Weilyn Chong: This semester I'm taking a class in visual arts where we are exploring our relationship with the internet but also our relationship specifically with the idea of linking on the web. We were asked for one of our projects to kind of get in touch with an artist who explores technology and explores it in an artistic sense. And so I reached out after looking at one of your pieces - I believe it was the User is Present piece. It really had a profound effect on me. Thank you so much for coming on today and letting me ask some questions.


Kate Hollenbach: Excited to be here.


Weilyn Chong: I'm going to start off with a little bit of your background. You went to MIT specifically to pursue a Computer Science degree. How do you feel like that background has shaped the way that you think about art and also, what was that transition from a technical to design like for you?


Kate Hollenbach: I went into a very engineering heavy program. I took a couple of art classes when I was in school, one was called fundamentals of computational media design. And that was taught by John Meda. That class really changed my understanding of what code could be used for.


And I think I went into school hoping that I would be able to do something kind of arts adjacent with my computer science degree like that. Maybe I would do interface design or be like artists that wrote code to make art. So taking John's class was like a pretty pivotal experience for me.


Seeing someone make a living teaching artists to code and also exhibiting their work in different venues and seeing his students also having done that when they graduated really changed the way I thought about digital art. I also took an intro to visual arts class and the visual arts department which was really, really difficult for me.


I found conceptual art pretty hard and traditional art classes felt a little out of place as an engineering student. I didn't have any experience in a traditional art space that prepared me for what I was being thrown into. I would say I didn't get it at the time. I was trying, but I didn't really get it. I think I would get a lot more out taking that class now than I did then.


So I think that more of my experience about what it means to be an artist is shaped by grad school. I went to UCLA to get a master of fine arts in design, specifically media arts. One of the reasons I wanted to go to that program was I wasn't really sure what I wanted to do after.


I got the degree and I had seen that a lot of the people that were from that program, some of them went into software industries. Some of them taught, some of them exhibited their work and some of them didn’t. And so I felt like the program didn't have a preconceived idea of what you were supposed to be doing when you graduate.


And that was something that was really important to me.


Weilyn Chong: What led up to your first exhibition?


Kate Hollenbach: I started grad school in 2015. And maybe this will sound weird but I finished college in 2007 and that was the year the iPhone came out.


While I remember while it was like celebrating and graduating, I remember most clearly when one of the grad students who had been our residential tutor had just gotten the iPhone and we were all Oohing and Aahing at it. I didn't go to school when smartphones were around. I had had them, obviously in my workplace for years, I'd worked as a user interface designer at a software company but never at school.


And when I went back to school, I was kind of struck by how much academic culture had changed because of the smartphone. I couldn't believe that people were checking emails or looking at Instagram during class because that was still kind of like a taboo thing to do and also not possible when I was undergrad, even though it hadn't actually been that long ago, it was less than 10 years ago.


So I got really interested in the impact of the smartphone on. People's habits and culture or rather the various cultural implications of the digital world. I started making a bunch of work about that. Super fascinating.


Weilyn Chong: I remember the first time I interacted with an iPhone. I was on a train with my mom and we had just arrived home in Singapore. When we got back one of my uncles had bought my mother an iPhone as a return present (returning home to Singapore after almost six years away). I remember sitting on the train next to my mom practically dumbfounded by the device in front of me.


Kate Hollenbach: I lived in Singapore too!


Weilyn Chong: No Way. Really? Were you in school?


Kate Hollenbach: Yeah. For high school.


Weilyn Chong: No way, did you go to SAS?


Kate Hollenbach: Yeah, I want to SAS!


Weilyn Chong: I was there from second to fifth grade. I wonder, would you have been in high school when I was in elementary school?


Kate Hollenbach: Maybe. Yeah, that's crazy. Oh my goodness.


Weilyn Chong: So another question that I'd like to ask is what is your relationship with the web? And I know that your art isn't directly related to websites or web design but walk me through your interactions and your relationship with the the internet or the worldwide web.


Kate Hollenbach: Sure. I do some web based work from time to time. They're not listed on my website because I think a lot of them are incomplete. Incomplete in the sense that they are complete to others but still need some tweaking.


I see the internet as a place to learn and a place to connect with other people. I also see it as a place that reflects the values of our present economic system. Living under capitalism and also an environment that's right for exploitation. Just in terms of how apps are built to get people to spend more time on them. Socializing, even if that's not what they once had by socializing. I also see viewing ads to support the whole ecosystem.


I think that earlier in my career, I found it really exciting to be like on social media and online and connecting with people. And I still do make new friends through that. Like eventually meeting people at conferences or other events whose work I've been kind of admiring from afar. But I also, I would say that I'm more of a lurker in recent years.


I just don't feel motivated to post and share things as often as I did in previous times.


Weilyn Chong: Interesting that you bring up this idea of how capitalism shapes the web. One of the main themes for this class has been looking at the early stages of the web and the purpose of the web at the very beginning.


How would you define links on the web, but also just links in general. How do you kind of view links?


Kate Hollenbach: I guess I see links as describing a connection between people or between things and entities. And for me the word link in a web-based sense also implies a directionality. So it's possible to create a link from a site to another site, but to not have a link back.


So it's not necessarily something that implies mutuality that's super fascinating.


Weilyn Chong: It’s so interesting to see a lot of the concepts we talk about in class are connected to the line of thinking of so many artists. I'd love to talk a little bit more about your work specifically. For the User is Present work that you did, you created your own software that recorded the front end, backend, and also the phone screen. What was kind of like the thought process behind that?


Kate Hollenbach: I was beginning a class that was about cyber recognition and was thinking through an idea initially to understand what a device can already see of someone. Because I had been working in the industry for a company that did gesture recognition.


So our work required a lot of use of cameras. It was discussed at the time that it felt like having a computer see you was something that would happen in the future. They thought that it wasn't really here yet. And I was feeling that maybe it was already here.


I got really interested in what the phone, what the device already could see of me knowing that I carry it around in my pocket, like all day. So the initial idea was for it to be a 2 hour feature film and to take footage over the course of one day.


I initially collected some test footage for a day and as I was developing it, it was very boring to watch as a feature film. I thought to myself maybe an aggregate, like over a longer period of time would be more interesting. I just started recording for as long as I could kind of leading up to the end of grad school.


So that was some of my earlier work. For User is Present specifically, previous iterations from the same series had only the front facing camera or the front and back camera. And I felt like those pieces had a judgment. The inherent judgment in them that like what was happening on the screen didn't matter or wasn't important. And that the physical world was more important.


And I don't really think it's that cut and dry anymore. I felt like the earlier works had this idea that like you should look up at all the things that you're missing while you're on your phone, or look at what your face looks like while you're on the phone.


And I wanted the actual activity which is actually quite fast paced to be depicted in the work as well. Both the physical activity and the virtual activity are equal forms. So that was how that work came to be. The intersection between the physical world and digital world was fascinating. The reminder that we are floating constantly in and out of being conscious in the physical world and the digital world.


Weilyn Chong: I remember when I first watched the piece I think you wrote it on your website too, but this idea that the facial expression that you have for your phone or while you use your phone is so unique.


That's specifically for like, you don't really use that expression elsewhere. And it made me think a lot about the way that I look at my phone and the way that I interact with it. Super fascinating. What would you say is your design processes and moving into 2022, what are you focusing on?


Kate Hollenbach: My process is that I think about things for a really long time and I like to work iteratively. So once I have something, I usually assume that the project is not going to be done. Even after I hit whatever initial deadline I have to show or to show the work or to send the work out for some kind of application, I usually assume that some other version of the work is coming and that the first like finished version is a prototype where I'm just learning about how it interacts with other people. Once I've completed some version of it and usually I feel that there's more to do from there. These days I am focused a lot on teaching and less on design work and more on, um, like exhibiting art.


Weilyn Chong: Yeah, for sure. Do you feel like you're ever satisfied with the work that you put out? You say that you keep on making iterations, but is there a point where you're ever satisfied?


Kate Hollenbach: I think it's more that my interest shifts to something else or I’ll get interested in another aspect of human computer interaction or networks and want to explore something different, more deeply.


I generally don't consider any line of inquiry done. I consider myself done with the line, but I generally feel that like, there's more for someone else there. Or that there may be more for me to return to later or after my life to shifts in some way, or like something has changed about my personal experience.


It causes me to look at something I did a long time ago differently. That's sort of fascinating.


Weilyn Chong: Do you ever use like HTML, CSS in the work that you do? Is there anything from you want someone to know about your work that they may not garner from the website?


Kate Hollebach: I do some work with HTML, JavaScript and CSS. The user is present doesn't have any of that. Yeah. Cause it was just a different kind of process.


When I make web-based works I do use all of those things.


Gosh something I would like people to know about my work that isn't obvious.


There's a lot of video processing that goes into, um, making some of the gridded works and even just, um, rendering out the like layering of the different works. And that's all done, um, with processing using a very, very slow process. I guess when I have talked about the process of actually writing the code for that project, what I normally want people to know is that I use software that I feel most comfortable with.


I don't feel a need to use the fastest or best tool for the job, but the one that I feel I have the most control and understanding over. So sometimes that means it takes several days or some of the videos to render. Cause I'm doing it in a custom way. That's very, very slow.


Weilyn Chong: How do you wish, or in an ideal world, what do people's relationship with technology and as, or the internet kind of look like?


Kate Hollenbach: Oh, big question. I think the ideal relationship is a healthy one where technology is supportive of things that people want to do and achieve in all aspects of their life.


Technology should play a supporting role, but not a lead role in that. And that the human connections are made stronger by the strength of their connections without the technology as well.


Weilyn Chong: I love that and what a good nugget for everyone to take away with them. If there's, is there like one piece that you particularly love or one piece that you've done?


Kate Hollenbach: I think that doing the series of work from phones to User is Present is very generative time. And as someone who came to making art later in their life and had a different kind of career before that, I think just kind of having that body of work come out of such a transition time in my life always feels like something that was filled with small victories.


That's not to say anything about the quality of the work, but just having done the work and having explored it in such a deep and thorough way is something that I found really satisfying from working on those projects.


Weilyn Chong: I love it. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for just answering all my questions and kind of exploring some of the topics that we're learning in class.