Free SVG 12”
Ben Sisto
“When I went to respond to this image, I thought I would just hit the waves and maybe it would be good today.”
[Editor’s Note: the final work can be found at the link above. A glorious visual documentation of the process can be found here.]
Interview by L. Valena
What did you respond to?
You sent me an image that looked like a digital painting or a scanned painting of three clowns- it looked like three motifs of clowns. A classic hobo clown, a circus clown, and them maybe a Lindsay Kemp-style clown, on a stage.
What was your first response to that?
My first thought was that I'm not a big fan of the circus arts. So I saw this, and thought “huh- what am I going to do with this?” I just tried to clear out any ideas about what the author's intent was because aside from it just being three clowns... there was nothing in it like 'hear no evil, speak no evil,' or like another clear message. I just basically had nothing to go on, so I decided to look at the file itself in different ways. You can open any file with any other program. Sometimes when you open image files in an audio software, you get these jarbles of noise. When you open it in a text editor, which is what I did, you can kind of see the image as code. So I just started poking around with different ways to look at it.
When I opened it up in a text editor, something caught my eye right off the bat. The header and the body of the code seemed to be space apart- there was a little break. In that break, there were five or six characters that sort of looked like a 1-line emoticon. Like when people will sign their email with an owl, smiling, or something. I think because I was already thinking about the clown images, this particular emoticon had characteristics of, if I was to draw a smiling waving clown in one line of code, it kind of looks like it. So I thought that was kind of an interesting coincidence. Maybe I should just play around with this piece of code. So I opened it up in Illustrator, and just started looking at how it looks graphically, in a bunch of different fonts. In the typeface Papyrus, it very closely resembled a graphic image of birds flying in front of a sunset.
So then I had this kind of image to work with- this sunset image. I ran it through Google Image Search to see what it would think was visually similar. The first image I got back was music notes, but birds were the dominant motif. I refined that search by restricting it to only images that were labeled for reuse Creative Commons or public domain-type licenses)- I wanted to make sure I wasn't poaching anyone's stuff. That brought up more bird images, and also an svg file depicting a topographical map of the Canary Islands. The Canary Islands thing had this phrase below it- it's from 'FreeSVG.Org'. I thought 'Free SVG', even though it's obviously talking about these files, has the sound of when graffiti artists, rappers, or hackers (people with pseudonyms) get locked up, and people have 'Free Kevin' (or whatever) campaigns.
So that’s where the project title comes from. I started doing a Google image search for 'birds' and 'Canary Islands', and it brought up this book from 1901- essays and photographs about birds from the Canary Islands and South Africa. That file was on Wikimedia Commons, totally free to use, and linked to a Flickr set of other images. I found an image in that set that I really liked the most. A black and white shot of a bird's nest on some rocks.
So my first idea was, just that picture, would be a 24x36 poster, and I was going to end it there. But then I started thinking about this Canary Islands thing, and how Google Image Search had first brought up music notes. So I laid the Canary Islands out over some blank music sheet paper, and it referenced Fluxus era graphic scores to me. Then I just emailed to different friends. James Corrigan and Adrian Michna. I just showed them the picture, and said "given this, can you record a piece of music interpreting it in 24 hours?"
I needed them to do it quickly, because I had the thought that the project would go to a different level if I pressed whatever they gave me to vinyl. But right now there is a global pandemic, and there are only so many people who do extremely fast turnaround vinyl pressings in normal times. But I found a guy, sent him the artwork, and in the mail on Monday, I got one copy of this 180gram lathe-cut 12”. The center art for the record is that picture that I found from WikiCommons, of the bird nest. So I had this record. In my life, I've spent a lot of time looking at and buying things from this website called "Discogs.com". It's somewhere between a marketplace like Ebay and a Wikipedia for recorded music. It's a really cool community- people put a lot of work into updating and maintaining the list from there. So I thought that I have a copy of this record, but it's only really real if I list it on Discogs. There's a very particular way you enter information, and do notes and everything. A lot of Discogs pages also include a link to a Youtube video where someone has recorded a record playing and attached it just as a point of reference. So I thought I should do that too. I recorded the audio playback separately and mixed them just so it was loud enough, and uploaded that to Youtube. My final project that I returned to you, is the Discogs listing page, which has all kinds of images and information. I don't think of the record as the project. The Discogs page is ultimately my response to those three clowns.
Wow. That is incredible.
I'm glad you guys liked it. Do you know the website Parallelograms?
No.
It's not the same as what you all do, in that it doesn't have an exquisite corpse angle. But they mail you an image, and you make something in response. And when I had done the work for them, I did a similar style of work- I feel like the 'medium' is web surfing. When I went to respond to this image, I thought I would just hit the waves and maybe it would be good today. This could have turned out really shitty, it just feels lucky sometimes, when you catch a wave.
I like that idea that you're catching a wave. Because it really seems like you were following leads- going down a trail that went somewhere and ended up producing something cool.
It's like when you walk in the woods, and decide to walk to that cliff. And then you get to it, and you say "I'm going to walk to that river", but you're only picking each milestone as you go. You don't know if you're going to end up at the top or bottom.
Is that generally how you work?
No. I would say what is similar is... I'm not really sure how else to say it, but an idea just presents itself, and it's my job to collect the parts and edit it together. There's an old adage where sculptors say that the sculpture is already in the stone- they just reveal it. I don't want to say something quite as cornball as that, but it's just kind of looking around. Seeing what's out there. Most of my life, my job has been in event coordination and stuff, so I'm always doing things like putting together a band, a dj, and a poet. I think I'm always searching for things that can be recombined or recontextualized.
I love your visual documentation- it was great to kind of go through it. I think there were some things, like the emoticon, that I wouldn't have understood if you hadn't explained them, but it's cool to see it like that.
When I did that work for Parallelograms, a friend or two told me that they thought that it kind of read like a zine or a book. I ended up thinking about that a lot. It's a format that I really like- where it's somewhere between traditional documentation, but also like a how-to guide.
I think it's a cool invitation, almost. I think a lot of people have an idea that when you start a creative project, that you have to have an end in mind. It's really nice to be presented with this piece, which became such a cool artifact, which resulted from your 'nature walk'.
I don't think I'm ever starting or making final work. It's somewhere between cartography, or if you hand someone a book that's really long, and you tell them the chapter you want them to read. It's like placing markers. But I don't think of this record as a thing that is done.
Is there anything else you want to say about this piece or about this process?
It was fun. I think the thing that I enjoyed most about it is that the two artists who are present on the record don't know each other. In this Covid-19 lockdown it seems like we're increasingly isolated from each other, and this is a nice opportunity to bring people together, even if in a digital and slightly obtuse way. The world is fucked, but we can kind of hang together and make weird stuff.
Totally. I find that we creative people are usually kind of holed up in our studios, so this project is a fun opportunity to bond with strangers, even if you don't know their names.
Call Number: M36VA | M27NA.siFre
Ben Sisto is an artist and curator living in Brooklyn, NY. He is the world's leading expert on Who Let the Dogs Out, and co-Founder of Silent Partners, which issues restriction-free $1,000 grants to Black Brooklyn-based artists and Movement workers. Previously, he founded both the Artists in Residence and Dear Reader programs for Ace Hotel, and has otherwise been involved with something like 2,000 public events.