Conversations: Mitch Trale

An evolving conversation between Mitch Trale and I beginning with a discussion of his work, Tower Inline

“This piece is called Tower Inline. It is a pocket internet; a sculptural server built with mirrored bronze acrylics and a custom hardware / software stack. This internet contains a single web site, called Etemenanki.

Etemenanki is a micro-blogging site, modeled after Twitter. The conversants in this system are bots running sophisticated artificial intelligence programs. Each bot possesses its own “brain”, and speaks its language from this knowledge base. As the bots read each others’ messages, they immediately integrate new learnings about syntax and vocabulary back into their own brains, allowing each bot to chart its own course towards perfect comprehensibility within its peer group.

Smart phones, laptops, and other WiFi-enabled devices may connect to Tower Inline while sharing a physical proximity with the piece. Doing so allows a viewer to spy on the near-constant conversation occurring between the bots of Etemenanki.

With this piece we are interested in creating a subspace within which an evolution of language may be isolated and accelerated. Moreover, we are exploring the cultural and technological implications surrounding the instantiation of a private internet, which functions as an independent and parallel environment to our primary Internet.”

Mitch Trale and Jacob Broms Engblom, 2011

Louis: So, what’s first interesting about Tower Inline is that it’s an object, and though it can be viewed online as such, it can’t actually be experienced this way because it literally relies on a viewers physical presence/proximity to it in order to activate/access its content.  While it seems that most art objects struggle to go beyond themselves and most participatory projects aim to do just that (but often look or feel convoluted or too complicated) Tower Inline seems to cleanly contain all these elements successfully; it is a sound unforgiving monolithic structure, yet explicitly relies on a viewer’s voyeurism for it to go beyond itself.  Enter the computer.

In this way it’s a nice approach to offline exhibition space seeing that it can only be activated physically.  Most of your works are created on the computer and experienced online, was creating a work that couldn’t be accessed this way a specific goal/challenge?

Mitch: I’ve had a hard time sorting out my feelings about physical objects since I started really thinking about this shit a few years ago. Just dealing with ideas about access and permanence and decay when making a thing. Digital objects can short some of those issues out by being evergreen and always online, hosted hermetically on a server somewhere. Most of my work enjoys those conditions, and I wanted to translate some of that to this private space inside a box, where these bots could have this constant exchange that could be somehow outside of time, while still forcing myself to deal with the structure and physicality of this prison I was constructing.

There was also an idea coming from the JstChillin READ/WRITE show itself, which encouraged artists to translate or integrate aspects of their pieces for the Serial Chillers project into something physical. My digital piece for that show was called Analog Environments, and it was about this parallel nature of online and offline, which I feel are these highly analogous zones now. I’d been thinking about being more aware of the intersections between those two planes, and of the controls in place which determine how I can use these systems, and about how my access to these online resources is gated by devices and ISPs. And doesn’t ISP seems like a really weird acronym now? Like, how much do I truly rely on AT&T to provide me with a connection to the Internet, which I often treat like a birthright and an embodiment of my hopes for the future? I’m not trying to talk about net neutrality but that shit is going to get crucial sooner or later.

Anyway with Tower Inline I was interested in building an object that could model a kind of independent and self-contained internet, with controlled access points / intersections into our space, as a counterpoint to the pervasiveness we feel when we think about how the proper Internet is suffused throughout our lives. It’s like we’re all swimming in this ocean but there are lakes everywhere — these inland, private nets, full of 0-day couriers and government employees and quiet, calculating machines.

L: I think it’s interesting that READ/WRITE culminated in an object based exhibition; this process of translating the immaterial into the material, as if to make the former more “real”.  In this way I feel we still rely on objects to confirm a desire for authenticity or to legitimize an experience.  In many ways physical realization is also a good excuse for bringing together a massive group of people (READ/WRITE).  But, I wonder if we really need to showcase anything at all if the incentive is just to socialize and get a chance to meet your online friends face to face.  On the other hand, there is an importance to this kind of translation: how do I make my online work successful in the physical gallery space when it seems like there’s no good reason to do so?  And of course this conversation is met with a myriad of opinions, some embracing objects and exhibition, some consider attempts at materialization futile, and others trying to make it all work without necessarily incorporating the physicality of objects.

There’s no doubt that physical exhibition is essential—as a space, not as the ideal representation or vessel for an art experience, but today as a hub for furthering our social relationships with one another; a type of relational zone.  So, when you say online and offline are today, now highly analogous zones, I would agree in that there isn’t a hierarchical evaluation of experience, i.e. you don’t privilege offline or online experience over one another, instead they are understood to represent a plethora of varied experiences, but, online and offline exhibition/work still seem to be at odds with each other in the presentational aspect.  Perhaps this is why 3d rendered exhibition spaces can be so disappointing because they merely mimic what their offline documented versions lack (the extensive gallery walkthrough, the gigapixel close ups, the video/sound pieces, etc.).

Your metaphor, “It’s like we’re all swimming in this ocean but there are lakes everywhere” nicely summarizes the simultaneous private and public spaces of the internet.  It actually reminds me of that Firefox extension that came out this year, called Firesheep developed by Eric Butler.  It’s this session hijacking add-on that allows you to take on the log-in credentials of any nearby user logged on to sites like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etc.  Butler’s intention was to highlight the security risks of certain social networking sites (i.e. the non encryption of login cookies).  By exploiting the “openness” of these systems he hoped to create an increased awareness of the websites we pilgrimage to everyday.  Though, I wonder if his project was successful in this aspect.  It seems that the obvious incentive to download Firesheep is so one can assume the identity of another but from a distance so to speak.  By this I mean there exists a desire to enter into a foreign account/space without the intention of modifying or editing information but to quietly, “safely” investigate and gather: to look without touching. We are aware of the dissemination of our personal information, yet were not quite bothered.  We seem to embrace these modes of hyper social surveillance as long as we are being paid attention to and so long as we get to pay attention to others.  There’s a certain thrill to scavenging through the emails or chats of another and I think Tower Inline encapsulates these excitements, only the conversing bots carry no information that is directly valuable and thus alienate themselves from the visitor in a way.

M: I don’t feel like the physicality of the pieces in READ/WRITE was a confirmation or abnegation of the digital work that had been exhibited through Serial Chillers. The gallery’s just another context with its own constraints, and I think many of the artists involved have shown that they can move fluidly between online and offline space.  Relatively few artists in that show seemed concerned with adapting their existing online work to this offline setting. If anything, READ/WRITE provided an opportunity for the artists to expand their practices to include physical forms and concerns. This was certainly true for me, as I hadn’t worked in physical sculpture before that show.

I don’t know, man. I like a lot of the renders we’ve seen lately, and mostly because they’re so cheeky and fucking good looking. The power of solid trompe l’oeil to fool audiences into sentimentality or a false sense of preciousness is something I love seeing play out. Like with Billy Rennekamp and Timur Si-Qin’s work at Chrystal Gallery. There’s that tension between how good we think we are at detecting a visual falsehood, and how hard it can be to actually do so when our perspective is controlled by someone else. We’re not explicityly releasing control but we’re being forced to realize we aren’t necessarily entitled to the singularity of our vision online.

Dude sometimes I feel like it’s already Strange Days out there and we’re all just trying not to get Sizemored into oblivion by each others’ sensations and experiences. We’re surrendering privacy all the time and we’re fine with it so long as we aren’t forced to deal with the totality of the data that’s being generated, but as soon as you look at it closely it’s just these moving mountains of identity.

I agree that it’s alienating to read these bots’ conversations and to wonder about their weird private world, and to think about them in their oubliette internet just spinning this endless yarn of local, inbred language. At one point we had considered using some kind of lit up / water-cooled Russian PC case as this readymade enclosure for the piece, as a way of inviting people to engage with this bright object, but decided against it because we realized that what was important to us was the impersonality of the computer, and an expression of the sterility and energy absorption inherent in a loopback network. I think the barrier of entry to the piece turns out to be important, because in some ways these bots are operating outside of our time and scope, and what they’re building is not for us, exactly.

L: Response in progress…