The role of an artist in society is very particular because I feel like art is something everyone can do, like mathematics or science somehow. Everyone can produce artwork but it doesn’t mean that you are a mathematician or a scientist and it’s the same thing with art and artists. And I think there’s a lot of responsibility that comes with that and that generating work, even work that’s meant to be interacted with the public. Like, it’s very humbling I guess, as well to be able to engage with a public as a voice or as a generator of content. You get to be in dialogue with all of these different fields and you are taking these abstract concepts and grounding them in a way that people can interact with, it’s people that don’t necessarily have a really strong sense of abstract thought and how these concepts can enter in, especially when you are dealing with newer technologies are bringing things to people that they are not necessarily aware that are happening. So, I think with, especially with anything that related to the internet, I feel like there is some accessibility with the public that wasn’t there before and when I talk to family members who don’t necessarily have a lot of background in art education, but they understand when I’ll say something like, ‚Oh when I work online, it’s similar to the way that like theater becomes a film and the way that a painting now becomes part of the internet.” And so it’s something that’s accessible to them in a much more open way to work digitally. Because it’s also something that people can participate in with me in a much more open process. They aren’t going to a gallery necessarily to see the work, they can go on their own computers to see the work, and then they can engage with it there and also produce work that I engage with. So, it’s a very different playing field.
At least with my work, I feel like part of the responsibility is to be able to introduce technologies that do exist and introduce them as contemporary problems, or contemporary things that people really think are happening in the future, but they are problems we have to deal with now. With privacy or control over certain technologies and things like that.
I view originality as a cumulative process and so it’s like this snowball were all this information and dialogue is happening before me and I’m just adding a little piece to it, and then someone will add on to that. And that for me is the validity of my contribution, is that someone else will use what I’ve entered into that conversion in a meaningful way and take away from it so… Yeah it is a privilege. But it’s also strange because it’s not something that turns off. Like I feel like at some point wouldn’t it be wonderful to work at a job where at five o’clock you no longer think about that job anymore? And being an artist you are kind of always looking and always trying to understand things or take things apart and I don’t know, I feel like there is something in common with artists as well… people I’ve never met and you’ll see something of you in them, like you are kind of cut from the same cloth. Maybe it’s a brain thing, I have no idea. I don’t know how not to be I guess… an artist. You know, even when I have worked at other jobs, you know, even how I came to doing net art was just by having done web design and that’s just so… I needed to find a way to make this into something that I could craft out of this. You find a way to turn any medium or any process into artistic process and it’s super interesting. I feel like that’s how new mediums gets developed as well, you explore with new technologies, you explore with new fields, or new disciplines and industries. Industry is the most exciting, when you traverse with something else, but it is a privilege. To walk in so many worlds and to also … I don’t know, its a freedom that’s somehow society allows us to have… you’re allowed to have this concept of an artist and it’s not universally appreciated, but it’s allowed to exist and it’s a privilege I guess.
