TRANSFER

Saul Appelbaum: Kelani, will you compare and contrast how the art world and TRANSFER engaged with art and technology when you started the gallery?

Kelani Nichole: When the gallery opened in 2013, the art world was still treating digital art, media-based art, and even time-based media as a different kind of discipline, a sort of outsider art, if you will. And one thing that we experienced early on, maybe even in the first year of TRANSFER’s history, was how these hype cycles would hit the art world. This industry had not changed much since Web 1.0. With Web 2.0, we started to see some transformation where artists could develop their personas, market their work, and reach a new audience through various Web 2.0 platforms. But the art world wasn't changing. There was nothing shifting in the structure or the mechanics of the way the market worked or even the way that criticism, audience, and these cycles of meaning happened.

When VR first emerged around 2015, there was so much hype, which quickly turned to AR, and then there was blockchain, AI, crypto, and now of course AI (again). TRANSFER remained consistent in our approach to working with technology and artists, specifically artists trying to think about and question the fundamental assumptions of technology. We would ride these hype cycles, but we were thinking about it in a different, more holistic way. We were doing things the art world wasn't used to. We were bringing in ways of working that technology companies used to develop software iteratively. Test, learn, fail quickly, and often. We were thinking about these kinds of practices in the space of the white cube.

When TRANSFER first started up, there was this amazing community online making art on the Internet. It was an experimental and open public space on the Web. There was something so special about what the artists were doing to push against the trend of platform commercialization and truly thinking about the Internet as this vast open space for exploring ideas in the commons in a public way. This was always something in the gallery's programming, we were pushing against, and dancing between the space of proprietary technology and open technology, what it means for virtual artworks to be more visible, from concept to an experiential perspective.

SA: I love how you talk about testing or an open exploration of technologies and have rolled that out into the entire lifecycle of projects. Similarly, I've always been impressed by larger movements in technology, like openly sharing information almost in real-time as it's being produced and co-work in a network, with the caveat that an open environment may be exploited for free labor by market powers.

KN: Yes, that ethos of openness is something that we were exploring at TRANSFER and, again, why the public space of the Internet was always the primary means of presenting work. A lot of our shows were installed for social media. One of our installation techniques was to take a phone camera and go around the gallery to look at the angles. As we were installing things, we had this technique using blue tape to outline everything in the gallery, trying to get the shot and check out how it would present and represent.

Many of our earliest shows were online first, like Rick Silva's En Plein Air, originally its first instantiation was on Tumblr. The serial presentation format of the Internet is something that became conceptually part of the work. It was vital to the work that it was presented in a scrolling serial way where you see many iterations in this large series of work.

And so, our process at TRANSFER was to try to translate that experience of serial openness, repeating page loads, refreshing browsers, and ask what it means in the space of the white cube. For En Plein Air, it became this huge stack of posters, and every time someone would take off a poster and roll it up, it was akin to a page load, someone had physically refreshed a page. The work traveled away from the gallery, and was appreciated in a distributed way. We were playing with how we could bring the affordances from the Internet into the physical space and have that become a part of the work, installation, experience, and development in the 'real world' conceptually.

SA: Wade, before this interview, we talked about your undergraduate studies in digital anthropology and growing up immersed in digital technologies. Looking back at TRANSFER in 2013, what do you think about the lore of digital transformation or the transformation from analog to digital technologies?

Wade Wallerstein: I was born in 1995. I grew up young enough to experience it, but I didn’t really understand the turn of the century, the new millennium. My family got a computer in 2000 when I was five years old. I remember a time before it, but not really. I also was a member of the guinea pig generation for social media. Facebook came out when I was in the 7th grade, and by the end of 8th grade, all of my social organization, communication, and chats with friends happened there. We had AIM and different kinds of messaging before it, but I grew up using the type of social media similar to what we have today.

I have had a Game Boy in my hand since I was four years old. I have played video games my entire life. This has defined how I understand media, how I understand communication with other people, and how I understand problem-solving. Around 2013 that was right at the cusp of next-gen gaming when companies like Nvidia announced they were working on streaming computer rendering services. The idea was that you didn't have to have the hardware, but you could stream into a very robust 3D environment or video game. It was also a time of 'techlash,' 2014 being the crest of Amazon and some of the big five tech companies. That was the beginning of a scholarly effort to understand online harms. That was the year in high school when they started talking to us about the effects of what could happen online.

My entry point to the digital art world was limited then. There weren't a lot of centralized or good resources for a young person to enter and access digital artwork. Museums and institutions that I would go to weren't showing this kind of work. Regardless of whether experimental or private gallery shows were happening, it wasn't in the public consciousness.

SA: Growing up in this digital environment, was it shocking that a digital and analog divide existed in the art world?

WW: It had been frustrating that this work wasn't being canonized and shown until now. But also shocking, given the rich and emotionally effective experiences created at the time. Around 2019, the art world was starting to understand the impact of net art, or more specifically, internet art. More writing was put out about it because people were beginning to realize (which I thought was obvious) that you can have a rich, phenomenological experience with a piece of media art on your computer.

As someone who grew up seeking out those experiences, trolling through forums and Reddit pages for cool digital content, exploring random chat rooms, games, and different worlds that I grew up playing, this was exciting to see happening. Growing up in an Internet culture that was heavily predicated or filled with video game meme jokes from gamer language and gamer speak, all these sorts of things, it just didn't compute to me now how you might look at a painting and see it as more valuable than a digital video.

KN: This conversation brings to mind something I don't know if I've processed before now. What contemporary art does for us as humans is it helps us understand our place in this moment of history, right? It helps us parse all the complexity and messy, confusing things about contemporary existence. Because media art was pushed to the outside for so long, we didn't have that mode of processing all of these digital phenomenologies, to use Wade's term here. And I think that set us back so much, and after the post-pandemic transformation we've all experienced, culture at large is now virtual in a way it wasn't before.

We could have been so much farther ahead if we had embraced some of these artists, ideas and ways of working within the contemporary art world, especially as a place for idea generation, R&D, experimentation, and thinking differently about these technologies. So part of the mess we're in right now with, for instance, the widespread adoption of LLMs (large language models) and the AI-fueled crisis of culture, is a result somehow of the tension of the scarcity and openness that this digital transformation of our lives presented to a legacy industry like the contemporary art world.

WW: The original Web 2.0 companies treated users as data points but not as experiencing, sensing beings that have agency and participate in the network meaningfully. These companies and others are now adopting a model based on giving people meaningful moments. This is one of the reasons why Kelani's work with TRANSFER is so critical because it reminds people every step of the way that you can have a meaningful phenomenological experience with a screen.

We need to treat these spaces with care, we need to treat them with reverence, and we should be developing them holistically, meaningfully, and connected to our offline values.

SA: Kelani, given the way digital art builds meaningful human edifice, what's one of the most brute objections you've heard to the value of digital art?

KN: One of the things that we encountered a lot at TRANSFER, especially as we went into a more traditional market context with these kinds of work, was this sentiment: why would I want to buy something that everyone can get for free on the Internet? What does it mean for me to invest in something that everyone can “have”? To me, from a position in the tech industry, this seemed so apparent as this place of value, the commons, the shared space of the Internet. But it didn't resonate with collectors at art fairs who were in more of a scarcity mindset from a market perspective. It's one of the things that we heard over and over again. And these values have massively arrived with the transformation we've seen post-pandemic related to crypto, specifically NFTs. These values are now leading and driving a whole new market. It's been fascinating to see how out of that tension, it wasn't as if the old market changed how they think about these things, but instead, an entirely new market emerged.

WW: One way we've discussed this in the past is a shift from exhibition value to circulation value. In this paradigm, value isn't determined by how beautiful something is. Value is determined by how expensive it is. Value is determined by how many people see it and how many people encounter it. And that's a significant shift that Kelani has addressed since the beginning.

One of the first shows I worked on at TRANSFER was Cassie McQuarter's Black Room. It's a fantastic video game piece that is freely available on the Internet and available. It's low bandwidth, so it's easy for folks to play, no matter how great their connection. Instead of selling the game as a whole, we sold video editions from within the game and levels of the game. We were experimenting with this idea of what it means to value circulation potential and play potential. We wanted not to entice but to teach collectors that by purchasing a level of the game and having their name written into the source code (which was the offer that we presented) that they could be part of the increased circulation value of the piece, but still have this exciting and meaningful ownership and relationship to that work.

SA: I love the idea of a company philosophy that's the core beliefs, whereas the mission stays true to the philosophy but also changes through time due to real-world contingencies. What was TRANSFER's early philosophy and mission?

KN: The core philosophy of TRANSFER has always been about giving priority to the virtual and understanding how this shift affects us as humans, how it transforms our experience, and the ways it enters our lives, our bodies, our identities, our landscapes, and our lived environments.

The mission of TRANSFER was always to stay focused on the studio and its needs and how to communicate the essential concepts and ideas in the work. Nowhere is what will sell, what looks good over the sofa, or what is easy to place in a traditional context.

There was a real spirit and ethos of experimentation at every TRANSFER show. We treated the gallery less as a white cube and more like a holodeck. It would change almost as a set. We would have these environments you would enter, and it was about creating an embodied entryway into the concepts of virtuality that these artists were exploring in their work.

As humans, we need to enter a physical space, encounter physical objects, and dialogue with others to create a space of meaning. That's shifting in our lives as popular culture has gone online. But it was that translation and experimentation between the virtual and the physical reality, specifically early in 2013, that was the focus of the gallery. We talked a lot about descreening the artwork. That was a core mission of TRANSFER. How could you not always be looking at TVs or projections? How could you experience work in a more holistic, embodied way?

SA: Kelani, returning to your inspiration from agile development in tech or 'Test, learn, fail quickly, and often,' what were some of the mission failures?

KN: If we did it right, every show had some failure. And that was the point. Also, we were constantly pushing our abilities and ideas about exhibition design and installation. One of the most significant constraints in technology-based artistic practice is the necessary toolkit and resources—everything from compute power to display resolution, lumens, brightness, etc. The gallery danced between what we had available at hand, where the industry was, and what we could achieve. Points of failure were a constraint that helped us push those ideas even further.

Early on, we did a show that attempted to be what we're seeing now with organizations like Superblue or the ArtTechHouse, where it's an entire floor-to-ceiling projection, a completely immersive space with complex virtual mapping. We were hacking that completely together with in-house display technology and render upon render that mapped to the actual physical space of the gallery. Of course, the software has progressed so much now that you can do advanced virtual mapping in a few clicks. But at that time, we were inventing those ways of thinking and seeing. Great art is a source of R&D and experimentation.

That was always the point of failure, pushing against where the industry's capabilities were and the tools we had to work with in the gallery.