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Feral File x Rhizome: Net Evil Launch Talk
Recorded: Aug. 26, 2025 Duration: 0:59:38Space Recording
Full Transcription
I have the card to make you live.
Oh, no, Michael.
Come in.
And then we'll know.
Hold on.
I have an echo.
Oh, we're live.
Amazing.
Hi, everyone.
I'm Lauren Jones.
I'm Director of Growth and Growth at Feral File.
I want...
Does anybody else hear an echo?
I don't think we heard.
Yeah, you cut out a little.
You sound fine now. Okay. Anybody else here, Necco? I don't think we heard. Yeah, you cut out a little.
You sound fine now. Okay.
I wanna welcome you to the launch talk for NetEvil.
We're thrilled to talk to the curator, McDavenport.
Most of the artists with us.
I'm so sorry.
I think there's something coming with me on the phone.
I'm gonna actually. I think there's something happening with my microphone. I'm going to actually turn it right over to Michael Connor of our programming center for this exhibition.
And I'll let you introduce all of the artists as well. Thank you everyone for being here.
Thank you, Lauren.
Hi. Yeah, this is a really great project. I'm really excited to be here. I'm Michael
Connor from RISO. And we are a programming partner this summer with Fural File. We got
to do another of these earlier in the summer for their entire exhibition, which was also
full of really exciting works.
But I really love this one in particular because we have
an especially fun and juicy topic, which is the seven deadly sins serving as the structure
for an exhibition of new works by seven artists, each one representing their own sin.
So we're here to talk about sin today.
And I think like, the concept resonates with me, we're gonna hear from Mac in a moment, because there's
really so much kind of fear mongering about the internet right now um age restriction in the uk and things like this um that make um
make for a definite sense of like the internet is a kind of forbidden fruit
which um in some ways is maybe what's interesting about it um so i'm going to turn it over to Mac
to introduce the topic of the exhibition,
and then we will hear from each of the seven artists
or five of the seven who are with us today.
Yeah.
I mean, I think you introduced it pretty well.
The exhibition is Net Evil.
It's an exploration of evil and sin on the internet.
I think as, I mean, artists,
or I guess for these artists involved
with technology and things like that, we have a very like generally optimistic view of the internet
and technology and how useful it's been, particularly, you know, for digital art and all
sorts of things. And I don't know, I found I was sort of like, any dig with this sort of like
utopia of like, oh, it can fix all these problems, but there are legitimately like bad things going on on the Internet.
Right. There's a reason for all this fear mongering and all this stuff.
And I thought it would be interesting to focus on that for a bit.
And also like it can lead to a lot of kind of like fun and engaging work.
Right. So when I was thinking about the way to structure a show that would deal with bad things on the internet, there is already this
kind of like moral code separating all the bad things, which is the seven sins. So that would
be an interesting framework to do it. So each of these artists is representing one of the seven
sins vaguely inspired or directly pulled from how those sins manifest on the internet. So it's much
more of a sort of thematic thing tying it all together. There's a huge range of medium and style and all sorts of things like that.
So yeah, that is NetEvil in summary.
Yeah, I don't know if, Michael, if you just want to turn it right over to the artist to introduce their individual works.
I mean, I can click through them or I could start that as well.
You're muted, sorry.
Which thing should we start with?
Let me see.
I think, let's start with, well, who was at the top of the page here?
I was going to suggest maybe Sloth.
Oh, we don't have Damiansky here.
We don't have Damiansky, but I can talk about it.
Let me talk through his work.
Yeah, why don't you do that since we're hearing from you already.
He's first, right.
I'll start with him.
So Damiansky has released Napster 24. So Damiansky has released quite a few artworks he's an artist based in new
york quite a few artworks based on this idea of sleep right so he had this app called napster
where you could sort of find a place for him to nap and then a three-day version of him would show
up there um so he was naturally the first one i thought of when I thought of sleep, but he took it to much a darker place than I thought it would with naps for 24.
So on August 8th, 2025, Zemnowski took 24 naps, which basically means he completely disrupted his sleep schedule.
One nap every hour. He would sleep roughly for 10 minutes an hour.
He started at 12 a.m. and he ended at 12 a.m. the next day, basically.
ended at 12 AM the next day, basically. And these pieces are based on data from a sleep tracker that
he wore while he was doing this, and he used them to visualize. So they mean all sorts of different
things based on sort of how deep the sleep was, how long it was, all these different legal metrics
he used to visualize them. So it took a relatively dark turn to what I had initially thought of like,
oh, he's sort of like fun sleeping artist. So I thought that was very interesting. So this is Napster24 from Damjanski.
The whole idea, or at least one of the ideas that he spoke about with me is this idea that sort of
the internet can fracture your sleep schedule, right? Like you can be up having to do something
on this side of the world. Maybe there's remote work. There's all these sort of reasons
and ways in which the internet changes based on the time. There's different
people on at 2 a.m. Then there are at 9 a.m. It's all these different places. And that sort of
fractured sleep schedule is what he performed and then used as the basis for the data to create
these artworks here. So it's kind of like a, you know, relating to like optimization culture a little bit.
People, there's a lot of people talking about like the importance of sleep to good health.
Yes.
And I think, yeah, there's like the positive side of it.
There's also maybe the like obsessing over, you know, your body's metrics to the point of you know measuring nighttime boners and all
of that stuff to get into too um and then they're sort of like yeah intentionally torching that for
the sake of an artwork right to be able to do wrath next? We can go to retina.
I'm looking at Lorna here. Hi Lorna. Hi. How are you? I'm good. Straight from RGBMTL,
I really wish I could have been there. How was it? It's a big goofy love fest it just has nothing to do with
selling or promoting we're just looking at art on incredible screens and uh crts and happy to see
each other so it's definitely not nft nyc that's it not this. We're here to sell.
Yeah.
Support the artists.
Get in there.
Put these in your wallet.
Show them yourself.
Werner, what have you got for us for this in a wrath?
Oh, well, when I was first invited to do this, I thought, I'm sure I've got something I can throw in, you know. But then I don't know how it happened, where I first noticed it, but I ended up doing a deep dive into ballistic gel dummies. bodies and the more expensive ones obviously have blood inside and some kind of arm armature some of
them have muscles the blood colors change you know depending on you know where you're getting it from
and there are just this there's this incredible wealth of guys testing um weapons on these. So I've got like swords, axes, guns, bowling balls, baseball bats,
anything you can imagine that's going to do damage to a human body,
they're throwing at it.
And the other great thing is that for this particular footage
that is on YouTube,'re um slow motion uh so there's so many more
frames and everything's like crisp so they were even though they're incredibly detailed and like
have like so many little bits of blood and chips of bone they're so clear and crisp there's no motion blur so that like it was fun to actually
cut them out it's not always fun cutting this stuff but they're like if you don't know i just
cut things i take gifts i abbreviate them as much as possible and um then i just cut them by hand
frame by frame and that for these ones these were taking about a week and a half each, some longer because of the detail.
And yes, slapping them on a colored background or a black background.
And there you go, Rath.
Thank you, Orna.
So you're doing these frame by frame is it have you tried to not do that or
is it like part of the fact you have to look like this um i really wish i could automate the process
you wish you could so the discipline is not itself a virtue. Not necessarily. Sometimes it is.
Because when you're that close to an image or like, you know, a set of images, a sequence of images.
You know, I'm able to think how I would place them in a collage.
So you're into it.
You do a deep dive into what is in front of you.
And that focus, you know know is a big part of
what I do but I um um when it comes to automation the amount of decisions I make for every frame
and different decisions I can't really instruct someone to do it it's so peculiar and it's peculiar
to the animation I'm using it's peculiar to the image it's peculiar to the animation I'm using.
It's peculiar to the image.
It's peculiar to the, you know, whether the quality of the photographic, the initial photographic or video image.
So all of those things require a human brain rather than the machine brain at this point.
Yeah.
Well, in particular, your human brain, in order to, yes.
But I'm curious, Mac, why did you choose,
I feel like you somewhat cast Warner against type,
obviously very well known for pornographic gifts as well.
Yes.
Was it because she had this body of work that you were aware of?
Well, I think it depends on the timing because some artists chose, right?
And then some artists were sort of assigned by necessity.
And Lorna, I believe, chose.
Oh, she chose.
Yes.
And I think there was, I mean, there's, of course, like the,
there's the pornographic work, like, you know,
the penis being stuck in the trombone or whatever,
something I'm very familiar with and all sorts of things like that from Lauren's work, not in general.
But maybe that work is not about sex actually.
Right. I mean, there's, I think like,
what I was looking for with all the artists is sort of like the willingness
to engage in kind of like unsavory or dangerous things. Right.
The right person. Yes. But I think they've all done it in some way, right? It's just in totally different ways. So yeah Lorna said wrath and I said it sounds great.
Well lust wouldn't work for me because like the sexuality in my stuff is very burlesque.
Yes. Cheesy sexual innuendo. So you know it's not really lust it doesn't end up sexy yeah no no very very
yeah it's i mean sometimes it's very absurd and sometimes a little bit horrifying oh definitely
burlesque is not exactly the word i would use i'm going to look back at it with that word in mind
um wonder would you like to choose the next sin for us to visit
oh i absolutely loved my man's envy we go to envy thank you so much lorna it's really cool to hear about your process from you um yeah this is envy um well the the piece is titled hard copy i've been thinking about this piece for
a really long time um when the news story broke around this case between sydney nicole gifford
and alissa shiel um i was totally enamored by it it's It's one influencer suing another for copying her. And when I found
this court document, I just thought it was so beautiful. One of the most beautiful documents
I'd ever seen in my life and completely absurd. And so when I was talking to Mac about what to, what, um, sin to choose and what, what piece to make. I was really fixated on
this idea of envy and how it's kind of like an emotion that underlies a lot of the work that I
make, which I think it's an emotion that underlies a lot of forms of desire on the internet. Um,
but it was really fun to think about this. And then for a while,
I was like, should I edit the PDF? Like, should I extract the imagery from it? Because the imagery
is so interesting. But ultimately, I just felt that the document untouched was so perfect visually
and so absurd that all I added to it was my digital signature in the bottom right corner, which
is how I signed every document people ask me to sign online.
And it's behind me.
Installed in my studio.
The hard copy.
The hard copy.
Yes.
Yeah, this is a really, this would have been been great for we recently did our seven on seven
arden technologist collaboration program and this year all of our technologists were lawyers this
would have been yeah um yeah yeah context very in this is in a similar world yeah but one of the
things like i gleaned from talking with all of those lawyers was
like how much um how much law sort of i guess shapes what we think of as art or creativity
or like kind of encodes it um and it's really fascinating to think of the um
arguments taking place here which are kind of easy to dismiss,
but then also people are building big businesses and putting time and passion into these creative
decisions as well. So maybe we can, yeah. I mean, is it about envy or is, you know,
I mean, is it about envy or is, you know,
should we be taking these influencers more seriously
at face value with their claims?
I think that's what's so fascinating to me about it
is that it is about envy,
but I was talking to my friend who is a lawyer,
one of my best friends, and she was saying that, well, you know, isn't it
kind of the intention of an influencer's job to get other people to copy you? That's kind of the
job description. And so in a way, someone copying another, like an influencer copying this other influencer is sort of like the purpose of influencing.
But this case was wide circulated in the law communities and, you know, colloquially known
as the Sad Beige lawsuit. And it brought up a lot of questions around digital ownership and
questions around copyright. Can you copyright an aesthetic?
Can you copyright a personal vibe?
But, you know, these are things that,
these are words that people use.
So naturally when they talk about the way that other people post online,
but in this document,
everything is laid out in this extremely clinical way,
which is what makes it amazing to me.
Yeah, and they, and, you know,
like everyone owns a sweatset like this.
I mean, not everyone, but a lot of influencers.
It's kind of this unspecific, basic aesthetic,
but also, people should look through the document.
I've spent a lot of time with this document,
and I have my own thoughts.
I have my own thoughts. There's some really amazing moments like when Alyssa gets a tattoo
There's some really amazing moments,
of a flower in the same place as Sydney on her arm a few days after Sydney posts about it for
the first time in a long time, this one. When you look at the dates at the bottom, January 29th,
2024. Then February 9th, 2024,
Alyssa comes out with the same tattoo.
So, you know,
that's all.
The anxiety is interesting.
This is amazing.
I want to dive into this more,
but I think we have to move on to gluttony
because DadaBots is not
guilty of the sin of sloth no they have a
job and they call early so you have to do that work to feed that gluttonous appetite
you want to talk us through this work uh yes uh so yeah gluttony um which is the like excessive
consumption to the point of sickness.
We wanted to make that tangible and experiential.
So yeah, just a little artistry context, the rise of computer art.
But this doesn't just bolster digital media.
It also bolsters danger art and experiential art and what Matt Dryhairs calls protocol art.
And coming from Artblocks, where the Artblocks protocol makes the HTML file
the centerpiece, which is of course great
for generative visual art, shaders,
but you know, ask what else can you do with an HTML file?
You can do a lot, you can embed things in it
that can be downloaded.
So yeah, here, Fat Funk,
it is a mixtape that has been splintered into pieces.
Does that come through?
Yeah.
Good.
Yeah, exactly.
And so, the game here is to assemble all the pieces of this mixtape into the big 24-minute release of this genre, Fat Funk.
Fat Funk, so yeah, Funk is a hip-hop derivative style of music, which is chopped and screwed and slowed way down.
and it's gone through many revisions and evolutions.
And it's gone through many revisions and evolutions.
And here we've made it beefier, more metal, more harsh.
It grows and evolves over time,
and you really feel like some monster's eating something.
But the game of assembling it is not easy.
In fact, it may even destroy your computer in the process.
Each of these contains what I learned is called a zip bomb,
a very, very large, a very small zip file,
which opened and expands to fill a large amount of space.
And during this process, I'm like,
is there an easy way to make these?
I asked ChatGPT, and it refused to tell me how to make them.
I'm like, no, this is zip bombs.
I can't tell you how to do it.
So instead, I actually got a very large hard drive
and manually made these zip files by taking small MP3s
and just adding chunk characters and multiple times zipping them.
The largest one is 29 terabytes,
and no ordinary person uh is able to
to open this um but you know in the experience of trying to even listen to what music that you
like is contained in the piece uh you run into many questions of gluttony right like one i'm
the artist taking up your space just consuming it But two, your hard drive, what's in it?
It's full of software bloat, temp files, cache files.
Why is all that software being so gluttonous?
And also, why are you storing all those TV shows in there?
And yeah, meanwhile, this log, it's sort of a fantasy of if an agent was running your computer,
what was the thought process as your heart like
computer starts to fail um and it's it's kind of funny like even on macbook pros if you expand
try to expand the zip file which it won't be able to do it tries it starts expanding it and it'll
just completely fill your hard drive your your computer starts slowing down, everything crashes and then reverses.
I'm like, I don't know why Apple lets you do that,
but it does.
That's amazing.
Are we looking at one of the 70,
or is it just in terms of the work that's on FeroFile?
Correct, yeah.
This is one of the 50 here. That'sero file. Correct. Yeah, this is one of the 50 here.
It's not 70, sorry.
Yep, that download button gives you your personalized zip-omb.
Got it.
I'm scared.
But when you buy the work or when you collect the work,
you don't have to download the 70 terabytes file, 29 terabytes file. Or do you? No, you don't have to download the 70 terabytes file,
29 terabytes file, or do you?
No, you don't have to,
but the first person to assemble all the pieces into the full mixtape, uncorrupted,
will get a prize.
Ooh, a prize.
You should have stored all of the zip files on chain,
just written them.
That's cool.
So can you give us any hints to get us started with the game?
No hints.
It's brute force.
It's brute force.
It's a puzzle, but instead of steganographic, it is about contortion.
So you need to get a giant hard drive, download them all, and listen to them one at a time,
mashing them up with the audio. Not that you're giving a hint, but that's what I've pieced together.
Yes, that's correct.
It's definitely beyond the capabilities of my personal computer at home.
Yeah, you surely will be brought to the point of sickness if you attempt.
It's sponsored by hardware manufacturers around the world.
Yeah.
Cool.
I like the terminal aesthetic here.
Is it something you've used before in your work?
This kind of like programming language?
You know, for this piece is my first,
and it makes a ton of sense
because this is day-to-day
how I'm creating these things anyway.
And well, actually in our live performances
as DadaBots, we do live coding at Algraves.
And we're making music with code live to an audience of people dancing.
And we show our terminal window as we're like parameterizing our neural nets to make music.
And yeah, it just kind of become our aesthetic.
Oh, cool.
Yeah, this does have that kind of behind-the-scenes feel
of live coding, performative feel.
Do you want to choose the next Deadly Sin?
Yes, let's go to CBP.
So that would be Greed?
Yep, Greed.
All right, let's hear from Greed.
Yeah, so several months ago matt came to me and he's like
steve i'm running through some uh some dire financial straits here and eith is really
underperforming and i just need a way to manifest some wealth and into my life and, and make some money. So I was like, Matt, don't worry. I got you.
I know exactly what to do. So, um, I decided to embark on this, uh, this metaphysical journey,
uh, called money vortex, which is partially inspired by a, I guess one of my favorite niches or sub niches of youtube videos which is
well i guess you have the niche of these general manifestation binaural beat videos where the idea
is you play one frequency in your your right ear another frequency in your left ear and they're
one frequency in your right ear, another frequency in your left ear,
and they're slightly different frequencies.
So the way your brain puts it together,
it kind of feels like there's this weird beat.
I mean, there's all total bullshit, but I really like the idea,
and it's all very fun and soothing and relaxing to listen to.
But the idea is like, okay, well,
if your right ear is playing 440 hertz
and your left ear is playing 430 hertz,
then your brain sort of triangulates a difference of 10 hertz.
And then that affects the patterns of your brain waves.
And somehow this is a way to subliminally reprogram you to
change your behavior in certain ways, or metaphysically it changes your vibrations
in a way that will affect your life experience. And of course, there's a subgenre of this genre
that's specifically about wealth manifestation,
which I was attracted to.
And I think the first one I came across
was several years ago.
I came across this YouTube video called Luck Vortex,
which I borrowed a lot of the aesthetic from and that it
it was definitely vortex uh themed and it had a uh sort of like a four leaf clover image and said
luck vortex and it's this very soothing optimistic video that you watch and a lot of times i just put
it on the background i really enjoyed it it. Just without explicitly manifesting wealth.
But yeah, I think in general, it was an interesting theme to dive in.
It was interesting to dive into this with relation to the theme of greed.
Because it's just weird because
like if you watch these videos for a long enough time, it's, you kind of get this weird like
cognitive dissonance where it's like, okay, I'm sort of floating through this grand metaphysical
space and like the kind of oral vibe here is that like, Oh, nothing matters except for where I am.
It's this very Zen experience of being centered.
And it, you know, it brings you this like metaphysical piece,
but at the same time there's this undercurrent of like, yeah,
but really it's all about making money here.
And this is the thing you should be manifesting.
So yeah, it was just a an interesting
and fun project to undertake and it's uh it's also been very lucrative so far because eth has been
doing really well since i uh started uh i, picking the outputs and spending a lot of time
manifesting. So, you know, the proof's in the pudding. And as I was explaining to Mac the other
day, if you would like to manifest your own wealth, I have found that this works very similarly to
transcendental meditation, where you have your own personal mantra that is given to you.
So I would suggest really you have to purchase your own money vortex.
And if you manifest using your money vortex that you purchased, then that's the quickest way to manifest all sorts of levels of abundance in your personal life.
Can I click and play the sound for a second?
Yeah, go for it.
All right.
Great.
It's quite quite soothing i um so stevie p claims that this doesn't actually work um
does anyone want to fact check that like maybe an artist from the west coast
want to come in and offer a different perspective on this this method um well i feel like it works
if you it only works if you believe that it works and you uh because
that's really what manifestation is all about you really have to buy into the uh the the vortex
yeah yeah there's something about the word manifesting that's like so so sort of like um
tricky because you know so many people you, the kind of messages everywhere are that
you have to manifest this sort of thing. It kind of puts this incredible personal responsibility
on people who are all, we're all kind of like locked in this system, which is a very bad game,
which is, I think, you know, something that I get from, you know, your, your other, your kind of practices in general, Steve is like, just the,
you know, it's like this kind of,
the game of money is rigged in favor of certain players and against others.
And it's all kind of like, you know, there's something very,
very cynical about it. But I think what this project does,
which is maybe a bit different than some of the others,
as far as I understand,
maybe you would see this differently,
but there is something that is kind of like spiritual about money.
Like it's so high on the symbolic order.
It's like, it's in your subconscious,
it's in your dreams,
it's in your relationship with love and your parents and everything.
Like it's just so woven into, like,
the very innermost parts of ourselves.
So something like, you know,
this kind of, like, way of dealing with it
feels like a little bit of a departure,
but maybe also, like, taps into another aspect
of, like, the way that money is kind of so inside us all the time.
Yeah, I think there are probably two ways
that I think you could read this project, one of which
is sort of like, as you're saying, maybe it's like the less cynical version, which is that,
you know, like in a lot of ways, because like a lot of the affirmations that I used for this
project were affirmations that I found in actual wealth manifestation videos and techniques.
And some of them are really dopey and they talk about removing patterns of lack in your
spiritual DNA and they get really far out there. But I think a lot of them are also just around,
really far out there. But I think a lot of them are also just around, maybe they're a little bit
more abstract than just money. And they kind of boil down to, you know, more base concepts like
abundance and just sort of like, you know, feelings of being secure in the amount of resources that
you have. So I think, you know, the less cynical approach might be to sort of view it as
a legitimate meditation piece where you just sort of, you know, you stare at the center of the
vortex, you breathe, and you sort of focus, you just sort of tell yourself, like, it's okay. It's
like, I have enough resources to live as long as i'm still breathing
it's everything's fine and it's not worth worrying about money um and then i guess like the more
cynical approach uh might come out where if you stay on any of the money vortexes long enough
eventually you'll start getting pop-up ads which i think is i don't know i think like to me a lot
of this is like i'll sometimes i'll be watching one of these videos and like a youtube ad will
uh interrupt it or if like sometimes if i'm just like trying to relax i'm listening to ambient music
in my bed uh then like you know my internet cuts out and you're guaranteed to get an ed ad in
the middle of that yeah it's just like it's just like there are all these like reminders that like
okay well it's like even though i'm trying to have this very kind of grounded uh like meditative
experience it's still it's still kind of being mediated by some third
party that really what they care
about is making money. So at the end
of the day, they're kind of commodifying
this idea of
meditation or manifesting wealth
or what have you and trying to
sell it back to me. But really,
at the end of the day, they're sort of the ones
who are manifesting the money and making money
off me directly or indirectly in some way.
Nice.
I think we just have two sins left.
Pride and lust?
Pride and lust?
Pride and lust.
Anne, do you want to go next?
Yes. Hello, do you want to go next? Yes.
Hello, everyone.
Okay, so I had lust, which I love, and I feel actually a lot like Lorna in the way that most of my work about lust is often comes out like awkward and
cringy but maybe also that's what like lust is anyway so it kind of works out perfectly
um but so for this project which is called Annie's Phantom Obsessions I'm continuing the life of this AI I've been working with called Annie. My name is Ann. Her name is Annie. So she's like an Annie AI. And she's not, I don't consider her like autonomous. I consider her the version, I consider her me. She's the version of me when I use AI. So like,
similarly in the past, I've like considered my performance self, like who I am on camera.
That's me when I'm on camera, which is a different person than me off camera. So now my AI person is this whole other person and I've chosen her to be like a tween.
Because I love tweens and I like I with my work, I really am obsessed with like emotions and manipulating people's emotions.
like emotions and manipulating people's emotions. And I feel like in your tweendom years, those are
the years where you're just like so emo and have all the biggest emotions. And so that's why that's
a playground for me is that, that time. And then also I've been thinking about,
I've been thinking a lot about crone core, which is something I just invented,
which is like thinking a lot about like crones and the aesthetic of like crones and what it
means to be a crone. So I think of myself as the crone in this situation, like a mother gothful type of person. And the anti-AI is kind of my young
Rapunzel that I'm like sucking the life out of in order for like me to stay young. And that's
kind of how I view AI. It's like, I'm getting older. I'm fucking dumb, like, I don't have anything left in me.
But like, when I use AI, like, I'm way smarter, I can do more, I'm like, way more creative,
and can make like, way more interesting things. So that's why I use Annie AI. And then so for this particular one, I decided that she should have crushes because that's like obviously so fun to like have a crush.
And that's like something like I wish like I wish I could like have crushes and like be in like Crushville and Crushland all the time because it's so fun.
So I started giving her all these crushes and I was
using chat GPT to make the images. But chat GPT was like really sensorial about like what it would
make images. So it wouldn't let the Annie AI have a real crush. She was only allowed to have an imaginary crush, an unreal crush, a fake crush.
And I just thought that was so weird. And I also thought it was very repressive
of the AI to not let its own self, like just even have a real crush. And I was really into that like repression because for me repression is actually the thing
that fuels desire fuels lust so it makes you like desire even more if there's some kind of
repression involved so it's like repressing itself but like in doing that making itself even hornier
um so um I was into that dynamic and just having it have crushes on girls, boys, aliens,
non-entities, angels, devils, just everything. And what do you mean it wasn't allowed to have
a real crush? Like if you uploaded a real picture of a person, it couldn't have a crush on that person or. So that, but even if I was like, you know, make a collage of your crush, it would be like, sorry, like you're not allowed, like no entities, no tweens, nothing is allowed to have a real crush, but you can have an imaginary crush.
Like, would you like me to do something where the crush is imaginary?
And I would be like, sure, do that.
So that's why it's called Annie's Phantom Obsessions, because she's not allowed to have a real obsession, whatever that even means in this context.
It's already so far removed from reality anyway.
way yeah is that so that has to do with like um is is it about like it's like an ai safety like
Yeah.
safeguard that they put in yeah i think it's to protect kids but like the premise of annie
in chat sheet pt that i'm using is already that she's not a real kid. She's an AI tween. So I
already prefaced the prompts with like, you are making this as Annie, an AI tween. You're not even
a real kid. So there's already a layer of like, it's not real. And then it's again, okay, well,
not even this fake AI tween can have a real crush.
But the output kind of ends up the same anyway.
So it's just weird.
Fascinating.
I mean, yeah.
So you said you tried to use ChatGPT.
Did you say what you ended up using?
I might have lost that detail.
Yeah, it's ChatGPT. So Annie's Google. So even though you worked around the restrictions with ChatGPT. Did you say what you ended up using? I might have lost that detail. Yeah, it's ChatGPT. So Annie's...
It's ChatGPT. So even though you worked around the restrictions with ChatGPT and within the repression.
Yes, exactly. I love... Sometimes I hate censorship because it censored a fun thing to like work around. And also you, you know, then you just have this repression in there.
That's, that's very sexy, you know.
Amazing.
Thank you, Ed.
I think we have one more sin left, which is Pride.
Are we on Pride?
We are.
Pride.
Let's hear from Pride.
That would be me, yeah.
Speaking of Pride, it's a little hard to go after such an incredible artist.
Yeah, Mac hit me up. I don't want to say how recently because it's a little
terrifying to think about, but I was actually a late cover to the show.
And as usual, my answer was a first, at least internally, no, but I got on a call with him.
And Max's energy is so infectious that he was kind of pulling me in. At the same time, I was trying to think of what could be good for Pride.
Pride is an interesting one.
I would say my work, in as much as it has any cultural critique,
which it doesn't always, would usually be more greed-focused.
I'm glad Steve got that one because this project was much more interesting
than whatever journal I would have come up with. But anyway, Pride is an interesting one because, project was much more interesting than whatever uh journal i would have come up with
but anyway uh pride is an interesting one because you know i think when you think of like biblical
pride versus how people view it now i mean a lot of communities uh in some ways are reclaimed and
it's a good thing you know and um instantiations of pride that i see as negative on the internet or usually viewed as negative are
usually you know kind of filtered through another one of the sins right like someone's like
blessing their lamborghini and that could be like greed or maybe a tinge of envy or maybe there's
like lust or whatever um and so you know i i felt like I needed to sort of distill it down to like the base thing, the base, you know, the base thing that one can be proud of, which is just their identity, you know, in a sense.
And so celebrity felt like a natural fit for that.
You know, celebrities have existed before the internet, and this is a show about the internet.
And so I started to hone in on these celebrity selfies.
I didn't really have much of a thesis for it.
I had already been playing around with the sort of mirror motif.
You know, previous to this vein of thought, I was working on, you know, maybe an idea with these things called a first surface mirror,
which is like a scientific instrument quality mirror that gives you like a perfect reflection of
something. Um, but yeah, I started to look at these images. The first one that I looked at
was the Kendall Jenner one. Um, and you know, it's interesting because it struck me, um,
you know, she was in the bathrooms, a banal bathroom, you bathroom, or whatever it is. I don't know what it is. Really just the most banal, nondescript room you could think of. But the image is loaded with so much identity and context. And I look at it and immediately I'm thinking of everything I know about her and her family and all of these associations. And then I got a little curious about, you know,
where she is and what is happening here.
And then I was struck by this, you know,
desire to just see the room without, without the person there.
No, he had to, to, to, to Kendall.
Did I say Kendall? I think that's Kylie. I don't know.
This is embarrassing. I don't know which one it is. Kylie. Oops.
Yeah. So I just started erasing it um and i sent mac a very very crude version of just the erased one well first i stared at it for like five minutes um trying to figure out if it was
interesting or not um it felt interesting to me but you know it's like i couldn't tell if it was
just in my own autistic sense or if other people would find it interesting too.
But I sent it to Matt first and I was like, look at this picture.
And then, uh, I let him dwell on it for a little bit.
And then I sent him, you know, the non-erased one, even the reveal.
And that felt interesting too, because, you know, that was him going through this sort
of journey in the opposite direction of me.
Right.
It's, uh, you know, he's seeing the room first, which I never can because I'm the one who
had to sit there and erase it.
Yeah.
So then that sort of morphed into this idea of these video sculptures or whatever you
want to call them, video pieces.
The images themselves, I thought felt interesting and kind of hilarious to put out there just
because they do look so boring like it could be
part of any one of our lives um and you don't really know what the context is but i wanted to
reinsert these people um as themselves instead of as they're you know um instead of as they're these
things these these characters that they play in our cultural sphere and so and i also you know i
wanted to sort of have a balance of the original image and the sort of
erased version. Um, so I got this idea of just like flippering them in almost
subliminally. I mean, I want to be able to see who it was. Um, and then, um,
in order to sort of metaphorically insert the real human, uh, back into the,
back into the frame, uh, they're,
they're flashing out a pattern that spells their legal name.
So far, everyone has to take me at my word
because no one's figured out how to actually decode it.
I mean, it's pretty simple Morse code,
but it's like a bit of a custom thing.
I do have a script that I had to use to make sure
that they were actually encoded correctly,
which they weren't until the night before we minted everything.
So I'm glad I made that script and fixed everything.
And then, yeah, the last layer is the length of each piece
is scaled roughly to approximate their Instagram followers.
Got a little complicated with name length
because we have to use legal names.
And for example, Kanye's legal name is two letters.
And then some of these people have very long names.
So there were some compromises made there. But overall, if you plot them, it's legal name is two letters. And then some of these people have very long names. So there were some compromises made there.
But overall, if you plot them, it's pretty linear
according to their Instagram following.
So, yeah, I mean, I think that's about it on my end.
And I have no idea how long I've been rambling for about it.
That was great. Thank you.
Yeah, the spaces are fascinating.
And I'm trying to think like,
it doesn't, I mean, the backgrounds really like in some cases sort of, extends it or something.
But, yeah, I mean, it's a really interesting, like, way of, I guess, recontextualizing these kind of moments.
What did you, like, have you worked in this way before this kind of image alteration or,
like, recontextualization? I guess it's similar image alteration or like recontextualization?
I guess it's similar if you like recontextualize an object.
You're also kind of like changing its role.
Yeah, I mean, no, I would say this is a pretty big departure.
And not only have I not worked in this way, I mean, I haven't really worked off of a prompt
and someone else gave me before, which is a big reason why I was a little hesitant
at first, you know, my, my process is usually coming up with a bunch of ideas and then kind
of by the nature of, of, uh, the kinds of work that I do usually self-censoring, like 99% of them
just being like, wow, that's really, that's really stupid after a week of mulling it over.
Um, it turns out that I, that I worked pretty well with a very uh energetic and motivating force
i might have to i'd have to hire mac but um yeah this was very different i mean in some sense
you know there are some elements that i'm sort of some elements of the process that i'm repurposing
from some other other bodies of work um yeah um there's one that I did called Seed, which was using AI imagery.
This one is, and I guess I can talk about that a little bit too. You know, I tried immediately
when I sort of crystallized the idea. I was like, well, obviously I'm going to use AI.
It's going to save me so much time. I felt pretty strongly that I needed to get like a sort of
objective view of what the background looked like and not have like any artifacts.
You know, I wanted like patterns to continue like you can see here, this random one with the molding behind him is like continuing, right?
Some of them and some of them, I think the, this one we were just looking at some of them like a tile pattern or and behind them or they're including like an entire room or you can see part of a piece of furniture behind them.
And I could not get any tool to, you know, come up with anything even close.
So we ended up having to do all these all of these by quote unquote hand.
I mean, you know, still using technology.
But, you know, we were sitting there trying to determine
what the things behind them looked like
and how best to represent them using bunch of different tools.
Mostly ended up being, you know, Photoshop.
Yeah, I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.
I would say if you look through some of them,
you can notice like little quirks and artifacts,
you know, and, you know,
I think no human can never perfectly create reality
and some of
these were
pretty complex
to do
but I'm
happy with
how they
turned out
it reminds
me a bit
I mean
it's a
you know
these are
works that
didn't involve
like a
specific
erasure
but just
in terms
of like
giving us
a way
of looking
at the
images
differently
it kind
of reminds
me of
videos
or films
like
I think what you mean is the fall of communism
as seen through gay pornography.
And then Los Angeles plays itself by Tom Anderson,
which are both about like taking one set of images
and looking at them to see something totally different.
Yeah, I like that reference.
I keep getting Paul Pfeiffer,
which I'm definitely inspired by.
And I was going to say, you know, I'm hoping that Paul sues me
so that Maya can make a work based on our, you know,
season desist that I get.
Yeah, I'm going to call that one very unlikely,
but we'll see.
We'll wait for the lawsuit to come through.
I have a link to those videos I mentioned.
I'll just put it in the chat here.
Yeah, definitely.
You just have to connect your wallet to see them and then...
Right.
So, Michael and I, I guess I shouldn't say this because it makes me look stupid, but Michael and I had been talking about maybe talking in the 70s scheduling link that I need to connect my wallet for.
You know, in my defense, you know, some people do have things of that nature,
and I do know how to connect a wallet
without getting it drained.
And I would have used a burner,
but anyway, he was just punking me,
and I reacted sincerely, and I'm very stupid.
I think it's exciting that we live in this new world
where people kind of connect their bank account
to social services for no good reason.
But that was really interesting. I enjoyed my, that was a deep dive and also we've done all seven works I think, right?
Yeah.
What should we, should we take, I don't know if we can actually like easily take questions
from Twitter, but is there anything you wanted to like bring out as a kind of reflection on the
artist works we heard from Mac?
I think we had a pretty good overview.
I know you mentioned a couple of times,
I'd love to dive into this again about Maya's work
and one of the other works.
So if you have any follow-ups, I think that would be great.
We've got some time.
I think, yeah, we need to see like a 90-minute film
of the lawsuits plotted out one at a time.
But Maya, is there one more visual detail you want to share
from the lawsuits that we would miss as a casual observer? Okay, yeah. A detail I really like.
Well, there's a lot of details I really like. Wait, I'm looking for the exact number. Okay. On number 40, hard copy 40. So what I really like seeing in the document is the kind
of like a lawyer perspective where they're building an argument for the case here. So something I like here on the side, it says flower clip
and white boots do not come with the featured skirt and shirt set. So what they're pointing
out here is that defendant got the set, but not only got the same set, but she also added
these flower clips and white boobs that did not
come with the original set so they're building more evidence that like this is like beyond just
ordering the same thing um so and little details like that and also this one also has one of these
red circles on it um which seems like it's just hanging like leftover from like in the wrong place.
But there's a lot of red circling on some of the other editions with like the Amazon
storefront list, like the editions 61, 62.
I really like those because they're circling the same items, same beigy items they have
listed on their Amazon storefronts. um but yeah it's really cool to
hear about everybody's work i feel like you know obviously this is a show about the seven sins but
in everyone's work there's this kind of like earnestness and about human desire and all of them and that's how I really feel about this piece too
like they're just they're both just really really trying at this influencer um thing which is it's
it's quite a complex practice for people um and I think the defendant, you know, both of them are kind of, you see them struggling,
like you see the struggle present in all of these posts. And I think some of the
copying and infringement kind of comes through this struggle and this earnest desire for success.
So, and the medium, it was important for me that the medium is PDF of the actual work.
So it's very interesting to me
that kind of opens in this PDF viewer
because the original medium of the work is,
of the full PDF is obviously PDF.
So we're all on the plaintiff's side, right?
Team plaintiff?
Wait, what?
We're all on the plaintiff side right everyone no
you're on the defendant side
like if this like any high school girl can sue like any of her friends like it's crazy that's so true like this is how things
it's how like it's the natural way of operating is wanting to copy what you aspire to um
i'm trying to remain ambiguous am i i don't know i just and i am honestly
what's that I don't know. And I am, honestly.
What's that?
I missed what someone said, but I think that this is like
systematic
wholesale replication of someone's
whole project.
But whether that should be a legal
matter or just a matter of
a troll war or something is another thing.
Totally. Well, that's kind of my thought also, because then my layer is my piece is a systematic replication of someone else's project.
And now I'm calling it my own also.
I'm calling it my own also.
Yeah.
What?
Seems like you might be guilty of your own level of sloth.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, I mean, Amy Adler in R7 on 7 talked about how basically the entire, yeah she was a big Richard Prince
advocate actually. So she would have definitely the fact that you know this was a transformative
use and counts as its own new work of art. So congratulations, you made an art.
Yeah.
So, congratulations.
You made an art.
Yeah, looking at stuff, pointing to things.
And now all of you listening get the chance to own this art.
So, with that, maybe we should wrap up and let people get over to the website.
Yeah, I just want to say apologize apologize to everyone. Apparently one of my 87
open tabs was YouTube. That was the cause of the echo earlier. Thank you so much for being here,
for listening to our talk, to the artists for being here, and Michael for, as usual, wonderful
moderation. This has been such a fun exhibition to work on. I think it's about a year ago, Mac,
that we started talking about it now
and it's been really, really wonderful
to see it all come together.
So if anybody has questions about collecting
or the artworks, you can email me
at lauren at ferrellfile.com.
You can DM the Ferrell File X account or Instagram account.
I'd love to talk about the art with you.
And thank you again for being here.
Thank you all.
Congratulations, everyone.
Bye.
