[EN]

Selena Larson: What type of technologies do street artists use, either to share or track their work?

Mathieu Tremblin: When I work in urban space depending of the proposition, I’m mostly a low-tech guy on the field.
I use daily walk and digital camera do document my work.
Since 2000 I create websites to diffuse my work (or the one of my friends doing also urban intervention or graffiti) in the manner I wanted.
First I was using Dreamweaver to create HTML websites (in 2004, I launched La Peinture à l’Ancienne, my first personal website dedicated to my graffiti and illustration practice which did last until 2007) and since 2009 I only use WordPress and creates my own themes (in that year I created Démo de tous les jours my second and still online personal website about my art and urban intervention practice).
I also started that year to spread works and infos using basic Newsletter software like SerialMail.
Now I’m developing Tarmacadam Complex a research blog about creativity and urbanity in the frame of globalized city named (opening in 2016), and plan to create a newsgroup in order to gather a community of activists, artists, curators, critics and various people – friends – involved in urban space related activities in order continue the path drawn by Alain Bieber since he stopped Rebel Art his dedicated platform to art and activism.

SL: Do artists think about « going viral”?

MT: I do not think about my work in term of viral ability when I create it. Its necessity comes from the urban context in which it’s implemented. But I feel that some works can get viral because they generate immediate adhesion without need to understand the context or because they are rooted somehow to post-internet culture which make them easy to appreciate when they are shown online.
Even after having said that, I don’t get so much how virality does work: I was surprised that Ink Geyser action which is based on Mentos Diet coke explosion meme didn’t get viral for example but that Graffiti Statue went despite the fact that the text I was writing was in my own spoken langage instead of English which is usually a discriminating criterion to its worldwide sharing.
Strong recognizable and immediate contents get more chance to get viral but actually as I do not consider myself as a Street Artist, my corpus of works is evolving all the time, I’m changing medium considering the message I want to share, the place I want to intervene in. So there’s a few possibility of identification in term of graphic style or visual branding as it is usually in Street Art and then a few possibility relevant work I do could get viral.

SL: Does the internet, like Banksy says, put greater demand on artists? How?

MT: Artists are told to stick to the new and the efficient part of their work where mostly the relevant and most interesting part stays out of casual online visibility (or at least demands users to invest in long reading that don’t fit with casual attention they use to pay on content spread on the Internet). But in another point of view it’s also pushing creativity forward as you can access to a lot of wonderful art forms and artists who are almost unknown by a large audience that mass media is not promoting them because they don’t fit to the logic of profit (i.e. they refuse to produce art artifacts/objects which could be valued or generate speculation through the global market of art). It permit to a lot of artists and people to do things different than what you see on TV or in museum because they can act in a self media way and share their works in the manner they chose beside consumer’s society, beside the dictatorship of spectacle and visibility. In deed, it also offer the possibility to people (artists or not) to act more humble while they realize that most of creative gestures have already be done by someone else they didn’t knew because art history was written by a minority of specialist (sometime even tied with certain hidden commercial interests) and what matters finally in art is the power of transformation on imaginary or social scale it brings when you share it and not the originality or preciousness of it (which are values from the modernist period that fits with liberalism perfectly).
Since the social network started to cover the access of content spread on the Internet.
On social media, it’s all about the here and now, trying to follow the flux of constant datas flooding your timeline.
That’s why I always try to focus on real experience not on how it looks in picture. And also does spread all the gestures that I do throughout blog/social network but often let people discover it by them self in order those work appears to be find by users in their everyday life surf instead of just being feeder through platforms that tends to get monopoly of informations flux like GAFA.
That’s also why I’m chosing to do mostly none spectacular (i.e. not clipped film, not music video style) and very slow/real time recording of my actions because the time of experience is (and should remain) the reference regarding the experience or art forms, not the time you spend in consomption of online content (which is unfortunately very short).
It’s all about moving your acknowledgement about how economics should work for a better life serving people (and not using them or turning them into products) to the way the economy of attention works (and is actually reproducing this liberal/capitalist pattern) in order to influence your relationship to the world and the one of the people who are looking at your work.

SL: I find it interesting that the internet is so crucial to street art, because a lot of people waste their time reading/watching the very things that street art is commenting on. i.e. people stare at their phones as they wander down the street instead of looking up, which the artists’ work encourages us to do. Do you have thoughts on this?

MT: I guess inviting us to stop staring at our smartphone when we walk in the streets is a pitiful aim for an artwork.
Avant-gardes from the XXst century insisted on the fact that poetry should be found in everyday life, not only in museum, that art should be integrated to life and not reduced to a rare and precious artifact you could speculate on. Nowadays artists who are practicing outdoor do not invite us to consume their work in an open-air space as if it was a giant size gallery, they want us to refuse that urban space is turned into a succession of private-branded space without any possibility of free and individual expression in the city. They want us to make the public of public space happen, to activate freedom of speech and to reclaim the streets.
But there is certainly a bound between the popularity of Street Art and the rising of Internet use in the beginning of the XXIst century. Urban art forms started to have a big success since artists who were creating it were the first contemporary artist using Internet as the privileged place for sharing there works instead/before art galleries. Since people who navigate online are experiencing movement in the same way they do it in real life, it make sense they started to pay more attention to the art forms they were surrounded by in their everyday life, the art forms they discovered in the street suddenly started to popup in their visual field because contrary to arts experienced in white cube which you pay attention to because it’s inserted into a neutral space isolated from daily routine, arts in urban space are dealing with a space sautéed by signs and advertisement. And in order to get receipt they have to deal smartly with the economy of attention (on this topic you can have a look at Stéphane Hugon’s book Circumnavigation were he is putting in relation IRL and URL travel experience as part as a same experience).

SL: What apps do you or street artists use?

MT: As I do not consider myself as a Street Artist I don’t know what they use. My personal use is: carpulling and train reservation apps to travel, GPS for finding a place when I need to buy material,
sometime the camera or microphone because the ones of smartphone are lighter to carry when I m doing daily survey. Sometimes I use Twitter to archive small stories (@logbook with David Renault) or ideas (@twittoeuvres).
I bought this smartphone in order I could share its Internet network while I’m in travel and need to access my email (those last years, I spent almost a week each month in collective transport)

SL: How do you use Facebook?

MT: I share content I feel relevant regarding the way I would like society evolved i.e. articles about critic of mass surveillance and citizens control, open source culture mostly.
I usually share only one time links to my own works or reblogging of my works when I feel it’s relevant to access to it by this way.
Mostly I’m posting the documentation after the work did disappeared/have been destroyed, in order the online experience doesn’t spoil the real experience.
I also closed a few month ago my personal profile and stopped liking or commenting anything after I totally cleaned all my history, links, comments and likes as a kind of protest on the way social media started to be none neutral one (with the infamous algorithm used by Google search and Facebook timeline to provide oriented content to its users without letting him acknowledge of it) and also regarding the fact that French government started to apply principle of mass surveillance (i.e. Loi de renseignement) using the empathy generated by the death of cartoonists killed in the attack of Charlie Hebdo (as previously US government used 9/11 to pass the Patriot Act law).

SL: When I was on the tour with Demian Smith from Street Art Paris, he mentioned Facebook a few times, especially that we should share the art on Facebook where it can live. Can you talk about why it’s so important to immortalize/share that work?

MT: Sharing art on social media is a mediacratic way of offering a change of perspective on the way you look at the world.
Transformation is the key and for the user of social network who might discover a creative process through this lens in the middle of other contents – advertisement, LOL or relevant informations – this is the first step to bring him to turn his words/thoughs into acts.

Unpublished interview by Selena Larson, The Daily Dot, 7th November 2015.

Tags: interview