10: Timeline Ch 7—Net Era (1990s) with Auriea Harvey, Joshua Davis, LIA, Scott Draves & Vuk Ćosić

[MUSIC PLAYING] Hello, everybody, and welcome to this Lerandum discussion following the release of Chapter 7 of our Generative Art Timeline. And that was covering the decade of the 1990s. I'm your host, Peter Bauman, or Monk Antony. I'm the editor-in-chief at Lerandum. And joining us today are the artists who lived art history in the 1990s, especially digital art history. And those artists are Arya Harvey, Joshua Davis, Leah Scott Draves, and Book Cossage. I'm also here with two other people from the Lerandum team, so that is the funny guys and Conrad or Nemo Kakes. So thank you to Gentlemen for joining as well. A little bit more about why we're doing this talk at Lerandum. I've been writing this Generative Art Timeline for almost for about a year. And Conrad has been invalibly helping with adding images. And the timeline goes back 70,000 years and covers just systematic thought in general as a kind of pray-lead-to, pray-lead-to, Generative Art. And we've had a talk for each of the chapters that we've released so far. This is our talk for chapter 7, the early web era that covers the 1990s. Our artists today, I will begin by introducing them. And our first person that I'll introduce is Arya Harvey. She is an artist that produces simulations and sculptures that bridge a physical and digital space. But she's also a net art and video game art pioneer who contributed to some of the first internet projects commissioned by a major institution. And that was the Guggenheim Museum. And she was the winner of the first major prize given for an online interactive work by SF MOMA. Her work can be found at institutions like the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Buffalo AKG Museum. So Arya, thank you so much for joining us today. Our next guest is Joshua Davis. He's a renowned American designer, author, and new media artist who's been using programming to create interactions with users and generate visually stunning compositions through randomized processes since 1995. He's a pioneer of-- he's a very early adopter of the Flash program and a pioneer of Flash Art. But he's worked with many other languages, which we'll talk about. His work has been shown at the tape modern PS1, MOMA, and Rselectronica. Our next guest is Leah. She is a pioneer of software Flash and NetArt, who's been producing work also since the mid '90s. Her practice spends video performance, software, installations, sculpture, and digital applications. Her work is rooted in minimalism and conceptualism and has been exhibited at venues such as the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Venice Biennale. And then our next guest is Scott Draves. He is a pioneering software artist known for his views, algorithm, and electric sheep, which was a collective intelligence consisting of hundreds of thousands of computers and people that used math and AI to create an infinite animation. But he was doing that in the '90s. The predecessor to a lot of today's AI art. So we're very happy to have Scott with us. His work has been shown at LACMA and MOMA, our final guest that I'll introduce certainly not least as a costage, a pioneer of NetArt and ASCII arts. He's also a lecturer, writer, and curator. He's been exhibited and published internationally. And in the mid '90s, he was one of the originators and founders of NetArt. His work has been shown as the Slovenian representative at the Venice Biennale and at the Stadelec Museum and Amsterdam. So again, what an incredible lineup. It's hard to believe we got you all in one place. So thank you all so much for joining us today. It's a real astonishing pleasure to have you all. So thank you very much. And I think we'll get started with a question. I've been talking way, way, way too much. Maybe we can begin with a question for Aria. Maybe you can just kind of tell us about starting with NetArt in the '90s or getting started in general with working with computers. I think I've read that your parents or your mom was worked with computers, and that's how you originally got started. But yeah, I'd like to know how you first kind of got started working with NetArt in the '90s. And if you could talk a bit about skin on skin, that first engagement of yours with the Net and the Art World. So thank you so much for joining us Aria. And please can you tell us a bit about yourself? Yeah, well, I would love to. It's difficult for me to talk about getting started with NetArt. But we'll start with my involvement with computers, which indeed does come from my mother who was a key punch operator at a certain point. So she had a knowledge of computers in its very early stages of being something that humans, normal humans, could interact with, I guess. And she very much wanted me to know about this world also and put me in computer camp when I was a child, when I was basically nine or 10 years old. And that founded a love in me for programming and understanding program directions as something that creates visuals, let's say. I became a teenager and rejected all of that for a while. As was the way it was in the '80s and away, it just seemed like uncool. I had no examples of it around me. And therefore, it felt like I was doing something very unusual. And I rejected it for a bit until I got to college. And then I got back into the beginning of the '90s. Like '90, '91, I got back into computers again. Because I was going to Parsons School Design in New York City and they started a computer lab. And that I got a job at the computer lab because I had some previous experience. But at any rate, I got out of school in '93, still no internet, of course. That was only in '94, '95, around '95 sometime, that I saw the internet. But I cannot talk about net art without talking about book and the postage in LIA and all the rest who were already there or who were just starting to get online as well. We were all kind of there at the same time. And so there was a real community there already. And it was an international community. And it was the first time I really had any thing of that magnitude where you're really talking about talking to someone in another country. This was just not normal back then, really, to do that. Everything was quite separate. I find that I have to explain this so much. I don't know what the others feel like, but it's weird to have to explain. No, there was no talking to someone in Austria if I was in New York City, just like that. So this was a beautiful thing, actually. And it was very impactful, not only for me, but for everyone who was online at the time to suddenly have this ability. So I would say to answer, at least, sort of broach upon your other question about skin on skin on skin. Yes, that's how I met my husband, who was in Belgium, Michael Samin. And we immediately started collaborating on that. But I had already been working on my personal website, which was intrapayate.com, while I was in New York City, which was kind of my fake it till you make it site from 95 till 99, where I was-- I don't know, I'd say I was into the same stuff that Josh was into, by the way, just working, pretending I was a big graphic designer, getting clients, like working with-- I was working primarily with, in that time, face working with Virgin Records and movie companies. Virgin Records, I was making sites for Rockstars. Basically, it was hilarious, because it was just me in my little East Village apartment, working with these, like, this giant corporations and stuff. But you could get away with that back then quite easily. But that-- so that was sort of the front-facing part was that sort of work for clients. But then in the back room, where I had my real fun, I was doing the net art stuff and meeting people online, Olya Lialina and BookCosic and many, many others, and we were just having fun on private servers. I think at least three of us were in hell.com. I don't know about you, I can't remember. But anyway, there was so much to talk about about that time and I would actually love to pass it over to Voxa to hear about his early experiences online because I kinda idolized, I very much idolized, like all the people who were involved in a very, very first wave of net.art, which was very different from what we could have done in New York City, which we would never dream of calling that net.art at the time because that was just not, the net.art was the thing that was happening on other mailing lists and different locations on the web. But I would love to hear him talk about it. So I know I'm taking it away from you, but I would just pass it over to Voxa. - Fine, I think that I'm a listener, Olya, very carefully, I'm really grateful for the sweet word you said now. Everybody felt that there's no center. So it's kind of fun to listen to someone from New York, sitting in New York and explaining how, you know, we were in this third world place, things were happening somewhere else. And me, I'm talking from Slovenia, fall places, and you know, now I'm supposed to, after hearing you say to myself, oh yeah, yeah, we were like cool dudes, which is more like that. But of course, this emotion, this feeling of like being at the super-glug periphery of everything seems to be global and there's no center. Otherwise, yes, what I recall, I mean, it's very similar. You sit with that machine, you feel some sort of epiphany like, oh no, I can do these things, I can communicate to people, I can express, you know, whatever I feel, without many filters, without any administrative profiles, such as curators or galleries, you know, these waiters. In our lives, and, you know, the cliché, it's wrong when a waiter tells you what you're gonna eat, and that's how I always felt with curators. Like you worked for me, young man, no, the other way around it, it's never going to be like that. And so fuck off, to put it mildly. And so internet gave us this. One possibly specific little thing about this, European, mainly European band of net artists is that, yes, we were all, you know, with mother's milk, we were given this institutional critique, and we felt like we were warriors in, you know, against some sort of a big evil art system. All of us kids in this, let's call it band or what, worry. We all had our brushes with this system. We all disliked our experiences, and so we felt free. And so there was a lot of that. The band was maybe an important influence privately, but the previous pop phenomenon that gave us, let's say a seriously important lesson was the Grunge Movement, you might recall, you know, these people started committing suicide like 20 minutes after becoming famous, and they became famous pretty much like on a second reef they ever played, like it was so, so fast. So this gave us some ideas how to not behave. So we were looking at like defense. So you like jump on a stage and you look at people like with your like ugliest look you can give them. I think that describes our attitude. And when it comes to work, man, we were very different. We, it's felt a little bit like, you know, all these crazy immigrant painters in France in the early 20th century, you know, these Spanish immigrants, they should be a Dalton basically, in normal world, right? They all had studios next to each other, you know, because they'll brak the grieves. And we felt the same only at a large distance. So I remember Orias early, you know, Octopus and all that, all those things, it was really remarkable. And you know, it's fantastic. I felt like she's my first door neighbor. I can look behind the shoulder and check, oh, you're working on this. How cool is it? So there's some of the stuff that got invented in the cloud among us, unclear who came up with what. And I find that to be beautiful. So there you go. That's my very first little sport steak on what I remember. - Yeah, thank you for that response, Fouca. And maybe we can jump it over to Joshua really quick. Since Orias also mentioned a bit of Joshua's work, but Josh, you started early in your career with HTML and just kind of diving around the experimental internet. And a lot of these early skills that you've built were very crucial to kind of the really iconic website, pray station that you obviously worked on for a long time. Maybe tell us a bit more about that story and how that kind of emerged from like your early practices in the '90s. - Yeah, I think the common thread that you'll find between all of us is, I really felt like we were all working in a vacuum. Like it's not like we could walk down the street and walk into a gallery and go, oh, okay, this is how you make artwork with computers. So we were all kind of in this like empty void. And I think that's why we naturally all started to gravitate towards each other. Like what the fuck are you doing? And what are you doing? And how are you doing this? So it was a strange time because there was no social media, there was no YouTube, there was no, you know, I mean it was dark. We really were making work out of nothing out of a void. To go back, I got my first computer when I was 11. It was a Commodore 64, mostly because I was playing a lot of video games. So my dad bought me a Commodore 64 and he ends up getting the visual basic programming book because he thought, well, if this guy's gonna like, you know, video games, maybe he wants to program them. So I think my first computer book was when I was 11 that was programming visual basic for, and I still have it, it's upstairs. I still have the Commodore 64. I still have the hard drive, which I think weighs like the size of a small man. It's easily like 50 pounds. I still have all that stuff, which is hilarious. I have to talk about bulletin boards because my whole route was actually kind of like the tail end of punk rock, early goth and industrial and skateboarding and how that whole scene relates into like a fuck everyone do it yourself sort of mentality was a big shaper in like, you know, no one's gonna help you but you and so, you know, you wanna learn something, fuck and figure it out. So stop crying. You know, there's no resource to look up, right? You get this like Google what you got a program. I mean, it's insane. I don't even remember how it was done. I think you just had to like try things over and over again. It's like, anyway, it's forgotten thankfully. Sorry to interrupt. Yeah. But if we talk about like bulletin boards, like I couldn't afford software. And so like I remember I went on to a bulletin board in New York called Cemetery Ridge. It's where I downloaded my first cracked version of Photoshop and in that day, the people who would crack the software would leave like a five minute, fully like 3D world with planets like cracked by and you'd like fly through this thing. And I'm like, I don't know what the fuck this is but I wanna be friends with these people. And it was always like this five minute like preview animation. And now like when I think about it, when I think about the demo scene, like they were doing shit that I'm trying to do like in 2024 with GLSL and I'm like, how the fuck did these people do it? In front of this cracked software. So that was kind of like my first like aha moment into digital work. And I remember in 1994, I go to work for, I go to school at Pratt, much like Aria. And I got a job there in the publications department to do Pratt's first website, which I think we launched in like 1995. And that was all HTML. And thankfully with HTML, you could view source. So I could like look at what other people were doing, like understand like, oh, this is how you take two images and have them swap when you roll over. And I remember like that was my first foray into really getting serious about this. Was like 1995, I had a domain on the Pratt website where I was just like working out HTML and JavaScript and Pearl. Now, much to Scott's point, I was so hungry about learning this. And I think I bought like 30 programming books, all different like one was C, one was C++, one was whatever. And I just ended up doing like the Hello World program and like every single book. And what I found is is like, I knew how to write Hello World like in every programming language on the planet, but like I wasn't a master of anything. And it wasn't until I saw Leah's work that she was doing on Turex and Dextro that I was like, I don't know who the fuck this is, but I want to do this for the rest of my life. And if it wasn't for Leah, I would not be on this call with you today. Anytime I get invited to do any kind of show, I somehow weasel Leah into collaborating with me. So I bring her into like every, oh, you're doing a museum show. Do you know Leah? Like I managed to try to pull her into everything because if it wasn't for what she was doing in director at the time, it would have not like impacted me in such a way. profound way. So I'm going to move it to her because I don't exist without Leo. Thank you so much. I'm very, very thankful for bringing me into a lot of things because it's a man's rule. It's hard. Yeah. For women in this field. Anyway, I started in 1995 and I wanted to become rich, which didn't work out for decades. My boyfriend back then he did 3D architecture models for architects and he earned a lot of money. I was like, I want that too. So I bought my first tiny computer and my first job was to cut out images for CD Roman. It was about natural healing plans or something. So I would go with my zip drive and I would go by bus into the next district in Vienna and deliver my pictures and I was there. I saw a guy and he did something with cold and stuff was moving and I was like, I want to do that. That's interesting. He makes cold. It's like a wizard. He writes things and stuff starts moving and it was interactive and I was like, so I asked him if I could have a copy of the program because I had no money at this time. I got a copy of the program. I got the handbook and I basically copied the macromedia director handbook by hand twice until I understood what the function was. It was called a handler and the language was lingo and it was really, it still is or was actually. It was one of the most powerful programs ever out there. Macromedia director, it allowed people to really quickly do some animations but dragging and dropping without knowing how to code and then you could enter the next level by actually writing code. So either you would fill your timeline with lots and lots of sprites. They were called like the images and the sounds and the material you would use for making a city romp or you could be super smart and write everything in one script and it would do the same thing but it was smarter and nicer. So anyway, I learned how to program myself which has advantages and disadvantages. I think the disadvantages were that it was probably much slower in learning and probably there are smarter ways how to do things and the advantage was that I was so clueless that I tried things for myself. Like as an example, I tried to build a tree. How do you build a tree? You have a trunk and then it starts branching but if you only have like 150 channels in that macromedia program then you have to come up with a solution what happens if I already have 150 branches what do I do? So some branches would stop and some would start again and everything would be interactive and depending on the mouse position on the screen. So if nowadays I would like to make a tree, I would probably google it and say okay, a tree and then I would come up with an L system or whatever boring, ready-made thing and I would never try to do it myself basically. So advantages, disadvantages of being early, disadvantage, there was no one to look up to and advantage, we had to do it all ourselves and we had to be creative and we had to invent everything from scratch basically. That was my first program. Thank you for that and yeah, hopefully we can get to a few more questions later and maybe we can move to Scott and yeah I'd love to maybe to hear more about electric sheep. I know this is this was at the very end of the 90s so maybe you don't have to start there but I just think it's such a fascinating project and we've already kind of touched on it offline before the call. So yeah, can you tell us a bit more about electric sheep and how you got started with that project? Sure, I mean it was the first version, I mean I wrote it like a week in between, I had like a month in between two jobs, I think it was yeah it was 1999, I was living in San Francisco, I mean the.com boom was happening and I had I think I had a month in between jobs and I like I went to I went to Burning Man for a week and I would think I wrote the first version of electric sheep and this sort of the original idea was kind of I mean it was based on the fractal flame algorithm which was sort of the pre-existing works from the early 90s and actually goes all the way back which was the series of experiments going back into the 80s and I can tell you more about the electric sheep but I really want to at least briefly mention and agree with like what Josh said about like the the the pirate software scene that was really sort of pivotal for me for like becoming a programmer and getting into computers, getting that you know the spirit of sharing and just getting access to all the sort of tools and languages that I wouldn't have other libraries had access to like you know I had just an apple two at home and you know like I think some of you basically taught myself a lot of bad habits and you know it all it all worked out in the end but like the scene seen those intros and and sort of just having to figure stuff out on on your own was really sort of pivotal for me and just like I remember as the kid I think spending a lot of time you know at home alone in the dark and essentially just trying to entertain myself like how can I you know write a program that doesn't get boring like you know starting out with like spyrograph and then like you know random numbers and placing geometric shapes and saying like oh it's too slow like what can I do to make it go faster and so you know what can I do you know to increase the probability that something interesting happens and so I think that stuff was really you know formative for the project that became the flame algorithm you know which was released as an open source to refer back to the sharing thing and then but the the funny thing about the flame algorithm was it was it was really slow and you know part of how it worked was you know by solving an equation not just like sort of by drawing primitives like lines or triangles or something like that and so it takes like millions or billions of iterations and so it took like an hour to render a frame on a regular PC like you know like what like what I had and so you know when I had originally created that algorithm I actually was it so I'll tell the story it's it's a little bit crazy but I was actually on an internship and I had I had this job in in Tokyo and I had access to a super computer essentially as the high-end silicon graphics workstation and so I during this brief moment of free time like I could you know I was able to just you know I'd been working on solving the equations and I always made like approximations you know in order to get the render time to be reasonable um but this was the first time I was able to just say hey like just run it and come up with the real you know the real answer and that was sort of like the sort of like that super computer was like the telescope that allowed me to you know highlight us to like sort of see the beauty in the mathematics and sort of sort of extract sort of get started to get the message from you know this uh from this information space um but you know it was just a summer job so I didn't get I didn't continue to be able to use the super computer I had to go back to the regular PC and so animation was pretty much impossible you know or really hard to do for a very long time but because there was open source it got put into like after effects and stuff like that people started doing stuff with it and I at some point I got this like a video a VHS videotape in the mail I don't even remember how they got my address uh and it was of a really cool fractal flame animation that like some guy who worked at like a VFX place like maybe like somebody like lia's boyfriend um who had like you know a real job in a render farm and they had made this cool thing and I was like wow that's great I wish I could do that but all I've got is this crappy PC so you know how could I get access how could I how could I um do this and I think that was this was when SETI at home had like just come out a couple months ago and so really I just uh put two and two together um and uh I had the idea for that first version of electric sheep and it just was uh a quick you know I just threw it together and put it out there and like nobody noticed I mean like I said it was Linux only and it took quite some time for people to pick it up and eventually, especially getting some open-source contributors to do things like port it to Windows, port it to Mac, and then eventually it went eventually, it started to take off and with the electric sheep, into participatory the more people who are running it, the more computer power it had access to. And so, you know, that was kind of the sort of the origin story for that. And I'm not sure, I'm happy to, you know, I'm not sure where you want me to go with it. There's different sort of questions or directions I can answer, but that's the basic outline. I think you mentioned diffuse algorithm also. I can tell you a little bit about that if you want. Where is that? I have a separate question. I do. I would love to talk about diffuse algorithm. One thing, maybe a follow-up about electric sheep. And I know one of the artists that you really looked up to was Carl Sems. And I'm wondering about this. The connection machine. So. Right. I'm wondering about this connection between evolutionary art and the kind of machine learning art that you were doing at the end of the 90s. And also how that relates to the AI art of today that isn't really related to Harold Cohen and that symbolic logic driven art. It's more related to this machine learning and big data art that. I think the roots of that are with Carl Sems and Latham and with your work with electric sheep. So I'm wondering how you see that genealogy. Yeah. I was inspired by Carl over and over again. I totally agree that it was sort of an extra step beyond what, of course, the Harold Cohen's technique, what you would call the expert system. But that was just, this was just the normal evolution of computer technology. That was the state of the art and AI when he was going by the time, you know, the late 80s had come up. We had, you know, genetic programming and stuff like that. And with more computer power, you could go beyond. I think what Carl did and what the flame algorithm did was, you know, we both, we were both using genetic algorithms or genetic programming. But there is an important, you know, which a lot of people have used and it's actually not that different from sort of the symbolic kind of AI. They both have sort of just like tree languages inside of them. There's a machine learning component instead of like a human expert approach. But the language for the search is sort of similar. And I think this, you know, the language, which is essentially the model is a really crucial aspect of, you know, machine learning, of course. And I had, you know, by then I was, you know, in grad school and studying, you know, information theory and I was like super into AI. And so this idea of like, you know, language as the machine learning is like the approach to art was just like, you approach to making things. And sort of like a finite language is a way to like, you can say an infinite number of things. And so there's a way of sort of like crossing, crossing over there. And so that was kind of the kind of the attraction. But what I was saying is like there was something extra, which is like in Carl's work and my work was that it was that it's not just like the genetic symbolic part, but there was like a sort of a pixel part. And you know, that was what was sort of different about the flame algorithm. It wasn't rendered with just like a couple of normal triangles. It was, you know, like a neural network. It was doing a whole lot of floating point in order to sort of solve an equation to, to, and then the image kind of emerges from all that computation. Similarly, like Carl's thing, it was like this running the algorithm on every single pixel for his genetic images. So the end result like had this sort of like organic living sort of like more feeling that like was little less human. It didn't look, it didn't look at all like something that somebody would like sort of like draw or paint or whatever. It really had this kind of like alien contact feeling that, you know, that I like. And so that kind of like the heavy, I think the heavy use of floating point is also a key aspect of, you know, AI that was the brood up at that time. Thank you, Scott, for this amazing, yeah, fascinating background information. I think now that we have some fascinating background information about all of you, maybe we can skip to some, some group questions. And actually one that I would like to ask to, yeah, to whoever wants to reply to it. Like how did the communication exactly happen between all of you in the 90s? I think for someone that's in 2024, it's probably difficult to imagine, but I got where the mediums and how important are in real life meetups in this community. Real life meetups were not necessarily no required nor did they really happen that often, but I would say the main way mailing lists, right, like legendary mailing lists, 7 and 11, 7 and 11, let's hear it. I'll get you that time. Well, I've done, I did those two, but there's been other stuff. I'm really, I'm really just one grateful you mentioned BBS and for me, you know, however all you are, there's always somebody older that was your idol. And for me, it was Tom Jennings. I don't know if you know that guy. She came up with this fight on it, which is not so too allowzy, right? We all are hired. But also things you mentioned, like before doing all of that as an early, whatever person, he used to do a gay skaters theme in the early 80s. And somehow still cannot remove this from my mind for him, this was a Genesis, and I really appreciate it. Anyway, yeah, this is different between Europe and US, I guess in those times, in those days, we did manage to meet up relatively often. It started in the early '95, like random emails, like, "Hey, what's this thing you're doing?" And it's kind of nice, uninterested. But there was only a few of those. And this question was out of me earlier, but I kind of avoided it. The first meeting of this next time banned in June '95, you know, in this Venice-Ripy village fair. It was kind of funky, because at the time the Berlin Club of Scene was very important, and the organizers of the Venice Barrier, the 50 that these people come over and do a presentation of that. But our German friends did was to organize a three-day raid, which is at the moment quite something. And in the top floor of that theater in Venice, we had a three-day conference of internet critique. And at the bar we had Marina Bramovic, Staling Drinks and Joseph Crosshut, and those people who were just providers in Germany at the time. Anyways, then we started meeting very often. There's been a good conference in Budapest, Hungary, of all places, called Metaphorum every year. And we would invite some American people, but not young people of the time, but we had a leash, a cocaine cowboy, John Perry Barlow. I don't know if anybody remembers that name. Who wrote that obnoxious Davos manifesto of what was it called, Independence, CHIT, crap. And I don't know, remember other American people, Huck in Bay, a New Yorker, Peter Lambron Wilson, a great guy. So that was a connection. But we kept meeting and we kept doing books of our texts, and we kept sharing our websites and doing collaborative websites. And so it was kind of dense in Europe for a time. He's bonding with my brilliant beautiful friend still today. He experimented with only living in festivals. So his entire totality of his luggage was a CD-ROM with his backup around his neck. And he would just move from couch to couch, from festivals to festivals with the 90th, Hick to Kavanate. Before he moved on to BAMF, which is in Canada, where artists go to die, he got himself a job for two years. Yeah, it's like, sorry, the expression. What we used to call it at the time, because it was like too beautiful. It's like in the middle of a national park, and pine trees, and swimming pool in the morning. And a beautiful, wacko European cafeteria called the La Palette, where everything was pink. It was like the most disgusting thing imaginable. Yeah, so before BAMF, yeah. Anyways, communication with mailing lists all the time, continuously. You would be on three, four lists, and you would not everybody alive. And you would be really burning to see which crazy beautiful person is going to be publishing something. You would really genuinely think of that during the day. And that year. So it hard to think about. with NetTime, with NetArt itself, was our output communication itself, where the web-based stuff or stuff inside email was the illustration of what we wanted to talk about. So the actual dialogue was more important, and the web-based stuff was just like a promo, like a demo of what I was thinking of right now. I think that was that communication. And of course it died quite fast, because people moved into the career mode and that that's the death of community. People started giving their posts to proofreading first before posting them to NetTime. That's when we made 7-Eleven. We should fuck this man. So it's a bit punk. I think for me the first and this will fall down to obviously conversation with Lea and Eurea. I know I started on IRC after bulletin boards, and then there was a follow-up to that that happened a year later called ICQ, which were, so IRC and ICQ were kind of like the WhatsApp before WhatsApp, where you could have a tray of friends and you could constantly message those people. I don't start dreamless, I think, until 2000. So I mean obviously that doesn't relate till the 90s, but I think there was a need for my community of people who was predominantly using kind of flash at the time, where dreamless was a hidden message board where the how you got in as you had to view the source. And if you've viewed the source there was the instructions on how to actually get into the community. And dreamless I think at the peak was about 5,000 people, and it had all the early KC, golan, a lot of the early net art people were all there. It ran for four or five years and then eventually I shut that down. And we didn't start doing these things on dreamless, they were called riots, where we actually started getting, so anyone who was a member of dreamless could do a riot, and a riot would be like a local meetup in a city. So we had a section on the message board where people could organize these meetups. And the funny thing is, and I love telling the story, is the first one that we had in New York, we had the hello, my name is badge, and we all ended up writing our names and no one knew anyone. And so we had to start over and writing our handles about, oh your pre-stations, like oh, you're Josh, I don't know who the fuck Josh is. So it was funny, we were all using these sort of aliases, and it wasn't until we actually put our names on aliases that we understood who everyone was. But that didn't happen in my sort of collective group of people until 2000. However, hell comes along. So I was kind of working on two projects at the time. I was working on pre-station, where I was kind of like working out ideas. And then I created a character in an alias that worked on a project called Once Upon a Forest. And once upon a forest got me invited into hell, and when I joined hell.com, Leah was already there, Aria was already there. And I would love for them to talk about hell because it's such a great project where everyone thought that the website was that you couldn't get in and that there was nothing more. And so everyone believed that you couldn't get in and that there was nothing more, but there was actually a private server where we were all sort of talking and showing work together. Of course, that's where I meet Michael and Aria and I see skin on skin happen in real time. I watch them fall in love in real time. Which was incredible. I would say to the to the alias thing, Leah has always been Leah. Period. Which I always admired that. Leah has always been Leah. Yeah, it's only because my second name is not really something that shows your nose. Oh, but it's great. But Leah, in my show that's up at the Museum of the Moving Image, they blew up that the screenshots you took of me the night Michael and I met when everybody was there in the big chat and we were all on video and stuff. And I started going into private room talking to Michael and you took a bunch of screenshots and you sent them to me the next day. This collage of screenshots is now blown up like gigantic on the wall. I need to send you a picture. Yeah, I just got to say if you're in New York and you have not gone to the Museum of the Moving Image, like I hate to say this because she's on the call, but the fucking show is incredible. The show that has been put together at the Museum of Moving Image of like, I want to say her life's work is really something not to be missed. So if you're in New York, please stop by the Museum because it is a wonderful collection of artifacts from over 30 years. It's incredible. I don't want to speak for Leah, but talking about like being, you know, using computers while female, you know, I think a lot of us really did want to be a bit more anonymous because it just made things easier to be able to shift in and out of your actual persona in a sense. So I had many different handles, depending on what I was doing for a while, you know, but no one knew my name for a long time at all. Like, and that only happened towards the 2000 end of things, I guess. But to invite Leah and again, the one thing I got to say about that was there were sort of local scenes or it felt like it. So like, what was going on in Austria at the time was super interesting and dovetailed nicely into the 2000s because it was very audio visual. It was very like, like, Leah's work was really beautiful. It is really beautiful, but it was really beautiful at the time because it was all these small elements leading up to this sort of big effect, you know, and you could sort of see this local style in a way. I don't know if you felt that Leah. I've always wanted to ask you that. So many artists who were working with you at the time have just disappeared in a way. Yeah, I think we all influenced each other in Austria and a friend of mine, not that tough and big, he organized something called the abstract now, abstraction now. Like it was a show and video tapes. So there were a group of people in Austria who liked doing abstract work. For me, it was like, I always liked abstract work. I never liked to draw real things because first of all, I'm very bad at drawing real things. I tried to copy like 27 books of art history and I tried to copy almost all the pictures in there, if you search the cave paintings, probably I could have done them best. So I always liked to draw and play with colors was my most favorite thing to do. So the abstract art was perfect for me and playing with colors. In the mid-90s was playing with a very restricted palette. Also, like that's why black and white was the first choice because you could do things that did not look completely ugly in 256 colors. Yeah, you were asking about the scene. Yeah, we partially worked together, but we would also meet up and show each other work and we would comment on each other's work so that it was quite a lively scene here. Also, the first question was about the meeting in real life or meeting online. I post met like Orier and Shoshua online and we talked online for a long time and then years later, we would meet in real life and in person. We still like each other. I can ask your New Yorker people, New York people, did you guys come across a thing? Walt Gang Stale? Of course. Participated along or whatever. Yeah, of course. He was our man in Havana. He was like our foot, you know, Omaha Beach, the other way around. He was like our first stop in New York. Yeah, he was always cool. Yeah, absolutely. Right, right. Just acting. So for me, Austria also, the Arsiotonic Festival on my behalf, they invited all the artists from all over the world and they would come to my country and I'm joking, of course, they did not do it on my behalf. But for me, it was really cool because I could take a train like two hours and I was in Lins and I could meet everyone there. Every year, there was this huge amount of people coming here and yeah, it was awesome. So it was both email mailing lists and real life meetings. Did you work together with the Konrad Becker, those people, the public net base? No, not really. In Vienna, there were like three servers. There was like the public net space and then there was silver server and the fourth server on a fuck up. I think they were three and they were basically Shoshio has one golden knee. Yeah, yeah, he did it. I didn't do it. I never, I never went to Arsiotonic. Actually, I did move to Europe. When I moved to Europe, the main reason I was really happy to finally move here in 1990. '99 was because I could finally be in the same time zone as the people who work I really admired. I really enjoyed finally going by train and meeting you and meeting Olya and meeting everybody. Because view source was the biggest thing. You were so used to viewing people's brains, the inside of their mind in some way and seeing how their minds work and how their creations were made and so meeting people in real life. And I'd say that a lot of my work is about this idea, about how you're in the digital, it's also very intimate. This intimacy that you had, this intimate knowledge that you had of other people through their ideas. And then you finally meet them in person and it was just like, it was amazing. You felt like you all had already known each other for your whole lives in a funny way. And we shared that adventure. We were conspiracy theorists, but our conspiracy was making about their world and not describing the killing of Kennedy. And the fashion was comparable to what we've seen now with crazy people. I'm going to crazy you a lot. And maybe one thing, especially like, talking about like, like, lias, like, remove kind of project and we talked about like this audience engagement that net art provided with you kind of allowing your art to reach a kind of a global standpoint to some degree. And lias, remove was very amazing with it kind of allowing the audience to really interact with the system, really interact with the parameters and kind of change things around. How did this kind of global engagement kind of influence your guys' kind of creative careers or kind of ideas behind some of the work that you created? I'd really love to learn about that. Well, the first question we asked was, oh no, now we have a global audience. We're going to have to, we're going to have to somehow influence our topics. We're now suddenly going to have to forget our local cultures and things we care about and start behaving like IBM commercials. We like little girl in an Indian village operating in keyboard. And well, now everybody had a different answer to this. My little group of people, all of us being very cynical and very anti-capitalist and all of that. Our choice was to deliberately go for lower tech, our choices to deliberately go opposite to run at fastest we can in the opposite direction from the one subjected by the makers and vendors of any type of technology be it's up to our hardware infrastructure, protocols. So our aim as a spoke of the particular group of people was to like get away from that. So we didn't care, I think. And that made the work function. We kind of suggested one of the poetics that we later became ubiquitous. That was the question of time, but let's not complicate it. I guess we did not know how many people would see our work and that made it also like, I didn't know who my audience was, how there was no analytics or whatever. So it also, it kind of gave me freedom to do whatever I want. And I didn't have to fulfill anyone's expectations because there were none. So the biggest thing was, I think, do not have to have a gallery or someone who promotes you. You could just put it online and see what happens. That was the big freedom. Yeah, there was definitely a vibe of trying to avoid anything that normal as a gallery or something like this. Like you really wanted to see if we could create a different way of a different system. And I'd say that to what Vooka is saying, it was very eye-opening to encounter the so-called local cultures, the local cultures of anyone, outside of your own skin. At that time, and so suddenly to be confronted with what was going on in terms of global conflict and all this stuff from a real personal point of view, because you're suddenly immersed in it, so to speak, by your connection via your connection with other people. I for one was obsessed with the server logs of my servers. I was hosting my own stuff, even when I was in New York City for a while. And I was obsessed with knowing where people were coming from and where they were going. You could do that back then. You could just see where the IP address is, do a reverse look up. You could understand this. And to me, this was really important. Knowing who my audience was, I had a webcam trained on me. I was sitting at my desk and there was a webcam on me 24 hours a day. And people would come to my website for, I just replaced my entire homepage by this big video stream. What we would call a video stream, it was actually more like a pushing and animation every so many frames, because there was no video streams online. It was just a very fancy sort of def animation in a sense. And I could see when someone connected, because I would see it on the computer, someone's connected. And I would be able to know kind of where they were in the world. There was an email address and people could email me while I was sitting there working or whatever. And this was amazing, actually. But I'd say the most amazing thing was when I started hooking that up to visualization. So, Michael and I, when we got together, we made our web pages. We would always make sure there was a way you could see how many people were there. You know, sort of just this kind of basic data visualization. You would just see like, oh, via the way the pattern was on the page, you know, or we did an online performance every week via this engine that we hooked up with flash and pro scripts and all kinds of stuff. It was called wire fire and everybody would be visualized as a speck of dust on the screen. So you come in and it would just be, you know, and you would see the 50 people here, you know, or whatever. I mean, it's a good segue into talking about tech a little more maybe because flash was awesome. I'm just going to say the way you could hook it up to, I mean, there was director, which I, which Leah talked about, which I think was instrumental in a lot of us understanding in a very easy way how to create interactive visuals. But then you got something like flash where you could really hook it up with web tech with, like literally with other types of web scripting and all this and create very sophisticated things online very easily. I mean, if I could do it and anybody could, I felt and that was what was great about it. And I'm sorry, it's dead in a way. And even before that, there was, I think I cut my teeth on hypercard, which was almost forgotten these days, but it was all there. And I was really happy actually to hear Rick mentioned Hacking Bay and John Perry Barlow. I mean, that stuff was really, yeah, in the air and the influential for me, that's what, like my friends were talking about. The music we were listening to was that kind of stuff. We call out ensemble. I mean, I was in Pittsburgh. I knew, you know, and for me, it was really a lot was more in person, you know, with Steve and Nell Tenhoff. Actually was a big mentor for me at that time. And just the other, you know, grad students, who I learned so much from, you know, that's where I learned sort of about the cut up technique and just sort of like the, you know, the culture of like, you know, art is life and, you know, that kind of stuff. So I wasn't so much in the mailing list, but for me, it was like an in person thing. And I felt like, yeah, like sort of like there was like a, in this like weird club of, it's just a sliver of people who had like sort of a double life or like sort of access to some other, some other world that, you know, that we were concerned about as real life. So it's good to hear those names and ideas again. Yeah, the field, the three classes, not all was glorious, glorious, right? Yeah, amazing. But there's been all these stuff. I mean, we were all reading the histories of Avangards and we were all, I mean, most of us seeing ourselves as like the lone riders of this like completely new world and you looked back and there was all your acceptance and all, you know, blah, blah, blah, let's reshape. But genuinely, whatever you came up with, you told someone and it turns out it's like the first time that was ever uttered in the history of humanity. Like, whatever you put your fingers on to try and make, it was like the first free on the internet. It was like the first triangle on the internet. I don't know. And that's intoxicating and it's beautiful to remember. And it's in a rush even now that I recall some of these tiny episodes, super private episodes that it's, it's beautiful and glorious. Feels good. Well, all of us are like Jimmy Hendrix who failed to overdose, you know, which doesn't be alive talking of these things. Like gone with our, you know, use and should like that. Thank you. For the, for the wonderful image. I mean, I agree that it's, it's humbling to speak with with all of you. And I'd love to. maybe continue with questions that you have for each other. And one that it seemed like Aria asked Josh, what was a bit more about Flash. And I know Josh that you are known and you've used a lot. More languages than the just Flash, including lots more, including Java and processing. And you could tell us more about that as well. But yeah, I love to get your take as an early adopter of futures flash animator as it was called. And also you have a quote of that maybe you can tell us a bit more about. It's that Flash was a scripting language with a vector based environment. I like the idea that I could edit things on the fly. There were more possibilities with illustration than there were with Photoshop. So I'm wondering Josh, if you could just maybe break that down for us and maybe explain that to us a little bit more, especially anybody who's listening without any technical background. Yeah, so first understand that when I saw Leah and her work and knew that she was doing an director in Lingo that the book for director was like this big. And the book for Flash was this big. So let's not let's not kid anybody. I ran away from director because the book was too large. It was I just felt like oh my god, there's too much to know and I'll never be able to catch up. At the time it was called futures flash animator when I first started using it. It was not owned by macro media. Macro media then of course buys it and then it becomes flash. And really, I mean, I'm going to be totally honest. The reason why I really went to flash was that there was this moment when I realized that when I was working in HTML and JavaScript and I'm going to watch everyone's face on this call right now because you'll all understand what I'm talking about. I swear to god, I spent half of my time on a project just sniffing whether they were on Mac, where they were on PC, where they were using Netflix, where they Netflix. Escape, where they're using internet explorer, like half of my code was just trying to figure out what hardware the end user was using. And so when flash came about and it said, hey, the thing that you make is exactly what the person will see as long as they have the plug in. And as I was just like, okay, cool, that's it. I'm gone like goodbye HTML and JavaScript. Hello flash. HTML you needed was the embed tag. Oh, you did. The embed tag and and everyone would see exactly the thing that you intended. So there was this idea of intention that when you were working in HTML and JavaScript and because it was the Wild West, like you just didn't quite know, like you go over to a friend's house and you'd be like, wait a minute. This triangle is all the way up there and it's green. That's not what I intended it to look like. And so I go to flash like super quick because I realized like the intention that I had the thing that I could make. I knew that they were going to see it as long as they had the plug in and the plug in was actually, you know, growing and growing at an exponential rate that we kind of knew that it was it was going to take off. It was vector based. So you asked this question about, you know, raster versus versus vector. And this is your Photoshop versus Illustrator. So it's like, if I make a square in Photoshop, you know, it's it's made up of pixels. And if I make it in Illustrator, it's actually points that describe that square. So I always loved working in the vector based environment because it didn't matter if it was a CD ROM or a billboard. It could be printed at any size. And I remember having this conversation super early on with Leah. I was like, how are you making work like for these album covers like because we were all working at like 640 by 480, mind you, like that was the resolution 640 by 480. And here Leah was making these like amazing like album covers. And I think she told me like one time either online or when we met up that she was making her work like super huge. And I think maybe you were tiling it so that she could assemble the tiles in Photoshop. And then when she would shrink it down to the album size, it would gain in resolution so that it could be printed. Right. So these were all problems that we had with vector. It didn't matter like it could be printed at any size. And it also meant that and Scott had mentioned this too. When you look at my early work, it's static because I couldn't animate it because what I was doing is I was writing all these programs and flash. I was actually passing them through post script and post script would generate this dot PS file that I could open up an illustrator and an illustrator. I love showing this slide when I give talks. My flash programs that I was writing passing through post script were 144,000 layers in illustrator. So they could not be animated. And that's why you don't see me start to animate things until like you know maybe 15 or years later where I was able to actually animate some of this stuff that I was generating. So I always liked vector because obviously when it's raster, it's flattened and it was very hard to edit anything inside a Photoshop where these flash files because I was drawing with vectors and then painting them back to post script to vectors. It meant that if I didn't like something, I could just select that individual thing and just delete it or change the color. So there was this way that I could edit things that was just a lot, a lot, a lot easier. And the funny thing is I spent 15, 20 years in flash. I worked at a studio called IO 360 and my designer was Casey Reese. And I was like one of three we were called design technologists and Casey then later says like, I think I want to learn how to program and we were like, oh, okay, cool Casey, like you go do that. And he's like, yeah, I'm going to take continuing education classes at NYU and we're like awesome. And then like a month later, he's like, yeah, I think I'm going to go to MIT and we were like, what the fuck is going on. And it's funny because I'm known Casey for a long time. And of course, he creates processing and now like it just comes full circle like, you know, I'm mostly using process second of day today. So it's just such a really beautiful weird circle that occurred. And that we do P5 JS. We're back to the web. Yeah. My answer to vectors or raster was I think like don't go, don't go where the capital is and he's going like don't go there. And I'm not criticizing your choice young man. I'm just trying to reply. No, I'm right now I'm redoing actually my old remove works to put them online again and I'm using P5 JS and I had to write something that would because directly with pixel based. So I have to write something now that puts things by. Would something onto a pixel and not in between and not make it anti al al or something like that. So. And directly if I would draw a line from one point to the other, it would be really, really pixelated. And so I had to find something you would just call phrase and hands line algorithm that actually I can use to make lines pixelated again. That I get the same feeling look from the mid 90s again. It works for most of the stuff I'm doing right now, but with some with some shapes, I have problems, but yeah, I'm working on it. Yeah, about the about the output. Yeah, I once I wrote a remember I wrote a. I wrote a Adobe PDF. Description, which was super long and I wrote my own Adobe PDF files output. Output from director, which would write post script file so that I could then open with Adobe as a PDF. Quite I was back part of that back then. I didn't it did it did lines and pixels mostly. Yeah. And then of course in 2013 Casey was asking me if I should if I would like to do some processing piece for the online exhibition of the processing website and was like, yes, sure. Half a year later, I was like, Oh, now I have to learn how to write in processing. So I had to learn like this direct translation basically from lingo to processing and yeah. In the meantime, I'm using different languages, of course, also. Yeah, I think 2008 or nine. So I went to the framework lab at the art of tonica. They were kind enough to have me there and. It's got learned how to program a little bit in C++. I'm still not a very good programmer. I guess I learned a little bit of elastic. It's like me with GLSL right now. time I look at GLSL and I'm like, what in the God's name is this? It's like, it's like, it's like the most crazy, like crazy language I think I've ever looked at. And it's so funny, it's like you think you know what you're doing, you know, so okay, 30 years of programming. And then yeah, now I look at GLSL and I'm like, I have no idea what I'm doing. I find it kind of interesting that the different programming languages, for me, it's a different way of thinking with many languages. So like the shader programming I tried, I did some things, but it's like, it's cracking my brain every time I try it again. And I forget it again and again. So it's just, I figured it's just not my way of thinking. And it's funny how like node-based programming, you know, has really changed people who maybe don't want to learn how to program. You know, it's like you look at, and I kind of wish maybe we had those tools early on, like the touch designers and the notches. It's really in the VVVVs. It's amazing how those tools have really matured to allow people to kind of navigate in the work that we were having to do, you know, completely by hand, which is absurd. The Max program goes back to, you know, Erkham in the 80s. So it's really been around. I don't know who was doing it back then. But it's definitely an old idea. It's still a good one. So people love that. And I think it's great for getting stuff up and messing around. But you know, at least personally, for like, you know, building like, you know, engineering or a large complicated project at some point, all the wires drive me crazy. I get lost and frustrated. And always return to just the text. Still a good one in a terminal. So it's really, I think, in book, I'd agree. I'm sure that you can do everything worth a grid of characters. So everything can be expressed with the simplest thing. I have an architect friend who is a cynical bastard, a little bit like me. And he claims that he can recognize that by walking down the street, he can tell which house was done in AutoCAD, the three and which one in AutoCAD for. That is a trap. I think it's more like a dog, but that's a type of trap I'm trying to avoid. Like it's a, I call it a consumer electronics trap. Well, the idea is right there. You know, the language, you know, affects us. And just like the the tools affect us. And you can, it leaves its mark in the work. Yeah. And then how you actually embrace it, and do you try to fight it or you try to get graduated? And why not as a better effect? And like call it the plus, not the minus, whatever it is. I just want to really recap something that for me, I think is really resonated with me for this entire discussion that in my mind kind of encapsulates our crew in the 90s. And you guys can obviously a chirp in or disagree or agree. But I think the thing that I think stands out the most about something that Leah mentioned was that for me personally, I was a, I was a skateboarder, you know, I did not go to school for computer science. I had to sort of like self teach myself programming. And that was a blessing and a curse. I think it took me a lot longer to like learning how to program. But I, because I didn't know what the rules were, we ended up like a breaking a lot of the rules. And so I think one thing that I would say kind of resonates from this, this decade of, of navigating this space is that it really was working in a vacuum and avoid. And it was sort of trying this, this work and sort of yelling it into the nothingness, hoping that people enjoyed it as much as I enjoyed making it. But it was a struggle because there was no reference, there was no YouTube, there was no look up to see how something was done. And I, and I think in a lot of ways that that was really beautiful because we did a lot of things that I think helped kind of forge our community. And also it just meant that we weren't doing things by the rules. It was very, it felt like the Wild West. And it's interesting because if you look at today, and obviously we didn't talk about NFTs because it doesn't relate. But it's amazing how it feels very cyclical. It feels like a lot of the stuff that has happened in the NFTs space, hearts back to like a lot of the stuff that we were trying and experimenting with back in the in the early 90s. And yeah, that that's it for me. I think I'm really grateful for the time that we've all had today. And and that's my take on this wild, weird vacuum of a time and space. Thank you, Josh. What an incredible conversation we had. And thank you all so much for the time. I think Josh, it's really interesting what you said about the kind of the working and avoid. It reminds me of what a lot of the 80s pioneers that we've talked to also said. And maybe you remember that too, Conrad. And what's so interesting about the 90s is that you had these kind of disparate nodes, but then the internet came and brought everybody together. And I think that's that's one of the the big takeaways from from this decade. And then the Wild West then just got transplanted online and and that's where we're still at today. So thank you. What an incredible panel and discussion. I mean, I really could go on forever, but I have to, you know, we have to respect everybody else's time. But just thank you all so much. We couldn't be more grateful and thankful. It's been a real pleasure. And I hope we can do it again soon. For me, it was good. Thanks a lot. I haven't seen some of these faces for quite a while. So this is cool. And yeah, there will be some other occasions. I can't time. I hope let me sometimes physically drink beer or not. Whatever. Thanks for having me as well. Yeah, thank you everybody. It's really an understatement that it's an honor to kind of have this script together. It feels like a bunch of lifelong friends kind of getting together the chat and we get to kind of be out of this fireside kind of fly on the wall situation. But thank you for everyone for the anecdotal stories and kind of dialogue that was able to be kind of brought up throughout this entire time. Thank you all again. Thank you. Bye bye. Give everyone. Bye bye. Bye.