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Tech

The High Priestesses of the Post-Internet on Dating Apps and the NSA

Holly Herndon and Jennifer Walshe think the internet is messy because people are messy.
Photos via Holly Herndon and Jennifer Walshe

Saying that the internet is an inextricable part of our everyday lives here in the Global North is easily brushed off as trite in 2015. But in those few words that together make up something of a cliche lurks the collective joy, pain, anger, happiness, and hatred of billions of people—just like the internet itself. Hell, Facebook alone.

Nobody realizes this better than Holly Herndon and Jennifer Walshe. Herndon is an artist, a musician, and an academic who makes aggressive, minimal techno about having her Gmail inbox violated by the NSA; when she's not busy completing her PhD at the Stanford lab where digital FM synthesis was invented in the 60s, anyway. Walshe is an Irish composer, vocal performer, and Reader in Music at Brunel University London whose works incorporate the internet conceptually and practically. Her recent project THMOTES involved sending strangers music scores over Snapchat and seeing what they sent back.

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Walshe and Herndon's work might seem pretty different, but both of them are on the vanguard of what the art world has been calling "post-internet" as of late. Basically, it's art that acknowledges that the internet is the water we swim in these days. You could say that, simply, post-internet art is art about the internet, instead of merely being on it.

The two artists are now collaborating on a project that aims to crowdsource a collection of texts and music that could be considered part of the post-internet movement. Their hope is to build a database that artists and academics can use to check the pulse of the post-internet music community.

Clearly, both Herndon and Walshe have a lot to say about our networked world, so I got them together over Skype—Herndon was looking like she was on the set of Werner Herzog's Nosferatu—to chat about everything from dating apps to the NSA.

Herndon on the left, Walshe on the right. Screengrab: Skype

Motherboard: In terms of your work, what do you think are some of the biggest shifts the web has brought to our lives?
Holly Herndon: The thing I've been focusing on in the last year are the emotional changes that happen. Relationships are modulated in terms of the ways we communicate with people, and that almost creates new emotional modes that then need new affects, or ways of expressing that emotion. When you're chatting with someone, and you see that dot, dot, dot… And you're waiting for them to say something… That's a very different feeling than a kind of pregnant pause when talking in person. It's a different emotional mode. I want to express these new emotions without relying on older emotional tropes.

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Jennifer Walshe: It's very interesting what Holly's saying, because I'm very interested in how people are communicating their emotions, or talking about their lives through text—when people are internet dating, and how they're writing to each other. I was reading a book called Dataclysm by Christian Rudder, who's the head data scientist at OKCupid. He was saying that there was this big shift when smartphones came into play; people stopped writing long messages to each other on dating sites. Having used internet dating, and having many friends, we remember the old school ways. Like, you got a letter! Now people are like, sup?

"Don't feel like you don't have another option, or like Facebook is so entrenched in your life"

On the note of the human element being at the core of the internet, your work has elements that are pretty unsettling. Jennifer, with your project ALL THE MANY PEOPLS, there's even elements of horror…
JW: I took a bunch of audio from YouTube videos that UK and US soldiers in Iraq took of themselves blowing things up, so there is literal horror on there in the audio.

And Holly, you also deal with the government, the NSA, in your song "Home." Do both of you see these new changes as being anxious, or unsettling, or dark, or are you more optimistic than that?
HH: I think it encompasses all aspects of human emotions, which is the darkness and the light. The internet isn't one thing or the other—it's part of our society, it's an extension of our community, so it encompasses all of those things. But I'm a generally optimistic person. I think in some ways, especially in electronic music, there's a tendency toward dystopia. I love dystopian sci-fi, but I think if you go too far down that road, you can lose hope. You need to have a bit of optimism at least to feel like you have some agency over your life, and where the future can go, and how to build new infrastructure together and create the future you want. If you have no optimism, you kind of just give up.

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JW: I love Bruce Sterling, and there's a talk I heard him give where his definition of the texture of the times we live in is "dark euphoria." On the one hand, the planet's going to hell, and everyone's facing problems personally and economically, ecologically, but on the other hand it's very exciting. There's a freshness and a sense that things are changing in ways they haven't before. I like that very much, that "dark euphoria," as a way of describing it. What I often see if that we go through periods of hysteria over tech and the web. This worry about tech is always there.

You bring up the NSA, I find that people are incredibly apathetic about how infiltrating these things are. With my students, when Facebook did that emotional contagion study, I brought that paper and explained what all the language meant, and their minds were blown. They had no idea that even happened. I think our job, whether teaching students, or making art, or doing interviews, is to try and hammer home for people: don't be apathetic. Don't feel like you don't have another option, or like Facebook is so entrenched in your life. Or that anything is so entrenched in your life that you're never not going to buy another McDonald's meal again.

HH: It's about feeling empowered to make alternatives. If you look at the independent music scene in the 1990s, you had artists actually building their own distribution, touring, and zine networks, because they weren't fitting into the infrastructure that was provided.

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I get the sense that there's not just optimism, but an attempt to make things better. There's a lot of talk about safe spaces and violence against women and visible minorities offline right now. When we're talking about art of and about the internet, do you think there's also an obligation there to address biases online that have to do with those things?
HH: I don't know if you've ever dealt with online trolling, but I've dealt with some pretty hideous online trolls and I haven't made any work specifically about that, but that of course comes in through my work. It influences what I'm doing, as well.

JW: That's why I don't leave comments on stuff. It's really something I feel quite strongly about, because talking to people who have been trolled—women—they say, yeah, I have to turn YouTube comments off… On a new music video! I think there are some women who think that if they stick their neck out, they're likely to get more trolling than a guy doing the same thing. What I've been listening to lately is a lot of rap by people like Mykki Blanco and Big Freedia, and that gave me hope for the world. I think a lot of rap is really interesting sonically, but the lyrics are so homophobic or sexist that it's hard for me to listen to. And then I hear Mykki Blanco and I'm like, oh, I can get back on board and enjoy this! I think there will always be people who are trucking along and doing this, and hopefully the internet allows us to discover these people.

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Watch more from Motherboard: William Gibson In Real Life

Just as an aside, I saw Mykki Blanco… Well, I shouldn't say that I 'saw' Mykki Blanco. Mykki was playing at a small festival up at a farm here in Southern Ontario, and I ate too many shrooms and had to go to my tent. So I was hearing Mykki Blanco through the walls of my tent in this mental interzone, and it was transcendent.
JW: Okay, now I really feel like I'm in a VICE interview.

We have to mention it, it's in the contract. I've actually never done drugs in my life.
HH: [Laughs]

Jennifer, in another interview I saw you used the phrase, "The internet in its current iteration." How do you define the internet?
JW: I'm paraphrasing William Gibson! Get on to him about what the internet is. It's something he's talked about in several interviews: it's flexible, it's an ecology, it's constantly changing. The internet isn't the same today as it was a year or six months ago. I hope that, in five years from now, the internet isn't just Amazon and Facebook. My dad was a very early adopter and had a site about his kayak, getting advice from people in America. His experience of the internet is different from mine or Holly's.

HH: And people are always trying to create a parallel internet, or rethink the structure of the internet, whether through peer-to-peer or other means. The internet that we know today is going to be completely different in five years. There's something called Internet 2 that certain fancy institutions have access to, it's like the internet on crack. There's personal differences, regional differences, there's censorship. In the UK I'm constantly getting notifications that my stuff isn't family friendly, or whatever. Depending on where you are regionally, the internet is also really different. It's really difficult to define.

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"People are always trying to create a parallel internet, or rethink the structure of the internet"

JW: It's also very different for the elderly, or someone who's over 70 and being told to go to the Silver Surfer's Club in the library. I want to see more art about what it's like for people to look for an Alzheimer's care site. I want to know what the texture of life is for people who are older. A lot of what internet art is about now, is being 27, and maybe being high, and eating Doritos. So many pieces are located in that world. I'm looking for something that's going to stretch on as this generation ages, and we get older with the internet, unlike those photos we put on dating apps.

I guess the takeaway is that whatever happens to the internet, there's always going to be this kernel of the human element.
JW: What else would it be? It's people. It's people at the core of it.

HH: And all of the worst and all of the best.

JW: And they're sloppy and messy. I'm sloppy at dealing with the web, and the legality of all of it.

HH: I like the word 'sloppy,' because I try to infuse all my work with messiness and unkemptness. In the 90s, media art was infused with this cleanness and repetition, just these 1s and 0s, but that's not really the experience that we have today. It's this messy, complicated, and leaky world.

This interview was condensed and edited for clarity.