Interview mit Constant Dullaart

Constant, welcome to Hamburg and thank you for sharing your time with us and answering a few questions. We would like to start by asking how you would define yourself as an artist?

In general it is already difficult for me to say that I am a man, or that I am human. I think that I am inhuman most of the time. So giving you a definition is hard but reflecting how people describe my practice relating to the web as my medium I can say that I am mostly a visual artist. But since I also do non-visual work I am more of a predominantly visual artist. It is not something that reflects my identity, so I am okay with this definition.

How many hours per day do you spend on the internet?

How many hours a day does anyone spend on the internet now? These days it is quantified in the amount of gigabyte agreed on in your mobile phone contract and so normal that it is hard to measure. I am not online when I am asleep and another two hours maximum. The rest of the time I am probably watching a screen.

Regarding to your critical artistic involvement did you change your behavior on the web concerning your interactions on social media platforms for example?

On May 24 in 2012 I gave away the access to my Facebook account. I made it public during a performance and asked people to take it over. I am not in control of that identity anymore. Everybody that uses social media platforms is branding themselves, even if your audience is small and you know the people on a personal level. You use certain proprietary tools and communicate in a way which is commercialized by the medium that you are using it through. So you effectively become a mini brand. It is almost impossible to use this media purely on a personal basis and I tend not to use them personal at all.

If we are interacting on these platforms is it a corporate version of ourselves?

Yes. Social media itself is a term that was coined by Facebook, by the corporation itself. By participating in these information transactions broadcasting to your audience, you are supporting a hyper capitalist system, even if your audience is private.

In an e-mail discussing whether to leave streaming material on the internet you wrote us that it should not stay online for more than two years so ›that we all have the chance to reinvent ourselves‹. How would you explain that?

It is meant in reference to the law about ›the right to be forgotten‹. The idea of that concept is that in case of slander against you on the web, there is a right to request search engines such as Google to remove the link to that website. If you are able to prove that you are slandered by old, outdated in-formation they need to remove the access to that statement. You cannot get them to erase the website but the pathway through Google to it, which is already a recognition of the dominance of Google as a search engine by the way. We are forced by corporations to stick to our old identity, and it will only become stricter. But I think that there should be this poetic liberty to deal with your own identity and to have control over it.

Do you think that the internet has a culturally important meaning for us?

It is undeniable that there is a cultural influence and that a culture that manifests itself within this networked communication. People started broadcasting and could find an audience themselves. Years before the web existed people had to find their audience through more artificial hierarchical means. We can just self-publish now. It is very interesting which cultural expressions come from the web. It still continues and develops very strongly into the kind of words we use, how we phrase, what kind of jokes we make, to language in general and the way that we relate to other countries. It is enormously influenced by the fact that we are part of this communication network all the time.

Who is your audience?

At Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, one of the advisors, Hans Aarsmann, who works with photography said »Your audience is your father.‹ My father died in 1994 (before the web was really popular). I really choose my audience and this is something that I still do in my mind. I create for certain people who read my work in a particular way. The nice thing about publishing it on the web is that everyone else can also find their way to the work. So I am not only publishing within one kind of niche. The relationship to the audience is quite exciting because it feels like I can choose my own audience and do not have to think about who I have to satisfy as an artist.

Why did you become an artist?

There is a very abstract reasoning why I wanted to become an artist since I was twelve. Just like my prior motivation that I wanted reality to be more moldable in the way that we document it by cameras and other tools. The representation of reality and its experience through representation can be quite moldable. We are flexible in how we perceive and memorize it. So even a really dramatic experience can be recontextualised through its representation, documentation and become something beautiful.

Why did you choose the internet as your medium?

I was really frustrated with the amount of rules that I had to follow to participate in mass media. I had to have the right camera and the appropriate equipment to be on TV or to make a movie for television. The web on the other hand was this great source of information where I could publish things. More importantly, it offered a lot of content to reconstruct and recontextualise to shed a new light on it and find a new way to it. The materiality of itself dawned on me. The web itself became really interesting to take as a subject, to review and think about the way we are looking at things. It took a while and it also had to do with the fact that it became part of this popular mass culture. Only for the last few years the relevance of this medium has become very clear. It is the most important cultural evolution that we are going to experience and that we got to know in the last few decades. By now it is almost amazing that this was not clear at some point. I still think that it is difficult to bring on my work in relationship to galleries, publications or to physical things but it is still very interesting to work with the idea between the physical and online materialities.

There is this border between an artist and activist. Do you have a political approach and do you cross the line?

Of course there are political intentions that I have when making a certain work but I do keep it within the marks. This is how I see my job, I highlight, discuss topics and raise the awareness because it is worth it. I remain in a kind of symbolic acts field.

What is ›DullTech‹?

 Technology should be boring. It has been exciting way too long. That is what DullTech is all about and the fact that this hyper branding is taking over. My name is ›Constant Dullaart‹ in Dutch. In English it becomes ›Constant Dull Art‹ and is then converted to ›continuosly boring art‹. It got so boring after so many years that I thought ›if it‘s dull art, I make dull tech. I started the brand and have the trademark. I make really boring media players and develop them. It will work without extra features which was my approach to technology.

Why do you do that?

The brand started as a way for me to have access to Chinese factories where a lot of our technology is produced. It is my research about how the products get to us. We have all kinds of devices and standards but do not know how these are developed, where they are produced and how they get to us. DullTech offers me the insight and true relationship and that is the reason to investigate into this project.

Have you been to China and did you visit the factories?

I did go to China and into the factories where the media player is developed and produced. That was the initial idea. I would like to see it as an artistic startup but also as a tech company at the same time. There are people who want to fund my tech company for certain profits but I have to tell them that it will remain an artwork. It might make profit or it might not. I learn how funding works and there will be a Kickstarter soon.

So you are again on the border between art and activism?

Yes and it is a participatory anthropology. It means going into research about people and culture and participating to learn how they function. That is what I am doing, too, taking part and reflecting. It is about online cultures but also tech cultures. It is activism and what I am learning from it but it is also not. I am giving an option.

How can we learn from your approach?

Firstly there is the importance of how to relate to technology. You have to make ethical choices whether to support certain systems and choose what tools you use. Especially when propagating these. If you work with someone who does not care about protecting data or any privacy e.g. reveal it or take an active stance in that. The tools we are using, besides a simple hammer or so, imply ethical and moral choices and we should consider that. Besides decisions on how to deal with content is of significance, too. We are part of a continuing revolution. I try to participate in it and you as designers can also do. In the way we treat content in general. And when talking about design you will have to deal with other peoples‘ shitty content and stupid things. You will have to think about the context, values and other kinds of immaterialities that people who studied 20 years ago do not understand, like the context in which an image is perceived, how it spreads on Instagram or Facebook. You take control of that.

So design is always a tool that we have in control to use, like we utilised your pictures in these soaps and decided to sell them?

Yes. The fact that I see them reproduced in the building is super weird to me. It is actually creepy to see the picture of myself raised to an object, almost monumentalized. I do not see myself as a subject. The way my life is reflected online through this brand has become an object in this school and will even be realized in a monetary transaction and be part of our capitalist system. (Laughs) I see it as a collaborate damage to the fact that I want to speak about other things. But the image of me comes with all the digital images that are flowing around and you have a different relationship to them than I have. You have to think about it.

We are sorry! Let us get to our last question. You teach designers?

Yes, as an artist. I teach at Werkplaats Typografie which is a design master in Holland. Especially graphic designers like you have this relationship to content and it is either generated and produced by yourselves or by somebody else and you need to edit it. The relationship to this editing process and reduction is very important and also part of my practice. I make it to be an autonomous art piece which has slightly more liberty than what kind of context you place the result in as a designer.

Thank you Constant! Very enlightening.