Jan Robert Leegte (NL) has been active as an internet and browser artist since the early days of the world wide web. Rosa Menkman (NL) is a glitch artist and theorist who achieved fame around 2010 for her work around image compression in the context of digital visual culture. Matthew Plummer-Fernandez is a ‘bot’ artist and blogger on, among other sites, Algopop, where he writes about the role of algorithms in daily life. Works by Jan Robert Leegte and Rosa Menkman were acquired along with works by Rafaël Rozendaal and others in December 2016 by the Stedelijk Museum in association with the Museum of the Image (MOTI) in Breda. Matthew Plummer-Fernandez is co-curator and speaker at the Bot Club, the Thursday Night Live! programme about current developments in algorithmic culture, the first edition of which will take place on 2 March 2017.

Using the content of Sleep Mode and their own experiences as a starting point, all three reflect upon the increasing entanglement of human culture and computational processes, about various notions of digital simulation and about the development of different audiences in relation to digital culture.

Entangled

Since the early days of screensavers, the ways that human authors, code, hardware and the public affect each other has changed radically. At that time, generative images were still an exotic phenomenon that frequently referred to pure mathematical laws that allowed the computer to simulate natural processes. Today large parts of the media, the economy and other sectors of society are hopelessly entangled in indistinct interactions between human psychology, biased computer models, filter bubbles, statistical forecasting, misplaced suspicion and misplaced trust in technology.

KK: Alongside yourselves as makers, various kinds of software such as browsers, digital platforms, hardware and the wider environment of the internet all have a voice in your work. How do you see the interaction between yourself as author and the roles of all the other software and hardware elements?

JR: For me that is a very material question, almost like asking: ‘What sort of paint do you use?’ But it was a real process of realisation. When I began in the late 1990s there was barely any history for my sort of work. At that time I always showed it in Windows ’98 with Windows Explorer. For me, the formal idiom of that interface referred to modernism and minimalism, more so than that of the Mac from that time. That specific form was important. See, for example, Scrollbar Composition from 2000.

I didn’t make any more online work for a while after that. When I looked at my old work again in 2007 I saw that it was totally transformed. I viewed Scrollbar Composition on a Mac with the new aqua scroll bars. It had become something totally different in visual terms. At first that created a distance and the work didn’t interest me so much any more but at a certain moment I saw that that transformation was essential. I began to understand the digital ecology of the development of the web.

I now make a lot of works that use APIs and here the transformation and vulnerability can actually be a point of departure.[1]  You don’t know precisely what will happen in the black box of an API. For example, when I showed Random Selection Random Image in Mexico, very different images emerged than in the Netherlands. The Flickr database is highly localised. If you log on in Mexico, the image results for your searches come from the region around Mexico. Then you see the tactics of a company such as Flickr unexpectedly expressed in your work. Nowadays I really enjoy giving in to this.

In January I was in a show, Electronic Superhighway, at the Whitechapel Gallery in London. Together with the musician Dragan Espenschied I had the idea of showing a work in three different epochs. Then you suddenly feel the performative characteristics of such a work, that it has developed over time.

RM: I’m always interested in pulling apart all those voices or actors to see which ‘affordances’ and specific qualities they possess. I think it’s important to analyse this and to show it in order to get a better notion of how the technology actually works and how it influences my perception and perspective. Sometimes, for example, a compression with certain qualities plays an important role. 

"Sometimes there are enormous political choices and issues behind the choice for a certain piece of software. I try to capture and show motivations and consequences, either in images or sometimes in sound."

I always focus on a small part of the enormous chaos of elements that play a role in this and try to elucidate it from different perspectives. In short, this means that I often attempt to anthropomorphise various elements. I did this, for example, in DCT, a work from 2016 in which I attempt to offer a perspective on how JPEG compression works by following the compression from compression to compression.  

MPF: I begin to see my work as reconfiguration, of code repositories, platforms, Google searches and such. For me it is interesting to bring those voices into the process as part of a generative process. I try to reconfigure or recycle those elements into something humorous or satirical. I kind of think of them as entangled systems that are by their own nature quite open-ended. I use APIs or other tools of which the end result is also open-ended to turn pre-conceived ideas about what you should do with those tools on their head.

I do not see this as direct criticism. It is more like performing a strange, mischievous social role, exposing the norms of the system of the technical construct that programmers, users, everybody seems to obey. By turning everything around, by twisting the plot slightly, that set of rules and norms is breached.

Simulation

KK: More and more realities are being algorithmically modelled and optimised. We are to Facebook what those cows are to the milk-production system. There is often a mathematical model behind those sorts of systems that functions as a normalising standard for the algorithms’ interventions. In the first screensavers and in early generative art, simulations – mathematical models of reality – often played in the foreground: the idea that an aspect of reality could be captured in an algorithm and imitated in the computer. With the emergence of ‘machine learning’ and digital platforms, dynamic models of parts of reality play a role in more parts of society. Does the idea of simulation play a role in your work?

JRL: A classic idea of simulation plays an important role in my Minecraft work, for example in Spiral Jetty, which is literally a participation in a digital, simulated environment in order to reflect upon the artistic tradition of Land Art. Robert Smithson (the maker of the original Spiral Jetty in 1970) subjected himself physically to an ambitious project in an inhospitable area. He attempted to succumb to the landscape. That sort of idea is also important in Minecraft. For that reason, I made my Spiral Jetty in Survival Mode. [3] That was a very conscious choice for the idea of simulation. Otherwise I would just have been playing with Lego. First I had to find a good place, like Smithson had. 

"I had to travel, search and find, while beating off monsters. I had to build a hiding place and make tools." 

Minecraft has its own process that you go through as a player, also with disappointments. That’s also very funny. Then I climbed into a high tree, but that didn’t give me a good shot. I had to climb up another tree in a different place or stack stones to make a screenshot. This work also plays with the idea of simulation in the receptive sense. Most people know Spiral Jetty only from photos and documentation. Very few people have been there because it’s in the middle of nowhere. It is also now underwater. People also know my Spiral Jetty in Minecraft only from the documentation.

I was very intrigued by the qualities of landscape in the digital domain. Not only in Minecraft, but also, for example, in Flickr. That’s what Mountains & Dropshadows is about. This work should of course be compared with what Eva en Franco Mattes have done: the re-enactments of famous  performances by Marina Abramovic and Gilbert & George in Second Life. I think of Second Life more as a culture simulator than a nature simulator like Minecraft. In my opinion, those re-enactments of performances wouldn’t make any sense in Minecraft. This sort of work is more about what is simulated than about the more abstract idea of the nature of simulation. 

"Simulations are not only models or reproductions but are speculative machines in which something new can always happen and which can make predictions."

RM: The concept of ‘simulation’ has a limiting factor: many simulations take on the visual form of the process they simulate. There are so many possibilities in more fluid translations of actions that do not always need to be observed or do not directly resemble the things they simulate. Take cancer research, for example: by simulating or modelling the growth of cancer not in imagery but in sound, the growth and development of a tumour can be observed via a rhythm. Some forms of cancer grow at a different ‘rhythm’: for people, development is easier to understand and assess via rhythm than through an image. I think there’s an enormous wealth and future within the field of more experimental forms of simulation and translation.

MPF: That early notion of simulation triggers curiosity, almost in a historical perspective. It goes back to the weird dichotomy of the virtual and the real, and the idea that these digital processes were there to compute or mirror physical processes. My work called Peak Simulator was really about simulation. It was looking at the history of simulation and generative art, at the first modelling of 3D terrains. The first computer-generated landscape was made by Loren Carpenter and was used for Star Trek 2.

When I was asked to do something for the Lake District, a beautiful, mountainous area in the UK, I decided to take his original algorithm and then build a mountain ridge and put it side by side with a real natural landscape. I wanted to take it from its simulated nature and put it back in the physical world, as a form of physical trace of an algorithmical process. It is easy to suggest that algorithms are part of the digital domain and not of the physical, but it is interesting to see such processes materialise. The Amazon warehouse is a good example, a huge physical space that is entirely arranged by algorithms.

Simulation started with the question of how to model the outside world, but we have moved beyond this to almost a reversal, in which physical processes have now become the traces of primary digital processes. I am not particularly interested in algorithmical processes that emulate natural phenomena. That is too romantic.

"The element I want to bring in from the physical world is the messiness of it. The human element."

In the early days of generative art, media art had a highly speculative dimension, the exploration of technology. But the computational has become banal, rather than sublime or futuristic. My work doesn’t have to find strength in newness, it is about the now, not about the future at all. It is also not about technology as such, it just takes technology as a context.

For me technology becomes more interesting to play with when it becomes banal. I would rather make a piece on Facebook than on virtual reality. VR is not banal enough yet. It is still exoticised. Whereas Facebook is as boring as a shopping centre. Everyone knows that. So that is where you can do your software art equivalent of The Dawn of the Dead.

KK: Perhaps the screensaver had a banal aspect?

MPF: The screensaver did not have a place in media art that relied on the technological sublime. Screensavers were rather simple pieces of software, and were not designed to run on supercomputers. Maybe you can regard it as a kind of folk art. The screensaver became this cultural artefact that was overlooked at the time because it was so ordinary.