In this episode, Allie talks to Rachel “Win” Winchester about Internet Art. What is it, what does it say about us, and how can it be a launching pad for underrepresented artists?
Links Mentioned:
Shawne Michelaine Holloway – portraiture: http://shawnemichaelainholloway.com/alignment
Twitter: @cleogirl2525
Adrian Piper – wikipedia page: http://adrianpiper.com/removed-and-reconstructed-en.wikipedia-biography.shtml…
Residency Program blog post: https://getshifter.io/internet-art-digitalcube-residency-program/…
Win’s website: https://visualwebmaster.com
Episode Transcript:
Allie:
Welcome to the Underrepresented in Tech podcast, hosted by Michelle Frechette and Allie Nimmons. Underrepresented in Tech is a free database, but with the goal of helping people find new opportunities in WordPress and tech overall.
Allie:
Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Underrepresented in Tech podcast. This week, Michelle is taking a much needed vacation, so we’re going to send her good vibes through the universe, and I’m here chatting with my friend Winn, or Rachel Winchester. Hi, Rachel.
Rachel:
Hey, Allie. How are you doing?
Allie:
Hi, I’m good. I’m so excited to be talking to you. Our paths have crossed a handful of times in the past few years, and I just think you’re such an amazing and interesting person. So I’m really excited to get to chat with you, like dedicated, just you and me in some detail about the things that you do-
Rachel:
Our past do cross very often. You were actually a speaker at the first Wordcamp I’ve ever been to.
Allie:
That’s so cool. Aw. Which one was that? Do you remember what city it was?
Rachel:
Wordcamp New York in 2018-
Allie:
’19, probably.
Rachel:
’19. 2019.
Allie:
Yeah, that was a good one. I liked that one a lot. I’m from New York, so I was really happy to be able to go back for the Wordcamp and be in my city and, yeah. That was great. Well, yeah, I’m super glad our paths have crossed and I’m super to have you on the podcast. Can you tell our listeners just a little bit about who you are and what you do, where you’re from and all that good stuff?
Rachel:
Sure. Well, my name’s Rachel Winchester, but I go by Winn for short. I’m from Easton, Pennsylvania, and I live in Philadelphia right now, and I work for DigitalCube as a UX user experience designer/product designer. So I work on their WordPress products and our agency websites, and also represent us in the community. Before this, I worked in different arts institutions around Philadelphia, and I have a degree in art history.
Allie:
Nice, nice. I’m curious what brought you from, because when I think art history, I think, you know, tactile, physical art paintings and sculptures and, you know, all that kind of beautiful stuff. How did you go from kind of that world and that background and end up doing UX and product design and, you know, virtual art, digital art?
Rachel:
Well, I am a millennial, or maybe a, whatever generation is after that. Grew up with a smartphone in my pocket, so obviously I’ve always loved the internet, always had that on my mind. It’s been a big part of my life. My senior year at college, when I was finishing up my art history degree, I had an idea, a burning idea for a website that I wanted to build. So when I graduated, I used all of my graduation money to build that site and pay for hosting and all these extra resources. So that’s really what got it started with art online for me. It was more art history than art-making, but I created a community where people can talk about art online, and then after making that website, I made a couple more websites as a hobby that all related to art.
Rachel:
Then at some point, I realized like, “I’m more interested in this internet stuff and building websites and building tools for artists and art tangential people to use rather than,” you know, “being an art historian full time in that way.” So then I took a pivot. I wanted to get into web design. I did a UX design bootcamp and really dove deep into the WordPress world. So that’s how I ended up as a web designer and how I ended up working at DigitalCube.
Allie:
That is so cool. I love hearing stories of how people got started with WordPress or how people got introduced to WordPress, and I feel like so many times, it’s like you said, it’s out of necessity of like, “I have an idea,” or, “I have things I want to communicate, and this is the medium, this is the way that I found to do that,” and then you just get sucked in.
Rachel:
Yeah.
Allie:
[inaudible 00:04:25]. That is so cool. So I know that you’re really passionate about something called internet art. I hear you talk about that a a lot. I see you post about that on Twitter and so on. Can you explain to me as well as our listeners, because I feel like I understand it, but I feel like I don’t understand it. Can you explain to us, what is internet art? What is that and why do you love it? Why is that your thing at the moment?
Rachel:
Yeah. I’d love to explain it, and I’d also love to explain why you think you know it but you don’t know it because I really like to explain, to get deep into the interpretation of it.
Rachel:
So internet art is art that uses the internet as a medium. So if you think of artistic mediums like oil paint, canvas, well, the internet is a medium as well. Think of the tools that we use to build websites and build other things online on the internet. Those are all tools that we can use like a paint brush to make digital internet-related works online, and the internet isn’t just, it’s not just digital technology. So internet art is a part of digital art, but the internet itself is its own thing. It relies on these networked connections between people connecting people through devices. So it’s more than digital art. It’s really about the connections between people.
Rachel:
So it’s a little hard to explain. I think one way to explain it is to go back to the original internet artists. So there was a finite group of artists who called themselves Internet Artists with a capital “I” and a capital “A,” and these people were working in the early ’90s, the very early ’90s, I think between 1991 and around like 2000, but these people were working at the very early age of the internet before, they started their work before The New York Times even got online. Maybe the only coding language available to them was HTML. So they used HTML as their artistic medium to make artworks.
Rachel:
One of my favorite examples to really explain how this works as a medium is this piece called GRAMMATRON. GRAMMATRON is by an artist named Mark Amerika, and it is hypertext literature. He wrote a novel, an entire epic novel, using HTML and links, hypertext. So we see hypertext all the time. We see links everywhere. You can’t really look at a webpage without a link. That’s how things work, but just to think back at the very early age of the internet, when links and HTML was new and novel, Mark Amerika used that as his artistic media to write an entire epic novel.
Rachel:
So that’s one, that’s the core definition of what Internet Art is, with a capital “I” and a capital “A,” and this finite group of artists, they actually kind nicknamed themselves, the Net Artists, so just capital “N” and capital “A,” and they were working in the early 1990s. At some point, they just realized that, you know, the art that they were making and the times that they were making their art in had changed, and that’s where the art history comes from and that’s why I get so interested because of how things change over time. So at some point, the capital “I” went to a lower case “I” and the capital “A” went to a lowercase “A,” and internet art just kind of became ubiquitous around the internet.
Rachel:
We see creativity and artworks around online, but you know, we may not call it internet art or think of the creator even as an artist.
Allie:
Right.
Rachel:
Yeah. So as an art historian, I really like to focus in on the original innovators, the original visionaries who were the first to work with this new and novel medium, and then see how those ideas kind of spread throughout the internet. So today in 2022, internet art is everywhere because art is everywhere and the internet is everywhere-
Allie:
Is everywhere.
Rachel:
So it’s almost hard to pick out like, “Oh, this is internet art,” or, “That isn’t internet,” or even it’s even hard to say like, “Oh, this person is an internet artist.” You know, they might be a filmmaker or a comedian or a conceptual artist who just works with the internet often.
Allie:
Interesting, okay. So that makes a lot of sense. Yeah, I get why I feel like I get it and I don’t get it because as you’re describing that, so many different things are popping into my head of like, “Well, is that internet art?”, and, “Is this internet art?”, and I feel like the answer to all of those is probably yes. Like the first that I was thinking of is r/place, which, are you familiar with that one?
Rachel:
Is that a Reddit thing?
Allie:
Yeah, it’s a Reddit thing. So I didn’t know about it until it was basically over, but it was basically an event where, how can I describe it? It was so cool. Basically, it’s like you go to r/slash place and there was an empty canvas. It was just an empty set of a set number of pixels, and you as like a user got one pixel that you could do whatever you wanted with. So groups of people came together and said, “Okay. We’re going to organize and use our pixels to create a picture.”
Allie:
So you have this huge, ridiculously detailed image now that exists, that there’s videos online of it, of the time lapse of it being created over time as all of these people just like, I can’t even describe it. It was ridiculous. It’s like, if everyone is given a paintbrush to paint on one canvas and they’re creating all the, I would highly recommend anyone listening to just Google “r/place” and look into it. It’s one of the most fascinating things to me that I’ve ever seen, because I can’t imagine the number of people and the amount of work that goes into this.
Allie:
So at first glance, like if you just showed it to someone, you’d be like, “Okay, well that looks like a hot mess. Like that’s a piece of garbage.” It’s just like memes and flags and crap all over the place, but when you know the history of how it was created, and I think they only had like 12 hours or something or 24 hours to build it.
Rachel:
Wow. This is really interesting. I’m not, I wasn’t familiar before, but I am definitely going to do a deep dive after this recording.
Allie:
It’s so fascinating-
Rachel:
Who knows? Maybe this piece might end up in one of my future presentations.
Allie:
I hope so. Like that to me is definitely like, as you’re talking about using the internet as a medium and using the connection between people as a medium, this seems like such a prime example to me because it’s like, if people were not able to connect and communicate around this, it would just be a big brown mess probably, right? Like all these different colored pixels that don’t connect to each other, but you know, you have like fandoms in here, you have countries, like you have a Germany flag that goes through it. You have an American flag, a French flag, like people-
Rachel:
I see the Panamanian flag and the Hong Kong flag.
Allie:
Mm-hmm (affirmative), and it’s ridiculous because it’s so unbelievably detailed. So you can open this image and just kind of look at it, but then you can zoom and zoom and zoom and zoom and zoom and find even smaller things. Like it kind of makes my brain hurt looking at this sometimes because some of the images are large enough that they just stand out, but some of them, like you have to zoom in like a hundred times to actually be able to see it because it’s just, you know, maybe 20 pixels, you know-
Rachel:
Wow, yeah-
Allie:
Or something like that-
Rachel:
This is wonderful. I’m definitely going to look into this more.
Allie:
It’s really incredible. They started it, there was one in, I think 2017 that they did. It’s a collaborative project and social experiment hosted on Reddit, is what it’s called. So they did it for April Fool’s Day in 2017, repeated it again this year, and yeah. I think it’s one of the coolest things ever, but then I also think, you know, as you were talking, I was thinking about memes. Are memes considered internet art? I think so.
Rachel:
Definitely.
Allie:
Yeah. Like I think about people who create TikTok content or YouTube content, or, you know, back when Vine was a thing, like people who created Vines. Those people are using, I mean, I guess maybe they’re primarily using video as their medium, but that video wouldn’t have anywhere to go if it wasn’t for the internet and for that platform.
Rachel:
Exactly. Yeah. One thing that I’m starting to notice with, you know, my look, my studies into internet art is that, you know, related genres, genres related to the visual arts that are native to a screen tend to be a lot more popular. So gaming, film, and social media, performing arts, things like that. So when I think of art museums and visual art, I think of, you know, sculpture and oil painting and architecture, and things like that. But when I think of internet art, I think of film and games and social media, and a lot more of those kind of newer art forms.
Allie:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah, for sure. This gives me like a weird amount of hope, right? Because I was listening to a podcast recently, this podcast called Stuff You Should Know that I’m obsessed with. It’s my favorite podcast, outside of this podcast we’re recording right now. It’s my favorite podcast in the world, and basically every episode, they just pick a random topic and the two guys in the podcast teach it to you. So one of the most recent episodes was postmodernism. So you have these two guys who are not artists, they’re just professional podcasters, trying to describe what postmodernism is, which I never realized how complicated-
Rachel:
It’s so complicated-
Allie:
Postmodernism is, like how complicated it is and how like there’s so many different definitions and the definition has kind of changed over time, and then they talked about like post-postmodernism, or like the aids that we’re in right now that probably won’t be defined for another 20 years, but we’re kind of leaving postmodernism behind and coming into this new thing, and they kind of hypothesized based off of what they read that it’s kind of this age where, yeah, art is everywhere, but also art is marketing. Art is advertising.
Rachel:
Yes.
Allie:
Art is, you know, commerce. Art is capitalism, right? Like we’re in this age right now where we kind of can’t separate the two. You talking about internet art, I mean, yeah, there’s definitely ads online and there is a lot of marketing-related art that we ingest just by being on the internet, but something like r/place I love because there’s so many different things on here that are not related to brands or ads or marketing or anything like that., but at the same time, there are. I was watching a video where this guy was doing a deep dive into r/place and zooming in and out, and there’s like a thousand, you know how there’s like hidden Mickeys at Disney World? The-
Rachel:
Oh, there are.
Allie:
R/place has hidden the little guy from Among Us. He’s been hidden all over the place, which is such a … Like that strikes me as so interesting because I’m sure that the company that made Among Us didn’t go in here and do that, but it’s still-
Rachel:
[inaudible 00:16:56]-
Allie:
Promoting-
Rachel:
Oh, that’s hilarious.
Allie:
A product-
Rachel:
Yeah.
Allie:
Right?
Rachel:
I see, yeah.
Allie:
Like whether they intended it to or not, it’s still a commercial figure that people have put in here, and it’s reflective of what is popular, you know, with this video game that is popular right now that’s now, you know, immortalized in this piece of art. So yeah-
Rachel:
I mean, there’s kind two things you just touched on with that statement. I mean, first, like ever since the ’60s, really, and the advent of pop art as its own kind of fine art genre, then like the marketing and the idea of popularity and artistry could have kind of combined. So that’s one thing that you’re definitely touching on with that. The other thing, you know, thinking specifically about the internet and internet art, like internet is its own landscape. It’s a metaverse on top of our own reality. There are businesses big and small. There are people doing small projects, big projects. There are people who live their entire lives online.
Rachel:
So there’s definitely a lot of like individual small scale creativity, very personal projects, but also there are large-scale marketing and projects that are still considered art and, yeah. You could use the term “art” for all of it.
Allie:
Yeah, for sure. That’s so neat. So one of the other things I wanted to talk to you about, I know that like, I didn’t want to necessarily shoehorn this in just because this is what this podcast is about, but like whenever I hear you talk about internet art, I think about the opportunities and the avenues and the availabilities for underrepresented people to make internet art, because I feel like when we talk about Art, right, with a capital “A,” a lot of people think about, you know, what we normally see in most museums, which is like a lot of white European art, right? Even just, like when I was listening to that podcast about postmodernism, all the artists they were talking about were these white men, and I feel like the internet by nature, like by design is just so open, and I wonder, to what degree can like underrepresented people out there in the world look at the possibilities with internet art and say, you know, “I want to be an artist without these boundaries of sexism and racism and homophobia and all of these other things.” I’m not really sure what I’m trying to add, but I’m just [inaudible 00:19:51]-
Rachel:
I know exactly what you’re trying to ask.
Allie:
I always look at things through that lens, right, of like, “How does this apply to people who might feel like outsiders, or people who might feel like the thing that makes them underrepresented is a barrier to them doing what it is they want to do?” How does internet art kind of solve that problem?
Rachel:
I think it’s about the access and the inclusion and a lot of the hopes of Web 3, and also just the fact that everyone’s connected to the internet now and everyone has an internet connected device, and the tools that we use to make stuff online are becoming more usable and accessible. Think about WordPress and the full site editor and how that came out last year. So back with the beginning of the internet, it was kind of seen as a new frontier. People wanted to be the first to get on and the first to figure it out, and the original Internet Artists, again, with the capital “I,” I like to focus on this one specific artist. Her name is Olia Lialina. She was one of the kind of the premier Internet Artists who really helped shape the definition. She was one of the people organizing all of the other artists to help figure out, “What are we doing? How do we put a name to what we’re doing?”
Rachel:
So I love pointing to her to think of her as one of the original visionaries, because in so many art genres in history, those original visionaries are almost always straight, cisgendered white men.
Allie:
Right.
Rachel:
So I’d love to just highlight a female, a really strong female who, who, who put all this together and had just such great organizing powers.
Allie:
Right.
Rachel:
But, you know, zoom forward to 2022 it’s not Web 1 anymore. We’re into Web 3, and more people can do stuff online. So I want to encourage people of color, underrepresented folks to do stuff online, to get onto this new frontier and represent themselves and express themselves because everyone has access now. It’s not back in the early ’90s where only a few people had a computer and the computers were the size of a huge room, [inaudible 00:22:06] everyone has a few computers. I’ve got like three different computers on my desk right now.
Allie:
Yeah, for sure.
Rachel:
So I can do so much, and so can everyone else, do so much to express themselves online, populate the internet, this internet landscape with their representation.
Rachel:
So I want to highlight an artist that I found recently. Her name is Shawne Michaelain Holloway. She’s on Twitter as, what is her name on Twitter? Just one second,
Allie:
As you’re looking that up, I immediately, as you were talking about that, I started thinking about Issa Rae and how she’s like now one of the most successful creators on television, whether you want to call that streaming or otherwise, and she started out with a little YouTube short series that she just kind of made because she felt like it and she had stuff to say as an artist. I just always found that so inspiring that you can just hop on the internet with the camera on the back of your phone and record, right? Record, like do whatever it is that’s in your heart and in your brain, and that has elevated, that’s been like a vehicle that she’s used to accomplish all these other things, which I think is so inspiring and amazing.
Rachel:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yes, exactly. Representation matters and our screens and this media is everywhere. So the more of our face we can get onto these screens and controlling our own image, it’s wonderful, and I think the artist I’m about to share is doing similar things. So yeah, her name is Shawne Michaelain Holloway, and on Twitter, it’s @cleogirl, “C-L-E-O,” “girl,” 2525, and the specific piece I want to talk about is called Alignment on her website from 2015. So in this piece, it’s all about portraiture, and she tries to reclaim her own image, her image of her own portrait, by drawing similarities to other famous portraits in art history.
Rachel:
So there are images of Cleopatra and different Egyptian mummies, and she will photograph herself with the exact same facial expression in the exact same aesthetic to show, “Oh, this person who was written down in history and is a very important person in history, so much that we know who they are and we write about them in the history books, well, they’re just a person just like me, and I’m a person too. So I can connect with them that way, and I am just as important as they are, even if their image is more seen than mine.” So that’s kind of the point of the project.
Rachel:
There’s, I’ll share a link afterwards that people can see the images and read about it on their own time and kind of dig a little deeper.
Allie:
That is pretty cool.
Rachel:
And then I have actually a second piece that I can share-
Allie:
Yeah, please.
Rachel:
To touch more on the idea of representation and reclaiming yourself online. So one of my favorite artists has been one of my favorite artists throughout my whole life. Her name is Adrian Piper and she is a conceptual artist, and a performance artist. Started working, I think, in the ’60s or ’70s and is now in Berlin, but she has a huge body of work all over the place and has, you know, she’s warranted a Wikipedia page. Back in, I think December of 2013, she wasn’t able to edit her own Wikipedia page. In other words, the biography that is online that people go to to learn about her, she had no agency. She wasn’t able to tell people online about herself. She couldn’t edit her own Wikipedia page.
Rachel:
So what she did was she scraped that Wikipedia page and made her own Wikipedia page on her website that she edits twice a year. So people who know will go to the real Wikipedia page on her website to keep up with her biography and her ongoing projects. So I think this is just a really cool project, really cool idea. There are so many people out there with Wikipedia pages. I’m sure that there are people out there with Wikipedia pages and they don’t even know that they have a Wikipedia page, but she did. She does have one and she wanted to, you know, make it her own and she couldn’t. So she just duplicated it and now has control over this one.
Allie:
That is very cool.
Rachel:
So I think that’s just a very interesting move to make as a person in the real world and trying to control how people see you.
Allie:
Yeah. I mean, that strikes me as almost a piece of performance art in and of itself, right? Like a website that is, its sole purpose, its only purpose is to define things and people and events and to share what is true and factual. Like Wikipedia doesn’t provide commentary or opinions. It’s just about, “Here’s when this person was born, here’s where they were born.” Like it’s very factual, and so the fact that it does not allow, it takes that information and just distributes it as fact and removes her as the actual person from that situation is, it just feels like such a commentary on the truth of the internet in general. Like the whole, I mean, I hate to go back to the fake news thing, but like, we go on the internet and we put a large amount of trust in the things that we read and the things that we see, and we don’t always consider the person behind that information or the person that’s been removed from that information-
Rachel:
It’s so hard to know what’s real.
Allie:
Exactly. If you have a big name like Wikipedia, it’s even harder because there’s even more trust than if it was just some random, you know, some random article on a random website. That’s crazy.
Rachel:
Mm-hmm.
Allie:
Well, we are running up on time, but I just wanted to say, thank you so much for coming on. I feel like I could talk about this for much longer. I find it very fascinating, especially because I was recently learning about like different kinds of art and the art period that we are in now, which-
Rachel:
Yeah. I was very excited that you brought up the word “post-postmodernism”-
Allie:
Yeah.
Rachel:
Because I’ve been reading about post-contemporary, which is something that’s, I guess we’re on the we’re on the cusp of, or we have entered. It really depends on who you talk to.
Allie:
Yeah. I feel like it depends on who you talk to, and one of the things I learned in that podcast too is like a lot of these things are so, we can’t realize it in a moment. Like we have to be like 20 years out of it for people to go back and look and say like, “Oh, this was a period.” Like these are things that defined, and the thing that I learned about postmodernism too is like, we think about modernism postmodernism, contemporary, blah, blah, blah, and we think like, “Oh, that’s a style of art or a style of filmmaking or a style of music,” or whatever, but a lot of these things are a way that we, and I say “we” as like the western world typically, think about ourselves and think about the world that we live in, and then the art reflects those thoughts rather than the other way around.
Allie:
So the internet art thing to me is really interesting because the art is so ubiquitous and because we now have a lot of trouble separating the internet from reality, it feels like we live in an age of internet art as far as like, you know, in the ’80s we were living in the postmodern age or whatever. Now it definitely feels to me like we’re living in the internet art age because that is what defines our experiences, and then the art that we make as a result of that, I mean, I feel like there’s no art that’s been made in the last 20 years that at least hasn’t been photographed and put on the internet, right? Like-
Rachel:
Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
Allie:
It all goes back to that, and that’s how we share things with each other. Like, I went to a museum that’s local here in Austin, the Blanton Museum a couple weeks ago, and I was very cognizant of like, “I’m going to keep my phone in my pocket and really look at things and be in the moment,” but I took hella pictures and put them on Instagram, right? Because I wanted to remember it. I wanted to share it with my friends.
Rachel:
Exactly.
Allie:
And-
Rachel:
Yeah, I do the same thing. I’ll take photos inside of an exhibition and put it on Instagram, but it provides value for me because then years later I can go back and say like, “Oh, I remember that exhibition. That was a great exhibition.”
Allie:
Exactly. For sure.
Rachel:
And then I can compare, I don’t know, something that I saw 10 years ago to, “How are they changing the gallery spaces?”
Allie:
Exactly.
Rachel:
You know, things like that. As an artist historian, I love those kind of photos.
Allie:
For sure.
Rachel:
Oh, and one more thing that I wanted to mention before we get off. If there are any artists listening who, you know, maybe your normal practice is digital or not digital. Maybe you’ve done internet art before or you haven’t, but if you have an idea for internet art work and you’d want some people to collaborate with you, you might be a great fit for our residency program. I’m starting a internet artist residency program at DigitalCube. You can ask me about it and look for the blog post, but you’ll propose a project for us to execute collaboratively, and you’ll be inside DigitalCube while we’re working on your project.
Allie:
That is very cool-
Rachel:
So if there’s anyone out there with a cool idea and you’re like, “I need someone to do the tech for me,” or you just want to work with some cool people at DigitalCube, apply. Please apply.
Allie:
Cool. I’ll definitely make sure to include a link to all that information in the show notes as well so people can grab it. Thank you so much, Winn. I appreciate your time so much. Give us a quick shout-out of where people can find you online.
Rachel:
Online, my website is visualwebmaster.com, and on Twitter, I probably use Twitter most, so it’s @visualwebmaster.
Allie:
Awesome. All right, that’ll be it for today. We’ll see you all next week.
Rachel:
Great. Thanks for having me, Allie.
Allie:
Of course. Bye-bye.
Allie:
This episode was sponsored by the following companies. WP Wallet. WP Wallet is a free, simple, intelligent tool that helps WordPress professionals effortlessly manage all of their license keys and invoices for all sites and clients. Never forget a renewal, lose a license key, or miss out on a reimbursement again. Join WP Wallet for free today.
Allie:
LearnDash. LearnDash is taking cutting edge E-learning methodology and infusing it into WordPress. More than just a plugin, LearnDash is trusted to power the learning programs for major universities, small to mid-size companies, startups, entrepreneurs, and bloggers worldwide. If you’re interested in sponsoring an episode using our database, or just want to say hi, go to underrepresentedintech.com. See you next week.