I don't have much to say about this beyond what prefaced the first part, but it did occur to me that I should share a small, otherwise unpublished segment of the conversation so that you could read the entire interview in Jenny's voice if you so chose. Here it is. This is the second and final part of the interview, which immediately followed the end of the first.

It seems like a pretty unassailably good thing that you’re able to make informed choices and give yourself some direction in an unfamiliar place, but on the other hand it kind of undermines the idea of travel.

I’ve been thinking about that roadtrip project a lot because I’m here and it was in the project, but I know that one of the central questions of that project was about what it actually means to be in a place. Like anyone can go anywhere - arguably, even just using Street View - so how much and what type of engagement do you have to have before you can say that you’ve been somewhere? And the answer seems to be either that as soon as you go somewhere you’re there or that it’s completely limitless, that you could be somewhere for ten years and argue that you still don’t really know the area.

Have you thought about replicating the roadtrip…

IRL? [laughs] I thought about it. It took me a year and a half to produce a fictional two and a half month-long trip, because obviously it takes more than a day to do a day. You might notice that my hair grows really fast in the photos [laughs]. But I’ve never had two and a half months.

I guess that would be prohibitive. I’d be really interested in seeing what, if any, sort of impressions a town would leave on a visitor that evaded capture through online research only.

Yeah, I’m been thinking about that a lot here because I was here and I saw these mountains. Like when I got a cab from the airport, it hadn’t yet occurred to me that I’d been here on the trip and I got this really strong sense of deja vu before realizing that I’d been on that freeway, looking in that direction. As far as things that you don’t get through the project… they’re the things still seem not totally homogenized to me. There’s definitely an attitude that people have in different places, which is really fascinating to me. In Sweden I found that people were really reserved initially, almost like British people, but then after talking to them for ten minutes they’d be the warmest people in the world. That was something I consistently observed, whereas if you go to southern Europe everyone’s a little more laid back. Or those cliches that are actually somewhat true: people in New York being really intense, people in California being lazy. I’m not sure what the word for it is, but people in California like to make really pleasant small talk without really saying anything and refuse to criticize anything. There’s actual weather, and then there’s weather of the people, the place, and the mood. I was going to say you could get it from reviews, but the type of people that write reviews are already a very specific subset.

Yeah, totally. Interestingly, I found Yelp to be totally useless in New Orleans because it was such a large set of reviews that it was essentially representative of the entire population of the US. So it was no more useful than looking around and going by what looks appealing.

When you’re travelling somewhere, do you have any particular strategies to actively try and avoid being fed an experience? As an example, I was talking to a chef once - on a train, actually - and she said that her rule for selecting a Chinese restaurant was to go wherever she saw the oldest woman eating.

Usually the first thing I do when I go somewhere is go to their botanical garden. I’m not sure if there’s one here. When I was in Sweden, I was paying particular attention to what the relationship was between the people and the landscape. For instance, if you look at woodsy cabins on Airbnb in the US, they’re always described as secluded. You know - they’re all yours, you have all this space, and it’ll say that it’s in the woods but nothing specific about those woods. And then in Sweden, the second or third sentence is always, always how far it is to the nearest nature reserve or what sort of hiking is available. I went to a lot of nature reserves, and the way people would talk about those spaces was like how people would talk about wi-fi here. It’s like a public good, not as glamorized as it is here. Here nature is just some stuff or an amazing national monument, with nothing in between, and there everything was kind of in that in between. There’s no world’s oldest tree or anything there, it’s just something that everyone enjoys and thinks it’s important to have access to.

Nature incidentally, rather than intentionally.

Yeah, exactly. And here it’s much more visually spectacular and romanticized. I already try to pay attention to how the natural environment is different in places, which naturally leads me to think about these questions of how the people who live there think of the environment.

A related weird thing is that nature in the US has become totally opt-in. It seems like you could very easily avoid it entirely, should you want to.

Totally, which is crazy to me. You can choose to not acknowledge any of the physical reality of where you are. I just wrote a piece that’s not published yet on bioregionalism, which is the opposite of that - people who identify with the bioregion that they live in more than a city or a state. It’s like an extreme awareness of which watershed you’re part of, which continental plate you’re on, why things around you are shaped the way they’re shaped. I find it really interesting how much that varies. There are places that people could not be bothered to know what the most common local species of bird is.

That’s interesting - it seems kind of like an attempt at retroactively applying intentionality to the series of events in your life that brought you to a specific place. You know - it’s very important that I eventually ended up here, which I discovered to be my native habitat. I’m skeptical of that.

I guess I’m not as skeptical because I still live where I was born. Not that I’m a native Californian, but I grew up there. There’s a visual vocabulary that’s very familiar and comforting to me, even before I knew what any of the species were. There are yellow grassy hills, and two sets of mountains that look very different - I remember growing up understanding that it was because one’s drier than the other. To me, it’s not so much retroactive as it is elaborating a feeling that you already had, by way of giving more detail to the relationship you already have with a place.

I do think a lot about regionalism disappearing. Kind of like with the ability to shape your travel experiences, it’s hard to say that the ability to access things from places without being in that places is bad. There’s totally that romance to the inextricability of food or accents or whatever from the place that shaped them. Phrased that way, I guess I do buy it a little bit more.

Even if it’s somewhat disingenuous - you wash up somewhere, and decide to become very engaged in that place. I still think that people can have that as a recourse for how placeless the internet makes you feel. Especially in the last year, when I think everybody’s been more anxiety-ridden and looking at the internet all the time, things have felt very not real. Things had substance, but they were sort of being conjured - nothing in the news had a feeling of reality to it, and I didn’t feel like I had a feeling of reality myself. So I found it really therapeutic to look at and think about things that aren’t virtual like that. Some plants are in some places and other plants are in other places for a reason, which seems kind of trivial but is something that you can grasp onto to know that you are somewhere and not somewhere else. Versus being on your phone and being not really in one place and not in another place, which feels very unsatisfying at the end.

It’s become very difficult for me to reconcile things I see on the capital-N News with actual people, places, or events, which is really troubling. I’m not living anywhere that, say, national politics is happening firsthand, and it’s so increasingly bizarre that it feels like my physical being and any type of media that I consume are occupying entirely different worlds.

Exactly, it feels totally unreal, which is really dangerous. Last night, my friend and I went to the planetarium at the University of Colorado and watched this really strange film about the Earth. A lot of it involved this rotating 3-D model of Earth and they had all these astronauts reading quotes about seeing the Earth for the first time. They all had the same gist - you realize we’re all one planet, the first day, we all pointed to our countries; the third day, we just pointed to the Earth [laughs]. First of all, the planetarium is awesome and you should go there. Second, it really did make that more tangible - that this ground is connected to that ground over there. That’s the exact opposite of watching the news nowadays, where you might even see photos of a place but lack any sense of its existence in your physical reality.

That’s a big part of the nature draw, I think; total awe. Getting yourself up a mountain or whatever to see the biggest chunk of the planet that you can in-person. I think some of my initial skepticism about the bioregionalism thing was that it feels like something that wouldn’t have needed to be announced or made an explicit part of one’s identity until recently.

Oh, absolutely; I mean, I don’t think that Native Americans called it bioregionalism when they were doing it. That term was coined in the 70s, kind of at the beginning of the modern environmental movement. The actual naming of it was very much political; of course there are plenty of people who do smaller versions of it without knowing the word at all. But yeah, Peter Berg’s the guy.

That’s such a toxic effect of the internet: the instinctive skepticism about any sort of declaration or firm position.

Yeah, or just identifying with something. I’ve thought about communes in California a lot, as like a last last last resort if everything in my life completely tanked. I’ve looked at them before, and their websites and the forms that you fill out to join them, but there’s a similar problem for me. Everything they say, I agree with - you know, that we should be better stewards of the land, that modern living is very unsatisfying, it all makes sense. But there’s a big statement angle to it as well, being a bit holier-than-thou and deciding not just to do it but to make a part of your identity. Another really weird example is that a lot of people in Oakland are polyamorous, which is fine. Some people just are, and then some people you meet and then mention it right away - I’m polyamorous, does that offend you? Bringing it to the forefront of their personality as this big thing that’s in active opposition to how things are normally done. Just like with communes, I’m totally onboard with the underlying ideas, but then there’s this extra element of wearing it as a fashion statement.

It’s almost like we’ve gone a little too far into self-determination. Maybe in the 18th century your whole life was laid out with the single input of where you were born and to whom, and sometime after that we hit a nice equilibrium. But now there’s a sense that there are so many possible paths that aggressively justifying whichever one you took becomes a natural impulse. I think it’d be great if 100% of a new experience was the actual experiencing of it, but now you’ve got the 10% of defending it or whatever eating away at the experience.

I think it’s often not the most interesting thing about someone. It’s a decision about how they want to live their life, but more often than not I think I’d be more interested in hearing what they think about other stuff.

Yeah, I guess when you’ve got a widely shared, subscribed-to identity it’s a lot more interesting to find out how that refracts things outside of it. It’s almost like an ideology; once you join, you’re invested wholesale and the details of that are kind of already known. It’s a lot more interesting to get an ideologue’s view of things that fall outside of what’s already kind of preordained.

[A single bee arrives as our food is taken away, but to Jenny’s dismay remains at the table instead of following.]

I’ve always thought about doing hyper-literal transcriptions of these interviews, and today would be a particularly entertaining one. This actually started as kind of a similar idea - not necessarily getting artists’ opinion on non-art things, but publishing something as close to a normal conversation with a given person as possible. I sensed a bit of a gulf in how creative peoples’ minds worked relative to my own, and wanted to get an actual, honest account of conversating with them.

I teach non-art majors, and I don’t really think there’s anything different about a creative mind. I think people just have different outlets that work for them. I think everyone has a unique way of being in the world. For instance, I was at this wedding recently where I didn’t know many people, and we all went swimming in this river/creek thing. I think I’m a fairly talkative person, but I realized that I was sitting at the side of the river digging up rocks and making weird little arrangements out of them. That’s my earliest memory: being a kid and drawing things on paper then cutting them out and arranging them. If I turn off every other part of my brain, that’s what’s in the background. Or staring at stuff, like a snail or something. I’ll crouch down on the ground and look at a snail for five minutes like a crazy person. There’s nothing I can do about that, that’s just my filter on the world. So all of my work, even though I say it’s in the middle of this transition, is just different versions of that. And I think everybody has something like that that affects the way you talk to people, what you see and don’t see. If you were to make something, it would come out of that. How to make stuff seems less important than finding whatever that thing is.

Does that imply that you don’t have a lot of choice about which artistic medium is most apt for sharing that particular perspective?

I don’t think so. I started out photoshopping a bunch of stuff, then I’ve done walking tours, websites, books, augmented reality. I think you have a lot of choice for medium, and what you don’t have a choice about is the particular spin that your brain has. It’s just a matter of finding what kinds of things you can create and leaving it to its own devices. Strictly speaking, I don’t feel like I really make anything; I feel like more of a collector, or an archivist. But I have friends that like making things out of nothing. That’s just the way of being they inhabit, which I don’t.

As someone similarly skewed towards the re-assembly of existing things, I associate it with the very strong evangelical urge that I get for things that I’m really into. Wanting to highlight things not because someone else absolutely has to like them, but to ensure that they’re not unjustly overlooked, I guess.

Totally. I just did that Internet Archive residency, which made me more aware than ever of the fact that I like finding things and sharing them more than I like making things. I kept finding stuff in these old Byte magazines that was so weird and creepy that I wanted to show it to someone. Eventually I did do a show, but my friend who lives here was also in residence at the time, living in South Korea. So there was a time every day when we’d both be going through these old computer magazines and our entire message conversation would just be screenshots back and forth with lol or omg in between. That made me realize that the second part of liking to go around digging for things is wanting to show what you find to someone.

One thing that I find really endearing about teaching the non-art majors is that they’ll come in worrying about never having taken an art class before. Then on the first project they’ll freak out about the idea of coming up with something original, and you see them slowly realize that nothing is original. These things are part of a long conversation that has been happening for centuries. Duchamp has that quote, art is a game among men of all ages or something like that. People are talking to each other across time through these responses and recontextualizations.

There’s one other thing that I wanted to ask you about as a general idea: the notion of transmitting an experience to someone else. I feel like a lot of what we’ve been saying leans toward the idea that it’s kind of a futile pursuit.

I don’t think it’s futile! I think that’s actually probably one of the most important things to me. I gave this talk last year at EYEO about David Hockney using different forms of technology like fax machines, video, and iPads. I was using him as an example of someone who’s making work using technology that’s not about technology. He’s said in interviews that his work is about observation, looking actively instead of passively. For the video piece that I was talking about, where he attached twelve cameras to his car and drove down this really green, tree-lined road, what you’re looking at is this grid of screens that are all moving past this foliage simultaneously but not as a totally continuous image. It has this really hallucinatory quality. People will look at it for a really long time, even though nothing is happening. I talked to the docents about it, and they said people would come back and say that they went outside and everything looked different. That’s all I’m interested in, things where someone see something differently and creates a mediated experience that tricks the viewer or somehow invites them to see that thing. Especially when it’s something that’s supposedly familiar. I saw that piece and then went to the botanic garden and saw it completely differently, in a David Hockney way. It was beautiful, and felt very generous on his part. But I definitely needed to see that piece, which was like a scaffolding to experience the same thing. That’s what I’m going for - with the Bureau of Suspended Objects, the intended outcome is that you go and look at all of these supposedly everyday objects and find out all this weird stuff about them. Then you’re supposed to go home and realize that everything in your house is that. I feel responsible for making that accessible to other people.

I find that since I annoyingly talk about birds all the time, some of my friends who don’t actually really care about birds still notice them more. It’s almost involuntary. It’s contagious. If you spend a lot time with someone who’s always paying attention to cars, you’re going to start noticing cars. Everyone has specific things that they pay attention to, but that can very much be affected. I saw a John Cage performance in 2012, which I remember because I never heard sound the same way again. I’d read about him before that, I knew what his deal was, but I went to a symphony hall and watched the piece performed, then walked back into the city I had lived in for many years and heard it completely differently.