Katrina Sluis, London, 16 June 2010
Interviewed by Daniel Palmer
Katrina Sluis is an artist, writer and Senior Lecturer in Digital Media at London South Bank University where she leads the BA (Hons) Digital Media Arts. Her research examines the way in which software and hardware structures mediate the circulation and consumption of digital images in contemporary culture. She extends these concerns in her art practice, using photography and new media to explore materiality, archiving and transmission in relation to the photographic image. We started the conversation reflecting on her studies at the College of Fine Arts (COFA) in Sydney.
Katrina Sluis: Like most people who go to art school, I arrived with certain preconceptions; I majored in painting, even though my brother, who was involved in the Computing Services department of COFA, tried to steer me away from it. As an undergrad, I found when I was painting I was increasingly thinking about what kind of ‘value’ painting holds as a medium – about questions related to representation and ‘mechanical reproduction’. That was in 1996–9, a crucial period in the popular adoption of the Internet and consumer digital technology. I remember the day I was printing in the darkrooms and my brother came down with the Apple Quicktake [one of the first consumer digital cameras, launched in 1994], which the College had just bought, and started taking digital photos with what appeared to be a mysterious grey box. It was around this time I remember seeing Photoshop for the first time (probably version 4). Like other people in the painting department, I came to experiment with printing on canvas, which also held intriguing possibilities. And for the final year of my BFA I painted the same painting 50 times, so you can see where my interest lay – I was plagued by the question of reproducibility, questions which were reinforced by certain painting lecturers who told me that “photography isn’t art”. I remember experimenting with images in photoshop and then painting pixilated portraits of people and my tutors were saying “I can see you’re doing this painting, but you’re only going to get marked on how well the paint is applied, and how well the edges of the squares are defined – we’re not interested in the conceptual stuff.” This obviously perplexed me!
In terms of my emerging photographic work I became very interested in the archive – Richter, Boltanski and so on – and I was lucky enough to have a solo show at First Draft Gallery, where I exhibited pictures from my family photograph album which I had blown up to the point where they sat in this weird space between looking constructed and not. They had this very strange presence in the gallery. It was very simple; I was using analogue technology, blowing up negatives, just taking an image from one context to another. At this point, to get even bigger prints we would shoot on medium format transparency and use a Flextight scanner and large format printer that COFA had bought – so with the emerging digital tools it was a way of going really large, in a very clean and simple way, without large chemical baths and expensive rolls of photo paper.
Daniel Palmer: Have you ever printed in an analogue form since?
Katrina Sluis: No, it was a decisive shift. That was about 1999, and I haven’t been back to the darkroom since.
Daniel Palmer: What is gained and lost in that shift?
Katrina Sluis: There is a certain community in the darkroom – you look at other people’s prints, and you have this lovely camaraderie and discussion. It’s a collaborative space because you can see other people’s work emerging alongside your own. Digital printing is more solitary, and I think today students prefer to work on their computers at home than in the college labs. And there’s also something about the time it used to take to perfectly print a single image – especially with a colour processor, which requires endless small adjustments via test strips to get the correct colour balance. Today, my practice is more in line with the rhythms, the interruptions and the speed of the computer. Right now, I am obsessed with the screen shot – I want to write a piece about its place in photography. I feel like the Internet is a playground: it is this landscape I want to photograph, and so the screenshot is now my camera. On my mac the keyboard shortcuts even elicit the click of a shutter, mimicking the camera. The screenshot is interesting because it suits a very speedy response to the image, it’s about documentation of things you find, and pulling them together to make sense of them. I can spend hours just downloading endless clumps of images, so you see this sort of database approach appearing in my practice.
Daniel Palmer: You’re the youngest photographer I’ve spoken to about this shift. You come of age at a moment when computers are already naturalized in our lives. You also said you were working in an IT field while studying painting – how did that come about?
Katrina Sluis: As an undergraduate I was working for Pizza Hut in their call centre, and I just said “this is hell”, and I had a friend working for CompuServe Pacific and he said I should go for an interview on the helpdesk. They were desperate for females and Mac users on the helpdesk so they were pleased to see me! I was so desperate to escape Pizza Hut, I had my brother tutoring me in TCP/IP, networking protocols, atdt commands, the intricacies of Mac PPP and so on. So I started working for CompuServe and learnt everything I know about computers there. It was great fun - we used to spend hours playing CounterStrike (a first person shooter game) over the network whilst we soberly answered tech support calls in the dark! So I was doing this in my final Honours year of COFA, and it was great because it was well paid and meant I met lots of fascinating geeks. And I kept doing it after graduation when I was teaching in the darkrooms at COFA. On reflection, I had a very postmodernist education – not acknowledging the self, or my own subjectivity in relation to the technology – but now I’ve come to acknowledge these histories in my work and research: I’m very much shaped by this early immersion in technology, my love of the slippery image, and the geeks I grew up with!
Daniel Palmer: What is it that continues to draw you to photography?
Katrina Sluis: There’s something about photography which is like thinking without words. And I always found with painting that you had to know what you were going to paint, before you started painting – unless, of course, you were an abstract expressionist. With photography you have a sense of what it might be, but until it’s in a gallery space or in front of an audience you don’t really understand what exactly it is you’re doing – so it’s a very playful engagement. I always learn so much about the work after I exhibit it, even at that First Draft show. I will never forget one visitor, a taxi driver who visited that show five times in the week it opened – there was one particular image from my family album that haunted him. So this idea of context, displacement, Barthes’ ‘punctum’ kept drawing me towards photography. I was not so interested in taking photos, as thinking about photography through using photography. I’ve never been one of those ‘photo-Daddies’ who obsess about the technical details of an SLR or the challenges of getting a perfect photographic image.
Daniel Palmer: With your current work, are you using digital capture?
Katrina Sluis: I’m just using screen shots!
Daniel Palmer: And you haven’t used film for a long time? I assume you don’t miss the aesthetics?
Katrina Sluis: No, though sometimes I have a longing for the slowing down that analogue materials involves, or require. I struggle with trying to make art in an age increasingly shaped by a sort of informational capitalism – this crazy world of RSS feeds, modular media and google bots – I almost have a nostalgia for painting, this idea of doing one thing for a long period of uninterrupted time. But I can’t fit that into my practice and often I’ll want to make paintings about photography as a way of slowing things down. But I’ve realized I can’t fit my practice around that, and instead I just find myself collecting, going into the web as an archive of images and pulling stuff out, appropriating endlessly. I’ve just spent the last week downloading all the book covers off Amazon and the British Library catalogue that are concerned with an area of computing science called knowledge management. I was interested in mapping an emerging discourse which seeks to shape and “manage” knowledge and images using software and its algorithms efficiently. Of course, the covers look pretty hideous as well in this generic computing textbook way. It is a very quick and satisfying way of making something in response to a question. Again, I am essentially using photography an analytical tool, as a way of thinking through images. But I should admit I also feel a mourning for the loss of my traditional photo skills (with the camera). But the quality or aesthetics of the print don’t interest me at all. I know there is a lingering anxiety among a lot of people about this, especially friends of mine who are artists who might incorporate photography into their work but then suddenly feel a pressure to become Gursky… They can’t let the image be this crappy bit of paper they got from Snappy Snaps to document something, they feel it is only valid if it “looks like art” which of course means a certain scale, a certain quality which we associate with fine art photograph. But I’ve always been fascinated by the snapshot, the vernacular.
I’m reading Alex Galloway’s book Protocol– it’s fantastic, because it takes apart the myth of the Internet from a Foucauldian perspective. It’s a book I’d have loved to write myself. I guess I’m finding myself very engaged in this material turn that’s happening in digital theory and I find myself raging against the lazy way people tend to talk about the virtual, which ignores the politics of the server farms, the network and the code which all forms part of this massive physical infrastructure. For instance, the server farm is ubiquitous and yet absent from contemporary consciousness. The US is offering massive tax breaks to encourage Google, Microsoft and Apple to build their data centres there. They have to be located near abundant cheap electricity, cheap labour obviously. Google have also patented a model for self-cooling server farms built on ships, cooled by the ocean. In terms of photography what we’re seeing is the server farm being rebranded as ‘the cloud’ – here the archive is re-imagined as this happy, amorphous space which hovers above us which we can access at any time. If you look at Apple’s iPad, it’s part of a move which imagines the computer as a kind of dumb terminal for accessing different media ‘clouds’. Nicolas Carr has suggested that what we are seeing with computing is parallel to the history of electricity which became centralized through the grid, accessed as a utility. But whilst the reason why we might think that many Web 2.0 platforms are ‘free’ we must remember that they’re not free. We forget that Google is, after all, an advertising company. All this commenting and clicking and favouriting – that’s all data around the image that gets mined to become part of valuable algorithms to be patented and used to direct attention online.
