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Podcast: Psych Central Turns 25 This Year

It’s Psych Central’s 25th anniversary! In today’s show, we celebrate the Internet’s largest and oldest independent mental health site with founder Dr. John Grohol. Just a few years after the World Wide Web became public domain, Dr. Grohol was inspired to create an online resource for everyone — a site where patients, clinicians and caregivers could come together to access and share valuable mental health and psychology information.

Join us as Gabe and Dr. Grohol talk about the past, present and future of Psych Central.

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Guest information for ‘John Grohol-Psych central’ Podcast Episode

John M. Grohol, Psy.D. is a pioneer in online mental health and psychology. Recognizing the educational and social potential of the Internet in 1995, Dr. Grohol has transformed the way people could access mental health and psychology resources online. Pre-dating the National Institute for Mental Health and mental health advocacy organizations, Dr. Grohol was the first to publish the diagnostic criteria for common mental disorders, such as depression, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. His leadership has helped to break down the barriers of stigma often associated with mental health concerns, bringing trusted resources and support communities to the Internet.

He has worked tirelessly as a patient advocate to improve the quality of information available for mental health patients, highlighting quality mental health resources, and building safe, private support communities and social networks in numerous health topics.

About The Psych Central Podcast Host

Gabe Howard is an award-winning writer and speaker who lives with bipolar disorder. He is the author of the popular book, Mental Illness is an Asshole and other Observations, available from Amazon; signed copies are also available directly from the author. To learn more about Gabe, please visit his website, gabehoward.com.

Computer Generated Transcript for ‘John Grohol-Psych Central’ Episode

Editor’s Note: Please be mindful that this transcript has been computer generated and therefore may contain inaccuracies and grammar errors. Thank you.

Announcer: You’re listening to the Psych Central Podcast, where guest experts in the field of psychology and mental health share thought-provoking information using plain, everyday language. Here’s your host, Gabe Howard.

Gabe Howard: Hello, everyone, and welcome to this week’s episode of The Psych Central Podcast. Calling into the show today, we have Dr. John Grohol. Dr. Grohol is the editor in chief of PsychCentral.com and the man who founded Psych Central 25 years ago. John, welcome to the show.

Dr. John Grohol: Great to be with you today, Gabe. It’s an exciting achievement.

Gabe Howard: I’ve never done anything for 25 years. It’s incredibly impressive. And I want to start back twenty six years ago, twenty seven years ago before Psych Central existed. When you were coming up with the idea for this Web site, how did you get this idea?

Dr. John Grohol: So it all began when I was in grad school down in Florida and I had a bad first year in school because I learned about the death of my childhood best friend who took his own life. And that was a difficult thing to come to terms with because none of us saw the situation at the time that he was going through and he didn’t feel comfortable in reaching out to anyone. This was back in 1990 and I needed help, but I didn’t exactly know where to turn. One of the places I ended up turning to was a support group online, and that support group was on a section of the Internet we call Usenet, which hosts newsgroups. We call them newsgroups, they are actually just what we would today call like a discussion forum like Reddit or something or even Facebook, similar in the sense of these were groups set up to discuss specific topics. One of those topics was a depression group. And I just found it astounding, amazing that there was an online support group for depression in 1990.

Gabe Howard: And this is before the Internet was a household name.

Dr. John Grohol: Yeah, this, well, this predates the Web, and that’s why it’s hard to explain and hard to have people wrap their minds around it, because here we are 30 years later and to understand that people were doing online support, emotional support and information sharing thirty years ago. So these are not new phenomenon. So for people to sort of look at the Internet and say, oh, you know, it’s not real or you can’t have a real emotional connection with other people, I laugh at them because we’ve been, people have been having real emotional connections through Internet technologies for well over 30 years, actually goes back even further than that.

Gabe Howard: Yeah, I remember the old, like, bulletin board system days.

Dr. John Grohol: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. CompuServe, AOL and Prodigy too were the commercial services and they also had the equivalent of support groups in their respective services.

Gabe Howard: They did. I used to work for CompuServe serve, and that’s where I found the Internet. So it’s interesting. We’ve got a similar story so far with technology really helping us get through difficult times. And of course, I’m really sorry about the loss of your friend.

Dr. John Grohol: Thank you. It was a really difficult time in my life, and using that support group really helped me and it really helped me understand the power that such support groups held for people, if only they knew about them. The fact that I came upon it, it was only because I had some mad computer skills at the time. Computers were a hobby of mine. So I understood how to search for that type of group on Usenet. At the time, it was not a simple process and you had to be in academia. Back then, you had to be associated with the university as a student or a professor or something even to access that part of the Internet. So that got me thinking, well, if this helped me so much, and it’s helping other people as much as I can see that it is, wouldn’t it be great if more people knew about this? So I started collecting, I started indexing all these support groups that existed back in 1990 and 1991. And I published those indexes on those groups to let people know about other great emotional support and psychology groups that existed so people could find them and find each other.

Gabe Howard: And this was all before PsychCentral.com was a registered domain name.

Dr. John Grohol: Yep, yep.

Gabe Howard: And now here we are. So it’s obviously you did this for five years, which is not an insignificant amount of time. This wasn’t a whim for you. This was something that was a major part of your life for half a decade.

Dr. John Grohol: I was actually deeply involved in newsgroups back then because that was the modality that people used to have online discussions. There was no Reddit. There was no other way of doing that. Well, that’s not entirely true. There’s a thing called mailing lists that still exists today, too. And that’s where you get the online discussion, it comes right to your email box. And those remain widely used in many parts of the Internet.

Gabe Howard: So now we’re at 1995. Twenty five years ago.

Dr. John Grohol: So 1995, it looked like the Web was going to be the phenomena that turned out to be, and I said, well, this is a good place to publish a Web site and to put these indexes, to give them a home. To point people to a Web site and say, here you can go and find an online support group here. You can go and find a group about psychology or some related topic. And it’s so much easier than trying to publish these on newsgroups. So the first couple of years, there was no PsychCentral.com domain because domains back then were also pretty expensive. So what most people did is that they would use an Internet service provider’s domain and they would have lots of users, much like, if you remember, early Web sites allowed people to build their own Web site like GeoCities

Gabe Howard: Like GeoCities

Dr. John Grohol: So, yes, that’s the one. So you had your Web site and it hung off the GeoCities.com domain. That’s where Psych Central originally lived at first in upstate New York, where I did my internship. Eventually, I went out and spent the, I think it was like $50 or $60 a year to have a dot.com domain back then. So that’s a pretty significant investment. So I had to make sure that I was ready to make that commitment to PsychCentral.com. And it was perfectly OK before like 2002 to not like have your own domain. That was more of a corporate thing.

Gabe Howard: So here we are, we’ve now registered PsychCentral.com. What did this site look like when you made the leap from, you know, hanging off somebody else’s domain name? What sort of took place in these transitional years, these startup years?

Dr. John Grohol: Well, at first, it was more of a hobby site for me. I mean, it literally was a way of publishing these indexes and learning HTML and coding for the Internet and doing that and understanding how graphics worked and how. You had to do it all back then. There was no such career as a web developer. HTML was built to be simple and easily learned. And so anybody could create their own Web site. I taught many conference workshops about how a clinician, how therapists could build their own Web site, because it was that easy. And you can still do it today. You can build a very simple Web site using raw HTML coding directly from an application like notepad or word pad or something like that. So for the first couple of years, the Web site didn’t have a lot. It was maybe like a dozen pages and a bunch of those pages were the indexes of the support groups.

Gabe Howard: To put it in 2020 talk, it was basically just a list of links.

Dr. John Grohol: Yes, it was a list of links, because that’s. It’s hard to understand this, but Yahoo at the time in 1995 was the only search directory and Yahoo was just a list of links curated by human editors. And that’s what made it special. But back in 95, 96, 97, the Web was small enough that you could actually have humans go around looking for new Web sites to put into their directory. And so that’s basically what I was doing. I was doing a specialized directory of links for mental health, for psychology.

Gabe Howard: Did that have a blog on it? Were you writing articles back then? Or is this?

Dr. John Grohol: So that’s a good question about blogging, because I did start blogging and I believe it was 1999. And I wasn’t satisfied with any of the blogging software available at the time because it was all pretty rudimentary and didn’t quite do everything that I wanted it to do. And so I coded my own blog software to be become a blogger, and I coded that in Perl. And I maintained it for a couple of years until WordPress came around. And that was in the early 2000s.

Gabe Howard: When did PsychCentral.com start looking how it looks today? And I don’t mean design wise, I mean, you know, having all of the blogs, having the forums, having the news and all of the stuff that people have come to rely on today.

Dr. John Grohol: From 1995 to 2006, those first eleven years it grew bit by bit, piece by piece. I worked on it in my spare time. It was not my full time gig. I had other jobs working for other companies, helping them build mental health Web sites. I added pages here and there where I could, when I could, when I had the time. And it was kind of done, you know, randomly, haphazardly. I didn’t really have a clear vision for what I wanted it to be and become because I was doing this work for other companies. But I did see it that it had a good traffic profile, that it still continued to get a lot of traffic, despite it not being as big as some other Web sites out there or as in depth about different mental health issues. I also encouraged a lot of people to publish on the site if they had an article or if they wanted to tell their personal story about dealing with mental health issues or dealing with treatment and whatnot. So I published a lot of other people’s stories, other people’s writing on the site as well. In 2006, that’s when I decided I had enough of working for the man and different start ups and seeing all the ways that they were doing things wrong and spending money on things that didn’t matter. And I was so sick of seeing that. I was seeing, you know, millions of dollars just basically be wasted and poured down the drain. And so in 2006, I said, look, I can do this better. I can do this more thoughtfully. And I can do this independent of any industry influence, whether it be pharma, whether it be my own biases toward psychotherapy. I believe we can create a better mental health Web site that has information that we keep updated, that we add new stuff to, that we have a blog. 2006 was really the tipping point, the turning point for Psych Central, because I started focusing on it full time. It started paying my bills and it allowed me to hire my first couple of staffers.

Gabe Howard: We’ll be right back after we hear from our sponsors.

Sponsor Message: This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp.com. Secure, convenient, and affordable online counseling. Our counselors are licensed, accredited professionals. Anything you share is confidential. Schedule secure video or phone sessions, plus chat and text with your therapist whenever you feel it’s needed. A month of online therapy often costs less than a single traditional face to face session. Go to BetterHelp.com/PsychCentral and experience seven days of free therapy to see if online counseling is right for you. BetterHelp.com/PsychCentral.

Gabe Howard: We’re back discussing the 25th anniversary of PsychCentral.com with founder Dr. John Grohol. Now, I know that Psych Central’s credo is to provide the best evidence based mental health and psychology information, regardless of profession. All voices are important and should be elevated in the discourse about mental illness and mental health. When did that credo come along?

Dr. John Grohol: The background for the credo comes from my seeing back in my graduate school days, my observing that the professions didn’t talk to each other. Psychiatrist didn’t talk to psychologists. Clinical social workers didn’t talk to a psychiatrists or psychologists. That each of these were their own individual silos in training and then in practice, in research and then trying to get those research results disseminated to clinicians. And there was no reason for it. We’re all trying to work on the same disorders. And I found it so frustrating because at the end of the day, all the mental health professionals and there’s, you know, five, six, seven, eight, nine different types of mental health professionals, they’re all doing the same kinds of things. They’re trying to help people grapple with difficult things in their lives, whether they be diagnosed mental illness or personality concerns or just coping with a life issue. And I saw no reason for this disconnect between the professions. It really annoyed me. And I talked to other colleagues and found, surprisingly, that they were open to the idea. That there is this desire to coordinate and communicate more between professions, but it just doesn’t happen. So from the onset of building Psych Central, I very strongly believed that we should be agnostic in our development and in our communications, the way we write content, the topics we focus on. We should try and be as objective as possible, as independent as possible.

Dr. John Grohol: And really just look at what does the research say? Does the research say therapy works best for this disorder? Or does the research say medications work best? Or some combination of the two? Or is there a third modality that you should consider? And I just put aside any professional biases as much as humanly possible and tried to create the content that reflects that belief in the credo. The last part of the credo is that it’s not a conversation just for professionals to be having among themselves. The most important part of the conversation is patients, our clients, and they need to be a part of the conversation. Their stories need to be heard. And from day one, I always believed that. And I try and I tried to create a platform where patient stories could also be a part of the conversation. And in my view, the most important part.

Gabe Howard: John, it’s interesting, I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder back in 2003, and it was 2006, 2007 before I would say that I started to become a mental health advocate. And for years, I sort of bopped around in the siloed system that you speak of. I was a person with lived experience or I was a consumer, a peer, a patient. And when I met up with websites that wanted to talk about, you know, the research and the facts, they had no interest in my voice because they believed that my voice was opinion. And then I met up with you. And that was fantastic because you understood that the patient voice is relevant and the clinician voice is relevant and the caregiver voice is relevant and PsychCentral.com really has all of these voices coexisting in perfect harmony. So it’s no surprise that somebody like me ended up on Psych Central, because my only other choice would really to be on just a patient only Web site. And I, like you, feel that just leaves so much information out. And it also sort of makes us hostile to each other. Do you find that everybody coexists well, on PsychCentral.com?

Dr. John Grohol: You know, that’s the goal, that that is what we strive to be, what we strive for the site to reflect, that all of these voices are equal. I don’t know that, you know, we always are successful at doing that as well as we could, but we do try. And it is rooted firmly in the belief that the patient voice isn’t just one of many. I would argue it’s the most important. It’s the one that’s least heard and is often left out of the conversation altogether. And I find that just horrible, horrible bias in a lot of Web sites out there that they don’t include the patient voice or it’s sectioned off into its own special patient section. You know, here are the patient stories. I don’t believe in that. I believe that it should be as integral and as well integrated into the conversation as much as any other voice, because we’re talking about patient lives here. They need to be a part of the solution. They need to be a part of, an active part of their treatment, or in many cases, the treatment simply isn’t that effective.

Gabe Howard: Well, John, obviously you’re going to get no argument from me. I do want to commend you strongly for doing this, because I think that people who don’t live with mental illness don’t realize how often the patient voice is pushed down. So I was very surprised when I found Psych Central just as a user. It came up in a Google search. And I liked this because it forced me to learn about all sides. And I think that made me not only a better mental health advocate, but honestly, I think it allowed me to get better care. And I know that is a common thing that I hear running the podcast and doing the work that I do. So, of course, complete kudos to you.

Dr. John Grohol: Thank you. Thank you. But it’s not me. I have a hard time accepting such things because I do the platform and I do what we’ve created here with the help and support and standing on the shoulders of dozens of staffers like yourself. It wouldn’t be possible to have the great resources that we have on Psych Central without people like you, without people like our managing editor Sarah Newman, without all the other great editors and contributors that we have. It’s just they are all individually amazing people and they’ve helped, you know, make Psych Central what it is today. And of course, it would be nothing today if we weren’t able to actually speak to people in a way that they find useful. Because we have somewhere between six and seven million unique users every month. That also helps us do the kind of work that we’re trying to do.

Gabe Howard: John, we’ve talked about the past, we’ve talked about the present. What’s the future of Psych Central?

Dr. John Grohol: The future of Psych Central is always a question in my mind, because we’ve had a great 14 years as a full time ongoing concern. The online landscape over the past four or five years has definitely gotten a lot more difficult to navigate with Google and primarily Google, because that’s the search engine that everybody uses and their algorithm changes. A small digital publisher like Psych Central has a much more challenging time navigating these kinds of algorithm changes that don’t seem to make very much sense to us or to a lot of other health publishers. That’s definitely been a challenge for us. So in the future, I’d like to hope that Google continues to listen to small publishers like us and is aware that when they change the algorithm, and it can really hurt publishers that have been providing health information before they were even, before they were even a business, before they were even a company. I mean, we’ve been around before WebMD. We’ve been around long before Google. Part of the future of Psych Central is trying to maintain our leadership position as an independent mental health resource.

Dr. John Grohol: I think some of the ways that we can improve and do some awesome things in the space is, for instance, to put together a great app. We’ve done an app in the past, but it was more just a way of interacting with our Web site. And we’d like to do an app that is more intervention based and helps people wherever they are in their own mental health journey to try and become a better person, to try and cope better with those kinds of things that life is throwing at them, whether they’re mental health issues or relationship issues. And I see a lot of potential there. So that’s something that we’re looking to get started with this year and hopefully have something out within a year’s time or so. The future is, Tom Petty reminds us, is wide open. And I believe that we have still only touched the tip of the iceberg in terms of what’s possible to help people with mental health issues and concerns in their own daily lives.

Gabe Howard: Well, John, I can’t thank you enough for starting Psych Central, and I can’t thank you enough for being open to evolving. It wasn’t three years ago, actually on November 19, 2017, we aired the very first episode of The Psych Central Podcast where we had you as a guest telling us all about Psych Central. And I listen to that episode sometimes and it really just reminds me of how far we have come with the podcast in the last three years. And of course, thank you for being willing to invest in podcasting at a time when, well, frankly, most people were rolling their eyes and saying, everybody has a podcast.

Dr. John Grohol: Yeah, I mean, it’s just one of those things that we like to innovate. We like to see what kind of platforms, what kind of things people are interested in doing and trying to reach them wherever they are. I think that’s so important. If they’re into podcasting, why wouldn’t you have a platform? Why wouldn’t you have some podcasts to try and help people understand mental health better? Psychology better?

Gabe Howard: Well, I guarantee that every listener of this show could not agree with you more, John. This was great. You want to come back in say five years for the 30th anniversary of PsychCentral.com?

Dr. John Grohol: Gabe, I think that would be a great thing to look forward to, and I’m going to put it on my calendar.

Gabe Howard: Well, John, I agree, and it’s a date. All right, everybody, here’s what we need you to do. If you like the show, please subscribe. Please rank us. Review us. Use your words and tell people why you like us. Share us on social media. Send us in e-mails, mention us in support groups. If you’re at dinner with your mother and you’re bored, tell her all about The Psych Central Podcast. And remember, you can get one week of free, convenient, affordable, private online counseling anytime, anywhere, simply by visiting BetterHelp.com/PsychCentral. And we will see everybody next week.

Announcer: You’ve been listening to The Psych Central Podcast. Want your audience to be wowed at your next event? Feature an appearance and LIVE RECORDING of the Psych Central Podcast right from your stage! For more details, or to book an event, please email us at [email protected]. Previous episodes can be found at PsychCentral.com/Show or on your favorite podcast player. Psych Central is the internet’s oldest and largest independent mental health website run by mental health professionals. Overseen by Dr. John Grohol, Psych Central offers trusted resources and quizzes to help answer your questions about mental health, personality, psychotherapy, and more. Please visit us today at PsychCentral.com. To learn more about our host, Gabe Howard, please visit his website at gabehoward.com. Thank you for listening and please share with your friends, family, and followers.

Podcast: Psych Central Turns 25 This Year syndicated from

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whorchataaa · 5 years ago

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Podcast: Psych Central Turns 25 This Year

Join us as Gabe and Dr. Grohol talk about the past, present and future of Psych Central.

SUBSCRIBE & REVIEW

Guest information for ‘John Grohol-Psych central’ Podcast Episode

About The Psych Central Podcast Host

Computer Generated Transcript for ‘John Grohol-Psych Central’ Episode

Editor’s Note: Please be mindful that this transcript has been computer generated and therefore may contain inaccuracies and grammar errors. Thank you.

Dr. John Grohol: Great to be with you today, Gabe. It’s an exciting achievement.

Gabe Howard: And this is before the Internet was a household name.

Gabe Howard: Yeah, I remember the old, like, bulletin board system days.

Dr. John Grohol: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. CompuServe, AOL and Prodigy too were the commercial services and they also had the equivalent of support groups in their respective services.

Gabe Howard: And this was all before PsychCentral.com was a registered domain name.

Dr. John Grohol: Yep, yep.

Gabe Howard: So now we’re at 1995. Twenty five years ago.

Gabe Howard: Like GeoCities

Gabe Howard: To put it in 2020 talk, it was basically just a list of links.

Gabe Howard: Did that have a blog on it? Were you writing articles back then? Or is this?

Gabe Howard: We’ll be right back after we hear from our sponsors.

Gabe Howard: John, we’ve talked about the past, we’ve talked about the present. What’s the future of Psych Central?

Dr. John Grohol: Gabe, I think that would be a great thing to look forward to, and I’m going to put it on my calendar.

from https://ift.tt/2W2kXhE Check out https://peterlegyel.wordpress.com/

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ashley-unicorn · 5 years ago

Text

Podcast: Psych Central Turns 25 This Year

Join us as Gabe and Dr. Grohol talk about the past, present and future of Psych Central.

SUBSCRIBE & REVIEW

Guest information for ‘John Grohol-Psych central’ Podcast Episode

About The Psych Central Podcast Host

Computer Generated Transcript for ‘John Grohol-Psych Central’ Episode

Editor’s Note: Please be mindful that this transcript has been computer generated and therefore may contain inaccuracies and grammar errors. Thank you.

Dr. John Grohol: Great to be with you today, Gabe. It’s an exciting achievement.

Gabe Howard: And this is before the Internet was a household name.

Gabe Howard: Yeah, I remember the old, like, bulletin board system days.

Dr. John Grohol: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. CompuServe, AOL and Prodigy too were the commercial services and they also had the equivalent of support groups in their respective services.

Gabe Howard: And this was all before PsychCentral.com was a registered domain name.

Dr. John Grohol: Yep, yep.

Gabe Howard: So now we’re at 1995. Twenty five years ago.

Gabe Howard: Like GeoCities

Gabe Howard: To put it in 2020 talk, it was basically just a list of links.

Gabe Howard: Did that have a blog on it? Were you writing articles back then? Or is this?

Gabe Howard: We’ll be right back after we hear from our sponsors.

Gabe Howard: John, we’ve talked about the past, we’ve talked about the present. What’s the future of Psych Central?

Dr. John Grohol: Yeah, I mean, it��s just one of those things that we like to innovate. We like to see what kind of platforms, what kind of things people are interested in doing and trying to reach them wherever they are. I think that’s so important. If they’re into podcasting, why wouldn’t you have a platform? Why wouldn’t you have some podcasts to try and help people understand mental health better? Psychology better?

Dr. John Grohol: Gabe, I think that would be a great thing to look forward to, and I’m going to put it on my calendar.

from https://ift.tt/2W2kXhE Check out https://daniejadkins.wordpress.com/

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lav2capturephotography · 6 years ago

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Guest Lecture No. 11 Katrina Sluis

Katrina works part time in the Southbank university and as a curator in the Photographer’s gallery

She is a curator/ educator/writer/ artist. The photographer’s gallery was built in the 1970’s for having photography accepted as a cultural media.

She has no previous experience of curating exhibitions except of her own and some others .

WE ARE ALL CURATORS … ( Katrina Sluis- Slaus ) Katrina’s tutors said that photography is not an art whereas she studied fine arts in 1997.

She is interested in the context changing

She was working for the first internet provider ( CompuServe ) She became a Hybrid.. She made the Gitte Weise Gallery by typing HTML Code. Ground Speed ( RedPizza) #4 2001 Rosemary Laing

She got involved in shipping jobs

She got inspired from her teachers and decided to become a teacher

After a while she begun writing

She wrote a book which will soon be released.

-What does a not-so Proper digital curator do ??-

- Throws Parties….

the digital can be seen in different ways

- The digital is a tool for the artist

Its a new communications channel

- Photoshop is a tool, Isn’t it ?…

The 85% of the people who were in the photographer’ gallery had never stepped there and all of them were designers and artists.

- Ask People to do cool things

Invent cocktails …

- Hustle money and write grant applications

You need to know who is funding you and who plays with you ( Joking )

- Develop NEW COLLABORATIONS

Being able to write how important is a project is a key skill

- To make money go further and generate new opportunities for artists.

- BE CLEAR…!!!!

- Commission New Ground breaking work …

- Institutional Anxiety( You might be sealing with conflicts all the time )

- Convince People to do a project on cat photography, GIF’S Geocities… is a good idea …..

- Give Talks and Attend discussions…

Write stuff … and commission other people to write stuff

Be the technical genius…

The Specific Lecture Dictates in a manner of speaking the rules of being an artist/ a curator/ an artist

- Go to dinners openings and world arts events

Always have an opinion

Projects under development:

Centre for the STUDY OF THE NETWORKED IMAGE

Unthinking Photography 3 programme on photography ( Automation and cultural value GEEKENDER#2

Future Vision meet ups ( Monthly social events )

R& D Labs

TPG GEEKENDER #2 Experimental Photo school

I camera summer 2017

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hodldrgn-blog · 7 years ago

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New Post has been published on https://cryptomoonity.com/about-erhan-veriledger-co-founder-and-cto/

About Erhan: VeriLedger Co-Founder and CTO

The Fallout of the Financial Crisis

I first took notice of cryptocurrencies in general and Bitcoin specifically circa 2010 during the tail end of the financial crisis. At the time, I headed the Security Service Federal Credit Union software department. Already a top-10 US credit union, SSFCU acquired several institutions in Colorado and Utah pursuant to the NCUA’s guidance that credit unions with high levels of troubled assets find stable purchase before their imminent collapse. My role in such mergers and acquisitions was to assess their technologies and integrate their systems into our service-oriented architecture. I loved helping members of these credit unions, but like many, I recognized that centralizing trust presents intractable problems when that trust is abused.

Bitcoin from the Perspective of an Innovator

At the time, Bitcoin was making great waves. There were think pieces on how it would revolutionize the financial system, followed by calls for help because someone’s private keys were lost, essentially eliminating access to any funds associated with that. It was, and continues to be, an enigmatic process of innovation.

Even with these hiccups, blockchains, and the cryptocurrency instance, appealed to my software security background as a novel application of applied public key cryptography. Having presented at RSA the previous year for a decentralized cryptographic protocol that reduced trust in third-parties, I loved the audacity of solving a traditional middleman problem in such a grounded way. Unlike my project, though, Bitcoin and blockchain technology provided an innovative way to transact financially, and as a result created a new economy that grows to this day.

Since then, blockchains have ridden the hype cycle successfully to be a serious contender for a new decentralized network protocol. Blockchains in many ways reminds one of the early days of the Internet, pre-web. In the 1970s and 1980s, there was Usenet and email, both killer applications, but it wasn’t until the world-wide web, the September that never ended, and when everyone could have their own AOL or GeoCities site that the Internet entered the zeitgeist. Blockchain is following this cycle, with cryptocurrency the first of potentially many killer apps.

Blockchain, Banks and the Accountants In-between

With smart contracts alongside a cryptocurrency, any bank or credit union can be effectively obsolete in theory. In practice, financial institutions will rather evolve than die, and this is borne out in the number of banks investing in public or private blockchains, investigating how to work with cryptocurrencies, and working with fintechs to shore up their limited capabilities.

Though we may correctly recognize the skyrocketing prices of Bitcoin and Ethereum in 2017 as speculation, we should look at it with appreciation rather than disdain. Speculation is simply one stage in a natural normalizing of a new technology. When your Facebook friends are asking you for cryptocurrency tips, you know it’s gaining traction.

Blockchain technology, cryptocurrencies, and smart contracts are relevant to everyone in all aspects in a similar way that the Internet is. From a financial perspective, where I can speak with some credibility, blockchain technology is robust and getting stronger all the time, the “user-friendliness” of its ancillary tools is nascent. It requires a fair amount of technical knowledge to holistically comprehend a portfolio. Innovators and even some early adopters have this skill set, but the landscape is quickly shifting to where an organization may invest in cryptocurrencies but its accounting analysts who are responsible for preparing for taxes or audits do not have the tools to do their jobs.

When Megan Knab and I started VeriLedger, it was with this customer-focused mindset. For cryptocurrency and blockchains to fulfill their missions, it behooves all of us in the industry to develop the necessary tools, education, and guidance to help the early and late majority feel comfortable and competent with wallets, exchanges, and public addresses.

Erhan Kartaltepe VeriLedger Co-Founder and Chief Technical Officer https://www.veriledger.io

About Erhan: VeriLedger Co-Founder and CTO was originally published in VeriLedger on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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#Bitcoin #Blockchain #cryptocurrency #Ethereum #Finance

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awesomeblockchain · 7 years ago

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Bitcoin poster in Tokyo. Blockchain-based technologies and cryptocurrencies are becoming increasingly common. (AP Photo/Koji Sasahara)

Despite big price swings in cryptocurrencies this past year, investor interest remains intense around the blockchain world, even as many struggle to understand the technologies and opportunities.

This week, I moderated a panel at the Digital Hollywood conference in Los Angeles, featuring executives involved in blockchain-based businesses in film finance, video transcoding/servers, over-the-top video streaming, ad technology and video games, all areas ripe for disruption.

Out of that hour-plus discussion came a number of tips and perspectives that may help others pondering investment in blockchain tech and cryptocurrencies, especially in media, entertainment and advertising.

If you're just beginning, panelists suggested, start small, smart and slow. Look at the digital wallet services from Coinbase and the Winklevoss twins' Gemini Trust Company, and see their relatively limited offerings as a good thing for a beginner.

And, they suggested, as a way to further spread risk, consider the Bloomberg Galaxy Crypto Index fund that launched earlier this month from Bloomberg and Galaxy Digital Capital Management LLP, headed by former hedge-fund manager Mike Novogratz. Now, on to their larger points.

1) It's early. People are still figuring out blockchain's implications for media, entertainment and advertising. So look at basic tools that solve pain points already facing the industry.

Rebecca Lerner, EVP of MAD Network

"I don't think we will see a full realization of blockchain for 20 years. I'm just hopeful that regulation doesn't knock it off before we get started. This will be a really interesting space over the next five years, but the really transformative stuff will take 20 years."

There are a lot of early-stage, "not sexy" opportunities in areas such as "video distribution, the way you store and manage assets. Infrastructure, processing storage, those types of things. We're still pretty low on the tech scale. There are a lot of interesting applications for the technology but the technology is really, really young.

"People ask us where do you think we are in the evolution of technology and some people say we're in the

Geocities era (of the Internet's development). I don't think we're even there yet. It's pretty hard to think about what are some of the sexy applications, which entertainment is typically excited about.

2) What can blockchain and cryptocurrency do for the media, entertainment and advertising industries?

Robert Binning, CEO, StreamSpace

"Blockchain tech primarily solves the problem of trust on the Internet, which is particularly important in the entertainment industry. Blockchain can bring back an element of transparency to the industry, by allowing people to see in an open and public way where the money is coming from and where it's going.

"Right now there's a lot of muddied-up payment channels between artists, content distributors and audiences. I think it would incentivize a lot more filmmakers if they see where the money is going and who's getting what kind of cut. It'll eliminate a lot of the middle men who take a share of the profit and strangle the product."

Seth Shapiro, Head of Strategy, VideoCoin.io. Also with Alpha Networks.

"There are so many things in Hollywood that are old. Hollywood economics are deliberately opaque. So the notion of putting those on the (block)chain and having a transparent ledger where the economics are available, right there that's super interesting. It also has interesting implications in terms of piracy.

In terms of payout, that will take a while.But being able to compensate in models other than traditional deficit financing is interesting. Now, talent gets the data back that they get back, which may not be much. If you actually put that information on the chain, then it becomes transparent. And then it becomes more efficient."

Lerner

"We think it's a pretty huge opportunity. The market spends $270 billion a year in digital advertising." But a significant portion of that spending, between 40 percent and 60 percent, is taken by middle men in the ad-tech space, in areas such as validation and view ability.

"The foundation the industry is built on, OpenRTB, is fundamentally flawed. People are just slapping additional band-aids on the problem. It's like slapping a bandaid on cancer. It may make you feel better, but it won't do much.

Mike Pelletier, Blockchain and gaming consultant; former Call of Duty marketing director

In the video game industry, "It's hard to say where it's

not going to impact things. Users and consumers, developers and publishers will be affected. Blockchain lends itself to this idea of micro transactions and digital assets within gaming. Eventually, we'll think of our digital assets very differently. You'll be able to (re-)sell them."

3) Regulators are circling the industry. So are major financial institutions. Both will stabilize the investing climate, and change it, probably dramatically. But because of those shifts, now might be a good time to invest.

Lerner

"I think we're on the precipice of a massive influx of institutional capital. But there are a few major hurdles that we still need to resolve before that can happen. Custody is a big one. If we can't figure out how we can make pension funds and large private-equity funds feel comfortable about putting large amounts of money into crypto, they'll never invest, they'll never put money in that way. It should be in everybody's interest to see what's happening and see how they can align their business."

Binning

To avoid creating problems with securities regulators, StreamSpace is using blockchain technologies under the crowd-equity fundraising rules of

Reg. A+ of the Jobs Act of 2012. Their blockchain-based system tracks film investor ownership and payouts.

"We're tokenizing film assets, so investors can take part in crowd funding and crowd equity in indie films. It's essentially an ICO for each film, but it's all tied together in a single platform. People can invest in the film, and share in the profits."

Shapiro

The regulatory climate is different in different countries, and accordingly, so is the investment climate from country to country. Europe has been a really fertile ground for this, but his company also has seen a tremendous amount of investment from Asian sources.

"We're finding in Asia a tremendous appetite for blockchain and cryptocurrency, and also a tremendous appetite for media companies, which is good for this town (Hollywood)."

4) Know what you're buying into. Cryptocurrencies have made the most noise, but many blockchain companies are issuing utility or even security tokens as part of their services. Many are built on the Ethereum protocol (ERC20) and its smart-contract capabilities. And key issues like latency, security and how transactions are validated across a network are vital to overall operations.

Shapiro

"A utility token is something that gives you an asset to get a specific thing, like a ticket to Disneyland. You don't buy the token hoping it'll appreciate. You do it to get something. If something appreciates, that's a rough description of a security."

Lerner

"Do your due diligence, Understand their business model, and the token they're trying to create, and whether it aligns with what you're interested in investing in. The big advice is only put the money in that you can afford to lose. When I started getting into this sector, my husband was a total skeptic but he also does Daily Fantasy (Sports). I said okay, what are you allocating to Daily Fantasy? That's what I'm allocating here. That's a fun way to do it. I have fun trading coins, buying some stuff, but it's all money we can afford to lose."

5) Big institutional and commercial investors are coming in, but there may be room for retail investors who are prudent about where they put their money.

Pelletier

"A lot of big companies are working on this now, and it could be less than six months to a year away from all this big money coming in. I would say it's smart to get in the water now for the right reason and for the right amount of money. Whatever is the amount of money you could spend in Vegas in a year, put that money in Bitcoin and Ethereum and a few others. I think that could end up being a very smart move."

Shapiro

"Big money will come in to the extent they think they can control this. The people that, I don't want to say rule the world, but the ones who rule world, aren't going to sit idly by and let the anarcho-crypto guys take over the shop. They're going to figure out how to play this. It remains to be seen what that will mean for the entrepreneurial community."

https://ift.tt/2GTeWtj

#Ingentium #Inc. - Today

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flauntpage · 8 years ago

Text

Works of: A Conversation with Dan Miller by Jesse Malmed

When we have the internet—like we must right now—we find ourselves down any number of world-holes. I just tried to find a concrete answer as to how long after being born a baby can remain unnamed. There are states’ rights and rules about accent marks and banned names (a good enough band name, I think) and one source that says it’s 60 days in Australia and 42 in the UK. I’m typing this in Illinois and thinking both about the specificities of titles and sitting down for a job conversation and staging an argument and what you’re about to read. Dan Miller is relentlessly curious and critical, attuned both to the minutiae of our lived experiences and the systemic forces assigned to buffing them out. Before coming to Chicago in 2014 to attend Northwestern’s MFA program, Dan was living in Melbourne, where that critical curiosity and restless attentiveness began to find form in exhibitions, objects, situations and texts. The most visible component of his practice over the last few years—his ongoing, wildly generative collaboration with Thomas Kong—is finding new publics through a recent (and really excellent) publication with Half Letter Press. There’s a wry sleight of hand continually at play in Dan’s activities—somehow art about art about not art; hard work and hardly work; collaborative and singular. We both talk both about his work and then don’t. We barely mention his garden even though it was one of the things I thought about most when thinking about this, a slow conversation Dan and I had over the last few weeks. The images are all his.

Jesse Malmed: Let’s start somewhere in the middle: what were your cultural interests in your mid- to late-teens? And what would have been the obvious first question in an interview about your practice at that moment?

Dan Miller: I could conveniently bookend that period with two musical experiences: seeing Billy Joel and Elton John in concert as a fourteen-year-old, and seeing the anonymous art-rock band TISM play shortly before my nineteenth birthday. What I learned in those years is reflected in the enormous gap between the family-friendly Anglo-American über-culture and an Australian band who were wasting their university educations on writing vulgar anthems against the establishment. In those years it was music where I encountered ordinary people making things in response to their immediate worlds. This is the kind of culture I’m still interested in today. Back then, I gravitated to musicians and writers who understood our double isolation; suburbia at the “arse end of the world.” I was an enthusiastic spectator, but I completely failed to imagine producing anything other than good grades. If someone had asked me about my ‘practice’ then, I would have assumed they were asking what I was going to do when I finished law school.

JM: Transgressive/aggressive/soft/DIY/DIT/&c musics (and the communities surrounding them) seem to be the gateway for so many artists’ awakenings and interests in making culture. I think part of the ubiquity of this experience is reflected in your answer—conventional music is everywhere, so unconventional music has something obvious to bounce against, to camouflage itself as, to appear in stark relief against—in the way that maybe tens of thousands of people don’t assemble to watch a bloated but weak example of social practice on SPTV and then find their minds blown when they see a really killer sopra group playing in their cousin’s basement. Or maybe that’s what reality tv is. Did you ever play in bands? Are there other obvious or non-obvious ways that impacted your practice?

DM: You’re absolutely right. Although for many would-be artists I think music is the gateway but not the drug. I’ve never admitted this, but I was in a band in high school with a couple of friends for about five minutes. We practiced maybe twice, and we never played a show. Because I couldn’t play any instruments, I was designated as the singer. Because I couldn’t sing, we hit a wall pretty quickly (none of us appreciated the ideology of punk). There is a cassette tape in the bottom of a drawer somewhere that I really hope has been sitting next to a strong magnet this whole time. If anything from this experience influenced me it was the sheer terror of the idea of nakedly attempting to perform a talent in front of an audience. In recent years I’ve avoided repeated feats of virtuosity, and I’ve avoided being ‘on stage’ in various ways. I’ve explicitly shied away from working alone. Art is a place where—if you choose—you can be the singer, the guitarist, the roadie, the sound engineer, the pit photographer, the groupie, and the PR flack, all at the same time, while everyone else looks in every which direction. I love the messiness of this, and the unpredictability of a practice in which the author-spectator binary is abandoned or ignored.

JM: Maybe we could flip the old pedagogical saw and say that “those who can’t play instruments sing and those who can’t sing go on to make art”. I’m curious about how the “author-spectator binary” is contingent on some kind of spectacle (or text, I suppose). What does that relationship (or the breakdown of that binary) look like when there’s nothing else to look at? Or, if that question feels too obvious (or too opaque), could you offer some reflections on your experience in artists’ gardens?

DM: Well, it’s a truism that artists often “hide behind their work,” but I think the separation of artwork and author does little to avoid the extent to which the artist themself is also the thing offered up for consumption. The spectacle/text is all-encompassing. Thomas Pynchon may never give an interview until the day he dies, but we, loyal spectators, will forever be imbibing the Pynchonesque. What a breakdown of the author-spectator roleplay could bring is not necessarily “nothing else to look at,” but maybe “everything else to see.” A theorist whose work has influenced my thinking around this in the past couple of years is Stephen Wright, who argues that we should replace spectatorship with usership. What this implies is that art has to become more useful—perhaps so useful that it is indistinguishable from all the other useful things in the world. We should remember that ‘art’ as we know it is a set of conventions invented only in the last few hundred years. The ancient Greeks surely knew what to do with an oenochoe when they saw one on the dinner table.

JM: Do you remember in earlier days of the internet when email forwards or geocities pages would be filled with either lists of Steven Wright quotes that weren’t his or unattributed jokes that were his under the heading Head-Scratchers to make you go HMMMM? His work became useful in that context and functions pretty well as a voice and institution (let’s not say brand) such that it magnetizes ideas and phrases that feel like they could have been his. I would love to see him do a set of all the various jokes that have been speculatively attributed to him. The other Wright was my introduction to Bernard Brunon and a number of other artists whose practices he described as a kind of dark matter or, at least in my recollection, artists whose work is almost invisible unless you know what to look for. I’m curious about how your own interest in visibility (and in invisibility) deals with usefulness. I think it’s easy for us to see how a vessel can be doubly useful (I see what ewer doing there), but I’m curious about work that may be both useless (as art is sometimes described and proscribed to be) and invisible. We can easily make the argument that no art is truly useless but that its utility is bound up in our intellectual and sensorial experience, in its role as catalyst for thought and feeling—of course. Maybe there’s also something about the space between visibility and legibility that could be interesting to talk through.

DM: I would love to see Stewart Lee, my favorite meta-comedian, circle the wagons around Stephen Wright’s joke-magnetism. Or Yogi Berra’s, for that matter. I don’t know if The Other Wright has a funny bone, but my favorite anecdote of his is attributed to Brunon. Bernard Brunon is of course a very unwellknown artist who ran a house-painting business for 27 years, That’s Painting Productions, that was 100% a functioning house-painting business and 100% an ongoing artwork. I recall Wright mentioning in a talk he delivered to my laptop screen that Brunon often turned down invitations to exhibit in museums and galleries on the basis that he is “too busy working.” This is almost the diametric opposite of Duchamp’s boast that he had never worked a day in his life; that he had “never gotten wet.” Marcel, naturally, loved making the useful useless. If the readymade can said to be work, it is negative work. In the White Box, Duchamp asks “can works be made which are not “of art”?” This reads to me like a challenge that has never really been taken up. Let’s say that it was; would these “works” be invisible? I don’t think so—at least I believe that an artwork that is not visible (this is not to restrict visibility to the visual field alone) is not an artwork at all. But I agree with you that legibility is an important part of this—I’m interested in “works” that are legible as completely viable non-art to some people, and as completely viable art to others.

JM: I was once with a gaggle of artists at a small-town diner and there was curiosity about our presence there. “We’re residents just up the way,” one of us said something like. “Oh—you’re doctors?” they earnestly responded, trying to square our grubbiness with a concept of scrubs-iness. Like that, like practice, let’s shift in thinking about works to working. I’m always interested in how artists’ work impacts their work (and vice versa). An amount of your productive labor is given over to others in various ways. What other work have you done since you began making work? How have these works impacted your work? Are you interested, like Brunon, in fusing your work and your work in that capacity?

DM: Obviously art has an internal language and syntax, but we artists often don’t give non-artists enough credit for understanding what we do—or, worse, we relish the idea that what we do is somehow arcane. The classic “what kind of art do you do?” question can be a genuine invitation to dialogue, rather than eye-roll small-talk. Still, the possibility that a kind of double liberation can come from collocating (physically, conceptually) work and work is incredibly seductive. Ben Kinmont’s Sometimes a nicer sculpture is to be able to provide a living for your family (1998–ongoing) is a major inspiration. It’s no coincidence that many of these kinds of projects—Julia Bryan-Wilson named it ‘occupational realism’—occur at sites of commerce. Outside the work I’ve done in and around the art world, since I became an artist I’ve done all sorts of things for money—I’ve mowed lawns, moved furniture, hosted progressive dinners, ushered concert patrons, mounted televisions in fast food restaurants, and installed christmas decorations in shopping malls. Some of these jobs were fascinating (and many gave me ideas for artworks), but none seemed to offer the kind of structural stability needed for a true work-work fusion. But I keep thinking about it—I even wrote a manifesto last year calling for a group of artists to run a convenience store. This was heavily influenced by seeing Thomas Kong run his store Kim’s Corner Food over the past three years, but also by Chris Kraus’ book Kelly Lake Store, in which she applies (and is rejected) for a Guggenheim Fellowship to re-open a shuttered general store in one of those small Wisconsin towns you know so well.

JM: There’s something especially excellent about the convenience store as the site for these conceptual and physical experiments, as it relates to our earlier mention of usefulness and uselessness. Convenience stores have in their bones the understanding that you might be able to find a better selection or a better price or a better match elsewhere, but that there’s enough here, it’s not too expensive and what could be a better match than you and it being in the same place at the same time? They are eminently useful and in their relative predictability reveal their differences more immediately than other species of spaces. Did you know about Thomas Kong’s work before visited Kim’s or did you stumble upon that store just looking for a snack or something to drink? Do you remember your first conversations with him?

DM: I didn’t know anything about Thomas’ work before I met him in his store, although certainly a few other artists in Chicago had been aware of him for a while. The ironic thing is that I was walking home from the grocery store when I first noticed Kim’s Corner Food—I’m much more inclined to go the extra distance to avoid paying above retail (although there are a lot of surprising bargains at Kim’s). But you’ve absolutely nailed it when it comes to ‘convenience’—there is something irrepressible about it. If there’s a convenience store on your block, not even an Amazon drone could deliver you a cold Pepsi faster than you could put on your slippers and shuffle down the street. So what is this thing called ‘convenience’ we’re all so willing to shell out for? Perhaps it’s a kind of surplus value—maybe the surplus value that some people claim art produces. Fundamentally, though, it’s the use of this revenue-generating peculiarity to create time and space for other things that interests me. Some of the best jobs I’ve ever had have been inside the galleries of art museums, working in pseudo-security guard roles. I was always good at my job, but I also got a lot of thinking done and even conceived a bunch of artworks while making sure visitors didn’t touch the expensive paintings. One thing is for sure: the museums never docked my pay for thinking.

JM: I tried a form of active Cartesian splitting once while doing a cater-waiter gig in which I actively kept my mind occupied by a specific art problem that I had while I was dropping dinners and refilling glasses. I found that it was easier for me to be doing two kinds of work at once (at least something like that, with specific rhythms and relatively low agency) if I was focused in my mind-wandering. I also held one of those museum non-guard jobs before and thought often of this line from a David Berman piece about that kind of position: After guarding masterpieces for weeks, it feels good to stand in my dentist’s office before this cheap painting of a ship. Now, re-reading that piece I remember another line that I love: What Duchamp did with the urinal no longer surprises me, what surprises me is the idea that they had urinals back then. I was thinking yesterday about a class clown alone and home from school or wondering how if your work was doing your work would you daydream about washing dishes and populating spreadsheets. The you/r there is everyone/’s. I’m in rural Vermont as we type and two days ago a few of us walked a few miles to the General Store, which is mostly germane to this moment because of the name. There’s also been an uptick in an urban/e, curated “General Store” that strikes me now as being very much a Specific Store. Should interviews have questions at the end of each paragraph?

DM: Wow, that David Berman piece brought back a lot of memories for me. The anecdote about the guard placing asbestos fragments on the floor is brilliant—being sent home with pay is pretty much the ultimate work fantasy. To answer your non-question, if my work was doing my work (let’s say I was sent home with pay forever), I have a feeling I would still be washing dishes and populating spreadsheets, since they seem to be two fairly essential parts of living these days. I certainly wouldn’t be fantasizing about them. Do you daydream about writing grants when you’re in the studio? I recently got to see a piece of antique furniture called a dry sink, from the days before running water. Wasn’t a urinal without water just a pan? What would a dry spreadsheet look like? I’m not a luddite since I think being a reactionary is the surest way to misery, but I do enjoy inconvenience. Doing things the hard way is part of my DNA. Despite the idiosyncrasy of the space of the convenience store, some part of me thinks being an artist should mean being against convenience. Or maybe just against standardization. Where I live now, my nearest ‘convenience store’ is one of those monolithic chains that practically owns all of us. When Žižek first came to America, he was famously shocked by the condition of the toilets. Me, I was shocked to discover that businesses readily sell postage stamps for more than their face value. Still, I wouldn’t hold gouging like that against a mom-and-pop hardware store/pharmacy/tobacconist if they had some exotic plants in the window and a few handmade signs behind the counter.

JM: There’s a very specific handwriting that I associate with that scale of capitalism. My grandfather—Poppa Clown—who ran a vacuum store, produced his own special rug shampoo and sold bric and brac at the Cloverdale Swap Meet in greater Vancouver, had a style of writing that I still see in bodegas and on occasional telephone poles. When I just googled “my grandfather’s handwriting” I felt class anxiety that apparently he wasn’t a member of the quill-squiggling epistolarati. I’d like to switch gears a little bit—though I could type about handwriting for days—to ask you about Plinth Projects. I am, of course, very interested in platformist projects and outré curatorial conceits. This one has particular resonance for me in this moment because of the on-going conversations about the removal of Confederate monuments in this country. Perhaps you could share with us a bit about that project and how it has or hasn’t impacted your own thinking surrounding monuments here and in Australia and beyond.

DM: That’s a timely question. In the past few weeks that there has been renewed focus on monuments in Australia that celebrate colonial victories and ‘heroes,’ as rallying points for ongoing work by indigenous activists and their non-indigenous allies. Monuments are excellent things around which to focus people’s attention in a time of struggle, but they also allow us to see the absurdity and cruelty of the nation-state and its myths. Plinth Projects took an empty pedestal in Edinburgh Gardens, a popular park in Melbourne, as a site for a series of public art interventions in 2013 and 2014. The original statue, of Queen Victoria, had gone missing some time in the early 1900s, and as an empty pedestal it was actually very beautiful—it seemed to suggest, “we don’t make those kinds of myths here any more.” It had an empowering quality. My first real experience of the plinth was standing on top of it and making out with a date, not long after I moved to Melbourne in around 2009. A group of friends who used to meet for picnics in the park referred to it as the “statue without a statue.” In 2011 some traditionalist members of the otherwise left-wing local city council proposed erecting a new statue of Queen Victoria, a harebrained idea that was scuttled on the basis that it would be too expensive. So when we came along in 2012 and suggested mounting a series of con/temporary art projects on the plinth for a fraction of the cost, they were very glad to take us up on it. I do regret that we didn’t work with any indigenous artists, but I would at least suggest that our efforts, and those of the artists we commissioned, were deliberately anti-monumental. Art is almost never able to enact change at a political level, but I hope that it can at least present propositions for different ways to work against the status quo.

JM: Just a bit away from where I grew up there was an interesting response to a newly erected monument to sadistic conquistador Juan de Oñate y Salazar: indigenous activists chopped the statue’s foot off in mirroring recompense to his own brutality four centuries prior. This is a different but related manner. In the span of a week I was reacquainted with Laszlo and Lazlo Toth. The former is the geologist who attacked Michelangelo’s The Pietà in 1972 and the latter is the nom de plume of Don Novello (better known as a whole other character, Father Guido Sarducci) which he’s used for any number of wonderfully frustrating and deflating epistolary relationships with corporations, politicians and other loci of power. I’ve been thinking about this in part because I’m interested in characters like Sarducci because through their persistence of being as they move from show to show to movie to newspaper to show they stitch together diegeses and reveal them as a (speculatively) unified universe. Considering how fictions overlap might seem like an academic or obtuse response to our ever-worsening political climate. I obviously don’t advocate for what Toth did to The Pietà, but there’s something striking about how easily, if we were inclined, we could damage art. As a culture we have such respect for these objects that I won’t even consider touching a commercially-produced and friend-designated sculpture’s plinth without clearance. But they’re very vulnerable in real terms. Have you ever used a pseudonym?

DM: Late last winter I walked into an exhibition opening at an artist-run space in Chicago, having just hopped off my bike and carrying a large backpack of stuff. The entrance to the exhibition space was narrowed by an inexplicably-placed empty pedestal, and just as I had squeezed past I turned to hug a friend and swiftly wiped—with my backpack—a small sculpture off a shelf on the opposite wall. It didn’t break, but the gasps were audible, and everybody turned to stare at me. Someone from the gallery came over to ‘handle’ me. Most people there continued to give me the side-eye for the rest of the evening, as though my presence as a human in the space was worth less than the artwork I had accidentally assaulted. I was puzzled by the reaction. Somehow it never occurred to me that the artwork might have value beyond its role as a prop for our gathering there. Or, to look at it another way, it was our gathering there that was the thing that gave the object meaning. I feel the same way about monuments and other objects that aspire to permanence—they are just taking up space until people decide that they have meaning in their moment. This is the difference between making history and receiving history. Personally, I am not someone who cares a lot for objects (my favorite kinds of pseudonymous public performances are more along the lines of Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping), but I appreciate the role of icons because without them there could be no iconoclasm. And no, I’ve never used a pseudonym, but I have such a common name that it happily often functions like one.

JM: We hear often about art “starting a conversation” or, as you just described it, as a prop for our gathering (I’ve found the idea and phrase MacGuffin useful too). Like any good octopus, I’m both seduced by this idea and can easily summon another seven counter- and comple-example of how I experience art both in public and private. I’m curious maybe to hear more about the types of sociality and conversation you’re thinking about both with your work and the work that most appeals to you. I’ve spent 93.5% of this conversation thinking about it in terms of the constraints we’ve laid out and what I want to read and write about than about its eventual (and not circumstantial) public-ness. This is a very specific type of public-ness and of conversation. The inanity of the questions on talk shows is forgettable if not forgivable because we seem to want to hear about a celebrity’s vacation or their co-star’s pranks. In this process I am trying to write to you as if we were just writing to each other but there are also moments when I have a sense of your answer or, even, when I’m curious what that answer looks like as we type from our cheated-out talk show chairs. I want also to interject now briefly with one of part of that Toth thing that I think is an interesting historical footnote: apparently the first person to subdue Toth after his attack was a young Bob Cassilly, the artist who later created St. Louis’ City Museum. What is the best painting to have a conversation in front of? Have we ever seen a social practice work built around conversation that ended up yielding objects because people were so talked out they just wanted to spend their social time more materially? Someone told me recently that someone less recently had told them that when orchestrating large events everyone benefits from a small but irritating shared experience—like a quick rainstorm—to bond over otherwise they’ll seek that same antagonism from something more integral to the occasion itself—the dreary groom or the bad wine—which event planners generally try to avoid. How many times has the word “iconoclastic” been engraved into a monument?

DM: I’m not arguing that art’s main function is to “start a conversation.” That is the kind of cliché we see used all the time in defense of the indefensible—witness the responses of multiple US institutions in the past year to outcries over their exhibition of racially offensive artworks. What I mean is that the public presentation of artwork—even if distributed privately—is always an attempt to engender a public of some kind. But your question about paintings is a good place to start. For me, the best paintings to converse in front of are anti-authoritarian and dark and delightful and often vulgar. To return for a moment to my home country, I think of paintings by artists like Juan Davila, Gordon Hookey, Helen Johnson, or Janenne Eaton. But when I think of the conversations that could be had in their presence, I imagine viewers who share something with the artist (a community, an inclination, a grudge, a species) and see that thing affirmed or tested in some way. With artworks like this, you could say that the social both precedes and follows the artwork.

I’ve never understood the idea of a social practice that was somehow divorced from material practice—like you suggest, I see plenty of so-called social practice that generates objects. But I also see plenty of material practices that generate sociality. Bob Cassilly is actually a fine example of a kind of social practice artist who was motivated by a fierce allegiance to the material world. I had a chance to visit his unfinished opus Cementland while in St. Louis earlier this year, and I have been haunted ever since by the mystery of how he imagined his audiences moving and conversing through that space. There are also great examples of artworks that acknowledge the co-dependence of the social and the material while not privileging ‘art’ as an unimpeachable realm of experience. I’m thinking here of much of Group Material’s work, in particular their project Democracy (1988-89). For me, even something as frivolous as having a cuppa in the ‘tea break’ room in Jeremy Deller’s British Pavilion at the 2013 Venice Biennale was completely moving and concretely social. I like your pop-sociological hand-me-down fable about bonding with strangers. I am for an art that can be a “small but irritating shared experience,” but we shouldn’t forget that any shared experience is completely dependent on other previous mutual experiences. A quick rainstorm feels like it does because we all know what it’s like to wear clothes, move through public space, and be struck by falling water.

Walking to Mordor

EDITION #26

Anatomical Theatres of Mixed Reality: The Operature

The Rise of the Performance Art Festival in the USA

How We Work: An Interview With Sara Drake

Works of: A Conversation with Dan Miller by Jesse Malmed published first on http://ift.tt/2pLTmlv

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