GRETCHEN ANDREW: REMAKING THE GLOBAL INTERNET

Gretchen Andrew: In general, people don't care about what you care about. As artists, unlike companies and politicians, I believe we are not entitled to anyone’s attention. Trust and attention are linked. Attention, like trust, has to be earned and can be disrespected. Companies like Google and Meta constantly abuse our attention and trust. I believe artists have an important role in society and that communicating in areas where the world fails us is part of our job, whether by the poverty of language or imagination. As artists, we have to extend ourselves to go where people are and take them on a journey. The starting place for a conversation about technology is set by the narratives coming out of Silicon Valley, which is where I try to meet and reach people.

GA: In my practice, I hack systems of power with art, code, and glitter. The result of my work is always a transformation of power. Through my work, I have hacked Google search results for elections, re-drawn political maps, appropriated Instagram tracking technology, and infiltrated power structures in the art world. I have also gone from someone who suffered abuses of power to someone who increasingly holds it.

My identity as a woman is essential to its origins, process, and perpetual outcome. My experiences as a woman have made me personally interested in, even obsessed with, appropriating and subverting powers I used to feel I was at the mercy of. The resulting artistic process is a bouquet of technology-based strategies to combat imbalances of power. Not all women agree with this as a creative or tactical process. I find the implication that all women should agree on the same strategy offensive and deeply limiting. Third-wave feminism was supposed to teach us that not every woman has the same experience and that a diversity of approaches and outcomes has value.

GA: As an artist, I have learned to thrive off of limitations and limiting rules. I start each of my series of works by looking at the rules, algorithms, taxes, gender, art world, politics, and legal system. I then consider how these limitations have been constructed to benefit some and disadvantage others. The fun comes in making the rules do the exact opposite of what they are intended to do, such as using Instagram tracking technology to remind ourselves that we don’t need to buy anything to be happy.

GA: Some artists choose to operate outside of systems of power or attack them from the outside. My vision boards interject themselves into Google’s AI data sets and influence the way it thinks and operates. This is to say, I want to get in there and influence it from the inside. I think there's a misunderstanding about how to do this, in AI and in the art world. It is true that a more diverse set of people should have power, but it is also true that to get a seat at the table, to influence AI, you do not have to be invited. One way to speak truth to power is to become powerful.

GA: Arebyte Gallery in London was instrumental early on in helping me identify my practice as digital performance. I call myself an Internet Imperialist because I remake the global Internet in my desired image, insisting that we already live with an Internet made in someone else’s image. Well, why not mine? I am playfully abusing my power. The verbs and actions we associate with power are important. Information is our current battleground, and information imbalances are related to power imbalances. The question of who ends up with the transformed power is important in my work. With AFFIRMATION ADS, I put the power of social media back into the hands of users, allowing them to choose to see positive messages in place of advertisements.

GA: We are suffering in an age where nuance is difficult to hope for in both public and private interactions. Everything computers do is built on a 1s and 0s binary way of thinking. This limitation of technology has seeped into our increasingly divided world. As our technology-based tools know no nuance, we too have dispensed with it. Art, with its endless gray zones, perspectives, and metaphors, is the savior of our current condition. It targets what technology can’t do for us; it reminds us of uncertainty as a form of knowledge, of gray zones, of contradictions that we live better with. Choosing every day not to simplify is both a personal and professional choice for me and a value that will always have its detractors.

GA: Digital art has always had its champions; I think of Christine Paul at The Whitney, Bitforms Gallery, London’s Photographer's Gallery, and Arebyte Gallery in London. A lot of us are suffering a bit of whiplash, having spent our careers carefully nurturing digital works, their markets, their display, and their criticism. I am reminded that we need to zoom back out and greet this surge of interest with openness to learn and patience for the conversations to catch up.

GA: Artist resale rights are becoming a standard in all mediums.

GA: When Taylor Swift was tired of being portrayed in a certain way, she decided to use the caricature of herself as a character to write about in her song BLANK SPACE. Brilliant. She turned the limiting image into art. But, of course, not everyone got the joke. My artwork takes on the performative guise of being all about me, me, me, my desires, my idea of the future, and what I want. I change global technology systems to make MY dreams come true. Women are taught to make it about others, and I think it's an important feminist stance to play with rejecting this narrative.

But of course, it isn’t all about me, and the Crypto Mermaids were created with my entire studio team (Mia Stern, Imogen Hare, Monique Leong, Maria Peguero, and Eliza Blakemore) to demystify male-dominated knowledge topics, starting with crypto.

There is a good chance we are in the midst of rewriting how the financial system works. And, for the time being, I don't believe that this change will have an impact on who the financial system works best for. Understanding it is our best hope of being empowered by this change.

GA: One of my goals in my art is to be subversively mission-driven and reclaim technology as a positive and more inclusive space. I think the best outcome is that someone feels inspired to use perceived limitations as sources of power.