Interview with Sammie Veeler
Credits
- Rhonda Holberton, Lead Researcher
- Michael Webber, Interview Manager
- Jessica Sobrepena, Post Production
- Cristian Aquino, Editor
- Your Name, Web Editor
- Web Design: Sarai Mateo, Cristy Aguilar, Anna Huynh, Rosa Salangsang, Richer Fang, Vanessa Rivera, EJ Gandia, Cameron Chung
Abstract
This article, Interview: Joel Slayton is just that, an interview with CADRE Founder Joel Slayton.
Bio
Sammie Veeler is an artist and curator based in Los Angeles whose work examines the spiritual power of personal and collective digital archives through virtual worlding, hybrid sculpture, and visual poetry. As founding director of New Art City virtual art space, she facilitates virtual curation with individual artists, collectives, and institutions, and works to redistribute privilege from high density to low density. She is also responsible for developing the gallery’s accessibility initiative, artist residency, and commission program
Article Body
Sammie Veeler 00:00
I’m Sammy Veiler, I'm based in Los Angeles, and I'm a co-founder of New Art City, a virtual art space.
Rhonda Holberton 00:15
So what is your earliest memory of working with art and or technology?
Sammie Veeler 00:20
Hmm. Well, I've always had a computer. My family were early adopters of the Internet, so I've kind of had the privilege of observing a lot of phases before and after the Internet became “useful.” And I had a career in technology working in normal technology companies. And then I found New Art City, and that was my sort of introduction to the 3D web, and also it coincided with my gender transition, which sort of forced my hand regarding authenticity, and a lot of other regards which sort of made me want to be an artist. And so, this sort of ended up merging the skills that I had stolen from the traditional tech world, and the new research area of how to become an artist, and how to use new media To tell this story of my transition.
Rhonda Holberton 01:20
One of the things that I really love about the way that you approach community and community building is your generosity with your own creative gestures. So Sammy's garden; is that..?
Sammie Veeler 01:35
Oh, yeah, the Shape Garden!
Rhonda Holberton 01:40
Shape Garden! It's a 3D world that you've built in New Art City, but it's also this kind of exploratory tutorial. So it's something that I use as a pedagogical tool in my course work.
Will you talk a little bit about the way that you approach community building–both through those types of gestures, but also the other channels that sit adjacent to New York City, like discord?
You talk a little bit about community building, and in the way that you see New Art city in your particular role, co-existing and operating.
Sammie Veeler 02:36
Yeah! So the way that we view community building is… I mean, it's really tied up with everything that we're doing. A startup, I think, is very technology first, and we view ourselves more like infrastructure, even if we're made of the same stuff.
We want to provide both technical and cultural infrastructure to be successful on the 3D Web. And so, we've always prioritized people who are disadvantaged by structural injustice, and we've tried to mobilize the resources that we have to help amplify their work. That goes through programs, like residencies, which have a lot of one on one time along with a stipend, and then commissions. We also make a point of giving free space to anybody who meets our curation goals. We can offer this kind of support.
The shape garden is another piece of this, where, if I'm being paid to make a shape for a client, I can then turn that into a resource that anybody on the site can use. And so yes, we really want to synthesize technological infrastructure and cultural infrastructure.
Rhonda Holberton 03:28
You talk in your bio about working to “redistribute privilege from high density to low density,” and you've kind of talked around that in the last few answers. But, will you dive into the center of that question; How do you see New Art City and the possibilities of Web 3D doing that high density to low density work?
Sammie Veeler 03:52
Right? And I think that's maybe one of the parts I left out of my previous answer.
We want New Art City to act as a vector between high density and low density. It is a vector for privilege to travel between high density and low density, and so we attracted a lot of institutional collaborators who were able to give us financial resources, and we made a point of rededicating twenty percent of that revenue back to supporting specific projects by artists that we wanted to support.
And I think this also kind of speaks to New Art City as a conduit, as a gathering place. And so a lot of what we do is simply open a door for somebody to be creative and reduce their barriers to be able to get started. And I think that's why we've been able to accomplish so much, and the homepage speaks for itself. We've had one hundred and sixty public shows that feature over four thousand artists, and a lot of these people are showing in a gallery for the first time.
Rhonda Holberton 04:55
Can you speak on some of the structural, social tools and operational philosophies? You're also a massive advocate of accessibility! One thing that New York City does that I haven't seen any other kind of Web 3D toolkit even attempting to address is accessibility. Can you talk a little bit about some of the ways in which you're implementing tools and features to make that experience more accessible both for builders, but also for visitors right? And so what I touched on before in terms of accessibility is that we
Sammie Veeler 05:27
Right. And so what I touched on before in terms of accessibility is that we want to make it access plus inclusion; we want to make it easy to enter, and we also want to invite people who are historically excluded. And so, in terms of technical features, we have a screen reader, accessible catalog view that allows blind people to access the art exhibitions, and we are also working to make the tools of making your exhibition accessible–like the cultural understanding of how to write good alt text–accessible to our users as well, and we've also convened an accessibility panel that we meet with every six weeks or so who helps us stay accountable to our accessibility goals, find future goals, as well as publishing.
Charlotte Strange, Viv Chu, Andy Slater and Natalie Decker–they've been really valuable. And this is a way to sort of build community governance into the way that we curate in the way that we distribute resources.
Rhonda Holberton 07:16
It's beautiful.
One of the things that we're doing right now is kind of looking into the history of Web 3D, but also kind of taking into account where we are today, and it's impossible to kind of move in any Web 3D space without encountering this kind of overarching term of the metaverse.
How does New Art city situate itself in relation to that term?
Sammie Veeler 07:24
We're one of a very few 3D worlds that hasn't rebranded to describe ourselves as a metaverse or building the metaverse. The thing about this expression is that it seems to me to be more like a marketing term for a product that is trying to be sold to me by the same people who profited from Web two, and it doesn't really seem to exist, and I'm not wholly convinced that most people really want to socialize on the web in this way.
If you look at second life, it has maybe a million, something like a million or ten million– very small amount in terms of like platform capitalism–but they have a lot of dedicated users who have been using it for a long time, and this is evidence that there are some people who want to socialize this way, and there are lots of people who, of course, play multiplayer games, but I think making people make the jump to socialize online in that way… I think the the tools of publishing and distributing media and communicating have been unequally distributed, and when a platform like Facebook's Primary goal is to sell advertisements, and their secondary goal is to enable communication, then it will never advance as a communication tool.
What I'm really interested in is more expansive definitions of how we can communicate media and ideas fluidly with one another in a way that's preservable. Because if you look at discord or instagram. If you export your messages, there's nothing you can really do with them in a preservation sense, because everything is basically anonymized and it's not in digestible format. And so basically their assumption is that you will never have a meaningful conversation on their platform. And that's a bigger problem to me than you know, avatars, or whatever.
Rhonda Holberton 09:08
Will you talk a little bit about archivaleness, and what New York city's approach to that kind of creative ownership and history?
Sammie Veeler 09:20
Right. Well, Javascript is really advantageous as a format.
To gather these things where, like we have file formats that are collected into this 3D world, and then you can export that as plain code and the longevity of that. It's like Javascript is backward compatible with itself, and it doesn't seem to be going anywhere. And so, if you can preserve those files, you can self host an exhibition, and it should, ten years from now be about the same as it was before.
I think there's more work to be done in terms of making things that both perform well in the like exhibition format, but also contain the archival formats of files, which is sort of more in line with museum preservation. I think this has kind of broad reaching capabilities for an artist, to document their work as they make it, and to have kind of a single source of truth of what is finished. That's in a format that includes all of the metadata and Alt text, but also exhibition instructions, and the sort of oral history and documentation into sort of a complete package.
Rhonda Holberton 11:04
You mentioned this relationship with institutions like a museum. What happens when they acquire work? And there's different layers when we're thinking about archives and institutions. But you have worked with some institutions on exhibitions in New York City, and so i'm wondering
how you see these institutions navigating the relationship between the virtual and physical installations that they also also kind of post.
Sammie Veeler 11:37
It's interesting because we were kind of a magnet, especially during the earlier stages of the pandemic, when institutions were trying to exhibit virtually for the first time. It was just this huge hot bed of experimentation, and we were one of many innovative formats that were in 2D and in 3D like distant galleries. It is an excellent example of a format that remained in 2D, but still had a lot of resonance.
And so, we were lucky to experiment with a lot of institutions about how we can authentically use Web 3D to accomplish what you wanted to accomplish in physical space. And so
We tried the very like cut and dried method of like the way that a curator would install a physical with format festival in 2020. It was a seventeen-room exhibition, featuring something like three hundred artists. And the curators were familiar with laying spaces out in physical space. And so they gave us wall layouts of all of the artworks. and we've never done that since. But it was just fascinating to say, Okay, if we were going to do this one to one, how would we do it?
But each time we do this we learn more about what techniques that we can then share with other people, and that gets diffused back out through things like our residency.
Rhonda Holberton 12:37
Are there examples of exhibitions that you think you know kind of as a counterpoint to the Let's just take a physical installation and stick it into virtual space that are exploring alternate ways of viewership and exhibition?
Sammie Veeler 12:54
Well, I mean the perfect example is the one that we collaborated on: the Identity Factory, which was a virtual didactic companion to the installation of Pitot Sterle's Factory of the Sun at the San Jose Museum of Art.
Because of the exhibition requirements of that piece which are extremely stringent, and it's, you know, a product of the old Art World, where it was literally acquired. It was shown in the Venice Biennale, and then it's jointly owned by three museums. And so we were not allowed to recreate the elements of the installation, or show the video that is installed in it. We had to work around the edges of thematically the iconography that existed, and then build a game around the sort of core mechanic of the piece as we saw it, which is like, Yeah, that is about as far from a one to one recreation of a photography exhibition, as I can imagine.
Rhonda Holberton 14:07
And so New Art City…in addition to providing a toolkit for artists to make their own 3D websites, you're obviously also doing some consulting work. Has anything surprised you uh through that kind of consulting work?
Sammie Veeler 14:15
I mean, It's all new to me. And so, yeah, each time we collaborate with somebody. It raises new questions we might not have thought to ask and forces us to, you know, push the boundaries of both our technical and curatorial abilities like. I'm still really new as a curator. And it's very interesting to have worked supporting so many curators and like bringing together this unusual intersection of expertise.
Rhonda Holberton 15:21
Yeah, you've talked a little bit about the Artist and Residency program, can you? I mean, I'm sure it looks different for every artist who's going through it. But can you kind of walk us through what that might look like for someone?
Sammie Veeler 15:10
Yeah, we're on our fourth resident now, who has his opening on Monday next week. And basically the format of the Residency is relatively fluid, but it has some basic structure: somebody comes to us with an idea, and we say, yes, we would like to support this idea. And they meet with our team once a week for a month, which should help them think through the conceptual components of the piece, and then sort of draw from our strategies and work of like, how to actually install this and sort of bring in their own ideas. And then we kind of merge those over that period. And then there's an exhibition and each one has been slightly different. he Su Kwan, was our our first resident, and she created a digital shrine and and had multiple like ritual events for autobiographical feminist religion, where she 3D, scanned a pot look and all of the people at it, and put it in the ancestor shrine. And she also did a live stream of a cooking show.
And so what I really like about the format is that we get to commission works, and it's not sort of a typical gallery relationship. Where we're going to be selling pieces, we get to create a show that has no direct commercial ambition, which is, I think a really beautiful contrast
to the kind of carrot and stick of selling artifacts for money in physical space or with NFTs. And so it ends up, drawing a really consistent curatorial theme.
And also like a yeah, a significant departure from things that we get to see in other contexts. And this is sort of meant to be a moving body of people, where, after we get to a certain number of residents, these people will help us decide who is the next resident, both by nominating people and by going through the submissions through our form.
Rhonda Holberton 17:05
And is that also, like through the Residency program, through your weekly meetings with artists. Is it also a way for you to kind of bet you know, feature, find, or is it? Are you purely in a kind of a supportive production role there?
Sammie Veeler 17:20
We really try to stay in the supportive production role just because. We're a small enough team that, like developing new features to support a specific exhibition, ends up taking us out of building the broader infrastructure. But we have ended up finding a lot, or like building a lot of infrastructure that ended up being used by by other users like some of our basic interactions like you can make a sound play when you reach an object, and things like this, so like institutions teach us in one way, and then artists who are like pushing the boundaries both conceptually and technically of what we can do, also teach us ways that we could use the tool in a way that we might not have expected.
Rhonda Holberton 18:08
so both that kind of technical push and also kind of conceptual push. Thinking about this transition and the failures of web two.
What do you want to see kind of built into web three? Do you think about New Art City as a part of that kind of transition?
Sammie Veeler 19:09
Well, the thing about web three–or if you want to invent–people will always say, “Oh, web three; Neil Stephenson,” or whatever…web two was a marketing term created by Tim O'reilly to sell consulting services. And so, if you look at the people who market the term web three, Marc Andreessen is at the top of the list, and Marc Andreessen made a killing on web two, and he also invented the browser. Right? So it's like trying to offer an alternative, while also enforcing a false teleology. And so, insofar as I am working with a lot of people who call it are doing web three. I'm willing to say that I'm part of this movement, but I think my role in it has been somewhat polemical– that I'm often invited to perform expertise on web three, and I think I usually take a palatably critical tone. I always try to be peaceable and sporting.
Rhonda Holberton 19:28
There'sVenkatesh Rao. He's a media theorist and consultant, but he coined this term “cozy web” to talk about the pulling back from the kind of public facing and capitalist platforms into smaller, more self decided networks,so Discord could be something like that. I think New York City could also be that, too. And part of you know, part of cozy web is also trust building and a reaction to the fact that nobody trusts these major platforms.
Sammie Veeler 20:02
So trust is a great thing to talk about here. The blockchain folks will talk about a trustless system, and I view trust as one of the great delights of living. To build solidarity with real people is why I'm here. And so what you said about the cozy web really resonates that the platform era requires economies of scale. Therefore user acquisition is the priority, and it has to be everything to everyone, and I think the beauty of the pre web two era is that there were lots of purpose built spaces that were self governing, and had sort of a narrower purpose, as so they would draw like a more cohesive group of people in, and that led to much more substantive online friendships than you can enjoy. I mean, obviously many. I've met many great friends on Twitter, and that's maybe an exception to any other social media platform.
But I think New Art City really aims to be a community that serves artists first, and a place where artists can gather across a lot of different domains, I think. What makes it a special in the Web Three space is like, We're not wholly adopting crypto, but we have been showing NFTs since before Nfts became really popular, and it's one of the only places that the crossroads between folks who are fully all in on NFTs, and who absolutely hate them.
Rhonda Holberton 21:28
(laughs)So we could go down the crypto wormhole!
But I actually think maybe re-orienting and kind of thinking about your role as a steward in this space. and more broadly kind of thinking around digital creativity, production and meeting making in the world. What is your vision for the future regarding emerging artists' roles and impact for the next generation?
Sammie Veeler 21:56
That's a great question: vision of the future…
I had like a sentence like chambered, but uh, I need to think back.
Rhonda Holberton 22:22
Yeah, yeah. It’s a strange thing to ask when you're working so kind of close to, like, “What's the next project,” or you know, “like what three weeks from now.”
Sammie Veeler 23:16
So the part that I was forgetting was stewardship right…and so we definitely view ourselves as like a new type of art institution, and I'm really inspired by institutions like EAI, which offer kind of an alternative paradigm to distribution and publishing of this new media: video. And so, in the same way, I want to offer a distinct alternative to transactional modes of distribution and preservation, and try to be a cultural steward of this sort of ready-made archive.
One thing I've noticed through, you know, judging a lot of grant applications and like being in touch with a lot of people in a in a similar space is that archives are one of the most popular sort of formats for grants to take place in like lately that, like people really want to preserve cultural memory in these ways that was completely excluded in the previous generation. That, like history, is something that you write and like curation, is something that everybody must do. If we learned in the previous century that everyone is an artist, there is too much information. There's simply too many images in this century for everybody to not be a curator. And so I want to empower people to curate and make meaning from information of all formats, and share it freely with one another.
References:
Media
Video Recording of the Interview with Sammie Veeler, Conducted December 6, 2022
Kewords
New Art City, Community Building, Accessibility, Web Three, Virtual Art
Disciplines
Discipline 1; Discipline 2; Discipline 3