I've spent almost my entire life on the internet - playing online chess and flash games as a child, whiling away social and geographical isolation in my adolescence, and reading articles at a succession of bizarre computer-focused nothing-jobs after college. The anthropology thereof is the only academic field in which I am truly interested, and to which I can't shake the urge to start contributing.

All of this is to say that I was over the moon about getting to talk at length about online with Jenny Odell, who has thought about it longer and better than I and happens to be one of my favorite active artists. After featuring a couple of her pieces in The Good Word over the last few months, I reached out about a phone interview, only to find out that she was scheduled to be in Boulder just a couple days later (curiously, I never mentioned that I lived in Colorado).

We talked for quite a while over lunch, interrupted with alarming frequency by a squadron of bees intent on trying our pretty good croque madames. Because of the length, I'll be breaking this into two or three parts, the rest of which will appear in a couple weeks depending on your boy's travel schedule and general motivation.

To start off, how would you describe your practice?

As it is at the moment? I don’t really know what it is right now [laughs]. I guess I do a lot of work with archives, even those that would not be considered archives. I consider Street View to be an archive of photographs; for the virtual roadtrip thing that I did, user reviews of restaurants on whatever it was that people were using at the time. Plus actual archives, like the Internet Archive - things that would fall under the traditional definition. A lot of my work is going through those and collecting things, re-arranging them, and re-contextualizing them. Oh, the dump, another archive. Most of it’s digital, not because I want it to be, but because that’s the easiest way to deal with that sort of information. Recently, I’ve started doing more writing and more stuff involving, like, plants and ecology and stuff like that. So I’m in a transition period.

In anything that falls under the heading of content, i.e. for anyone that produces anything, it seems like there’s a constant threat of devaluation threatening professional creativity. I’m thinking of writing in particular, but do you see the same thing in visual art?

Oh, yeah. I have definitely observed that happening, but I’m in kind of a weird situation in that I teach. That’s how I make my living, and so I have the luxury of making whatever I feel like without worrying about whether it will sell. I pay attention to whether people get it or whether it has an effect, but I luckily don’t have to pay attention to whether it’ll pay my rent. I don’t know if you saw the watch thing, but that was just something super random that I felt like doing. I didn’t think anyone would be particularly interested in it. I see that happening with people that I know who are journalists or artists, but I haven’t experienced it personally because I have a different relationship with my work.

Is there anything in particular that’s pushing you towards writing?

I have more training in writing than art, actually, because I was an English major in undergrad. I’ve always written a lot, and if you look at any of my projects they always have a really long artist’s statement or they’re what I’d consider writing projects. With the virtual roadtrip, people tend to notice the part where I Photoshop myself into all of these Street View screenshots, but it’s a book, a really long travel narrative that tries to tie together all of these reviews from people. So for me, it’s a writing project that happens to have images in it, not an art project that has writing in it.

Similarly, the dump - The Bureau of Suspended Objects - that, to me, is also a writing project because it’s just researching objects. So that’s always been there, and then it’s been within the last year that I wrote up a talk that I gave - the how to do nothing talk - and that made the rounds and opened up some more writing opportunities. It’s always been something that I’ve been interested in as part of my work, but just within the last year I’ve started to get a lot more prompts for writing.

A lot of your work comes across as having been accrued - collections of observations or objects that it’d be hard to consciously define or pursue. How do you put yourself in a position to collect that stuff incidentally?

A lot of the stuff that I do was in some way prompted by someone else inviting me to do something. I think it’s good to acknowledge that, because I’m not just sitting in my room coming up with ideas for stuff to do. I have a sensibility, and I have things that I tend to do - I collect things, I have ways that I tend to put things together. But that how to internet piece was because a very good friend of mine was putting on a retrospective of the internet, so I wrote that talk specifically for it. Especially in the last few years, it’s been a lot of someone extending an invitation, or saying hey, what would you do with this? Like being in residency with the Internet Archive just means ok, do something at the Internet Archive, but I still probably wouldn’t have done that if I hadn’t been invited. I just try to follow the more interesting threads that are presented to me.

Do you think there’s still value and importance to the museum experience in digital art?

It depends on the project, but for the satellite thing, a set of digital prints, I had a show and realized that there was something I’d overlooked. The largest satellite piece is five feet wide, and my computer screen is not. No one’s computer screen is five feet wide. So I hadn’t noticed it because I was used to it, but there was no point at which I had seen the image at full size until it was printed. I had an exhibition in 2014 where it wasn’t until we had picked up the pieces and put them on the wall that I or anyone else knew what they looked like. There’s that very simple fact, given that that work is so much about detail and resolution, that there are some pieces that just have to be printed out. And then also, having people be able to see them from far away and then experience a change as they move closer. There’s one piece that looks really pretty from far away, and then you walk up and it’s chemical waste ponds. That doesn’t really happen when you look at it on a screen. I like doing this, so I like it when other people really get close and spend time examining different parts of the image.

On one hand I think it’s pretty cool to be working in a medium that’s natively viewable on devices that everyone has - I was probably in high school before I gave any thought to the third, textural dimension that paintings have. On the other hand, it seems like people are going to have a different relationship to anything they view on a phone.

Yeah, absolutely. There’s obvious stuff like attention span, and then something that I always have to remind myself and my students about is that the way that an image looks on the screen, where it’s literally backlit, is completely different from when it’s ink sitting on paper. For a while I kept thinking of printing as making a physical version of something that’s on my screen, but it’s really an entirely different thing. The Bureau of Suspended Objects has been exhibited a few times in different places, and I think it’s very important for people to have physical encounters with the actual objects. In that case, they sort of have this weird aura about them of having come from the dump. Yeah, I could go online and find another NES, but it wouldn’t be the one from the dump, the specific one that I found and researched. And then the way it’s set up is intended to be very browseable - I appreciate when other people’s projects give me the physical space and time to wander around and be curious. I’m trying to do that for other people, and it’s easier for people to do that in an actual space with a physical encounter than it is to idly scroll.

You’ve obviously got a bit of an archival urge. Do you think much about the eventual reconciliation of the simultaneous ability to save everything and inability to organize that much stuff?

I think the archival impulse, which you see a lot right now, is a very doomsday aesthetic. I think a lot about what art is possibly appropriate to our time, and it makes sense - people may not realize why they’re doing it, but it’s kind of like a hoarding instinct. By trying to save something, you implying that something is threatening it, or that it will go away. I see this proliferation of artists and other people trying to save stuff, or looking around at what already surrounds them and trying to figure out a way to preserve that. A really obvious example is the Internet Archive, which has servers in Richmond [California]. After the election, they expanded to a datacenter in Canada. That’s a clear response to being worried about what might happen.

To your point about not even being able to access it, I went to the data center in Richmond. It’s a big warehouse where they keep all of the stuff that they’ve digitized or are going to digitize, and it’s a giant room full of shipping containers that are packed in there. If you wanted to get something out of there, I’m not sure that you could. That’s what I mean by the doomsday thing - they’re just trying to get it all digitized and think about it later. It feels very apocalyptic.

I guess we’re at a weird intersection too, because everything’s so much easier to keep but by the scale of suddenness of deletion is massive. Looking at the music world, people are worried about exactly that with Soundcloud.

Yeah, or do you remember TwitPic? That’s where the photo of the plane that landed in the lake or whatever - that photo was originally uploaded to TwitPic. Oh god.

[A massive bee begins circling Jenny’s plate, causing us both a lot of distress. A second one arrives, and then a small, furry spider falls onto her arm from above as two more bees join. If ever you eat at Mateo in Boulder, I recommend staying indoors.]

I just watched this documentary about shapes in nature last night, and there was this part about people that harvest honeycombs off of, like, mountain cliffs. It was giving me so much anxiety - they’re rappelling down the side of a cliff and then suddenly bees are swarming everywhere while they’re supposed to cut these things off and carry them down. My worst nightmare.

That’s a cool way to marry a couple extremely common fears.

Right? Oh, and the guy they were filming was like I’ve never done this before [laughs].

I’m assuming it wasn’t the explicit purpose of this documentary, but that’s another weird emergent thing - a general public interest in watching people do things that could very possibly get them killed on TV. Remember that big thing last summer where the guy skydived or something without a parachute? The entire promotional campaign was framed around it being a live event and the potential for the dude to die on camera.

Yeah, the beginning of this documentary was about a group of people trying to form the world’s tallest human pyramid, and it kept showing a bunch of footage of people falling, and paramedics and stuff. The whole event was in an arena with this huge audience. Like NASCAR, imagine one of those events going really smoothly like, Oh, that was nice. Everyone drove very well today. Everyone would just watch on TV.

[The bees return.]

You were talking about TwitPic.

Right, so all of those photos ended up being fine, but there was a period of time where everyone who had photos on there was given a certain number of days to download their photos before they’d go away forever. This was like 2013 or 2014, and it was a reminder that your stuff is both hard to get off of the internet and also very fragile when it’s on there. That’s the other reason that I like printing things out, or that the main part of The Bureau of Suspended Objects is this giant book. I felt a ton of relief when the book came in the mail - that it was all in there, that I could hold it, that it didn’t have that ephemeral quality anymore.

It does something to - I guess the first time I noticed it was when I had the virtual roadtrip printed out, because that stuff is so ephemeral. It really changes the character of the information; now when you look at it, it’s like research, a document of cultural material that was online in 2010. It doesn’t seem that different from other things that are in books. Again, when that arrived in the mail and I opened it, I felt like I had transposed something. It read like historical information, which was especially satisfying in that case because some of the reviews had disappeared by the time the project itself was finished.

Do you think we’re coming around to placing cultural or anthropological value on those sorts of documents?

I think so, I mean that’s what digital humanities is right? In 2014, I went to a digital humanities conference for which I was the keynote speaker despite not really knowing what digital humanities was. I felt like it was very much that, a whole discipline around it. Someone did their whole paper on Slenderman, which I hadn’t heard of at all before that. Slenderman is very much a modern folktale, so I think there are people who are starting to take it more seriously in that sense, moreso even than five years ago.

What are your thoughts about online ephemerality? I still can’t decide whether it’s cool or not. I’ve got the same archival urge, but I also treasure the ability to get rid of things that I put online, whether or not I end up doing it.

I’m really conflicted. Sometimes I think that the rarest feeling now is when you remember something but can’t find it online. As frustrating as that is, I almost think that you should cherish that feeling [laughs]. This is a really weird example, but when I was a kid I used to play this computer game called Willy Beamish. It’s from the 90’s, obviously, and you’re this kid with a pet frog that escapes, which you spend the whole game trying to get back. It’s just a choose-your-own-adventure; you decide what to say to people, how to get out of doing your homework, and so on. And then my mom has all these tapes that my friend and would record, like variety shows. There’s one from around the same age that has a segment that we called Stan Lather interviews Stan Lather. Pre-internet, I would just not know what that was and have to deal with it, but now I can google it and find out that Stan Lather was a news anchor character from Willy Beamish, who was supposed to be a joke on Dan Rather. There’s even a screenshot of Stan Lather interviewing someone. That’s really weird to me, that some memory can pop into my end and not just end there. You can go back to that moment and find out all this other stuff around it that you might not even have been aware of at the time.

Which in turn undermines your actual, specific memory of the period. Similarly, I think we’re now denied the privilege of a perfect, untarnished memory of anything.

I’m always worrying about the question of authentic self-representation online. It’s even stranger now that social media has switched from sharing things with friends to pushing them into the void - generating things for a totally anonymous audience. It’s the entirety of many people’s conception of you. So at once I feel inauthentic deleting all my tweets or whatever, but at the same time I don’t want anyone getting the idea that that sort of cast-off mental detritus can be collated into any actual, extant personhood.

Something that we now assume is that part of making something is retaining the right to destroy it. My HTML-only high school website is on the Wayback Machine, and there’s nothing that I can do about that. I mean, nobody’s going to find it, but it’s really weird to see something that you made, here in front of you, being preserved outside of your control.

Yeah, I think that’s the conflict - on an individual level, I very much require that sort of control over things, but on an anthropological level the entire field is built on things that weren’t chosen or able to be destroyed.

I was re-reading how to internet the other day and thinking about the idea of surfing that you brought up - that the internet was conceived of as this homogeneous thing that anyone would plug into for the same experience. I almost want to say that that’s actually aged well, because we now have what we call internet culture, but then something like the election comes along and highlights that the internet is rife with things that can fly totally under the radar of the broader internet experience.

Surfing, to me, also implies agency and choosing where you’re going to go. That was a rhetoric suggesting that you’d get on and answer the question what are you interested in? There would be different portals, and it would function not that differently from a library - you’d look up a topic through the Dewey Decimal system and go and find the same books that everyone else would see. Now, I don’t know what the word would be, but it wouldn’t be surfing. Everything is recommended to you; yes, you are proceeding down a path, but you’re not shaping it most of the time. You may think you are, or you may have chosen the beginning part, but… like those Spotify weekly playlists are pretty good now. It’s pretty true to wherever I started when I started listening to it, but now I think it’s pushing me down a path - it’ll give me something and I’ll say oh, I like this, and then it’ll serve up some more of that. There’s absolutely no randomness to it, so even when I feel like I’m expressing my personal taste I’m usually just accepting a suggestion. That’s completely different from what you’ll find from going out and actually looking for stuff.

Aggregation being the current big internet theme certainly adds to the idea of a monoculture, I think. Scrolling is such a solitary thing that it’s easy to be a little solipsistic and extrapolate your internet experience to everyone else.

That’s why I had that whole section on randomness. I really like talking to people on the plane, because that’s the last place that I really know of where you don’t get to choose who you’ll be sitting with for what could be six hours. On the way here, I sat next to this guy who is the Vice President of a company that patented weed in a can.

Like a soft drink?

No, it’s just in a can. Strangely enough, he wasn’t actually coming here. Or trains. If you take a really long train ride and go to the dining car, you get seated across from somebody totally random. And then they’ll tell you stuff that your internet is not going to recommend you, because they’re not part of your universe. I think that has very real implications, given how much we use things online to decide where to go. Like for me, coming here was a process of deciding what kind of Boulder experience I was going to have. It’s totally going to be the hipster Boulder, right? If I go by everything that would naturally be recommended to me online, versus if I just walk up to some random person on the street and ask what they like to do. I think that really affects people’s perception of space and awareness of other people in a way that I find concerning.

It does seem like physical and especially commercial spaces are propagating an identity in more and more accelerative ways. One of the strangest things about Denver that I noticed while moving is that with fewer than two days in town and some cursory internet research I was pretty easily sorted into one of maybe three neighborhoods in a city of three million.

Yeah, it’s easier than ever to go somewhere and have an experience tailored more to you and where you’re from than where you actually are. I had a weird train of thought recently about how I’ve had to travel more and more in the past few years: if you’re going to a conference and not spending a lot of time outside or in a crazily different time zone, it can easily not occur to you that you’re someplace very different. Especially if it has the same types of restaurants and stuff, it can just feel like an outpost of wherever you’re used to.

I collect pinecones, and I have this pinecone that I brought back from Sweden. It’s a spruce cone, and when I got it it was kind of long and closed. I got home and put it on my table, and then three days later I looked and it had opened up because it’s drier in Oakland. The pinecone knew where it was, and I found that really reassuring. I might not know in that way, but there are indicators. Now whenever I travel, the first thing that I do is try and see what birds there are. That’s like a really high priority for me. Everywhere has crows, right, but they sound different depending on where you are. When I was in Minneapolis I heard a crow making a noise that I’d never heard before. I find those indicators really grounding and reassuring, because they’re not virtual. Those are real things about that place.

This interview was originally split between two separate emails. Part two can be read here.