Thea Ballard, Newsmakers: Italian Artist Couple Eva and Franco Mattes, Modern Painters, June 2016 Partners in art and life since they met at age 18 in 1994, Italian artists Eva and Franco Mattes have by turns a playful and critical relationship to cultural institutions and mass media, particularly the Internet. Their more than 20-year career during which they have stolen fragments of notable artworks, remixed websites, and convinced the citizens of Vienna that the city s Karlsplatz should be renamed and rededicated to the sportswear company Nike also charts the evolution of the Internet into a corporatized entity. The first three episodes of their video series Dark Content premiered at Essex Flowers in New York last fall; another four will show, alongside two adjacent bodies of work, in an exhibition opening at Carroll/Fletcher in London
on June 10. The duo spoke to Modern Painters senior editor Thea Ballard about the Internet, dark and otherwise. Thea Ballard: Tell me about the origin of your series Dark Content. Franco Mattes: It started when a video of ours got removed from YouTube and we sent an email asking for an explanation. As it turned out, it s not software that does this removal. Most people think that certain content gets removed automatically after it s flagged by users enough times, but it s not like that. We did a little bit of research, and that s how we discovered the shady world of content moderators: The process is actually performed by real people. These human filters are paid to watch all the images and videos that get flagged by enough viewers, and they decide whether or not this material should stay or be removed. There are a lot of content moderators, but it s also, for many reasons, an invisible labor force. One, they themselves want to remain anonymous because it s pretty horrible work to do. They spend their days in front of a monitor watching videos of torture, killing, beheadings, pedophilia, rapes, cat killing. They follow guidelines given by their companies, but the companies themselves are anonymous, so even the moderators don t know who they re working for one of them told me, I m pretty sure I work for Google. Eva Mattes: That makes this a labor issue as well. They work from home most of the time. The jobs are usually either outsourced or crowdsourced to Asia, to the Philippines, but a lot of workers are actually American. FM: It s an unregulated form of work: really taxing, but there s no psychological support. We found a way to interview some content moderators. Each resulting video represents one worker and his or her story, told in their words, but with the moderator represented by cheap-looking digital avatars, because we had no idea who we were talking with their age, gender, nationality, nothing. Everything was done through anonymous chats or emails. TB: The sort of morality that would lead one to decide whether or not to take down, say, a pornographic video is culturally specific these people are shaping culture.
EM: Yeah, exactly. In fact, most of the workers are based in the Philippines. Because of colonialism, they speak English and have absorbed American cultural values. It would be harder to outsource the job to a country that is totally different culturally and economically. But we were shocked when we stumbled upon other moderation requests that didn t seem to come from a corporation, but from a government. FM: It started with a content moderator recounting how one of the tasks he was given was to remove photos of Osama bin Laden after he was killed, around the beginning of Obama s reelection campaign. Not specific images of him dead, just any image or videos featuring him. I thought, That has nothing to do with moral issues, these images are not graphic or pornographic or violent, that sounds like a political decision. It turns out that a lot of moderators received similar requests from their companies, to remove things based on political decisions, not moral or ethical ones. EM: We collected information about videos of Buddhist monks setting themselves on fire being removed from Facebook. We tracked down the specific video that was removed, and you could hardly see that there s smoke; it wasn t removed because it s gruesome or violent, so there must be another reason. Facebook is really pushing hard to get into the Chinese market, which seems to have had an influence. TB: And how did the interviewees respond to that shift into more political territory? FM: Most of them said almost the same thing: This is not censorship because they work for a private company. Which is a problematic position. The New York Times is a private company, and yet it has some kind of accountability for what it does or does not publish because it s considered an editorial platform. Social media doesn t fall into that; we consider it to be neutral, a mirror of society. But if it s a mirror, it s a very distorted one, and it affects the way we live. Let s say you remove all same-sex kisses from Facebook. That s going to influence the way you perceive the world. TB: Right. There s the basic tenet of media theory, which is that media doesn t just reflect our culture, it also produces it.
FM: We re more aware of that with TV, newspapers, or magazines. But why don t we perceive social media as having that kind of power? We re not aware of the agendas. You know more or less what Fox News s agenda is, so you take everything they say with a grain of salt. You don t perceive YouTube as having a political agenda or even a moral agenda, but it does. TB: You started releasing the videos you made on the dark web. EM: They re shown as installations in a gallery or museum, and then the same works are distributed online. There are two reasons we decided to use the dark web. The first is very simple: Most of the time when content is removed from the surface Internet, the Internet we re familiar with, it ends up on the dark web. The second reason is that we wanted to encourage people to venture into the dark Internet to find these videos, because it s an anonymous platform and we d like to encourage people to use the Internet in an anonymous way. It s a counteraction to the way the official Internet is coming to rely more and more on actual names, personal data, companies forcing us to supply them with our information. FM: Most of the time when the dark Internet gets discussed in the mainstream media, it s in relation to drugs, pornography, and weapons, but it s not just that. It s also a platform that allowed a whistle-blower like Edward Snowden to release his files. It s a platform that helped during the Arab Spring, that allowed anonymous communication between those living under oppressive regimes. EM: Most people think, I don t care about being anonymous because I have nothing to hide. But anonymity is one of the fundamental elements of democracy: Voting is anonymous because, if it weren t, you could be pushed or manipulated in a certain direction. TB: When did you first use the dark Internet as a tool? FM: In 94. TB: Cool!
FM: No, that s a joke. It was not called the dark Internet, it was called the Internet. EM: Today s dark Internet very much resembles the Internet of the 1990s, when it felt like a much wilder place than it is now. That s when we started doing art online. FM: It s like going home. TB: Overall, how have the changes to the Internet over the two-plus decades you ve been working affected your practice? FM: There was a lot of idealism connected to the Internet in the 90s, even, I would say, utopianism: that we d finally found the technology that was decentralized and free and open sourced, that would bring about democracy, if not anarchy, on planet Earth. You could share information with the rest of the world for free in real time without any copy restrictions, without any monetary interchange. Of course, we ve realized that it s not that simple. EM: We were young kids trying to make things. We both come from very narrowminded, provincial, small places, so the Internet seemed like a place where you could get to a wider audience than you could normally if you were trying to show your work in a gallery. You could bypass traditional institutions and get in contact with audiences directly. It was really inspiring, in a way. FM: And it s gone. TB: How does your work read in a gallery as opposed to online? FM: On the Internet you have absolutely no control over the context, whereas the art world is almost the opposite. The white cube acts as a frame that tells you, Be careful, this is art. Whereas on the Internet you stumble upon a video or an image completely randomly. Another difference is that the art world is very respectful. However stupid the thing you do is, it s unlikely that people will actually tell you. On the Internet it s the other way around.
TB: How do you relate to the implicit politics in your work? FM: Well, we ve always been more interested in the psychological layer than the political layer of what we work with. Maybe we re more interested in people than structures, systems, the government. EM: I love the work of artists like Laura Poitras and Simon Denny. Somehow I feel like we re looking at the same thing, but from another point of view, like from a lower point of view, that of the workers. FM: You could say that, instead of dealing with the Man, we re dealing with a lot of little men and women. We re kind of not ready to face the Man.