In Conversation with Jaret Vadera
Hello, and welcome to the MIT Open Documentary Lab talk. I'm Sarah Wolozin. I'm the director of the lab. And today I'm pleased to introduce Jaret Vadera, who's a transdisciplinary artist whose work examines how images colonize the ways that we see the worlds around and within us. That era has different visual systems and reconfigures them to open up parallel ways of seeing. His work is influenced by decolonial theory, science fiction and the study of impossible objects. In parallel, Vadera has worked as a curator organizer and writer on
projects that focus on art as a catalyst for cultural change. His paintings, prints, photographs, videos and installations have been exhibited and screened internationally, at venues such as the Queens Museum, MoMA, the Smithsonian Asian Pacific Art Center, Asia Society of ICANN Museum, bal, Delhi LED Museum and the Merhaba Art Center. He's currently Assistant Professor of Practice in New Media in the Architecture, Art and Planning school at Cornell University, and affiliate professor and studio arts at Concordia University. Jaret lives and works between Canada, the US and India and is currently based in Brooklyn. Before I hand it over to him, I just want to
remind people that we will have a q&a at the end, and please put your questions in the q&a section. Without further ado, Jaret. Thank you so much, sSarah. I'm going to, I'm going to open up my share screen here. And let's see if we can get things started. Can you see the title card?
Yes. Okay, great. So thank you so much, Sarah, I really appreciate the invitation to talk to the, to the group of students and researchers and thinkers that you have in your lab. And really happy to be talking about this. Partially because, you know, talking about algorithms and technology as they intersect within art is sometimes a conversation that people will quickly sort of tuned out of, and they think that the work that you've been doing in your lab really embraces and pushes the compensation forward in all these really interesting ways. So I wanted to thank you. And I also wanted to thank Claudia, I also wanted to thank Rekha Malhotra for their help in helping me kind of figure out how to structure to talk today. So in this presentation, I'm going to start off with a little context first.
And then I'll discuss a number of works in my object oriented practice. But because of time, I won't be screening any of my video work. And but I will discussed three of them through a few video stills that I've compiled closer to the end of the presentation. And then at the very end, I'll talk a little bit more about my parallel lives as a curator, writer, educator, and cultural producer in general. So they say it's good to begin at the beginning. And this is where I began. I began in Toronto in the 70s. Just a few years
after my parents moved to Canada, they were part of a huge wave of migrants coming from all over the global south. And this is flowing in park Fleming Park has been called an arrival city on its good days. An arrival city is a kind of springboard community, that urban planners have theorized as a springboard community for new immigrants that are coming from other countries or coming from rural environments into the city. And it's kind of like a jump off for a platform. When it's good days. It's called an arrival city and on its bad
days, it's been called an immigrant ghetto. And my parents were both working class blue collar immigrants. They both spoke three or more languages. My mother is Catholic from the Philippines. And my father was a unique mix of atheist and Hindu. And he came from India. So growing up in my family at that time, you know, with this huge influx of migrants in Toronto, surrounded by people from all over the world. This is where I first became really acutely aware of how languages, cultures and belief systems, you know, can shape and control the way that we perceive the world around and within us. translations and mis translations were always being
negotiated in a very non academic way. They were, you know, just always in the air. In a very real and everyday way, and I think this is, you know, I bring this up because I think it's this time in my life. And it really sparked my interest in how meanings get generated through different processes, which is an ongoing theme, as we'll see to the rest of presentation.
Growing up as a person of mixed descent, educated in North American schools, I also felt another another thing very acutely, which was the conspicuous absence of brown and black voices in our history is being represented in, you know, teachers in books, examples of artists and other people that I could look up to. And this was amplified throughout all my education, but really kind of came to a head when I was in graduate school at Yale. at Yale, I was expected to really perform this exotic caricature of myself as an artist, or I was asked to act as a cultural informant, or I was asked to assume this very universal, neutral subject position, and it felt really assimilating. So you know, in the process of, you know, working out what it is that I was making as a student, I began to ask myself, the question is that if I'm a cultural policer? What culture Am I producing from what culture my producing for? And so I found myself in the library, as I often do, when I'm looking for, for answers, or maybe other questions, but Yale's art library was, was no good either. I couldn't find any
books on contemporary Filipino or Indian art. But they did have a lot of books with pictures like this. And this picture was taken during the British colonial era. It's a photograph from the 1900s, the English King Emperor, crazy name, the English King Emperor and the Prime Minister of Nepal, doing what I guess, powerful people did back then, or so it seemed, in these books, they went on a tiger hunt. And this image kind of grabbed me, and it wouldn't let me go. And I made a number of works to kind of make my way through what it was that was kind of haunting in this image.
At the time, I was deeply entrenched in post colonial theory, which seemed like an antidote to me to the the very hegemonic, American centric art education that I was getting. You know, I was a working class brown kid at this Ivy League American school. And I remember feeling like I was being colonized. So I felt like I was this one character like that I identify with the colonized. But I also felt like the colander colonizer I was getting this, you know, this education that was kind of tucked down education, but really strangely, feeling the most like the dead tiger. And so I reimagined this photograph, and I like stood in is all three characters. And, you know, I
normally start off with this image, because it kind of shows the way that I've dealt with some of the the absences or thought through, you know, ways of reimagining images in in the archive or thinking about like, new sci fi kind of imaginings. So this became like, a strategy that I then began to develop, I kind of leaned into this multi positionality and I began thinking, in threes. I started experimenting with different constellations of works as a strategy. And I thought about like, how can I juxtapose different works in different mediums that operate cognitively at different speeds, perhaps, perhaps, I could form a kind of slow non narrative multivariant storytelling as a way to conjure kind of cognitive ghost image or to present something that is absent, unrepresented or unrepresentable.
This constellation was part of an exhibition titled else which included the the photograph that's on the left here that I didn't print it off to look like it was a pitch ripped out of a book. And the title was untitled three beside that the middle is a gold flat x is really interested in x in mathematics or X on you know, a new treasure map scary thing that catalyzes people towards, towards seeking and exploring. And then to the right of that is an ambiguous kind of hybrid X ray, slash nap from another series of work called human Dragons. This is another constellation that was part of an exhibition titled prolonged engagement. On the very left here, there was a short looping video titled blackbox, about virtual perception as a kind of super body.
And this image is titled I promise, believe, literally a series of screen captures that I took glitches in Skype conversations. And this work, the third work in the in the constellation will take a little bit more explaining, because of processing a bit more layered. So this one is called Self Portrait in seven Pantone colors. And what I did for this, for this image
is I took multiple photographs 360 degrees around my body, and then I aggregated the photographs from the top down. And so they formed these banded layers that were averaged horizontally, from top to bottom. And I filtered them using only Pantone colors. So So basically, the very top of there, it's like the most black, it's because if you go 360 degrees around the top of my head, it's mostly black, if you if you go through this part, my face, you'll have another kind of average color mixed with the black of my hair, and that will kind of meet in the middle, and so on and so forth to the bottom. The other thing that is of note with this piece is its its scale, it's my height is five feet 10 inches, which is approximately approximately by height. And it's about three and a half feet wide, which is the calculated surface area of the outside of my body. I found this, this equation, as I often do, in my weird, quixotic research that could you know, based on your weight in your hike, you could kind of figure out sort of the surface area of your skin.
And so self portrait look is, in several Pantone colors is looking at the skin of my body, it's the kind of image and the ways that brown bodies have been translated in post 911 American post 911 America have been, have often been mulignan, one sided or a centralizing and reductivist. So that kind of signification of the brown body then gets put onto my body, which then actually kind of just functions as an image and prevents me from navigating the world in an easy way sometimes. The next few images are from another series of work that were influenced by infographics, fMRI, Rorschach tests and maps, the series looks at the Internet as a kind of neural network with a search engine algorithms become become a kind of memory that shapes our perception of what we see. And what we don't. This work is called all we see is vision. And this is a digital rendering,
that then becomes a large Final Cut that goes directly onto a gallery wall. And what I do is I do an individual image search for each word in the phrase, all we see is envision and then I download one of the first images that come up, I dropped the color vectorize it and then combine it with attorneys to create a new aggregate form. And then I do some detective work and figure out where in the world the server was located that the image was originally downloaded from. So using
reverse IP lookups and doing some kind of stuff work. I figured, you know, generally where what city and what the longitude and latitude of the servers are on a physical map of the world. And then I integrate all that information back into the image. And the
information corresponds with this, you know, with an invisible map of the world. So it implies where things are found. So British Columbia, Utah, Virginia, Massachusetts are where, you know, most of these image images came from and I ended up just putting those into the into the image. This is a picture of the work in another constellation for a show at William Paterson museum called the bind. This one is titled even Nowhere is someplace. And it was installed in an exhibition titled accented in the UAE.
And it stands at about 16 by nine feet. This one is titled ascending to outer space to find another race. And this one is about 12 by five feet. And its installed in an exhibition titled, The closer I get, the further I find. The next to that is another word called chronomat.
chronomat is a performative photograph, similar in some ways, to the first image that I opened with, which kind of looks at anthropological images or colonial images and takes through new relationships that overlap with science fiction. It's from a speculative fiction series about Asian futures and, and imaginaries. chronomat is defined as a person who travels across time. And another way to look at it is they can migrate across different dimensions. And the key to the Coronavirus is that they, they operate in a very nonlinear way. So there's ways that I was thinking about this you know, fictitious character of Crota mad as another way to think about somebody who moves across time zones, somebody who lives in a different cultural spaces, different ways of seeing, and in thinking about them, you know, positive supernatural.
This work is titled dollar store dragon, which is a bit of a homage to, to flemingdon Park and some of the communities that I grew up in. In this work, I took an old, worn out pair of shoes and reimagined it using duct tape and paint. And it's from a series of words called all that glitters, and all that glitters is influenced by dollar stores that it's the Filipino Japanese, and the art of golden repair. And in the series, I'm really interested in these small makeshift gestures when the discarded and cheap or the broke down is reimagined, tricked up and become something altogether new. This is an installation shot from one of the constellations where the machines were, were installed, and the exhibition was called aliens deadzones beyonders.
This is a projection that was in the exhibition, and it's a digital image capture of a street Street View Map, looking out at the ocean, and it's titled with the Ocean to the sky. This and the next few works are from a speculative series of works titled The Pangea series, we'll examine some of the relationships between representation, power, territory and migration. Pangea is a thought experiment affect the speculative proposition of a borderless land, populated by mythical Emperor's kronum ads sleepwalkers in an advertisement of water.
This is called no country. No country I used one of the most popular and widespread maps are mapping projections called the Mercator projection, which is what I learned was the world when I was a kid growing up. And the Mercator projection for those of you who who know knows that it's a it's a widely considered racist map that privileges the global north as opposed to the global south and really creates an inflated sort of scale to North America and into Europe and really diminishes the size of the continent of Africa. And it was used quite widely because of its
its efficiency and figuring out navigation for colonial ships. And I think Google still uses it right now, because it's kind of works on a grid that allows you to zoom in and out more easily. There may be some changes to Google right now.
But this is one of the projections. So this is the very common image that defines how we understand the power relationships scale of land in the world. And it's, for the most part, or it is, in many ways incorrect. So in this, in this work, no country, I rejected every name of every territory on the map, kind of went methodically over one by one. And it was a performative gesture. And I was kind of meditating on,
you know, borders, and the Danes, like every single name of every single place. He's written in history of power, a lot of the borders, most of the books are written in blood. And so, you know, Pangea depends on this, this kind of proposition for something, there's something else this work is called the emperor of no country. This is called a flag for no country. And it also is the same scale of the surface area of my body skin to almost six feet, by three feet. And what I did for this, for this piece was, I
aggregated all the flags from around the world, like all of the nation states, and the number of nations that I feel should have sovereignty, and I kind of averaged the color based on the amount that they can show up. And I just wanted to kind of see what color would create it, if we can break it down into one color. So this is the single color that comes from mixing all the five colors together. And it's interesting, when you look at, you know, the history of flag colors, the they often relate to a number of different affinities, you know, either religion or colonizer or different things, but the the main colors that show up in the flags at the highest percentages were red and white.
And then blue was like a, like a third that, you know, it's kind of like a trailing third. But both the red and white kind of came together to form like a base that was kind of pinkish. And then the end was really surprising to me turned into this, like, Toby bandaid color. And then so I printed it off on a flag and then I went this is another self portrait. And this one is called sub Self Portrait in ocean blue. So the independ gs series, I was also thinking about decoupling the colonial relationships between the body and land and territory. And I started
thinking more about the body and identity in relation to fluidity and in relationship to water. So it was done in kind of the same way that the earlier ones seven self portrait and seven Pantone colors, taking photographs around my body. But then instead of using Pantone colors in this one, what he did was I created a tri tone color profile that was based off the colors of bodies water near different places for different places that I consider to relate to home food. So Drano New York, Bombay, and Manila. And so based on those profiles are created this color, Blue tracktown color that then became the filter that I use using this work.
So now I'll briefly talk about a few video projects. I think they might. I didn't want to not include the video projects, but I felt like it might ruin the flow of the presentation. We have about four minutes to go through things. But what I did do was I had some of the links to the next three projects I'll be talking about. And I'm not sure if Claudia uploaded them into the chat or she could do them, whatever. But there's also links that I
encourage you to watch and to experience the work on its own time. So we talked about three works. One is called file not found which is this one. Another one is called on kings and elephants and the last ones ident unidentified so files are found is a short video of text and single images were an unnamed identity contemplate their own death and the productivity of memory in relation to the search engine. I first wrote out this text and then used the image search, in a similar way to the way that I was using the image search in the worship, graphics infographics. And then, you know, based on the images that came up for each search, they also became the images that showed up in the video as they corresponded, and sometimes didn't quite correspond with the words.
And the second video that I wanted to talk about, it's called on kings and elephants, and on kings and elephants. It was it was, it's an old story. I mean, basically, it's based on the story of the elephant in the dark, or the poor blind. And I was you I use this story kind of as a base to explore the ways that accented text to speech software programs, work and how, how do you translate in, you know how it would be if I fed this, this ancient story into this new technology. And what would happen when a text to speech software program would, would return it. So over the centuries,
this story has traveled across many cultures. And it's been translated innumerable times, in different areas. And the main crux of the story is that it warns about the trappings of translation, ego and uncertainty. The narrator reads through three English translations of the story from the night from the 12th century, the 13th century in the 19th century, you know, by Rama Krishna, by Rumi and by poets tonight. And although there are subtitles in the work that has no images, and it kind of becomes more of a sound piece, that it has, like these really interesting hiccups that I find quite glitchy on a cognitive level.
The last of the video skills that I wanted to show from the video and identified and identified, I did a number of searches for the images for images of aliens or UFO sightings that I could find on the internet. And what I was doing in this video was I was really drawing on the aesthetic of a slideshow. And I created this kind of floating text.
And the floating text, you know, ends up structuring the work. And the images also correspond in that way where they're both like aligned that kind of off. And the text itself was looking at some of the intersections between the political rhetoric surrounding the idea of aliens, in kind of announced of the idea of the new moon shadow in our fear of the other. We also looked at conversations about UFOs. You know, there's so many really fascinating websites that I came across, looking into UFOs, and through to the vast amount of information that they have to support some of these claims. It's really
fascinating, we really blur this line, between fact and fiction, shrieking is deep fakes all of that. But also, I really wanted to highlight this conversation that was kind of ever present, that was dealing with migrants now over the last four years or so, and then before that, but also really like thinking through deeply some of the multifarious ways that we can think about the idea of the area. So this will be the last section of the presentation, I just wanted to talk a bit about some of the other things that I do besides making sense making objects. Sometimes I make things and sometimes I make things happen. And I've also worked as a curator, programmer and writer, and often it's really on projects or exhibitions that happen for underrepresented artists from North America, and often from the global south. And, you know, there's all these different ways that I've worked with nonprofits for the last 20 years.
And they open and actually seek out to do collaborative projects, or to participate in other people's projects. And I find that, you know, being artists in work for galleries can be amazingly powerful, but often thinking about different ways to engage outside of the sometimes when these boxes get your work. And so one of the things that I have been doing is, I've been working as a programmer, and organizer, and curator, and I've done this for a number of galleries and for a number of big institutions, and can spit and duct tape institutions. And for the most part, you know, art is the vehicle that kind of brings us all together. And it's something that I really focused on. But what I'm most interested in is ways to build community, and to build solidarity, while amplifying different or amplifying different artists voices, as well as their vision. And so the last project I want to talk about these is a Wikipedia editor upon called Martin community, and part of an ongoing series of edit thoughts that I started with was my Rizvi, who's an anthropologist and professor at Pratt, and develop this, this idea of having this on, as we were co teaching a class about our culture, and community development, we noticed that there was an alarming absence of women of color, Trans and Queer artists, activists and community builders on Wikipedia. And so our community is foreign.
For the last five years, since then, I've opted to organize the Edit thoughts, maybe one or two a year. And I often have them embedded within an artist residency that I'm in, or within a course that I'm teaching, I could have said, or we could have made this editor kind of like, package bubble and, and get in touch with people. But there's something about working closely with people that I really enjoy it, I think is really an important part of the process. I'm always trying to collaborate with people from the specific community that I'm in. So you know, for example, when I was on a residency project for the space, we had an edited time where we invited organizers and people from the community to write profiles for artists and organizers from Newark, New Jersey. And people came out and we added a lot of new new articles into the, into the listing.
And, you know, it's also an excuse, or it's also a way, you know, when you're working with people over time to encourage the deeper conversations and sustained discussions with the participants. And normally we have, Long's probably covered conversations about online meritocracies about structural inequities about bias and radical archiving. And although you know, it's just like a drop in the bucket, we've added, you know, we've added so many new articles for artists, activists, and organizers. And, you know, it's really been, it's really been a great project that's kind of like, had a life of its own. And I remember, you know, just, I guess, a week or two ago, I was talking to a previous board member of New York collective that kind of wasn't really meeting or talking and because went on to do different things that began in the 90s, early 2000s. And my students that I put up there, Wikipedia page, and this became like another catalyst for them to start meeting again. So now they're actually meeting again, I saw that they have, you
know, an Instagram page looking into the things that I've talked to where the numbers last weekend said they're trying to do some more programming. So there's a really nice way that some of these projects that kind of grow on their own, and it really excites me when it comes to these kinds of things. So I think that that will end the formal English part of my, my conversation. And I think it's maybe a good time to transfer into the q&a now. Thank you so much, Jared. If you want to stop sharing your screen, you'll see all the panelists who are with you.
Thank you that was so interesting. And just all the creative ways that you're interrogating imagery and media and technologies and decolonizing them. Does anyone here have a question from among the panelists that would like to speak first? Just raise your hand or turn your mute off? No. See now, that's Josh, why don't you start.
Well thank you so much for that presentation. And I was just taken by so many different forms of media that you're involved with, and the kinds of projects that you're making. I'm interested, if you could speak a little bit more about your research process? I mean, it seemed to be a form of artistic production in and of itself, and how you might document it or or do you track it? or? Yeah, just sort of how you account or perhaps even archive, just your research process? Because it seems to be so intricate, and, you know, so creative and connected to the work that you make? Thanks. That's a great question. And I think, for each project for each work, it shifts slightly. And it's a very, it's a very organic process. And I do think about it in
terms of, you know, a creative process or like, I just, I kind of, can react to the world around me, right, there's something that happens, there's something that kind of sticks in my teeth, there's something that haunts me, there's something that I can't quite get ahold of, and I use my work as a way to figure it out. And so what I often do is, I have these questions, that kind of form just as I operated moves through the world. And what I do is I just kind of give them space, and I kind of highlight them, okay, these are kinds of things that I'm interested in looking at.
And then what it does is, it becomes this weird, creative net, that starts to catch everything around you, right? Like, it's kind of like when you learn a new word, you hear that we learn, right? So when you ask a question, you start seeing different kinds of answers or different kinds of questions. So, for sometimes it takes 10 years of organic, weird, quixotic, thinking to kind of culminate in the work. And sometimes it takes, you know, a very concerted, you know, chunk of time when I'm producing something for a show, or for a project. But really, it's kind of this dance between a structured analytical thing. And he, like a very intuitive kind of thing. It's almost like,
it sounds corny, but it's almost like dancing. There's like a structure to it, but there's also like a letting go. That happens. And so maybe I didn't answer your question exactly. But in but in each situation, the research process, the creative research process, is very different. There's, there's something about giving myself the permission to be free to think in weird ways that I do, that I feel is also part of is part of this part of owning a little bit, you know, you don't have to make something that has an object at the end of it, you don't have to research so you can present an essay or, or a lecture about it, you can just kind of like think with both sides of your brain while you're looking at the world.
Alright, William Yeah, just let me amplify the thanks thatJosh gave. Thank you. The, your opening image or close to opening image of the of the Qing Emperor and yeah, that was that's a really haunting image. And and it was sort of resonated throughout your presentation. And I just want to pick up on so what you just explained to us is very much about expression, about feelings you have that you're finding you're giving voice to. And yet that picture is a real testament to the communicative power of of these utterances. And, and I guess, my question it has to do with audience
is that important in your work? Is there a particular kind of audience? How do you navigate that space? Do you is part of your the refining of your work done in conversation with audience or some some sense of audience response? Who's your public? And and how does that matter in your work? Yeah, it's one of the it's one of the most complicated questions. It's a question that the artist should think about, you know, Who who are you communicating with today? And what do you communicate it, and it's been a, it's, it's a lot more, it's a lot more tricky to speak, in a language to speak in the language of the art world when you're kind of invisible in these other ways, right. So. So in order to communicate in ways that talk to the wider public, you can end up assimilating or cutting off parts of the magic that come from the work. So the idea of like, opacity, you know, that people like we saw, sort of offer us, or the idea of inappropriate evil, that thinkers like tricky, and how kind of gifted to me become another way of owning both the individual sort of level of expression, while not feeling forced to communicate with the wider audience. Right. So So who does my audience actually become? is a whole other question, right? And so it seems like, if you look at the evidence would be for, you know, from my exhibitions, like who shows my work, who comes to the shows, and I think it's a really wide range of people who are interested in, in VR, who are interested in art technology, some who are interested in philosophy, but often my work, it showed interest workspaces. And, you know, one
of the things that I was told, you know, with that my work, immediately, when somebody saw my work, they're like, Oh, this is export work. Like this is work that is made by somebody in the diaspora, and I didn't know exactly what they meant, or how they saw it. But it seems like that's something that that comes out. And I'm very cognizant of making work out of my generation, and out of my concerns, and out of my circle of concern. And so that means it's sometimes the wider audience may not quite grasp it, or they congratulate certain elements of it. But I think that, I think that part of my job is to be as
honest as possible, and to put that work out there. And then hopefully, the audience will form. And, you know, hopefully, that's the thing that, you know, good art or interesting art does is it doesn't actually calibrate to the existing questions, but it reformulates the question. And also, that you're a curator, and an organizer seems other ways that you intervene and sort of bring in participants almost into the dialogue that way. Are there? Let's see, Vic has a question.
I Jared, it's such a pleasure to have you here and have your work here in this space. Actually, you answered almost everything in your last answer that I wanted to ask, you know, similarly around, around audience, there's one aspect of that, that I wanted to just, you know, follow up on and that is, you know, thinking about and I'm speaking as someone, you know, our circles overlap quite a bit. And, and I've seen sort of a shift within South Asian American, Asian American, second gen, immigrant art, practices and audiences, etc, just in the last few years. And part of it has to do with this, you know, shift away from feeling like we need to or, you know, need to centrally achieve a kind of acceptance or acknowledgement or inclusion, even though those battles are still important, right, that that, I guess the question is really about to follow up on audience is to think about how does the aim of your work shift or how does the aim of, you know, our cohorts work shift, when the aim ceases to be acceptance, acknowledgement inclusion when the audience ceases to be a broad audience and becomes focused in on a more an audience that that sort of, in some ways organically forms around the work and its concerns. So what is it that, that you feel like you're you want your work to do with that, with that audience, that's distinct from what the work might try to do if it were geared towards this kind of larger idea of mainstream acceptance or whatever. Does that make sense? Yeah, totally makes
sense. And I think that, I mean, that's what we're kind of striving towards, right, being the most honest version of oneself, like really kind of like getting in deep and pulling out the work that, that maybe only you can make, or maybe you can act as sort of a conduit to make. So what happens when do that, I think that's when the actual magic happens. I think that's where the potential like, freedom can happen. The liberatory, like, part of speculative fiction, or, you know,
creation is that we can actually celebrate in a larger, deeper way, with other people. And one of the things that I've always noticed, you know, with work that is radically vulnerable, is that I often when I interact, interact with it, I feel seen, and I feel like, oh, like, I hear, you know, that, that song, like, they're kind of like, references, or it's a mash up of the, the kinds of sounds that I know, I feel like seeing and the frequency kind of resonated in another way. And so hopefully, what I can do, and I'm not saying that I, I do do this, but if I'm, the idea is if I am radically vulnerable and honest, perhaps it can also spread to other other people who are thinking similar things or who are, you know, I could potentially connect with different realities that we have. But also I think, for younger artists, it can be can, it can be your way to kind of own it, kind of on that we are these mashups that we are, we are both and we're not either or, and we don't have to be aspiring towards, you know, the mainstream because the mainstream in many ways, is, requires a lot of a lot of environments, to, to our realities. And
so, you know, kind of tied in just quickly as well, to the last question. I mean, one of the things I sometimes do is I think about making work for a younger version of myself. And, and that's one one thing that I, that I, that I think helps me is some moments where I'm like, Okay, this is like, new to crazy, you know, there's, this is coming in from this island is coming from that side, who's gonna look at this work? You know, where's it gonna fit? I'm just like, okay, forgetting, just like, you know, that these ideas are true to you. So, you know, thinking about making work for a younger version of myself, sometimes gives me the courage to, to speak. Okay, it looks like we have one question from the audience, which I'll read.
says, Can you please suggest sources to improve storytelling skills for this type of these types of projects, or in general, actually, about these about storytelling? 15 I think, you know, I think that the ways that people tell stories, but the interesting thing, like I feel like there's different kinds of stories that are told by different kinds of people in different kinds of mediums that have different kinds of languages. And part of telling your story or telling stories, really, for me feels like an extremely personal, a personal thing, like how you develop your voice, how you develop your cadence, how you develop the tools and the language that you use. It feels almost like a question that is, it's like almost like a super personal question. Like, how do you be a good artist? Or how do you be a good person in the world? And so I'm not trying to shy away from the question. But I think that that
within that question is almost like a call to action, you kind of have to do it, you have to kind of look at things that inspire you. Think about why those stories inspire you. Think about how to challenge those stories. And think about ways that you can also integrate your own way of thinking into whatever mode makes sense to you. Any more questions from the panelists? Amber? Hi, your thank you so much for your talk. I was wondering like, because you chose you show us like many, like mediums that you use. So I was wondering, how do you choose which medium to use in like each single project to deliver your idea? Yeah, I think that I think that every, every new year is like a language. And every,
let's say that every medium can communicate one set of things that maybe doesn't communicate another set of things as well. And so I think I respond like, so I'm acting intuitively on one level, but I also, you know, I kind of like, follow my nose a bit. But then, at a certain point, I start to analyze and think through, okay, should this be a video? Should this be a slideshow? Should this be a writing? Should this be a thing? And it's I think that's part of what plays into every, every work. And so again, kind of like the other question about research, it's really on a case by case basis. And so I devised like whole systems of communicating or creating images, like, specifically for that, that idea, right. So the info Wireshark graphics were,
because I was really interested in Wireshark tests. I'm really interested in like, the proliferation of infographics that were representing a kind of like, truth or like data, you know, there was just like a proliferation of them in the early aughts that you're beside every single article. And, you know, they were being used to, to communicate with authority. Or they were also but they were also artistic, rightly called data, mapping of the projections or visualizations or artistic, they there's a way that they function in the world. So the quick answer is,
it really, really depends. It really depends on on what, what I'm interested in, and I normally start somewhere close to home, and then I kind of experiment with different things, and I live with different forums. And, and then, like, I print things off, I put them out, you know, around my studio, I would do like a short video that will be kind of like a sketch. And then I give it some time,
I come back to it. And I see what speaks to me. You know, and what, what stands the test of time, like what is still interesting, a week later, a month later, two months later. And that's normally how I end up keeping something is that it has to still have potential energy, and not just be like a one to three where I can just read it. And it's
Great, Jaret. Well, we're about out of time. So thank you so much for your fascinating presentation and taking us through the your thought process, which is really intricate and deep. So and thank you to everyone here for joining us today. And we will see you next week. Thank you. Bye.
2021-03-21 12:52
