I am sharing this interview about my process and art practice by Yield magazine from the University of Notre Dame.

https://www.yieldmagazine.org/content/interview-with-roberto-salazar

Jul 20 

Written By Mike Rippy

Mike Rippy: How did you come to be in the art world, what were your early influences and how did your work evolve?

Roberto Salazar: Since I was a kid, I have had a natural inclination towards the poetic. I understand the poetic as a metabolically useless operation, an unprofitable way of using something. That's poetic because it doesn't make sense pragmatically. In that regard, a poetic act is practically useless and a little bit defiant of our animal dimension. An image of someone thirsty pouring a glass of water in the desert comes to mind.

My father was a psychotherapist. He had a great library and music collection. From an early age I was incredibly curious and was attracted to the philosophy and psychology books in his library. I needed more parental guidance, I guess, because I was reading very dense stuff. I realized early on that when you don't have enough information to give your readings context the mind can’t help but give its own explanation.

I think those were the conditions that allowed me to develop a feverish sensitivity somehow. The images we perceive as a child are the most powerful ones. The world is always larger than life and difficult to make sense of because lived experience isn’t available for context and to promote inferences.

As a teenager, I became deeply immersed in philosophy and art. My first art inspiration was Julio Galán, a Mexican artist from Múzquiz, Coahuila. He was a creative machine. Then there was Julian Schnabel. How he treated surfaces was very inspirational. That’s where it started for me. In engineering pre-school, at the last moment, my teacher told me, “You're an artist. It permeates everything you do.” I surrendered to his statement and got a Fine Arts degree with a mayor in cultural criticism.

MR: Recently, I've been reading books on aesthetics and criticism, and many of them say that poetry is the perfect art form.

RS: To me, it is, and every artist in its most basic form is a poet. I consider myself a poet, before a photographer. Why? Because what poetry provide us with is a very democratic tool; language itself. While most of the time language is used practically, there's always the possibility to transcend its pragmatism and point it to another universe altogether.

If you don’t assume the poetic dimension of it, you end up being a journalist because everything strives to objective. I'm always thinking that my work is a kind of feverish journalism, a subjective journalism of sorts, because while I do want to document something out there, I never renounce all this poetic space available that allows me to be completely irresponsible regarding its validity as a truth artifact.

MR: That's a good way of putting it. Journalism is the context in which many people view the NFT space. You see a lot of journalism in the NFT space, which isn't very critical as an art mechanism. It's not the art photography that we're familiar with because it doesn't allow a lot of criticism. It's a beautiful photo. It's a beautiful image.

The more I talk to artists, the more I learn their motivations and what really interests them. When artists talk about their work beyond just what you see, and you see what they're saying in the work, that overlay enhances what they're doing.

RS: I mean, it's like falling in love, right? You feel attracted to somebody in the uppermost layer in a quick way. Then you marry that person or go to bed and time elapses and other layers are revealed. But all of those stages should be enjoyable, all of them. Then you grow up with the work and the reading changes and so does the speed with which it approaches you. I love all of those stages. I love what happens when there's no context, and you encounter some of the pieces I do. I'm perfectly happy with that. But I'm also perfectly happy to l talk with people like you, who want to go further.

MR: Your Portable Network Graphics photographs are the ones that keep coming back to me. They have a glitch aesthetic, and it's funny because you title the work as a magazine for robots. I look at the work and try to think about it as if I'm a robot trying to look at the work. I look at the initial work and think of it as human photography. But you conceptualize and then it becomes more and more computerized, and more and more like a robot.

I know you like referencing movies. A good example is from The Matrix. One of the characters is sitting at the controls, and all he's seeing is digits and numbers move across the screen. Neo asks, "What are you looking at?" And he responds, "All I see is, blonde, brunette …" That's who he sees, yet he reads the data and translates it. I started thinking about your work and I thought, "If a robot looked at this, they would see the blonde, the brunette …"

RS: Yes, Magazine for Robots is the sum of several collections in which each is like a chapter. Thank you for the opportunity of you speaking about the work first because I usually speak about it first and fear that I contaminate others opinion. It's nice to hear your opinion, without me influencing it. I want to talk generally about The End of Facts series and the Portable Network Graphics series indistinctly, because conceptually; they're feeding from the same plate.

We've seen a change of culture. We've seen a very radical polarization, especially in the US, and to me, that's not a surprise. One of the ways I dare to explain that is because the US is more exposed to algorithmic operations in social networks. What I mean by algorithmic is that there is a computer code that for the moment is black-boxed that curates and drives what information one is exposed to and isn’t.

The algorithm in social networks deploys different ideologies, messages and information to different groups. As an experiment a couple of years ago, I made two You tube accounts and I calibrated the searches from one account to go to one side of the political aisle, and then the opposite with the other. The results were staggering. And it became obvious that if you only consume one you get stuck inside an echo chamber and end up losing sight of the perspective of the others. After that experience I realized that from an echo chamber our modes of acquaintance are forever distorted allowing only for allergic reactions to the ideological position of the others.

My experiment inside intense echo chambers ended up behaving like a production line of solidified ideological structures that allowed for no other valid points of view. And to make matters worse all this happened in the context of COVID, where literally everything was about hygiene, sanitization and safety distancing from others. The other was now dangerous, simbolically and literally. The threat was the saliva and the speaking. I couldn’t help but react to it. I grabbed my camera trying to portray those realities, but the results weren’t enough. As I didn't want to picture a guy with a VR headset or a bunch of mouth covers to describe this problematic.

Then I thought, "algorithms, operate are code. How can I make it visible?" And so I began an inventory of the tools in photo editing software that worked with algorithms to edit images. The one I ended researching the most is called Patch Match. It was designed by researchers at Princeton and you can now even download it from GitHub. The social network algorithms and Patch Match work in similar ways. They look for similarities and correspondences and from there they construct a connective tissue of sorts, that either becomes a surface on an image or a narrative on the web.

Here in México, we have firecrackers made of rolled-up newspaper. When they blow up, all this printed information ends up scattered and flying in the air; some of the images from The End of Facts series look and operate to me in that way. Photography, as a digital object, has a liquid quality that makes images malleable and also provides them with a strange materiality as surfaces. Sometimes I distort them so far that a new surface condition emerges out of this liquid quality.

Later I started noticing that this let's say, strange brush I'm working with, which is the algorithmic distortion or deletion, at times also produced a pictorial result in the way that it tries to make sense out of the visual surface of the image. That was also very interesting. Then I started learning about generative adversarial networks and AI. The results are pretty similar but I had the pleasure of utilizing only the tools I'm aware of as a photographer as if the editing tools superseded the medium and overwhelmed it so.

The volume of data we are exposed to daily is so vast that our sense making capacities as human beings are insufficient. Have you heard the phrase “paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology”? This to me describes very well how we deal with the digital realm.

An image occurred to me in which images (the signifiers) were arriving at the speed of light and their meaning (the signified) arrived, if ever; at the speed of sound. There’s a moment of void and vertigo were we witness the signifier as a decontextualized artifact. Like my childhood readings where the signified as a symbolic compass is spinning unable to find any proverbial north. Usually our brains go into limbic mode and fills those voids with emotion. We become activated by the curation algorithms that presents us with some information instead of another. Really complicating our modes of acquaintance which become weaponized as we try to reconstruct our echo chambers in real life with all the social tensions that implies.

For the Portable Network Graphics series I was exploring the concept of redacted documents, which look similar to them in a way. Redacted documents are political manipulations of knowledge assuring that they arrive incomplete at the public sphere. Their benevolence somehow is that we can tell that the document is blacked out. It’s visible.

On the other hand, if we agree that data curation algorithms are a system/network wide redaction, their most salient feature is how invisible they are to the users immersed in them.

MR: When you said earlier that the algorithm tries to fill in the space, it reminds me of how artificial intelligence tries to fill in the space. But filling in the space is what we're trying not to do on some level. We want the space to be there, we want the pause, we want the gap, and maybe the technology isn’t built for that. You can even see that sometimes in computerized voice programs, they just don't know how to properly say a word and they can't space the sentence out properly. It demonstrates how limiting technology can be. Your work brings up this question of how the algorithm fills in the space.

The way you use space in your images, particularly in The End of Facts, the majority of the image is a black surface with, as you said, little bits of information exploded onto it. I think people appreciate it for its darkness and the negative space in the image. Then you move up to the Portable Network Graphics images, it's almost like AI has started to understand how to fill in the gaps. And even applied to your description of it as redaction, it's starting to use color, which is reflected in the way the colors are balanced.

There's a difference between the End of Facts and the Portable Network Graphics, which shows an evolution. It's interesting to see how you're exploring technology and computer algorithms and how technology is generating its own aesthetic.

RS: Making this works reminds me of how cowboys operate. They lead a herd (pixels) in a general sense without necessarily obsessing about the details of every cow behavior. They care about the group. So in a similar fashion I nudge and lead the software and then I record myself as you can do, for instance, in Photoshop, with actions. Then I start to make concatenations, like juxtapositions of actions over actions, until a certain state is achieved.

At the moment, I'm working in a new collection called The Nullz. They are scanned advertisements from magazines that then become painterly landscapes after deleting them.

I watched a documentary of someone in Switzerland who was trying to prevent avalanches. He has a canon and is basically throwing grenades at the mountain to provoke explosions. This causes smaller avalanches that are not so dangerous. Immediately I thought about Mount Rushmore and how beautiful it would be to sculpt something like that with the energy of such a weapon and from such a distance. The landscapes I'm making right now, The Nullz, remind me of that because of the way I make selections that are then deleted with this algorithmic tool and I don't know exactly what's going to happen.

Sometimes the algorithm will sculpt what resembles cloud as it is deleting the image by mistake, so I leave it there and keep going until you see a landscape that sometimes looks very Courbet like. But when you remember the background of it, you see the problem because, in the same way, as I'm using an algorithm to create a visual structure, right now algorithms are being deployed to create ideological structures that have a very specific effect in the real world through people's behavior, through the hijacking of their cognition and emotions.

That's the real work.

The image barely sustains itself; like a hologram, it's in a state of being nearly expired or of perpetually expiring. It has lost its physical reality and is exploring itself as a digital code. All of those changes of state are crucial. And we are human beings are doing the same thing. We're redefining ourselves digitally.

MR: Have you shown any of this recent work?

RS: Yes. They are not minted at the moment, because I am still working on the collection. They are incredibly challenging to make as I depend on randomness and accidents. Which is very photographic in the sense that I am waiting for something to happen or manifest that I don’t have control over.

MR: How long have you been creating these bodies of work?

RS: I began in 2000. I was working with the PlayStation video game and it was the same process. I wanted to understand the images as an object. I got my hands on a software emulator so I could launch the PlayStation games from my computer and I started working with screen-capture images from these games. That's where it began, intervening video games.

MR: You started to create this work in 2000, and then the NFT space opened up. How long have you been in that space, and how has it changed who is accessing your work?

RS: I started in the NFT space in September of 2021. And I am very grateful for it. As you can imagine the noise is very intense because the speculation that comes from crypto culture is very palpable and permeates the digital art space. Still, even against that background, there are some very sincere builders, artists and communities that make the space worthwhile and humane.

The possibility of having even a modest audience waiting for you to post or mint something in real time changes your whole perspective, and creating becomes less isolated and less of an individual thing. You start to have real-time feedback. That is fantastic and also spooky because the temptation to adapt and to follow trends is enormous, but I've been lucky. I’ve got sales from important collectors who really value what I'm doing, and I know I'm not being sought out for price speculation. That has been inspiring. My commitment is greater than ever. I also share a twitter space with Alia Malley every Friday were we have conversations about art and sense making were we try to go out of our echo chambers and reach out to people. We call that metapolitics.

Those are things that I love. I don't like that the cynicism is enormous. The speculation is strange and a little bit pornographic in a way, but then, it’s also interesting because every day I tell myself how to be more compelling in this ocean noise and strengthen my signal. It's pushing me in new ways.

MR: I think what is happening with NFTs is interesting. I'm a huge skeptic. It's hard for me to embrace something, and I applaud the people that are just jumping head-first into it. That's something I could never do as a person, just to jump in the deep end head-first. That's fantastic that there's a group of visual artists willing to do that. I see that the technology is not going away. Blockchain is here, cryptocurrency is here, NFTs are here. The market is very speculative right now. Consumers aren't exactly sure how to engage it. I don't think the people creating content know how to engage it completely. Like your analogy with the cowboys. It's like the Wild West right now and it will be interesting to see how this all works its way out into something that's a lot more formalized.

I don't know that the people engaged in it want it to become more formalized, but I think for it to gain wider acceptance, it needs to start doing that. I think that will happen over time, but I think for people like you, and others who have embraced and become early adopters, it’s a good strategy. You get yourself in front of it, and you have influence because you've taken the risk.

It's got to be frustrating being in that environment. It must take a certain personality to be able to stay through the ups and downs. It is a space that allows people to reconsider what visual art is. The work that you produce is starting to make people engage in digital arts more, and I think that's really important.

Before COVID hit there were some digital artists that I was starting to get more and more interested in. I remember thinking about it in terms of screens versus galleries, which is the traditional environment that I come from. I was never against the idea of putting a screen in a gallery and putting artwork on it. I don't think it's as big a leap for me as it may be for some other people. But it's frustrating that this happened during COVID because I think it's a really interesting development.

Maybe COVID helped push it along because we were all on our screens, but it's nice to see more people wanting to talk about art, whether it's good or bad. I'm glad that people are so open to having a conversation about it.

RS: Absolutely. I believe that if I didn't have this subject matter, I wouldn't be able to tolerate being on Twitter or other social media. But it feels so right for my interests to be exposed to the curatorial operations of Twitter, to be involved with it when Elon Musk is moving to purchase it and see if he sticks to his promise of making the algorithm transparent and open source. Not black-box the algorithm, but make it open source. I hope that we will have more tools that allow for more nuanced and, let's say, slow, complex work to be digested on Twitter and in the NFT marketplace. I'm interested in what JPG is doing (https://jpg.space/). It's interesting because it really could become a huge platform for curation. That gives me hope and I want to see more of that.