In the Studio with KT Duffy
KT Duffy
is a new media artist from Chicago's southwest side. In 2014 KT received an MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), Baltimore, MD and is currently an Assistant Professor of Art + Technology at Northeastern Illinois University and the co-director of Langer Over Dickie Gallery in Chicago/URL. KT spoke with Adrian Zuñiga for this interview.
INTERVIEW WITH KT DUFFY
Adrian: How did you arrive at your new media practice? Were you always drawn to technology in your studio endeavours?
KT: Digital technology has always drawn me in. When my family finally got a computer, I would spend hours messing around in MS paint. I remember being mystified by early screensaver visualizations and how you could customize user interfaces and web presences, like AIM and Angelfire websites. The process of demystification, skilling, and deep learning it takes to be able to articulate a thing via tech (software and coding) was a long one. Only recently have these processes clicked into place for me.
I got turned onto New Media as a genre during my last semester in undergrad. I studied digital art and design, but the program was not very rigorous. At this point in my art education, I was mostly making bad paintings. But through a new faculty member, I became interested in video, and that changed everything for me. I learned Final cut pro through the generosity of this professor; we did not have classes in video editing software. These sessions with my professor helped me bridge the gatekeeping gap that I had been experiencing when trying to access maker technology. I was also studying social work and was involved in a lot of art + social justice activities through AmeriCorps. Video felt like this accessible technical medium for me to expore issues I was thinking through in my very early social work career and as I formulated an early version of a queer identity. Having the ability to work with moving image and animation allowed me to bring more dynamic personal narratives into my work and to develop my voice as an artist.
KT Duffy
Obscene and Uncontained, 2020
VR work for Headset
I’m also a person who has always been interested in processes that require highly specific skill sets. For example, my earliest interest in art was a very detailed portrait painting. I’m also a formerly sporty person who could happily juggle a soccer ball for hours. Technical stuff draws me to it, and once I get a problem in my head, I won’t stop until I figure it out. I have found that this mentality is probably the best asset I have as a new media type person.
Adrian: You call your objects featured in this publication 'mashups.' Can you explain this classification?
KT: I'm always noodling around with something. This noodling comes from the hacky DIY crash course in Video I got towards the end of my undergrad career. A huge part of my practice is learning new processes, software, hardware, and working with new APIs. I'm often playfully messing around and learning by breaking things or seeing how far I can push a given approach until it completely glitches out and spits out unexpected outcomes.
The result of this ongoing hackery is a lot of little parts of things or vignettes that I find interesting for a variety of reasons. At some point, these vignettes need to become "an art," or they float aimlessly. Still, by approaching final works as "Mashups," I'm able to create works that evolve, inherit, and exist in multiple realities. Mashups are finished works composed of the ongoing processes of making small things and then mooshing them together into something that can both complicate their individuality and situate them with other formats that have a relationship. These relationships are never linear or straightforward. Often the relationships that form through this mooshing spur me to create even more pieces to add into the final Mashups.
Adrian: How would you describe the visual experience you're interested in achieving and what material traits are you drawn to that help you do so?
KT: Overall I’m most interested in creating scenarios that visualize things the human brain cannot quite comprehend. I use a lot of lumpy-squiggly references in order to create some associations for the viewer with both real and speculative life forms, or patterning via biomimicry. As the viewer spends more time with the works, their initial associations with the forms and environments in the work begin to dissolve, and the ability to categorize a thing becomes more murky. By askewing this natural human inclination to categorize, I also cut off the ability of the viewer to form hierarchies, which allows me to create speculative microcosms where the macro and the micro coexist.
Materials with qualities that seem to transform as you engage with them are most attractive to me. Video, VR, and other code based processes, specifically anything with modulators, allow me to do this relatively easily. In terms of physical materials that exist IRL, I love working with fluorescent acrylic, and I’m generally drawn to anything neon, iridescent, or holographic. Finally, I’d like to use this space to archive my undying love for jelly-roll pens, particularly the sparkly ones.
Adrian: Your work is often generated as a result of the combination of your physical labor and the automated labor of digital systems. Can you elaborate on this process and its significance to your interests? Does this process ever provide unexpected results? If so, how does that inform future works?
QT, 2019
PLA, Automated Plotter Drawings
10 x 9.75 x 3.5 in.
KT: When I started working with digital fabrication, the processes felt more like what I was doing while working as a designer and developer. My multi-piece works need to be fabricated with facets that fit together, perfectly. This process is meticulous and exacting. I find it exhausting and that it feels a little prescribed. I started developing some strategies of construction that could introduce elements of chance into the work.
I create a lot of the patterns and textures in my work through collaboration with an x+y plotter, which results in Automated Plotter Drawings. I have a few plotters, some that are smaller and meant for crafting, a bigger industrial one (which are sometimes called "vinyl cutters"), and a few hacky ones I've created myself with Arduino. I usually hack or alter these machines by installing custom software to initiate a collaboration with machines that I otherwise would not be able to achieve. My process involves using software and coding to generate “for loops” and slices of 3d forms, and then I send these forms to the plotter. The plotter, via the custom software, decides how it will plott out the forms. In this way, I grant some autonomy to the device. Often, the plotters have a hard time synthesizing the forms. This is where the exciting and unexpected things start to happen. So as I said above, I make a thing, I send it to the plotter, then the plotter articulates it. In this process, some of the machines' marks and gestures create incredible forms and shapes that could only exist between my labor and the labor of this semi-sentient automated thinking system. I like to refer to this unknown outcome as techno-mysticism.
Once the plotter spits out this first iteration of our collaboration, I respond. This response comes in several forms. For example, sometimes I scan this first plotted result and respond to it on the computer. Sometimes I go into the initial creation and intentionally glitch or tweak it to make something responsive to the plotter articulated form. Other times, and this is new and wild for me, I'll go in with my hand and add to it. I repeat this process several times until the print starts to resolve itself.
These outcomes of the process produce yet another vignette, which will be added to a "mashup" eventually. But as I mentioned before, the Automated Plotter Drawings and the techno-mystic process that spawns them create a lot of patterns, textures, and color palettes, which I use as both a digital and analog source. These outcomes inspire the creation of digitally fabricated pieces that house and hold the Automated Plotter Drawings, but they also heavily influence subsequent vignettes. In this way, everything I make is a direct descendent from the next, spawning and inheriting each glitch. What arises are new formats that can exist in multiple realities simultaneously.
Adrian: What are some of the other challenges you face most often in producing or exhibiting your work?
KT: Most often the challenges I face are engineering challenges. I have started to fabricate custom hardware and fittings in order to articulate the tech I work with in ways that allow me to seamlessly integrate it with the materials that I use. I view the tech I work with as just another piece to put into a mashup.
Other challenges I face have to do with the tech stack or devices I am using. I am always questioning their proper usage and trying to see what kind of wild workflow I can develop. Working collaboratively with these devices means asking them to behave in ways they are not intended to behave. There is always a lot of tweaking, troubleshooting and breaking things worse as I am trying to debug them. Even though this can be frustrating, I really do love technical troubleshooting because I am always learning something new. This process makes me a better educator because I am ready for any wild error my students may encounter because I have probably created that problem for myself in the past (laugh and cry emoji).
Adrian: You're a professor of Art & Technology and have led workshops that share your knowledge and skills. We've also discussed the importance of collaborating with other artists. How do you view these community-based practices in relation to your own studio practice?
KT: I think it's probably helpful to define the various trajectories of my creative output individually, but each collaborative project feels related in its aims and working processes. I feel strongly drawn to practices and undertakings that demystify technology, make technology accessible, and make art accessible via technology. My struggles with tech-based materials and gatekeeping get me fired up to create learning communities where folx at all skill levels can feel as if they are meaningfully contributing to new media discourse.
Collaborative work is a productive way to expand the genre of New Media. I have scrapped and hacked my way into this skillset and want to offer it up as a tool for other artists to utilize. In these collaborations we usually set out in one direction, and then end up making something totally unexpected that gets all parties involved outside of our comfort zone. Though most of the time working in this way requires a lot of extra work, the creative exchange that gets to happen within these orientations are some of the most affirming and fulfilling experiences I get to have as an artist.
Adrian: Lastly, it'd be impossible to conduct an interview in 2020 without addressing the current global pandemic. How has this event affected your practice so far and how do you see it shaping the foreseeable future in your studio?
KT: Before the COVID epidemic and the quarantines that followed, I began to think through shifting my practice to one that is more virtual and web-based, relying on installations or object making. COVID accelerated this impending shift within my practice.
Concentrating on making for the web and using open source tools was a way to hold myself more accountable to the social practice that has been becoming my main focus as a creative. The communities I strive to create through collaboration and education are ones that I want everyone to have the opportunity to access. And while I don't anticipate completely stopping my installation practice or object-making practice, COVID forced me to think about complicated questions of access and materiality. For example, not everyone can work with a large scale fabricator, and not everyone has the opportunity to exhibit their work in a considerable museum space or gallery.
Unfortunately, tech still has a significant access barrier, I'm interested in building things with open-sourced tools that either have a welcoming learning community in place or ones that I can form learning cultures around. For example, in March '20, I was supposed to have a two-person show at Ground Level Platform in Chicago with María Luisa Sanín Peña. The show was canceled at the last minute due to COVID. Rather than creating a physical installation, I built a web-based VR experience, jurrassicwarp.com, with A-Frame based on some of the themes from the show. Before this, I had just started to mess around with VR, so I was happy to have this opportunity to try to mess with web VR APIs. At this time, I was teaching my Web Code II course, which was also disrupted by COVID. My students and I worked together to reformat our class, and we all learned A-Frame together!
I’ve really only just scratched the surface of what can happen with browser based VR and I will be using the extended social distancing time to continue exploring the possibilities with this medium. I’m working towards finding new formats for articulating my object based and installation practices, and of course my Mashups. I’m specifically interested in VR’s ability to engage with user interaction and questions around the politics of the interface. I don’t actually know how to do this yet, but I’m excited to explore ways of inserting the user/viewer into the making process in order to bring yet another layer of chance and undetermined outcomes into my final Mashups.
