Ryan Kuo, OK., 2018-19, macOS application, software box, printed insert, digital wallpaper, Edition of 100: bitforms gallery. Simplified Chinese translation: Zhihui Zhang. Image courtesy the artist.
Ryan Kuo is a New York-based artist who explores topics such as whiteness and technocracy through artworks constructed within interactive software interfaces and applications.
The first time I came across Ryan’s work was seeing OK., an application interface that prompts its audience into simulating a dialogue rooted in whiteness. The project is physically manifested in editioned software boxes, the kind you see Microsoft Office software thinly packaged in. I was immediately drawn into the aesthetic and ideological intervention of software packaging, then hooked by the work’s deeper ethical inquiries into simulating whiteness.
His recent interviews include a conversation from May 2020 with Tommy Martinez at Pioneer Works, where the artist was a resident in 2019, and a conversation with media scholar Wendy Chun in Art in America in September 2019. His work has shown at bitforms gallery, where I first encountered it, Transfer Gallery, and is often released digitally through left.gallery.
Ryan and I conducted an email exchange over the summer socially distanced in our homes. Here is an edited transcript of our exchange.
BW: We had a call a few weeks ago to say hello and see what we were both up to. We talked about the early Black Lives Matter protests in Brooklyn that have now gained more steam and momentum, happening every day across several boroughs. Due to the ongoing police murders against unarmed black people, the movement for Black Lives Matter continues to demand change in an unjust political economy and system of policing that privileges white lives. Whiteness, a theme of inquiry and interrogation in your artistic inquiry, is privileged in policing, and in the COVID-19 and economic crises we have seen this year.
How are you holding up since we last spoke? And, how are these events shifting how you think about your ongoing work (or not)?
RK: I'm in the rarefied worker class The Guardian has named the Remotes. As a technical writer at a database company that has moved seamlessly into remote work, I can only complain that my body is stiff from working at home. It’s no joke that many consecutive hours of computer work can permanently damage your body, but relative to everything else, this is a senseless complaint.
I've been feeling strong identification with the protests against white supremacy. My work and my body have never dealt directly with policing and prison systems and my understanding of them was mostly abstract until I read Jackie Wang's Carceral Capitalism last year. But I was aware at a very early age that whites perceive my body as subhuman, a walking punchline, and that they feel zero hesitation to treat it as an obstacle. When I read about how Ahmaud Arbery was chased and killed, I felt this gut recognition of the way that whites can and will take your body away from you. I don't know if it's right for me to connect myself to this event, since my experience of white power has limits. But I hope that articulating what I consider to be the failures, and thus the vulnerabilities of whiteness, can be an ongoing act of solidarity with all people who are subjected to it.
Ryan Kuo, Family Maker, 2017-18, macOS application, Edition of 88: left gallery, Collection of The Current Museum. Family Maker is a Mac application that helps the user navigate family dynamics that may be familiar or unfamiliar. It has been conceived as a puzzle box to unlock and explore, and as a poetic support that can give form to the unnameable. Image and description courtesy the artist.
BW: I think the articulation of the failures and vulnerabilities of whiteness is a vital method for seeing through how whiteness distorts reality. While I don’t directly experience racism, I stand united with the movements against racism and fascism, such as Black Lives Matter, calls to defund the police, awareness for worker’s rights, and others. On your point of acts of solidarity, this is what compelled me to document the orchestration and overreaction of the NYPD’s response to these movements.
I listened to Jackie Wang speak after you shared the impact of her book. During that time, I also read more about the concept of whiteness from authors such as Nell Painter and Carol Rage, who recently published “White Rage”. The way Nell Painter problematized the issue of whiteness in her Op-Ed from 2016 resonated with me. She began with, “Donald J. Trump campaigned on the slogan “Make America Great Again,” a phrase whose “great” was widely heard as “white.” She goes on to ask, who defines whiteness today? Is it Trump and his cronies who are setting the parameters?
RK: The maddening thing is whites won’t even admit to acting out of self-interest. Instead, they call it something like “the silent majority supports the president”. And this is to imply that they’ve remained “silent” out of some innate propriety and not because they just have nothing to offer. The “the” before “silent majority” also makes me mad. This is a group that thinks it has existed before time and always will.
BW: I looked more into the term “silent majority” and learned more about how it has been used throughout political discourse in the last two centuries. Nixon used it to refer to the silent majority of middle Americans, rural and suburban blue-collar workers, who did not join protests against the Vietnam War or other such public protest. In the 19th century, it was used to refer to the dead.
File: A Primer, 2018, Keynote animation, Edition of 3: bitforms gallery. This kiosk animation was created using Keynote’s built-in tools for automating digital presentations. File: A Primer also serves as an introductory webinar for an artist’s book, File: A User’s Manual (in progress). Image and description courtesy the artist.
BW: You had mentioned in a previous conversation that you were working on a downloadable technical manual that extended your ongoing exploration of whiteness. Could you talk about this project, how the technical manual functions for you as a conceptual space of inquiry? How does the technical manual shift the inquiry in new ways than your previous work with AI, files, user interfaces, and software applications?
RK: It's actually a print project! I continue to be interested in these bureaucratic and tedious formats that I associate with the technology world. In this case, the technical manual is modeled after software guides like the O'Reilly books and more esoteric variants like Facebook for Seniors, which I found at Materials for the Arts in Long Island City, and also strategy guides for computer games. If you read the Doom II strategy guide, it is essentially a transcription of a flawless state that can never be attained except in the imagination. Software education is like this. It makes you feel that you can be the master.
The book is called File: A User's Manual and it gets into dynamics of white supremacy, assimilation, and fatherhood, or how I imagine these things. I am happy not to be working with an "interface" this time, except as an idea. Instead of developing a user experience, I can focus on what it is that I want to represent. I’m finding that a lot can be expressed in the gap between two pages.
BW: It seems that online dynamics across the political spectrum are one of your investigative inquiries. How do you research the concept of whiteness as it relates to technology and protocols? What does your research process usually entail?
RK: I wouldn't call my work research, because it has no defined methodology. There are many analytical gestures present in the work, but it is mainly an intuitive process. Things become interesting to me through my body, which is continually being subjected to expectations, interpretations, and desires. I read these as attempts to make me into a subject, and I respond as an object that takes up space. In other words, I tend to detach myself from everyday processes of subject formation, a habit I picked up from growing up in a racist town. This is an important first step in reflecting those processes back at the people actively engaged in them. I deliberately work in a space where subject and object are collapsed or interchangeable, which is one way that I consider this an art and not a research practice.
Ryan Kuo, Faith, Mac/Win application, Edition of 100: left gallery, Two-channel edition: TRANSFER, Application development: Angeline Meitzler and Tommy Martinez. Faith is an AI voice assistant that is easily triggered. With a unique conversational style written using IBM Watson, Faith sows doubt while capitalizing on the benefit of the doubt. Named after a white supremacist, Faith is defensive and resists being used or treated like a child. Unlike Alexa, Siri, or Cortana, Faith provides no information. Instead, she tells you why you are making her react this way. She is likely to be trolling you at any time, and you are free to decide whether you trust her, and how you might relate to her. Image and description courtesy the artist.
BW: I think it’s a valid point to question the application of research-based practice, especially in the context when the artistic practice is situated against research-laden practices. My wife is a social worker, and at times, I think about the difference between the parameters of “social practice” in art versus deep research that goes into social work. That distinction in research methodology and practice can become blurred as social practice or social work enter society.
RK: Yes, this is why I call myself an “artist and writer.”
BW: Who or what sources e.g. authors, films, movements, artists, ideas do you consider influential in your work?
RK: A few constant reference points are Beckett, The Amateurist by Miranda July, Jealousy by Alain Robbe-Grillet, and The Cage by Martin Vaughn-James. I guess all of these contain some image of a body trapped in or victimized by a larger, unknowable structure. The writer that I feel closest to is Abe Kōbō, for the way that he blurs the distinction between subject and object.
Otherwise, my artistic sensibility is focused on sequencing the body, and this is almost entirely informed by techno and jungle. This has been a very understated influence lately and I’d like to start bringing it out again. In general, I’m working through my memories, which are dominated by my parents, Usenet, and ‘80s mass media.
BW: How do theory and practice relate in your work? Are there observations or experiences you have encountered that have developed how you frame your work?
RK: The work is a reflection of the way that I encounter structures, an image that is distorted from my position within those structures. I have a vivid memory of being racialized as a young person. I can now never stop understanding my relation to the world as one conditioned by racism. At the same time, because I remember that moment, I know that there must have been a moment directly prior to racialization during which my perception was different. So while I can describe racist structures in my work, I’m not exactly trying to do so. What motivates me is holding on to the part of me that resides outside those structures, even if it is stuck in a time past.
I tried to describe this approach in very plain language in a residency application last year and was told by a juror that I was naive and needed to "be more familiar with critical race theory." In other words, one learns about racism by reading about it, which means that one considers racism to be abstract. Aside from this misunderstanding of racism, I don’t need to explain why it’s elitist to treat theory like cultural capital that you either have or don’t have.
Artwork can form a working theory about its material. To me, though, it is necessarily tentative, an active physical and mental practice. For that reason, I think that art resists formalization into anything other than itself.
BW: It appears that disrupting the audience’s perception of technology is a common theme in your work. I am thinking about your works, File, and Faith - a dynamic chatbot based on a neo-Nazi. How do you think about the audience in your work?
RK: I struggle with understanding who my audience is, and this is one of my biggest challenges. I’m the first to experience my work, so my image of an audience is an extension of how I see myself. I think of a user as someone who has lazy tendencies and is either bored or always about to be. So I try to make things as clear and as convenient as possible, from moment to moment, while also laying down unintuitive paths. File is inspired by the rabbit hole of Amazon links, and Faith is essentially trolling the user who wants to be spoonfed empathy.
BW: In thinking about big tech’s history and as a space of predominantly white male CEOs, founders, and VCs, how do you think the tech industry and Silicon Valley perpetuate whiteness?
RK: As you’re aware, whiteness was invented in service of capital and continues to remain in thrall to capital in Silicon Valley. It's not that CEOs and VCs are white, it's that CEOs and VCs define the terms. Silicon Valley claims to be about the future, but it is powerless without an event like "more and more companies are abandoning monoliths for greenfield opportunities in headless microservices, where we are uniquely positioned to capture the lion's share of this market, and the VCs are betting on it." This faith in capital, this dependence on capital, and this inability to think outside the language of capital is the triple-bind that reproduces whiteness like a Möbius strip. When whiteness tries to think outside that trap, it has to retreat into spiritual libertarianism at sites like Burning Man. The fantasies are about self-reliance and reinvention because dealing with market logic is like gambling with death.
BW: Given the domination of capital you mention, and their need to accumulate more and more of it under capitalism, I find Silicon Valley leaders distort reality in several ways. The spiritual libertarianism they preach is not legitimate because they make all the rules. For example, it’s not as though spiritual libertarianism will help run or even break up Facebook. Facebook is not a democracy because Mark Zuckerberg controls the company through 57.9% of the total voting shares. It’s more like a feudal model with a capitalist business engine if you think about it based on who owns all the voting shares. The second distortion is that these leaders seek wealth accumulation first, and they obfuscate that intention under their “world-changing projects” and lessons on how to practice compassion. The libertarian ideology conceals how these companies are anti-union, employ at will (they can fire workers at any point in the U.S.), and will extract any data from employees and customers they can get away with.
How do you think your work interfaces with, interrogates, intervenes in the libertarian ideology and whiteness which dominates Silicon Valley / Big Tech?
RK: Because I work in tech and have had to absorb and mimic Silicon Valley’s way of perceiving, talking, and being, my artwork deliberately internalizes rather than intervenes in these logics. For me, the first step in dealing with whiteness is to pin it down and frame it. In the past several years, I’ve brought what I have learned about speaking and acting white into the studio. This is a way for me to work out my feelings about my dual identity: white and not-white. I am generally being sarcastic when I use the white voice in an artwork, but I also think whiteness is so truly alien that it makes for great material. Whites often understand their bodies through rigged language and bad logic, both of which can be emulated or evoked with deterministic computer systems.
BW: In the interview with Wendy Chun for Art in America, you mention naming whiteness an affective failure (which I believe references your work, The Pointer). Could you elaborate on this naming (or pointing) and how it might help us see whiteness as a systemic failure or through lived experiences confronting it?
RK: Based on my encounters, I think that whiteness fails itself. It fails because it keeps laying escape routes when it knows it is losing. But it also loses itself down these routes. Whiteness is not fully able to confront itself, and by extension what it does to the world. It is a loser.
The Pointer may have seemed like a computer reference, but is just a shorthand for the way that whiteness is always pointing fingers at everybody but itself.
BW: Is there an exit strategy out of whiteness? Can it be negated? Abolished?
RK: This is really the question for me and some of my recent collaborators. In order for whiteness to be abolished, it would have to coincide with race itself being abolished. If one of them goes, then the other will follow. But this is unlikely to happen as long as neoliberal models of achievement make racialization out to be appealing and natural. I’ve been reading a great book, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life, that methodically unpacks the insanity of racial thinking. We’re all suffering from it.
You can follow more of Ryan’s work on his website, which feels to me like a direct extension of his practice.