computer, when it was in a garage, and all the early technologies explorations were made by people who were here and went through the Summer of Love and had a whole different idea of what technology could mean to society, of what globalization could mean to the human experience and people.
And the reason why all these companies like Google or Stanford were started out here is because of a certain cultural setting that valued creativity and entrepreneurialism in a certain way. And what you have now is a bunch of companies that are much more concerned with building their internal culture than building the culture of the San Francisco Bay Area. You’ll find companies like Facebook have an artist-in-residence program but what that means is you have an artist that comes in and they make art that lives in the Facebook campus or projects that get branded and rolled back into the company and not engaging with the community as a whole.
I think maybe it’s easier for a company that’s raising a Series C to invest in artist-in-residence programs but it’s difficult for an early stage startup to spend money in this area. It comes back to the value added. Plus, to people not involved in the art world, artists appear naval gazing and not providing immediate value or solving problems. When the reality is that good artists, like good engineers, are excellent at asking the questions you didn’t know you needed to ask and provide new ways to at look problems and outcomes that have internal and external application.
It’s a different mode of thinking, which is valuable to a process and a whole team.
But it’s difficult to figure out how that person fits in a company unless you’re a major company. And then it ends up becoming a novelty like, let’s just have someone come in and do streetart in our building. They know art is important but don’t necessarily know how.
I don’t know if you followed anything about the Deep Dream art auction we did with Google at Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, but that ended up being a super interesting project. We had the R&D department of a major technology company — Google — that came up with a this process for generating creative works based directly on its research development technology process that wound up gaining traction. And a lot of artists started exploring it in different ways and it created a body of work that directly spoke to a number of interesting cultural issues that are happening right now. What does artificial intelligence mean? What’s the line between a human generating art and a computer generating art? Where do we place value in computer assisted art? What sorts of affordances do these creative tools enable? So anyway, what ended up happening is that we entered into a collaboration with Google that took about six months to a year of pre-planning where a bunch of this stuff was printed out, framed and we did an auction of this work and it all sold and we ended up making about $100,000 for Gray Area Foundation. And it was a really interesting case of creativity and art exploration pushing forward technology development, artificial intelligence research and generating creative artifacts out of the process that had fairly significant cultural value for the place and time at where we’re at. And it’s also one instance of a company that worked with us at Gray Area that had wildly successful results by bringing their stuff outside of the walls and into a public event.
How can we duplicate the success of this event?
I think there were a couple of things that went right there. One you had a group of people who knew enough about the communities and what’s going on that they knew how to do outreach. What’s valuable about this work is that it’s using the tools and techniques of the 21st Century to make work that actually speaks culturally to the time we’re in. The hard part about individuals is that there is no one answer and that’s where this whole entrepreneurial things comes in.
Everything is fractured so much that there’s no one model now that people can follow and replicate to make this stuff happen. I think it’s all about people creating opportunities for collaboration. And that was another one of the big takeaways for me of the Artup project. One of the things that was sort of clear was the anxiety about how the art world doesn’t care about our work and the technology community isn’t buying our work, not coming to our events and don’t care about what we’re doing. And on the tech side they’re saying, the art world doesn’t care about the creative work we’re doing. What was apparent from that is if you really want collaboration and that’s important to you the onus is on everyone to create the opportunities for collaboration, to invite people into their process and to take that experimental risk upon themselves. That’s the only way these walls will be broken down. It’s about creating community and opportunities for other people to plug into that winds up being a successful strategy.
So more Artup-like events then?
I think that helps.
I mean, what is entrepreneurialism really? What it means in a sense is that there’s not inherent established structure that’s going to give you a path forward. So if there’s things you want to see happen in the world you just gotta do it.
Get people together, provide opportunities for people to plug in and a lot of times these projects will work out. You’ll find a lot more interest than you would think. But if you’re just waiting around looking for opportunities you’re not necessarily going to find the kinds of things you want without being the point of creation for these things. And that’s the kind of stuff artists are good at. Creating whole worlds, systems of thought, modalities, voices, visions and creative practices for themselves, which makes them potentially very good entrepreneurs.
Did you see things progress in this way through Gray Area and Artup?
Yeah, one of the things that clearly has been happening for a few years now is this cultural incubator concept. We’ve been doing it at Gray Area for a long time. NEW INC was one of the most high profile ones. There’s also creativity lab space in a lot of companies like Google Creative Labs and lab space in museums like the Met. This is a good foundation for a lot of artists to plugin.
There’s been some criticism of art incubators. Do you agree with any of it?
I think most of the criticism comes down to some sort of role of art and capital. I think it’s a valuable critique but not one I actually agree with. I don’t think these things are mutually exclusive. It’s ok that cultural incubators are a potential funding model that catalyzes work and makes it possible and that there’s public funding for the arts and a robust gallery scene. All these things can coexist and it’s not like we’re in a zero-sum game in terms of what the cultural landscape is going to look like. It will be a mix of all these models that will providing multiple opportunities.
I think the cultural incubator concept is an experiment that still hasn’t been fully vetted out. I’ve seen a lot of great things come out of it that otherwise wouldn’t have. Nobody’s forced to be involved so when I hear critique of them it makes me wonder if there’s some other argument that’s going on there that’s not really about the incubator itself. It’s more about what isn’t there than what is there. It’s like, “don’t do this because I want to see this other thing” and it’s like, then go do that other thing.
Right, that’s what I like most about these incubators is that it creates alternative pathways.
I think there are more options than there ever have been in the history of the world for someone to actually be successful doing a creative practice. There are opportunities that people through individual entrepreneurial activities can make for themselves. And when I say “entrepreneurial” that doesn’t necessarily mean creating a business.
What it means is creating a model and situation for yourself that works.
Net.Work is helping formalize a community of entrepreneurial artists and what it means to make work. Find out more here.
Say hi, send comments and feedback to @net_dot_work or tyler@absolutnet.work.
