Katrina Sluis’ work Server Room in the Central Saint Martins MA Fine Art show was on first sight merely a literal imposition of contemporary computing into the gallery space, but set amongst video works, paintings and sculpture, the work brought to light the complex, contradictory and ritualized relations that define our experience of the image / object in the digital age. On the final day of the show we discussed the work and its conceptual context.
Tom Clark. It felt like a bit of a rupture looking at the server room to start with, having seen it against all the projections. There’s a lot of conventional appropriation of representation. Is this work a deliberate gesture against that kind of thing?
Katrina Sluis. That’s a good question, I mean I guess a lot of the things that I think about, certainly in terms of my own writing and so on is how one might think about photography and representation in an environment where the flow of images is increasingly mediated by non-humans.
T. Yeah Ok
K. Traditional tools of semiotics break down. Having said that, I then think about how could I then think about images in all these different ways. So I build a sculpture and then produce images that probably relate back to the history of portraiture and stuff like that. So there is a bit of a collision there. But, I think its something I haven't resolved yet in my practice,
T. I suppose that almost inability to fully resolve it is why it makes sense, because - I've been struggling with the same sort of ideas - how do you bridge the gap between, representation, digital representation and its actual form, within its structure, I'm not even sure if you could or should,
K. Yes
T. Because then there's the question, when you talk about image sharing and things like that, is there a difference between the kind of work that you've got at the show, and Facebook or Flickr. Where is the difference?
K. Is there a difference between the art that I produce and something like Flicker?
T. Well how you might approach that kind of representation; I don't know whether there's more control as an artist,
K. Well, oh yeah, I think for me, like I said in my paper there's so many interesting images in the world, why create more? And certainly going back, in my photographic work I've always appropriated stuff, or I’ve taken photographs of photographs. So in a sense the work that I produce now is a combination of hinting at things that exist, like when I'm archiving or collecting or playing with the Google search algorithms as a means of archiving.
I'm pointing at things, but then you know that video work [Window 2010] is probably a blip in my practice, but its something I've been wanting to make for nine years. I finally was in a position of making it and I just though I'll just see what happens, so I was trying to expand my practice and be more exploratory instead of closing it down too much.
T. I mean that's interesting, I guess because I was thinking about the photograph as a kind of an analogue, culturally there's nostalgia for the analogue
K. The object yeah,
T. The obvious cause and effect, that you get with analogue. I mean it seems that there's a need for the analogue, it terms of how you think about the digital image or a kind of relationship to it.
K. Well, not really because when think about it, digital images today don't actually have to go through a lens they can be completely generated by a computer. You see more and more stuff created in 3D studio max in adverting and stuff so I think this thing of the old photographic index is very old news. Certainly, I've written this before, what we saw with the emergence with digital photography or digital imaging was not a crisis of representation, it wasn't you know the death of photography, and death of the index, in fact photographs are more and more used as evidence every day, you know from terrorism to whatever. And so what I would say about digital prints, the interesting thing about digital images is the collision, the transformation of photography form a paper based object to a screen based practice. Even down to the camera, more and more, you know you even mediate the world through the screen on the back of the camera, but also its the collision between the image and the network, that's quite interesting.
T. As the image becomes located.
K. So I think this is why network and database and transmission is quite interesting in relation to representation. At the moment I'm writing a journal article, about photo-blogging in relation to non-representational theory, about what does photo-blogging show us about photography and how does this signal a shift from an interest in the typology to the topology where the performance is more what its about than the content.
T. Going back to the show, when you see the server room, it's very sculptural
K. Yeah,
T. The cables and the colours, you get an instant aesthetic pleasure, how does that relate to the content, which is there or not there, you can't know,
K. You know, there's nothing going on really except an endless loop, and I’ve cheated really, you're not meant to plug network switches into other network switches, but that was how I got the endless flashing lights without having any computers connected. So it is really sculptural. But then there is something unresolved about it, you know, there is a question there; is this just a process of relocating something that exists in a server room to the gallery space? I didn't even know I was going to make it until two, there weeks before the show and then I just decided I was just going to go for it, it almost killed me!
T. Installing it?
K. Yeah it was a nightmare, I had to go to Hommerton hospital to collect switches. I did all sorts of stuff, when really I should have been working on my video. Anyway I threw it all in there and I managed to get it in there, I think I had gone into physical shock, I had even made a back-up art work for that room in case it didn't work.
T. So you weren't sure about it?
K. Yeah I was really unsure about it, and when I was in there looking it every day just building it building it building it, which was really complicated, I was just going is this art?
T. Yeah
K. You know is this art? I had one tutor who said yeah go for it and another who said don't do it it'll be really literal,
T. I suppose that was what was interesting because it’s impossible as a literal or working object, it won't work because of its looping. So the thing that I was discussing with a friend is do you need to know about…
K. Networks…
T. Yeah and ideas about data and its visualisation and things like this,
K. Yeah that's quite, some people have had responses where they though that they thought that the work was powering the installation next it. Then someone else asked me yesterday if it powering the whole building, it was quite nice.
T. The work was almost like a kind of totem in the middle of it all,
K. Yeah,
T. It has that sort of symbolic presence, because you recognise it and it’s function, well most people will recognise that.
K. Yeah I don’t know if everyone, well some people, I think it really is a generational thing. I really find my peers find it a lot more interesting than other people. There is this 'what is this strange object' some people find it fearful. But I haven't had much time think or reflect on it
T. Sure,
K. But, it was really exciting to make it was really risky and interesting and I'm really glad to be having this conversation with someone about it. When I first installed it I didn't put the carpet down, and so it looked like a load of crap in a room,
T. I guess that just looked like a 'gallery object' because of the grey floor, white walls, no related enough to its original function.
K. So ultimately it's unresolved, it's something that is quite sculptural, which is how I thought of it at first, because I was afraid of the literal.
T. But this is something that is really interesting me at the minute, ostensibly literal things that are recognisable so you can make the link to your relationship to it, but as an uncanny thing. Like the Foucault quote the invisibility of the visible, that’s what I quite like here, I saw people just walking past, and the critical part of the work could lie in that ambivalence guess?
K. Yeah,
T. Does it, I mean, is it critical, in that space; when you look at the rest of the show. Does it sort of negate traditional things – like painting, or video work - because it as an object, in context of other work, speaks of a kind of impossibility of image based representation of the digital image data file.
K. Yeah, I really like that reading
T. It's almost like a zeroing point
K. Yeah and its a logical outcome of a lot of the writing and research I've been doing. So it's been really enjoyable for me because in a university environment it’s reminded me to make work, it's been fantastic pulling together all these strands of stuff that I've been researching and think about. For me there's something really fantastic about thinking through art and so probably that's what unites the work that I've made: trying to grapple with these questions through my work.
T. I suppose yeah, my sense is that there's a difficultly now with conventional pictorial forms. I mean most people are able to use pictorial forms, like paintings, whereas now it's sort of immaterial. Even if you did try and create something digital and self reflexive then you're just creating more peripheral content. It’s always playing the same game, the visualisation of data etc
K. And there is this whole field and a whole renaissance in data visualisation and a massive field of media arts and in my job I teach all sorts of things about net art, new media which no one at Saint Martins would be interested in. Is very much ghettoised,
T. Yeah well think that's interesting.
K. I think that's very interesting as well.
T. There’s a resistance to it.
K. Yeah completely, and I play with this. We had a crit and it was a curator who came round and he was telling me you should look at early computer art and Jody.org and this sort of thing I teach and so just go, " yeah but isn't that really ghettoised in the fine art world?" and he went "yes because it's boring and made by nerds".
Then I made a conscious decision to try and to use representational media and stuff that is very material that doesn't involve sitting in front of a screen. Something that tries to have a relationship to these kind of forms as opposed to doing something interactive [sarcastic] which would suck up all the images off archives on Google and you could 'navigate' around them and you could bring a pop up window,
T. Well yeah, you can already do it, it's the Internet. I suppose the interesting thing is that these virtual forms are mediated by objects, behind the screen is an object.
That's why I quite like your video work Window, its sort of this world, that because of this idea of an un-connected unknown behind the screen, just get's ghettoised as just nerds playing computer games. I mean my friend used to play Counterstrike, there’s nothing wrong with it but it's seemingly so sort of..
K. Niche..
T. Yeah..
K. But it’s a whole culture as well,
T. Yeah and one that’s now fitting pretty much seamlessly into mainstream culture and behavour. That's what’s funny about this opinion that it’s an area for nerds, it's like, well ok, but you can just watch these emerging forms all go past you. You will end up having to play catch up.
K. Yeah. Well by the end of this crit I was being called the nerd so I was kind of 'ghettoised' by my peers as well which is quite interesting.
I've always been quite lucky because combining fine art and computing knowledge is quite a rare skill set to have so its actually worked quite well in my favour. But there is a complete resistance to technology apart from oh isn't this a neat tool, I'm going to make my work with it, but how is this a thinking through of technology.
T. This was one of the things I was thinking about before the interview; the rituals that support this. On the one hand you've got people who are very much being derogatory about the people who actually know what they're doing, but at the same time most people use some form of screen-based technology. This is kind of based on Boris Groys’ ideas on the ritualized repetition of belief, so in a sense in order for people to be able to come to terms with and not be overwhelmed by the paradoxes that support screen based image interaction and it’s contradictions it seems that there are these kinds of rituals. And this is one of them, casting it all aside as 'nerd's business' because then you might have some sort of control or power perhaps.
K. Well even, what was quite interesting, because I eat sleep and breathe all this stuff, with a job and my point two admin job, or my role playing friends back in Australia, and all that kind of stuff, I didn't realise how little people think about technology. One of my good friends on the course is in his forties, a really interesting photographer / video artist, loves making video mobile phone stuff, he's the only person I know who has a Youtube channel with all their art on it, yet looks at sort of stuff I do and goes 'oh i don't, that world Katrina is all horrible' and I'm like you're the most new media person in the class apart from me.
There is this sense of identity, and this comes back a lot to teaching, your identity in relation to the tool or what it is you a trying to engage with. If you immediately think I don’t identify with it, it makes it very difficult to engage.
But I would probably say then that the politics of my work is hopefully somehow trying to draw attention to the politics of the structures and systems you know in a Foucauldian sense initially, I'm very concerned about software as a mediating force in society, and how it’s this black box which, is very hard to critique if you're a cultural studies humanities person.
T. The seeming problem with it is that you're dealing with what is not a conventional representation but then, culture is mediated through these images. No-one deals directly with the binary data, it's not like the end off The Matrix, you're dealing with and through an image on screen.
K. But then an image is only an image because of what the software tells you it is, I really need to sit down and have a think about the post-medium condition in relation to the digital file. There are lots of German media theorists who are doing that much better at the moment.
T. But there it stays within theory, I think its really interesting to see it, how do you,
K. How do you make sense of it…
T. Communicate it, and make it recognisable as a similar form to how it exists normally.
K. I love server rooms though, they're just so crazy
T. What do you mean? Just what's going on in them or?
K. I just like the walking into one with all that noise and the air conditioning units and all the flashing lights. You know my friends at Hommerton hospital, they gave me some kit and I walked in and I said can I please see your server room, and he goes yeah, the IT guys may be by this little box here, its like 80000 pounds and its got every patient's details in the whole of the country. I just find it an incredibly strange sight because they're so hidden, you can't get access to them.
T. They look great on one level, but then there's something, you're almost able to touch it, you can go in to the racks and you're almost able to get your hands on whatever's inside. It's almost a sublime, It’s exciting in that way.
K. Yeah I suppose its also such an unknown, it's such a mystery looking at this machine, it's so complex but it also looks just like racks of ‘things’.
So yeah, they're just interesting objects. So to be honest this came about because I thought if I ever have a show where I could do a really big thing, 'what would i want to do?' I'd want to build a server room, and then on the course we got to do proposals to Robin at Matt's gallery, and I though 'oh fantastic', this is an amazing space, what could I propose? And so I did this massive budget, huge design of a hot aisle, cold aisle, under-floor cooling system for it. I read lots of white papers on building server rooms and presented it as an idea, and I had so much fun with I thought god, I'm going to have to build this one day.
T. I think this still works though, perhaps in a different way, in the show here. There is a curiosity.
K. Yeah, I think the curator said I should have called it my archive, which I think is a nice twist on it, because it immediately brings this excessive computing power just to keep one's images alive and the sense of them endless circulating.
T. Yeah, is that what, well I was resisting asking actually what was inside, and what's going on.
K. Well to be honest, if you really want to know the answer, um, I don't know.
I've got all these switches, and I don't know what their networking configuration is. I put them all in one rack, I plugged them all in together, creating an endless loop. The two X-serves on top are my old servers from work, Warhol and Mondrian, which were decommissioned this year. Goya and Ono have taken over- the new Intel X-serves at work. These two old ones I've had in my life for a long time and X-serves just make a huge amount of noise, and they're just there for effect. On one of them I actually found out how to boot it into a special mode which lets the blue light go back and forth, to make it even more like..
T. Kind of like Hal,
K. Yeah,
T. I think it's kind of funny having these ghosts of artists hanging around, it cuts nicely with the idea of digital aura.
So the books, is there any of that content in there? Because I though ‘so it would be great if this book was creating itself’, creating its own archive in the server…
K. Ah, that would be nice. I, to be able to do something, meaningful like that would have taken me a bout six months to actually programme, so that's why I went ‘it's just a step too far’.
T. But then you [the viewer] don't need to know that…
K, You don't need to, I could just be telling people… every time someone asks I tell them something different,
T. Yeah well again it's sort of interesting as a performance, but do you want to do that?
K. Well yeah.
I was a bit concerned that the books might cancel out the server room in a way, but I felt that the books, in a way gave viewers who couldn't engage with the server room a sense of some kind of history or context for the work.
T. Its almost like a clue, but also I think there's got to be a flipping between the actual pictorial or analogue or physical or the digital video as a go-between because then that really elucidates the gap between them and what’s inside servers I think.
K. Ah yeah.
T. How would you show it? Would this be shown at a gallery? Is it a thing to 'be shown'?
K. Its going to get dismantled and put into several places the actual servers so I’m kind of a bit sad about that, but if I ever make it again I'm going to have to hire a proper company to make it because it just killed me. I could never go through that again. But the books, um how do you exhibit artist's books? This is always the endless question, I've made them before and I've been in a show of artist's books, which was curated specifically around having a show of artist's books, which was interesting,
T. I think it’s like where you do photography, where there's the creation of a structure or loaded object. There's just the tangibility of that. I guess when you've been looking at image archives, this must be quite satisfying.
K. Yeah I mean there's very much a trend in artist's books to do a kind of hoarding thing that I've done. E Schmidt is someone who's always obviously worked with found photography, and he has his own little book-store with all his internet findings. So in a sense maybe that's where the artist's book belongs, in an online bookstore.
I really like making Art fast, there has to be a space for short sharp quick things to make, alongside the long tortured, drawn-out processes. So artist books, are fast, well for me doing something like that, it takes me a few days it’s satisfying. Through the process of actually collecting and actually making these objects there's a lovely thinking process that I probably used to get in the dark room, when you spent nine hours doing one colour print. It’s that repetition of making and looking at something that I find satisfying, but with a quick turn around.
I still think the art school does very much push you into this long, drawn-out tortured project and certainly I really would like to be a painter and paint about photography. But just don't have the time in my life to paint.
T. I suppose once you start a painting, you're committed in a way to that, but then that's symptomatic of the sort of the relationship to the digital you’re examining.
K. The only thing that appeals to me about painting is it's such a loaded language that often you can use it to try and look at another loaded language. I like that playful sort of photography, but I definitely don't have the time. I think with all my Internet use now, the thought of sitting doing something for such a long time, I don't have any long-term concentration span anymore. Do you find that?
T. Well I'd sort of try and justify it by saying I've got a lot on, but basically yeah, it’s a kind of ADHD.
K. I've had to a lot of writing recently and I can't sit and think for long, I'm interrupted. Katherine Hayles is doing lots of research about that, which is quite interesting,
T. The thing that irritates me about this is when I saw 'the new busy' campaign by Microsoft, that's kind of like being implored to be like this…
K. Yeah well I guess the direction that my work is heading is a critique of informational capitalism.
T. How would you define that?
K. Well I think, as culture becomes digital, as the way we remember ourselves, the documents we keep, and as you know, the archive expands beyond
T. Physical archives…
K. And also what your attention can muster. You see this initiation of culture coming through the standards like xml and other kinds of standards. The idea of the semantic web where everything is a kind of unit of information that can easily be processed by many different devices. All this is driving the faster, more efficient processing of knowledge. I'm really interested in the area of computing science called knowledge management because they've developed all these ontologies around how we can process information and these are all political, social, cultural…
T. With suggestions and things like that…
K. Yeah, yeah, and Google's a really good example, and the more and more we see software mediating our experience, the world, the city, each other, you know. Well there's loads of people writing about this at the moment,
T. But it’s very prescient, a lot of it to do with form I think because it’s virtual therefore invisible, but has a visibility. There seems to be a sort desire to be radical about it, because in a way it's scary, at a base level,
K. I think it’s very, very, difficult to find a space to think in relation to it. I have the most extreme email fatigue, as a lecturer I get 300 emails a week that I can't possibly deal with and I feel my life slipping away as I respond to all these.
T. You have to sort of perch on these layers of information…
K. Yeah and then also the process of researching is so mediated…
T. Yeah I get guilty every time I use Wikipedia.
K. But I think that it’s interesting with rumors of the ‘Google horizon’, thing of creating a two-tiered Internet. This is already happening, Cisco's networking switches are already building in firmware that allows companies to prioritize different bits of traffic on their network according to who sends it and who receives it. The great thing about he internet obviously is that it treats all packets the same and it will route everything equally and we're seeing moves for people to be able to pay for faster access, faster routing of information, which again is this informational capitalism, how fast you can process and circulate your information, the faster you can, the more wealth you create. So these are the kind of things, Google is a fascinating company, utterly interesting, and because they're so complex and they're so good at their marketing.
T. That’s one of the most amazing things about Google, behind that screen, well behind the image, there is this enormous company. When their phone was coming out they were talking about freedom from traditional networks and the constant auctioning for the cheapest network, and I thought that it was really interesting that they were offering freedom from big corporations, which you traditionally associate with something like Tesco that has a big physical presence. Yet behind the screen Google is one of the biggest, if you take into account the amount of knowledge and information it transfers: that's its bulk, it's mass is virtual.
K. People forget that Google is an advertising company,
T. Yeah basically that's what it is,
K. When Google wants to digitize the world's books its not for our benefit, its because that access to human knowledge means that they can data-mine it and increase the accuracy of their algorithms, which they then patent, and use to sell back advertising, I mean that's the basic law of Google.
T. Well that's it, it's very, very well put together, the design of it, the way you might not notice the suggestions, you think you're using just a normal or benign interface.
K. Yeah I think there's an emergent area called search engine studies from the humanities that are beginning to critique the search engine as a kind epistemological engine.
T. I could see how that could be interesting, that's another thing that you kind of feeling that you can attempt anything that is another symptom. I find that rather than focusing down an enquiry - again that ADHA thing - because when you’re looking at networks you have to have a kind of spread.
K. I'm terrible though I'm really obsessed with searching. I get really excited. It's like being in a library, or an archive. I get really excited and so making those artist's books was fantastic, so the way was searching, the tags I was using, the places I was going to look for these images of archives, and these databases and stuff, it was just like a wonderful journey through the Internet..
T. Also language, how you can…
K. How do you subvert…
T. It’s almost like an Esperanto, you have to have a very specific knowledge before searching the images, like their possible extensions for example…
K. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
T. I think that Google Images for one plays an interesting game by having just the images on the screen, particularly now where they're completely decontextualised from their own data, and meta data and source. I suppose in a way they're focusing what you're searching rather than you doing it.
K. But also I think it's very hard to make work about this, I think its very difficult as an artist. I know because I was on the part time course a lot of the full timers hadn't spoken to me very much or seen my work before, and some of them are coming out of the wood work, going, ' oh I'm really interested in this world but I have been making these prints for over a year and trying to deal with narrative, and I'm really confused’…
T. This is why partly why I asked if we could speak, well like you said earlier, it might just be a generational thing. I don't know whether its an accurate statement, but it feels like this is a generation that has grown up with experiencing the internet andalways experienced it and it’s development, almost at a similar rate; witnessing the speed at which the technology can self-support itself,
K. Yeah definitely,
T. I don't know how I feel about it,
K. Well even the way in which people talk to me about my work, they always preface with ' oh don't myself blah blah, so it's still very hard to have a discussion.
