Spiros Hadjidjanos in conversation with Perwana Nazif
Salon de Normandy was organized by The Community and powered by Novembre.global, as a free-to-visit and free-to-exhibit-by-invitation initiative at Hotel de Normandy in Paris, held between October 17 and 20, 2019. The salon is a gathering of an international community of galleries, exhibition spaces, projects, collectives, publishers, and labels inside the 150 years old hotel.
As a part of PAN’s screening series for multidisciplinary salon, Salon de Normandy, at the historic Hôtel Normandy in Paris, was artist Spiros Hadjidjanos’s Deep Crowd Simulation Breakdown (2019). The artist, whose practice spans across sculpture, photography and new media, often reiterates material from prior works along with exploring various materialities (and textures) and uses of the ideas he explores both conceptually and physically. Deep Crowd Simulation Breakdown (2019) is a video work that lends total agency to artificial intelligence networks and uses technology to create virtual crowds. While the technology visually simulates crowds in response to terror attacks, the sonics in the video, as described by Hadjidjanos in our interview below, were sourced from real videos on the internet. Read more to find out about the artist’s application of such technologies and artistic process.
Deep Crowd Simulation Breakdown (2019) has been described as “blurring boundaries between text and image” where the text has been abstracted to the point of becoming an image (of text).This abstraction of text to image occurs at the level of repetition, something we see on a larger level given that the video reuses, or repeats, footage from your video work Crowd Simulation Breakdown (2016). Can you tell me more about the significance of reproduction in this work and in your practice?
Exactly, the specific work stems from a work that was created three years ago with the technique of crowd simulation used in filmmaking and this year with the processing of this footage over and over by neural networks. When it comes to using old material as source, I prefer the term ‘reuse’ because it is closer to what I am trying to achieve in my work in general rather than ‘repeat’ or ‘reproduce’ which I perceive more as producing copies. Since in my practice I am mainly focused on technological processes, there are several reasons that make me decide to re-work on material from an earlier work. The dialog with my own past artistic production enables me to develop an idea further or to add a completely new layer to an existing piece as it happened with Deep Crowd Simulation Breakdown (2019). This process also gives me the opportunity to compare the outcomes. On a superficial level this might look like a linear act of progress but I would argue it is cyclical because the old piece gains new importance. The reenactment of specific aspects of an older work also creates a platform to prioritize the technological process I am interested in and to not think about the subject matter. This doesn’t mean that I am indifferent to subject matter but that it is not the most important layer in my work; I consider the technological transformation more important.
The sound takes on a similar abstracted form in Deep Crowd Simulation Breakdown where we initially recognize sounds of a large crowd, but it then becomes cacophonous until it melts into something sublime, surreal and totally unfamiliar. Where is the sound specifically sourced from and how were you able to gain access to it in both videos?
The sound comes straight from the older work of 2016 but it is a new reworked version. It was sourced from videos uploaded on youtube by live witnesses of the most fatal terrorist attacks that occurred in 2016, the year I did the first video work, Crowd Simulation Breakdown. These were combined with audio that my collaborator Bill Kouligas composed for an opera performance piece that we presented also in 2016 at the Volksbühne Theater in Berlin. Bill offered to rework the audio for the new video work this year. This was screened for the first time at the Salon de Normandy in Paris a couple of months ago.
The military and governmental context and usage of the technology and software visually described in these videos seems more relevant than ever given the current protests and political unrest in Lebanon, Hong Kong, Iran, Chile and Bolivia, amongst many other countries and areas. The application in that specific context appears to be an attempt to control via informed anticipation not unlike the methodology behind the Internet shutdown in Iran or mask-banning in Hong Kong. What sorts of dialogues did you intend or anticipate with the work, if any?
When I combined crowd simulation technology with audio from terrorist attacks, obviously I loosely thought about similar topics but I pointed to a specific type of crowd; the one that had just experienced a terrorist attack and found itself in a mayhem. Terrorist attacks peaked between 2014 and 2016. Now, the same work and its more abstracted new version reverberates differently due to current developments. The audience can connect to it in a different way and associate my crowd with other types of "crowds", which is very satisfying to observe. But it comes as no surprise and reflects on the decision to choose this technology to work with. When again in the history of image representation can an artist assemble (with almost no financial means) a crowd, give them some simple instructions (AI commands) and then observe its collective behavior? And to also to be able to change these “rules” on the fly? I am, however, not saying that my simulated crowd has replaced a real one, only that it is an interesting representation thereof. My intention and the dialogue I anticipated was on a dynamic level and deeper than the formal one where the relations among the elements of this technology are manifested.
The materiality and thematic connotations of your work constantly refer to or draw from technology and aesthetically manifest as futuristic and alien-like. The content, however, always seems to be precisely about the now and very relevant topics. How do you see the relationship between form and content in your practice and even the materiality of your works?
On form, content and materiality I would add 'process'. I try to keep these elements in relationships that make sense throughout the production, presentation and distribution of my works. They should fulfill the specific goals I set each time. The fact that you “read” the content of my work “to be precisely about the now and very relevant topics” is probably because in most of my work I intentionally use relevant fabrication techniques and the new possibilities by the utilization of technology become manifested, hopefully without fetishizing it. This approach makes even works that use as subject matter 19th century photography look relevant and about the present moment.
