You’ve been participating in the tech and art community for over a decade now. You’re work spans everything from establishing an artistic game-development collective to pushing the boundaries of privacy on public wireless networks with custom hardware. Just this past year you published the Critical Engineering Manifesto with Gordan Savičić and Danja Vasiliev. Was there a specific event or moment that inspired its creation and were their any earlier iterations of the ten statements that didn’t make the final cut?

Danja, Gordan and I felt a long standing need to frame our respective practices a little more acutely, foregrounding the languages and cultures of Engineering, rather than Art, in the creative and critical process. We’d each found ourselves frustrated under the vague, ballooning term of Media Artist – like trying to swim in a bathrobe. This came up in conversation enough times to explore alternatives. Afterall, it didn’t seem to matter whether we called what we made ‘art’, even ourselves ‘artists’, people were quick to do it for us anyway.

One thing that regularly came up in conversation between us is that Engineering, not Art, is the most transformative language of our time – informing the way we communicate, move, trade and even think. The reach of Engineering is so deep that it’s hard to disagree it has become part of our environment, with vast impacts on human culture, the Earth and how we understand it. So it follows that to ignore the languages, logics and ideas that make up this thing we call Engineering is to assume a critically vulnerable position – we become unable to describe our environment.

As thinkers with technical abilities in several areas, we want to take on our built and increasingly automated environment by the terms in which it’s given, opening it up for post-utilitarian conversation, for play and interrogation. If there’s ever a time to be doing that, it’s now, especially with opaque and hidden infrastructure in the telecommunications space deeply impacting diplomatic relations and civil liberties world wide.

The Critical Engineering Manifesto grew directly from conversations along these lines and was generally very well received, soon translated into 14 languages. A couple of people wrote in that they wondered why we didn’t include or reference ‘hacking’ as a critical practice to draw upon. Admittedly none of us had an instinct to include it, as it is also a term that has an increasingly vague meaning. I think Danja and Gordan would agree that those that hack in a way we appreciate are already Critical Engineers!

The Transparency Grenade and Newstweek are projects that are designed to disrupt traditional systems of information distribution in news organizations, companies, and governments. Do they achieve your desired affects on the systems they are designed to criticize? Have you been satisfied with the results of the two projects?

Read the complete interview at Rhizome.

What do you feel is revealed in your utilization of rigid digital pixelated form in the medium of painting?

A constant in my oeuvre is my attempt to create works that have several layers of meaning, most of my choices are open to multiple interpretation and I think none of them are wrong. My paintings want to be the starting point for a thought rather than the embodiment of a thought. First of all, rigid digital pixelated forms attempt to create an order, give meaning to chaos, bring clarity and simplification. It is a tribute to the wonder of color, too, its power, its importance in our life. My colors in a pixelated grid most of the time represent objects, but only if you look at them from the right distance, as you move closer to them the only thing they portray are colors: how they work together and how they react between themselves, how they affect us and how we react with them. But those forms are also something that carries us back to the most synthetic, most artificial part of out lives. I refer, no matter how obsolete the definition, to the virtual sphere of our experience, a part of out lives now merged. It seemed like something I had to talk about.

You’ve stated that “Consoles, joysticks, cables and wires that litter the desks as a contemporary reinterpretation of the genre scene, aiming to capture the climax of the information society, to consider a digital alternative point of view and tell what lies behind his cold surface, because if you stop to it what we expect is just a miserable future.” I wonder if you can talk a little bit about this miserable future, and your work as a kind of precautionary measure against it.

A miserable future is a cold one. A future without the warmth of human contact is a place whee we don’t recognize each other. Is the future without trust? ….

Read the complete article at Rhizome.

It’s interesting that your career has gone from taking pictures to thwarting cameras, with projects like CV Dazzle and Camoflash. When did you become interested in camouflage and face-detection spoofing?

I became interested in spoofing and camouflage when cameras metamorphosed from art making tools into enablers of surveillance societies. This happened gradually over the last decade starting with the Patriot Act in 2001. To me, this document marked the beginning of the end of photography as I knew it from art history books. Now, 175 years after the daguerreotype was invented, cameras integrated with facial-recognition systems comprise the fastest growing sector of the biometrics industry.

But the use of photography in biometrics is almost as old as photography itself. In the late 1800s Sir Francis Galton, cousin of Charles Darwin and pioneer of biometrics, used composite imaging in an attempt to predict criminal behavior and illness. For example, if a subject has similar facial features to that of a criminal he or she was more likely to commit a crime.

I see spoofing and camouflage as intelligent responses to the uses/misuses of photography: surveillance cameras, biometric systems, and paparazzi photography.  Though these uses have always been part of photography at large, it’s impossible to ignore their presence now.

Sometimes this negative omnipresence supersedes the camera’s role as an art-making tool. As a photographer, I think spoofing and camouflaging tactics can help offset this effect and make photography more interesting, more communicative, and that this can lead to better pictures. Camoflash and CV Dazzle are projects centered on making photography more interesting.

One of my favorite quotes, by René Magritte, is that “everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see.” When everyone is photographing and revealing the world, it becomes interesting to try and cover it back up, to reveal anonymity.

Read the complete interview at Rhizome.

This week we’re exploring the Digital Arts Market (or lack thereof). We’re asking the tough questions: What will take for a sustainable digital arts market to form? Is that even a possibility? Can the digital arts make money? And will they ever be incorporated into the contemporary arts dialogue? We invite you to participate in the discussion in the comments section, on your own blog (send us the link!), and on Facebook and Twitter (#DIGART). Let’s get the conversation started!

If you look around your city’s local galleries, you’re likely to find the standard fare of paintings, drawings, sculpture and collage. The more experimental among them may do performance pieces or installations or the occasional video show. But few among them will be exhibiting digital art work. In fact, in New York’s Chelsea district, which is home to over 370 galleries, just one is dedicated to new media and digital art. Those aren’t encouraging odds.

Gallerists and curators looking to work with digital art certainly have their work cut out for them, not just because the stuff can often be a pain to exhibit (trust us, we speak from experience), but also because there are few collectors interested in buying. And if you’re a commercial gallery, that means you won’t be open long. Today we speak to Michael Ruiz, artist and co-curator of the Future Gallery in Berlin, who gives us some insight on exhibiting digital works, how he pitches them to potential collectors, and the importance of hyper-real installation documentation.

The Creators Project: What are some of the challenges you face when exhibiting digital art works?
Michael Ruiz: Digital art is a quite art historical term with a history of successful artists, in both the institutional and commercial realms. Does digital in this sense refer to the tools used to arrive at a certain result, or rather is the artwork displayed in digital form?

Read the complete interview at The Creators Project.

Much of your work involves recontextualizing a lot of YouTube and Twitter content. Through this rearranging and reorganizing you compose and assign new meaning to the often banal, unwittingly revealing always-growing archive of user-uploaded videos and status updates. User content here surpasses individual critique and instead is aesthetically reframed and sometimes even gamified under your curation.  What does it mean for you to work with the uploads of others? What can you say about the role of the curator in this process?

I’m not really sure if “curation” is the right word to describe my YouTube projects. While I do, on occasion, go out and hand-pick specific content for display (like for my fun cat video blog or Violet Flame supercut), most of the rest of my YouTube work is either the result of an autonomous script, or a user-initiated generator.

For example, I have a cron (autonomously executing process) running for my At My Funeral project that specifies search criteria for YouTube videos with comments that contain the phrase “at my funeral”. The script has generated a database of (to date) 21,000+ videos that people want to have played in their honor after they die.

Does this kind of algorithmic selection count as curation? The result can be really interesting and even kind of comedic. There is something hilarious to me about mechanically collecting every single “better than Bieber” YouTube comment ever written. But, beyond the initial specification of the program that does the collecting, it doesn’t involve any of my creative/curatorial input at all. The content is selected and displayed automatically.

Read the complete interview at Rhizome.