Interview with Brett Wallace

I had a conversation with the artist Brett Wallace on protests, silent majorities, Silicon Valley, and artistic influences.

BW: It seems that online dynamics across the political spectrum are one of your investigative inquiries. How do you research the concept of whiteness as it relates to technology and protocols? What does your research process usually entail?

RK: I wouldn't call my work research, because it has no defined methodology. There are many analytical gestures present in the work, but it is mainly an intuitive process. Things become interesting to me through my body, which is continually being subjected to expectations, interpretations, and desires. I read these as attempts to make me into a subject, and I respond as an object that takes up space. In other words, I tend to detach myself from everyday processes of subject formation, a habit I picked up from growing up in a racist town. This is an important first step in reflecting those processes back at the people actively engaged in them. I deliberately work in a space where subject and object are collapsed or interchangeable, which is one way that I consider this an art and not a research practice.

Read it at Conversation Project NYC.

11.11.20

MIT final reviews