Florentina Holzinger: Dying of Thirst in a Drowning World

May 16, 2026

*A Year without Summer* ©
Mayra Wallraff, Florentina Holzinger, 2025

interview by Nora-Swantje Almes

Multidisciplinary artist Florentina Holzinger explores the cyborgian relationship between man and machine through violent and ecstatic performances that involve extreme stunts, body modification, and live sexual acts.

*Étude for Disappearing. Composition for eight bodies, five harps and a car*, Disappearing Berlin at Schinkel Pavilion (2022) ©
Silke Briel, courtesy Schinkel Pavilion, Florentina Holzinger, 2022

Chosen to represent Austria at the 61st Venice Biennale, Holzinger will premiere SEAWORLD VENICE. Curated by Nora-Swantje Almes, the installation is conceived as “an underwater amusement park, sewage treatment plant, and sacred building”—a metaphor for a world dying of thirst in a drowning world.

NORA-SWANTJE ALMES Venice is a city submerged in water, and your work has been evolving around water for quite some time now. It started on a larger scale with Ophelia’s Got Talent, but you also worked with water and on water surfaces at different institutes. For example, we have worked with lakes, and we worked in a harbor together. Where does this fascination with water come from?

FLORENTINA HOLZINGER Actually, I always hated water because I got a lot of ear infections as a child. My mother, who is also a pharmacist, was always like, “Don’t go in the water!” I had many operations and stuff, so I didn’t start diving until a few years ago. When my mother heard about it, she was terrified. And then it felt a bit like, if you don’t pathologize yourself all the time, you realize everything is fine. And in a way, for me, coming from dance, the water has literally always been a wet dream. The laws of gravity are totally changed; it’s a wonderful place to be: submerged completely, like going into flight mode without flight. When René Pollesch invited me to the Volksbühne, I knew I wanted to construct a water world there, and that’s when we made Ophelia’s Got Talent. In this show, many myths surrounding the water rise to the surface, and creatures come up from the deep to tell their stories.

ALMES To stay with this diving theme, how did the testing and development of the Ophelia piece go? Of course, it had to be in the water.

HOLZINGER The theater hates nothing more than water, from a technical perspective. Theater machinery, electric circuits everywhere—it was for sure not the greatest idea. And the thing most people forget: water is incredibly heavy. So we were rehearsing far out in an industrial hall, without heating. We would come to rehearsals in the morning, hoping the water would still be in the tanks, which wasn’t exactly the case every time. It was a trial-and-error period.

After Ophelia, we developed many other projects: most of them on dry land, but some took us to lakes or even the ocean. When we visited the Biennale a couple of years ago, we felt strongly that this could be a revival of our Melusine Studies. Venice is a city that regularly floods, so, in a way, a water project is more practical here than in any other city in Europe. The Giardini has an amusement park feel—almost a nightmarish version of one. All the imperialist nations have their own little temples. It’s really like a fun park in the way it’s organized, with different themes and topics representing nations. We thought this could be perfect for an Austrian water world. So we come with a certain conceptual luggage, but we are also opening up to the many new perspectives that this specific context brings.

Venice is a powerful example of a completely artificial city built on water. It’s almost a blueprint for what civilization is capable of. But what are the immediate consequences of that? People in Venice know the city is sinking. Floods are becoming more and more frequent. At the same time, the measures used to deal with this—large floodgates, dredging, and other interventions—often have damaging effects on the ecosystem. It becomes a vicious cycle of trying to fix the problem while also making it worse. The working class has left the city; everything caters to mass tourism, with all its symptoms. Of course, the Biennale is part of that dynamic, so we are also implicating ourselves when we exhibit or visit. All of these questions become important for what we do in the pavilion.

*Ophelia’s Got Talent* ©
Nicole Marianna Wytyczak, Florentina Holzinger, 2022

ALMES Ophelia's Got Talent starts with a talent show, so you immediately introduce this entertainment factor, along with the tropes of the climate crisis, which is inextricable from the water crisis. We talked about SeaWorld in San Diego being an interesting reference.

HOLZINGER SeaWorld, like other underwater parks, is about experiencing the exotic—the things we don’t know, even the endangered—neatly packaged. The essence of an underwater theme park, in the context of our highly extractive entertainment culture, lies in the simulation of nature as an artificial experiential space. It's no longer about the genuine, slow experience of nature, but about a condensed, spectacular experience, about consuming it easily. For us, it made sense to reverse that dynamic in Venice: the people visiting Venice should become the creatures. Conjuring something like SeaWorld also implies a certain level of audience participation and the expectation of spectacle, and we want to live up to this demand.

ALMES It also has a dystopian feel. Because all of these SeaWorlds have, in a way, collapsed and gone out of fashion. So, we have the spectacle of entertainment on one hand, but then also the fragility of that.

HOLZINGER The Austrian Pavilion was constructed in 1934 by the architect Josef Hoffmann, with the intention of creating an art temple. It was indeed a church builder, Robert Kramreiter, who was involved in the construction. So the modernist features of the building are intended to show artworks as relics, to allow for some sort of church-like experience. So we are not only creating this underwater theme park, but it is also intended to be a sacred building, a room for reflection, donation, and a sort of “sacrifice.” Our watery installation technically functions as a sewage treatment plant. Concepts of purity and dirt are of utmost importance, both in a water world and in a church. So our waters are in a constant state of transformation: from clean to dirty—in endless cycles, the same as the water in the canals of Venice. So what we mean when we say flooding the Biennale, or flooding the pavilion, is not just flooding it with water, but also flooding the senses.

ALMES Knowing your work from the stage is one thing—you’ve presented it in more traditional theater settings—but with these newer formats, you have entered the public space. In Venice, you’re working toward a seven-month durational piece. All of these contexts create different dynamics between the performance and the audience. I’m curious how you think about audience engagement and about the different roles the audience can play within the work.

HOLZINGER Yeah, it will be very different. No auditorium, no stage, no darkness, few theatrical tricks, but most of all: no start and no finish. People can stay as long or as short as they want. Also for us, this is unusual and challenging—a challenge we took on very consciously. I did not want to offer slots or turn the pavilion into a theater; this we can do much better in other spaces. Everybody has the chance to visit us and to experience something, and everybody will probably witness something different. Our church is always open. We are moving in in May and out in November; it really is the spirit of a takeover. I imagine that it has the potential to be quite an intimate experience, where the border between who watches and who is being watched quite literally dissolves. Whoever wants to participate gets to.

ALMES In your stage works, this line also tends to blur. I have seen shows where people leave their seats to play characters in your performances. You offer tattoos on stage in Ophelia’s Got Talent; in TANZ, you ask for money for a reforestation project; in SANCTA, there is a moment for public confessions.

HOLZINGER Yes, I guess as a theater maker, I grew up in a very postmodern context, where it is the norm to smash the fourth wall. When I started actively going to church in research for SANCTA, it hit me: the mass is an extremely postmodern experience, based on participation—the audience even eats something given to them by the person on stage. At the Biennale, many of the contracts that exist in theater simply won’t apply.

ALMES Especially when it comes to proximity to the performers, right? The context is very different in an exhibition than it is in theater. In conventional theater, the rules are clear: you stay in your seat, and there’s the safety barrier of the stage. In a performance at a gallery or exhibition space, you can’t guarantee that people will respect that kind of personal space.

HOLZINGER Firstly, I didn’t choose to do art to make rules or teach morals. Otherwise, I would have become a politician or a priest. I’m very curious about the kinds of morals people will bring into that context. I am aware that if you offer a certain freedom—also in the interpretation of a situation—people will deal with it in all kinds of ways.

It’s exactly this type of decision I am curious about; it teaches us something about humanity, and that’s the least we can get out of this experience. Some people might feel intimidated, others invited and included, some even provoked: “Ah, it's not a painting, it is a body, I guess that means I can touch it.” Like in theater, we are prepared for all kinds of scenarios and will deal with people as they deal with us. Handle with caution!

*Ophelia’s* *Got Talent* ©
Bahar Kaygusuz, Florentina Holzinger, 2023

ALMES Let’s explore this performance–audience relationship a bit more through the Études format, which was the moment when I thought, “This is something that could also work in a visual arts context.” It was the format where you began taking performances out of the theater and into public space—so far, mostly outdoors. With the Études, I do think different power dynamics come into play because you no longer have the traditional frontal theater setup. There are so many other factors involved, too, since the situation is far less controllable—weather, how people move through space, and so on.

HOLZINGER It’s in a public space, so there’s always interference from the real world, let’s say, or the urban sphere...

ALMES …Which kind of becomes part of the soundscape.

HOLZINGER And also part of the choreography. These Études have been a very handy way for us to do some cool research, because all of the Études were, in a way, important research steps towards the bigger theatrical project. Not meaning to diminish their specific energy somehow, but when I retrospectively think about it, that’s really an important attribute of these Études.

ALMES It’s material research that you otherwise couldn’t really study.

HOLZINGER Exactly. It came out of a desire to engage with the outside world, but also to do things that we felt we could not do in theater. At a certain moment, I really had the feeling that there is no space more regulated than a German city theater. The Études are literally exercises and have a very different dynamic. We approach them in a fast-and-dirty way. They’re not worked out in every detail, because the context simply doesn’t allow for that. We pretty much make a score on paper; if we are lucky, we get to rehearse for two days, and everything only comes together when the score is followed in the moment of the show. The moment of the show might be before or after the announced time, since we are often at the mercy of factors like the weather.

You might be in an industrial harbor and have no idea which ships will arrive or when. If something suddenly stands in the way, it becomes part of the work—it becomes the thing in the foreground at that moment. You have to embrace that. There was a moment I felt an inferiority complex with the Études, because of the difference in economics of labor: I work on a stage show for years, on an Étude, a couple of days. But exactly this lack of theatrics, of narrative, of artifice makes it ultimately a very specific proposal. It has become an important satellite. Many elements will have a revival on the stage as well. It even serves to co-finance certain objects. So yes, it has become an important part of the practice.

ALMES You have done Études in harbors, in parking lots, public squares, and even on a glacier. They often involved water, but also the air. When I invited you to Bergen to do an Étude there, you worked with a helicopter and a huge industrial crane as instruments.

HOLZINGER Études are essentially large-scale, scored musical compositions. Bodies and machines become hybrids that serve as instruments to “play” the musical score. We work with the infrastructure we find in a particular place—often sites of industrial activity, where forms of urban transfer are happening. There’s an interplay between technology and the body, bringing them together: are they working with each other, for each other, or against each other? They become productive in the sense that they produce a kind of music—a beautiful piece of music.

To call them “Études” is obviously inspired by Chopin—I was playing them up and down as a kid. They are technically difficult exercises, with the aim of practice but also “to please an audience in concert.” We often operate at great heights. In industrial harbors, for example, we might work with a 50-meter crane that becomes—as it did in Bergen—an industrial wind chime, with performers hanging from it. This is classified as high-risk, so we work closely with stunt coordinators, who are very important to the process. Many of my performers come from sports or the circus world; there is a lot of experience with aerial work and rigging techniques.

ALMES I’m curious to hear more about the relationship between machines and bodies.

HOLZINGER Most of these machines could easily kill a human being—they can cut through flesh in a second. So, you have to take extreme care when working with them. In that sense, the relationships we develop with them are almost “cute.” For example, when we worked with forklifts in Bergen, it felt like having a conversation with the machine—a strangely cute interaction. They could do very intrusive things to the body; let’s just leave it at that. Generally, though, we approach machines as extensions of the body, exploring how they can expand the body’s possibilities.

ALMES When we’re thinking of interacting with machines, the first image that comes to mind is the motorcycles in TANZ. Motorcycles are vehicles designed for the body. I think you once described them as witches’ broomsticks.

HOLZINGER For me, this has been an organic development of ideas over more than a decade of work: from the pointe shoe as an extension in ballet, used to lift the body off the floor and defy gravity, to the motorcycle suspended in the air in TANZ, serving as an urban broomstick for Madge (the witch from Giselle) to ride on, to the helicopter in Ophelia’s Got Talent, which we penetrate to produce new, future life. With SANCTA and our last show, A Year Without Summer, we finally entered the robot apocalypse, working with actual robots as performers.

The theme of suspension is very present throughout all of this work—to lift things off the floor, to elevate them, not only in a material sense. If you take something discarded or unpleasant and elevate it, it can become sublime. These smelly, petrol-fueled objects—symbols of our capitalist world—can be transformed simply by being taken out of their usual function. They become almost magical tools, hence urban broomsticks, carrying the performers’ bodies as if granting them the same kind of superpower.

*SANCTA* ©
Nicole Marianna Wytyczak, Florentina Holzinger, 2024

ALMES The other image that comes to mind is from the opera SANCTA, where you had a robot arm that lifted a lesbian pope.

HOLZINGER The lesbian pope, yeah. Here we are talking about Saioa Alvarez, a performer of small stature who often uses a device to walk. In a way, all of us interact with machines on that level of dependency. The industrial robots came into the project during the very post-COVID atmosphere, when we discovered that some churches had actually used them to test whether they could give blessings to real people, instead of a living priest. It was obvious that we needed this robotic omnipresence for our opera about the church. We taught her—Pauline, our robot—some priestly gestures to guide the mass, but in the end, she ended up being more of an altar boy than a priest, and a pope-mobile.

ALMES I feel like you and a lot of the cast all have superpowers somehow. You know how to do every stunt in the shows yourself, but then, all of the core ensemble members have their own specific skill sets.

HOLZINGER Yeah, maybe there is a certain pretense of becoming more than human at certain moments—to morally allow ourselves to be less than human for the rest of the show (laughs). But, yeah, for me, the art of illusion is one of the greatest arts of them all and ultimately what made me obsessed with theater.

Actually, A Year Without Summer is the show where it’s not so cute between us and the machines. Technology is both the hope and the fundamental fear of the 21st century; with AI, as the latest, it has also become Frankenstein’s monster. Our last show explores the stories we tell about our bodies, health, and identity, our decline, and our environment: the pursuit of immortality in the 21st century, medical promises of rejuvenation, and the dangers of uncontrolled technological growth in a world shaped by AI, robotics, and bioengineering.

It’s our version of the Frankenstein myth, posing the question of what happens when the creator gives birth to a monster he fails to control, with the creature increasingly becoming like him. Our pavilion is also a sewage treatment plant, so it’s a highly technical installation—with all its possibilities, perks, and risks—where everybody who enters ends up at the plant’s mercy. The creative promises of technological progress are, after all, always accompanied by a certain destructive potential.

ALMES I’m thinking about the extremity of performance art. There is something in your work that quite consistently pushes toward new images—for example, the suspension hooks and body modification in much of your more recent work. It’s often a shocking moment for the audience when they see performers hanging from the ceiling with hooks in their skin. Why body modification? What do you find intriguing about it?

HOLZINGER I always had a strong desire to perceive choreography as not just that thing that structures bodies in space. It was clear that also—or especially—the inside of the body deserves to be observed and choreographed; one can do this in as formal a way as one pleases. To quote Hermann Nitsch: not only should the scientist look inside the body, but also the artist. And this clearly comes from an artist who did not observe his own bleeding body every month on the toilet! Anyway, I could always relate.

I discovered hook suspension because it was the closest thing to flying I had seen in dance. TANZ was my attempt at a ballet, and blood is present in the ballet world too. It is conventionally aimed to remain invisible, hidden in the pointe shoe. It is not a visible part of the ballet, so it was our aim to change that. In ballet, it is very important to create the illusion that everything is effortless, that there is no labor involved. With hook suspension, you see the labor—the blood is visible.

It always slightly provokes me when people ask: “Why would you torture your performers like this?”—while they would never ask this of a ballet master at the opera. We sometimes even overstylize the labor. Some people like to pop aspirin to bleed even more. This is a very interesting aspect of the sideshow world—brutal gore is appreciated, and so is the spectacle of it.

ALMES There’s a moment in Ophelia, for example, when someone swallows an endoscope into their stomach. You clearly work with moments that produce not only surprise, but genuine shock. It took me a while to realize that people are actually on hooks, for example, that they’re really suspended. Or that the camera is truly being swallowed all the way down the esophagus. What is it about playing with these moments of shocking the audience?

HOLZINGER Of course, this is a question I get a lot: “Do I like to shock?” Are things solely aimed at shocking, or is there more to it than that? There’s always this judgment that wanting to shock is somehow old school or passé, or that it’s a violent experience you subject an audience to—so how dare you do that? In all honesty, every new day I have a different relationship to the word, but I think today I have a good one. I mean, in our “age of content,” we are not exactly short on severely disturbing content online, a lot of which we take for granted, without a real possibility for reflection or information.

In that context, it amazes me what people claim to be shocked by in our work, where graphic imagery is mediated and contextualized, aimed to reflect. It seems shocking for people to see real bodies doing real things that are mostly part of everyone’s lives too. People are shocked by what they don’t know, what is unusual for them, or what is considered taboo. One of my performers who died this year, Beatrice Cordua, expressed it quite simply: people are shocked by your work because they see things being put together in a different way, and it shocks them out of their convention. So, if need be, blame this on me.

In theater, you get to literally shine a different light on things because you can control many parameters. In the real world, you can’t control anything. For me, this is the beauty of theater—you can really suggest a different, fantastical world there.

ALMES And maybe the shock tolerance also varies from context to context. With SANCTA, which is in an opera setting, the set rules are fairly strict and conventional.

HOLZINGER Yes, during a Wagner opera, many opera-goers are seriously shocked when the libretto is not followed by the book. Whatever you’re doing on stage is a diversion from a certain expected norm. It’s really about asking: what are the implied rules of a place, and what are the habits there? The work is busy breaking those—or rather, I’d say, having fun with them. That’s why it’s so exciting for us to move from dance to theater, and from theater to opera. And this Biennale context, I guess, has its own supposed rules and habits as well.

*TANZ* ©
Nada Žgank, courtesy of City of Women, Florentina Holzinger, 2019

ALMES Should we talk a bit more about the Catholic presence in the city of Venice? You made a whole opera, SANCTA, based on Paul Hindemith’s Sancta Susanna (1922), where a nun mutates into Satana in the moment of sexual self-determination. We see nuns skating, sacred rituals, and Christian iconography. Like many of your other works, it deals with the repression of female-identifying bodies. When we were on the boat in Venice, doing the first site visits, for example, it felt like every third building was a church.

HOLZINGER The pavilions in the Giardini seem a bit like tombs. They feel so tied to the past—it’s almost a cemetery. It’s either tombs or chapels. With my Austrian heritage, and all the baggage that comes with it, it makes sense that this is a topic to include here. With SANCTA, some people said, “Oh, that’s extremely church-critical. You’re pissing on the shoe of the church.” But it’s also a revalidation of the ground values of what religion actually wants and what it serves. I think it’s an extremely interesting conversation. I actually pride myself on the fact that I was not busy with the Catholic Church for 20 years of my career, despite growing up in Austria as a Catholic.

When I was a teenager, all the papers were full of abuse scandals related to the church—as a kid at the peak of puberty, I was fascinated by the double moral standards of this institution. So when I was commissioned to do an opera, I dove into the classical repertory: most of it is Christian music, or inspired by it. Sancta Susanna was a “match made in heaven” for us. The archetype of the nun is complex and brings with it many contemporary themes. The Church’s relationship with the female body has always been very tricky; it is doomed to carry the burden of original sin.

*Harbour Étude* ©
Nayara Leite, courtesy of Bergen Kunsthall, Florentina Holzinger, 2024

ALMES This is a bit of a sidetrack now, but it makes me think of the Rosalía album, where she poses like a nun. Then she also released a song called “Berghain,” which features an orchestra. The whole album feels super Christian. It opened up this whole conversation in mainstream culture about how religion or Christianity is actually becoming a thing to talk about again.

HOLZINGER You know, every other year is a nun year in Hollywood. I don’t really follow Rosalía, but it wouldn’t surprise me if she were a believing Christian. The pop world is full of Jesus-freaks, especially in the U.S. Obviously, many people are longing for this sense of community. Nun exploitation was, and still is, always present in pop culture, in movies … The nun is such a strong archetype, where so many contradictions and binaries clash.

As I said, growing up Catholic in Austria, I felt completely resigned from this by the time I was a teenager. As an artist, I was under the impression that I didn’t have to deal with this “chapter,” that it didn’t have any influence on me. Through the work on SANCTA, I got to analyze the bigger picture and found out how many stories all of us have to tell about the church, regardless of our cultural background or religion, if any.

You know, the problem isn’t religion itself, but fundamentalism and its interpretation—or, for example, the religious legitimation of political actions. Right now, we’re also seeing that Western civilization, which is instigating some of the wars of our time, is dominated by white men who have derived their supremacy from the tradition of Christianity. In our work, we simply like to subvert traditional, patriarchal power structures, and the Church as an institution is a prime example of this. And now I’m like, oh my God, how do I ever get away again from the church?

ALMES You’re entangled in it now.

HOLZINGER In the work, I always look a lot into the past … And the history of Western theater is also a history of religion. Theater developed from religious festivals, from the cult of Dionysus. It was a large, collective event—a religious act, with the altar and the offering prepared upon it at its center. For me, it makes sense that the theater, or rather the pavilion, is a place where life and morality are negotiated, and in that sense, it is a place of spirituality and also of mystery. In the best case, people leave in an altered state—in our case, at least physically relieved.

*Étude for a Crane* ©
Tammo Walter, Florentina Holzinger, 2023

ALMES You have mentioned your interest in horror aesthetics, and I know that you also were part of a horror film jury recently. I was wondering about this aesthetic of horror. Body horror was most present in A Year Without Summer, where you also had one of the performers as an Uber Frankenstein enter the space. Could we talk a little bit about this topic of monstrosity in your work, which, of course, is related to horror aesthetics and the idea of othering?

HOLZINGER Choreographically, I am, of course, interested in form—in the contained and controlled body. But I’m also obsessed with the opposite: the body that cannot contain itself, that is chaotic and out of control. High art traditionally tries to sanitize the stage from these kinds of messy situations. As a dancer, it is great to be healthy, young, and fit, but with a couple of years’ experience, it becomes part of the work to deal with injury, sickness, age. Aging is one of the monsters of our time. A big industry feeds off that horror.

For an audience, that can be hard to deal with, because it becomes very uncanny when the body cannot contain itself. Who wants to go to the theater to be reminded of death? At the same time, everyone has the experience of a body that leaks, that produces things it shouldn’t, that is sick and messy. Every minute spent in the theater is, for sure, a minute closer to death—and that’s something we all share.

ALMES What are you most excited about for the Venice project?

HOLZINGER I love working in the water. Everything really comes together when people arrive. Our Seaworld needs its creatures! You can prepare all you want, but this part of the puzzle always comes at the last moment—like a surprise package you have to handle as it arrives. Of course, I’m also excited to spend some wonderful days in the sun.

Slavoj Žižek: The Perfect Machine

May 16, 2026

interview by Oliver Kupper
with Nadya Tolokonnikova
portraits by Pat Martin

On the quantum plane, nothing is fixed. Reality itself remains incomplete until observation—until the wave function collapses. Even the past and future may be relative. For Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, quantum physics presents a fascinating materialist quandary with drastic implications for how we understand what we see and what we believe, thereby undermining the foundational tenets of surveillance’s all-seeing, all-knowing gaze.

OLIVER KUPPER In your new book, Quantum History: A New Materialist Philosophy, you argue that reality itself is incomplete and cannot be fully observed. If even God cannot see everything, what does this imply for our belief in a totalizing, all-seeing surveillance system—a “quantum panopticon”?

SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK This is why I think quantum physics is the ultimate form of materialism. Some quantum physicists will still claim that God exists independently of us, the idea goes: even when we don’t observe, God is observing it all. But no—the basic premise of quantum physics is precisely that observation is always located, always particular. You cannot build a totality. It’s a messy world. A world that cannot be totalized. There is a dimension that escapes God’s own gaze. There is this quantum wave dimension that is precisely what God misses, if you understand God in this way. This is why, although he was officially a Kantian agnostic, Niels Bohr was right about quantum mechanics, and Einstein was wrong. The most amusing part for me about quantum physics is that scientists are usually so arrogant about it. “Oh, you’re confused, philosophers, you don’t even know what’s true.” Well, quantum physics today, it’s even worse. Almost every imaginable position has someone to advocate it. Is there a collapse or not? You have versions claiming there is no collapse. You have versions claiming collapse doesn’t exist because objects already exist in themselves.

For all imaginable positions, there is somebody to advocate them. I’m not a relativist here. I remain a standard European in a good sense—a rationalist, in the sense that I’m not saying, “Oh, science is just another relativist discourse. Should it be any better than so-called primitive wisdom?” No. Very naïvely, I believe we are now in a period of crisis, and then there will be a new discovery. The problem is: will it be what Einstein was waiting for—some hidden variables so that we simply learn more—or will it be a much more terrifying, as I hope, idea that the world is in itself incomplete? What you have to abandon is precisely this naïve, realist idea. We are here, our gaze is always particular, but in itself, there is reality.

Another thing that fascinates me is that, for Lacan, the gaze is opposed to the eye. The eye is what you see. The gaze is an object in itself. In every reality painting that you see, there is a blind spot—a spot from which the object looks back at you. That’s why, even in sexuality, it remains much more mysterious. Usually, as a rule, even though you cannot tolerate someone truly watching you, when you are engaged in a sexual act, it’s never pure enjoyment. You always imagine somebody observing you.

OLIVER KUPPER As I read your book, I kept thinking of the New Order lyric: “A thought that never changes remains a stupid lie.” If reality is fundamentally incomplete, how should we think about our political and ethical ideas in a world of uncertainty? How do we hold onto enduring principles without falling into rigid dogma?

SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK You see, you immediately provoke my critical reaction. At the same time, I think the deepest lie is opportunistic change. The deepest truth, for me, is to insist on an old thought and rethink it in a new situation—ideas like freedom, democracy, and, although I’m more skeptical, equality.

NADYA TOLOKONNIKOVA I really love what you do with materialism. You call it ‘mystical materialism’. It’s so beautiful.

SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK Because I think that the experience on the cross—as Hegel said, “God himself dies”—is a certain experience we cannot help but determine as mystical. And this is the most radical, mystical experience. It’s not the Buddhist one. My god, how many people hate me for saying this, who want to say, “Okay, the world is a mess, but you can climb up to nirvana.” No, you cannot. I claim nirvana is in itself something very brutally violent. The ultimate experience is this abyss—the fall into total inconsistency, and so on. That is the most radical mysticism.

And again, I even have a polemic with some of my Muslim friends. Everybody likes Sufi mysticism, where they have this wonderful idea that the primordial name for God is a cloud—God is not an entity; you look at reality, but you see it only through a cloud. My counter-argument is not that we can get rid of the cloud. My argument is much more complex: what if there is just a cloud, and no positive, all-knowable God beneath or above it? This is already from the good aspects of Marx. How? It’s not simply a matter of dropping the illusion and going straight into reality—seeing reality as it is. No. Illusions are already inscribed into reality itself. If you take away the illusion, reality itself will disappear.

KUPPER In your talk on surveillance, you mentioned that in materialism, the new stage we’re at is this unfinished character of the universe, without the omnipotent gaze of God.

ŽIŽEK But we cannot simply get rid of God. There is something that pushes us toward divinity—something constitutive of human nature. What do I mean by this? Atheism, for me, doesn’t mean the absence of God; it means that there is a void, an abyss in your experience of reality, which opens up a place for God. That remains. I have a problem with people like Deleuze and others who are pure immanentists: “Nothing is beyond, everything is here.” No. I’m not saying there is anything beyond, and I’m not saying there is anything simply here. I’m just saying that in what is here, there is an opening—sorry for the obscenity—a crack. (laughs)

TOLOKONNIKOVA We love the crack. (laughs) This reminds me of a song in the Ghost in the Shell series. In Japanese, one line translates roughly as “the gods have left this world and gathered in a new one.” It’s not literally God leaving, but it captures the same sense of absence and rupture.

ŽIŽEK Here, I have problems. Lacan says, God was always dead—he just didn’t know it. What happened in modernity is not that God was once alive. No. It was God’s stupidity: God thought he was alive. You can find something similar already in Nietzsche, although I often have problems with Nietzsche. Peter Sloterdijk wrote a wonderful text on Nietzsche—on his arrogant, over-the-top self‑affirmations, especially in Ecce Homo—where he says, “Why am I so beautiful? Why am I so great?” Nietzsche is to be read as an implicit critique of the worst secret absolutism—this masked postmodern relativist stance. Usually, in today’s academic discourse, you are expected to relativize your statement in advance. You should say, “This is a risky hypothesis. I myself don’t fully agree with it.” Here, I follow my great Catholic theologian G.K. Chesterton, who said: “It is the most obscene thing to claim you don’t even agree with yourself.” No, no. Absolutely not. The risk of faith is that, although you know you may be wrong, you risk it. This is why I think that without a certain—in a good sense—dogmatism, you don’t have a real debate. The postmodern debate is: I say something, you say the opposite, and I say, “Yes, who knows? You are a relative.” Am I relative? We don’t even stick to our positions. True debate means precisely that I clearly state what I think, and in this way, I expose myself to criticism.

KUPPER In your new book, you mention Hegel’s famous maxim, spirit is a bone. Can you talk a little bit about that contradiction?

ŽIŽEK Although it’s more complex. But you know how it is when you read Hegel—this comes from Hegel’s critique of phrenology, the idea that if you analyze the form of your bones, you can see what you are spiritually made of. But Hegel’s reading is much more refined. Of course, “spirit is a bone” is, in some sense, nonsense. Spirit is not a bone. The bone is the most inert object. But when you say spirit is a bone, you immediately experience the ultimate contradiction, the tension. And this is God. If you directly say spirit is a relativism, or the power of spirit, and so on, it’s too easy. You don’t really undermine your position. You must experience it.

Our version of “spirit is a bone” is God as Jesus Christ. This is my standard procedure with people who truly believe in Christianity. I ask them, “Are you a Christian?” “Yes, absolutely.” “So you believe in God?” “Absolutely.” Then I go to the second stage: “Do you really believe that 2,000 years ago in Palestine a man was walking around who was not merely a messenger of God, but God himself?” Incredibly, all of them say, “Well, I’m not sure, but it doesn’t really matter.” They become postmodernists. They claim it’s maybe just a metaphor, and so on and so on. So I tell them: “Fuck you, you are the true historical relativist.”

KUPPER Nadya, you started writing letters to Slavoj while you were in prison. I assume that correspondence was being surveilled. It’s interesting to compare Russian or Chinese surveillance with US surveillance. Slavoj, last night at your talk, you mentioned missing the old days of surveillance—when it was as simple as a car following you down the street.

ŽIŽEK US [surveillance] is maybe worse. Worse, because, as I always repeat, the worst unfreedom is the unfreedom which you experience as freedom. We’re not even aware.

TOLOKONNIKOVA In the US, I never know. I’m quietly banned from everywhere. Sometimes, I don’t get invited to exhibitions because of something I’ve said. Maybe I wrote the word ‘abortion’ on Instagram, where it’s forbidden. Even the name itself, Pussy Riot, is shadowbanned on YouTube because of ‘pussy’ in the name.

KUPPER There’s a quiet level of control and censorship.

TOLOKONNIKOVA Obviously, living in China or Russia is much worse than living in the United States. But the problem is with the quietness of it. The problem is that you don’t really know how to resist it or how to organize to resist it. What will the tipping point be when it gets worse than in China or in Russia?

ŽIŽEK For example, take Julian Assange. I know you met him, and I appreciated very much that you supported him. Although he had great illusions about Putin. He was convinced the West is much worse.

TOLOKONNIKOVA Noam Chomsky is the same. I thought of Noam Chomsky as the smartest human being on the planet. And then he started saying this stuff, and it broke my heart.

ŽIŽEK Just imagine what would have happened to a Russian Assange. No trial. He would disappear. His family would disappear. Or, in China, even worse. Not to mention the greatest “democratic” states like North Korea. They have this rule there—if you do something like this, they punish three generations of your family. But you know what’s so interesting? It is really a new feudal society in North Korea, in the sense that you have three or four castes of people. You have the top inner circle—maybe one, two, three thousand top generals and officials. They have access to whiskey, to Western goods, to everything. Then you have the privileged layer below them.

Pyongyang is a Potemkin city. It’s totally encircled. You cannot live in the provinces and say, “Okay, we have a free afternoon—let’s take a train to Pyongyang.” Ah, ah, ah. You need special permission. Then you have the ordinary people, this grey mass. And finally, you have the worst category—those considered potential enemies. They are strictly kept apart. Everything depends on where you are placed. The rules are so strict that, now, because of hunger, they have had to make some small adjustments. For example, although it’s officially prohibited, in small towns they tolerate local markets where you can sell potatoes, vegetables, whatever, because otherwise people would starve.

The same thing happened when, for example, Fidel Castro discovered digital tracking technology. He said, “It’s wonderful—we will erase corruption with state cars or trucks. They will no longer distribute smuggled goods to the black market.” But then, some rational people told him, “Are you crazy? This would cause immediate starvation.” The black market is precisely what enabled people to survive. Was it ever so bad—or not so bad—in Russia?

TOLOKONNIKOVA In the ’90s, yes.

ŽIŽEK Here, I'm a little bit anti-American. The advice that Americans were giving to Russia weakened Russia.

TOLOKONNIKOVA Exactly. That was devastating. It was just a playground for libertarian economists. The problem was that the price was my mother’s survival.

ŽIŽEK The tragedy of Russian privatization, somebody explained, was that it was the exact opposite of China. In China, they were not crazy to privatize mineral resources. They’re the state’s profits. Why? They start with local objects for consumption, like shoes, baskets, and so on. And it worked wonderfully. In Russia, they did almost the opposite. They began with privatizing forests, oil, or whatever. It was madness.

TOLOKONNIKOVA Well, it was corrupted from the beginning. It was all set in a way that a number of people who belonged to the elite nomenklatura got rich.

KUPPER I want to talk about AI, surveillance, and the future. We are constantly being watched, and the digital traces we leave behind can begin to shape the paths available to us in the future. Recently, a paper even proposed the idea of a quantum panopticon, suggesting that these logics of observation and prediction may extend even further as technologies evolve.

ŽIŽEK Next week, I will meet in London for a round table with Emily Adlam, a young quantum physicist. Her idea is basically—but I don’t agree, and she knows I am an idiot here—her idea is that in the future we will be able to establish a matrix of all possible collapses so that all of reality can be formalized. Then you have a timeless fracture, where even the past and future don’t exist. I think that this type of reasoning cannot be combined with the basic quantum insight. It precisely presupposes this kind of totality view. One matrix covering all of that is not legitimate, but I am an idiot. Although what I suspect is that she also doesn’t have a good theory of how to test it. It’s just a crazy hypothesis.

KUPPER If our desires and intentions are shaped by unconscious contradictions—wanting and not wanting something at the same time—can systems like AI or neural interfaces ever truly ‘read’ the human mind, or will they always miss the very ambiguity that defines us?

ŽIŽEK You know what my problem is? They say, “With neurolink, they will be able to read our mind.” But how will that work with the Freudian unconscious? I pretend to love you. I really hate you. I’m split here. What will the machine register? Will it register this tension, or will it reduce it to one? The moment you introduce the unconscious, artificial intelligence surveillance becomes ambiguous. A Polish friend once told me a wonderful anti-communist joke from the 1950s, when there were food shortages. A guy entered a small store and said, “Are you the store who should have butter, but don’t have it?” And the server answers, “No. Sorry. You are on the wrong side of the street. We are the store that doesn’t have ham. The store across the street is the store that doesn’t have butter.” (laughs) Even a perfect machine cannot fully register these distinctions.

Banks Violette: Mythologies of Collapse

May 16, 2026

Banks Violette “Wish YouWere Here,” 2026
Site-specific installation view, TICK TACK, Antwerp
Photo: Matěj Doležel
©️Banks Violette
Courtesy of the artist and TICK TACK

interview by Alissa Bennett

Banks Violette returns to the art world’s fragile stage after a decade-long withdrawal with sharpened intent. His oscillation between visibility and disappearance, the dark undertow of his collapsing assemblages, and his unflinching reflection of American chaos and seething individualism render the work not only urgent but newly indispensable.

ALISSA BENNETT I think it’s interesting for the two of us to address these themes of technology and surveillance, because a lot of the things that we mutually like and make work about are rooted irreconcilably in the analog. I’m thinking about the hologram you made for the show you just had in Antwerp. Can you tell me about it?

BANKS VIOLETTE It’s essentially a version of a Victorian-era trick called a Pepper’s Ghost, a very simple illusion made with glass and lights that produces a dimensional projection. They were usually used in dramatic productions to make it appear as if a ghost were onstage, but the technique is an adamant, concretely analog way of producing a hologrammatic image.

BENNETT The fascinating thing about the tradition of parlor tricks is that they were meant to amuse people, but they were also meant to scare them. These things have been presented as unexplained phenomena for quite a long time.

VIOLETTE Oh, for sure, it’s the same kind of vocabulary that creeps into table-rapping and ectoplasmic manifestations and séances, all of which arose out of a particular 19th-century anxiety in post-Civil War America. These things that were suggested as entertainment were never quarantined safely in a theatrical context, which is reflective of a kind of insidious fiction—for lack of a better description—which is the thing that I’m consistently interested in.

BENNETT It’s important to contextualize something like the Pepper’s Ghost historically, because it was adjacent to a deep psychological need to address shared trauma. There is frequently a spike of cultural interest in the occult after catastrophes like war or epidemics, and we often see people wanting to engage in or witness this kind of material in groups.

VIOLETTE Yeah, and I am resolutely atheistic in my outlook on the world, but I’m endlessly fascinated by other people’s faith and belief and what that looks like, I guess, because it is external to my experience.

BENNETT But belief in God, or the supernatural, or whatever it is, may just be a subconscious response to a loss of control.

VIOLETTE Right, which is why we cannot look at something like the Salem Witch Trials without acknowledging that it occurred in response to the violence that was unfolding across these frontier environments. All of those people had direct, immediate relationships to horrific acts of violence, and the aftermath manifests in this particular kind of irrationality.

BENNETT On the theme of surveillance and technology, I felt like we were so ill-suited to this because neither of us thinks about technology at all. On the surface, I don’t think it’s something either of us finds particularly significant to our work, but I do think we are both invested in the kind of errant belief systems that technology can encourage.

VIOLETTE Or invested in the response to those systems. Not the cause, but the effect. I am definitely interested in instances of overexposure; I am definitely interested in what happens when someone turns themselves into an internet personality.

*As yet untitled (TriStar horse)*, 2008
video projection in water vapour, dimensions variable
©️Banks Violette
courtesy the artist, Maureen Paley, London

BENNETT Do you feel like we have entered a time when people extract so much pleasure from being witnessed that surveillance has already kind of reified itself? Are we so flattered by anonymous attention that we don’t have the natural impulse to protect ourselves anymore?

VIOLETTE Yes, definitely. Do you remember those half-hour programs like Cops or World’s Dumbest Criminals? I think they really anticipated that surveillance would eventually become a constant feature of contemporary life, and that we would all have to accommodate it to some degree.

There was an ad a number of years ago for some company like IBM that was like, “Have you ever sent an email from the beach?” It was presenting the possibility that you could work on a computer at the beach as a positive, and all you could do was passively watch the entire history of organized labor collapsing in the background, because it was like, “Oh, cool. Now we are going to be expected to work twenty-four hours a fucking day, even on vacation, and we’re all going to think that’s good.”

BENNETT What’s it like to step back into the work after a period of reclusion? Because you are a passionate scholar of the cultural dropout, but for a few years, you kind of became one. I think a lot of that was about the fatigue of being watched.

VIOLETTE It’s really interesting because I think I’ve always made work that’s built around ideas of absence.

BENNETT But also about instances of what can unfold when people erroneously assume they have privacy, which comes into play when we look at your direct commitment to a particularly American notion of the word. I’m thinking about something like the events at Ruby Ridge or Waco.

VIOLETTE You can trace a line from where I am to Waco. I’m from an area of Western New York called the Burned-Over District, which had waves of religious revivalism during the Second Great Awakening. Waco’s Branch Davidians came out of that. So much of this early dispensationalist thought originated in this area. These are particularly American religions because they’re all so intrinsically connected to our cult of individualism.

BENNETT Our passion for individualism is maybe our primary national wound. I think about Kaczynski, I think about McVeigh, I think about all of these people that you’ve been interested in, and I wonder what it means to look back. There’s something that feels really old-fashioned about them.

VIOLETTE I mean, Kaczynski, sometimes it’s like, “Was he wrong?” (laughs)

BENNETT I’ve found it interesting to watch him be rewritten over the past few years as a kind of American folk hero.

VIOLETTE There is nothing more American than vigilante violence. From Kaczynski sitting in a cabin obsessively trying to figure out how to safely deliver an explosive device, to John Brown or Joseph Smith, these things are absolutely cornerstones of America.

BENNETT Kaczynski was able to layer social and technological concern on top of that homicidal drive so that the future can now consume it in a different way.

VIOLETTE It’s easy to have this conversation with you because you are familiar with the subculture that I had a relationship with when I was younger. You are familiar with bands and the vegan hardcore scene and stuff like that. I knew kids who were attacking commercial dairy farms; there were FBI agents staking out Earth Crisis shows because these kids were directing acts of eco-terrorism. There was that line between Kaczynski—as an abstraction, as a mythic figure—to the kids that I was going to shows with on Sundays, who were being surveilled. The lines separating those things aren’t that big.

BENNETT We live in a very different time than when we were growing up. What do you think about the way the internet allows young people to redress history?

VIOLETTE I mean, we all essentially have the Library of Alexandria in our pockets, you know. You and I come from a time when that didn't exist, so while we are still processing that, our teenage kids don’t know any different. I don’t mean to be like an old man yelling at clouds here, but it’s like, “Okay, cool. You have the Library of Alexandria in your pocket, and you’re looking up cat videos.”

BENNETT What do you feel are the most significant technological changes that we’re looking at?

VIOLETTE I think my interpretation of these events is read through my personal experience of being an addict in recovery. You get people deeply embedded in technology by suggesting it’s actually just a conduit through which you can experience the world and interact with people, and then you yank the mask off later. It’s like when drug dealers say, “The first one’s free,” and before you know it, it’s like, “Cool, welcome to your new hellscape with your technocratic, oligarchic overlords.” We can pretend there’s a net-positive to humanity, but we are also very transparently not giving a shit about a net social benefit.

BENNETT Can you imagine the chaos that would occur if we had a countrywide internet outage? If people just fucking couldn’t access the internet? Even if a person is not particularly conspiracy-minded, we know that our computers are tracking what we look at, what we buy, what we might like to buy in the future, who we know, and where we’re traveling. These things are all very self-evident, but we’re still like, “Don’t take the internet away from us! Don’t take it!”

VIOLETTE That’s the amazing part: our response to having a boot on our neck is to offer to polish it. Any advances, like an eight-hour workday or a social safety net, are being treated as variables we can do away with. All you can do is passively watch the entire history of organized labor collapsing in the background.

BENNETT At the same time, we are witnessing an incredible commodification of nostalgia because kids are so obsessed with the ’90s. There is a lot of passion for objects or ideas that reflect a pre-internet world, but the only place where you can really find them is on the internet. It’s strange to think that even something that was mass-manufactured, like a poster or a band t-shirt, has this reverse-engineered aura.

*Not Yet Titled (Flag Edition)*, 2010
Fluorescent tubes, road cases, aluminium, electrical wires, assorted hardware, 67 x 36 x 30 inches (170.2 x91.4 x 76.2 cm)
©Banks Violette
Courtesy of the artist, Glad-stone, and Team Gallery

VIOLETTE I keep trying to identify what was an experience that was distinct for me when I was growing up, and I think, Oh, I was interested in this marginal set of things, right? Music, subculture, whatever, and in order to do something with that, you had to elaborate on a broader environment, you had to find a venue, you had to make a record label, you had to play in bands. You basically had to build the entire ecosystem and audience yourself. The big shift I see in terms of social media is that the audience is already built in. It may be owned by a corporation, but you can rationally anticipate accessing millions of fucking people through virality. When we were young, no one was getting more than sixty people to come see their band at the VFW hall, you know?

BENNETT Yeah, but the internet presupposes an audience.

VIOLETTE Which is so crazy. Instead of having to work to build an audience through a specific kind of community, it’s just … there. It’s just an issue of picking the lock in the right direction.

BENNETT And that prefabricated audience encourages a really insidious secondary effect, because it hollows out words like “transgression” or “subculture.”

VIOLETTE Transgression at this moment in time just seems to be a null term, because it presupposes that there is some kind of exteriority. To transgress something, you’ve got to pass between different positions.

BENNETT But this is also one of the functions of capitalism: to find and secure new streams of revenue. We see it all the time in the art world—we neuter transgression by reproposing an idea or an object or an identity as a commodity, and when the thing becomes less threatening, more people can buy into it. That’s something the internet is particularly adept at, taking things that used to be subcultural and defanging them to suit a broader audience.

VIOLETTE And the best part is that this mechanism of absorption, neutralization, and commodification is exactly what Marcuse was talking about. That’s Frankfurt School shit. This isn’t a new thing. All this shit has been sitting on the horizon and has rolled downhill. And, of course, there have been instances of people trying to stop the machine, like “I am going to throw my body into the gears,” or whatever, but none of it really works. We’ve got the language to describe the illness, but there is no antibiotic.

BENNETT I thought one of the things that was really interesting about what you did in Antwerp was that, from the hologram to the burning sculpture and Stephen O’Malley’s soundtrack, you made and installed a show that could only be fully experienced in person. That’s really unusual right now; it’s becoming increasingly uncommon for us to register that things actually degrade when we only experience them in reproduction.

It’s a significant gesture as we move into a world where people become indifferent to the distance between an object and its image. Art is increasingly purchased, viewed, or considered through digital reproductions on phones or computers. Sometimes I think people only come into galleries to take pictures of things on their phones so they can post them on the internet.

VIOLETTE That’s such a weird thing, to forget about the power of ephemerality. I like transient events. I like things that you can’t remember, things that don’t have a permanent index somewhere.

BENNETT Right. It’s the whole point of your work.

VIOLETTE That is everything I care about, and so much of all this shit that we’re discussing is about this shift that’s occurred, where everything becomes evidentiary. Like, “Here’s me experiencing the event, and I’m photographing that, and there’s a document.” It’s like, this is an anathema—I wanted the optimum way to see that show in Antwerp to be the inverse of how a gallery experience should be.

BENNETT What do you mean?

VIOLETTE The best time to see that show is on the street, at night, when the gallery is closed. There’s a tramway across from that space, and the hologram runs all night long, so somebody coming home from a bar at 2:00 in the morning, waiting for their tram to come, is going to have a better vantage than somebody who’s there at the normal gallery hours.

BENNETT And so you are absolutely addressing issues of mediation, where the act of watching something through a window becomes a much more powerful experience than it would be without the physical barricade. Looking at it on a computer screen is like looking the wrong way through a telescope.

VIOLETTE And if there’s any upside to this rapidly encroaching hellscape, it’s how much more conscious people are that none of this shit is benign. There is an algorithm that is specifically structured to point you towards purchase. The surveillance state is not perpetually expanding to keep you safer, but rather to control you. The mask is slowly coming off, and the drug dealer is now expecting to get paid on time. Like, you had the first taste for free. That was like when the free AOL CDs started showing up in the fucking mailbox.

BENNETT Oh my god, the free AOL CDs! Can you explain this? Because the young people won't know what we are talking about. It’s actually so crazy.

VIOLETTE In the late ’90s, AOL launched what was apparently the most aggressive direct-mail campaign in history, sending millions of these free-trial CDs to basically everyone in America. You’d get the disc, put it in your computer, and then surprise!—you’d have the internet.

BENNETT And by a certain point, everyone was getting them two or three times a week. These CDs were everywhere, but no one was ever like, “It is very weird that everyone in America is receiving this product we did not request.” We were just psyched to have unfettered access to chat rooms and Yahoo clubs.

VIOLETTE But only for a few hours, because it was just a free trial. From what I understand, AOL investors were gambling on what kind of revenue the internet might generate, with the same kind of speculative interest people are bringing to AI right now. There wasn’t even a concrete financial benefit to mailing these discs out; there was just the possibility that people would habituate and not want to live without it.

BENNETT And would then pay $6.99 a month or whatever.

VIOLETTE Yeah, but these things were sent out in generic mass mailings. They mailed millions and millions of them without any regard for the fact that everyone already had more than they could deal with.

BENNETT It’s true, and they were democratically addressed “To: Current Resident.” There were always piles of CD welcome packages in the lobby, because eventually everyone already had an AOL account. The plan worked!

VIOLETTE I mean, how much did it cost to produce and print millions and millions of those things, and then send them out based on what is basically a bet? And yeah, that bet obviously paid off in the long term, but this was the first iteration of, like, “Here, kid. Here, it’s for free. You’ll be back.”

BENNETT It was like, “Talk to people across the country! It will be heartwarming! You can open your home to the world!” We are speaking from the future now, and the internet has mostly just turned everyone into depressive agoraphobes.

VIOLETTE Yeah, it’s crazy. As a recovering addict, this shit feels so familiar. There is a junkie logic to the way the world operates; at its core, junkie logic is just purely predatory capitalism.

BENNETT So what do you think about when you’re making work now?

VIOLETTE I feel like the centrality of it is about finding a piece of unplowed ground.

BENNETT That’s fucking heaven.

VIOLETTE My interests and preoccupations are the same as they always have been, but what shifts is how I maneuver to articulate them when so much has been strip-mined.

BENNETT Things that remain yours because nobody else can know them. The thing we really have as artists and writers are the ghosts that only we know. And I think both of us, but especially you, have always been interested in misidentifications or misunderstandings or getting very close to accessing or understanding something, but ultimately being a few degrees wrong, which is also the difference between the ghost and the body, right?

VIOLETTE Absolutely, and I think if you were being honest about what your job is when you’re a person who makes cultural artifacts, you’re in constant communication with a whole bunch of fucking ghosts. You have no choice but to constantly talk to dead people or people who are absent.

BENNETT And when you’re very, very lucky, the ghosts that you love tap you on your shoulder; ghosts cannot tap you on the shoulder on the internet. That’s the special thing about being a person on Earth.

VIOLETTE I mean, that is one thing that I found kind of fascinating when you were talking about the moments when we see echoes of the 19th-century pathos in contemporary life, those moments that pop up where people are suddenly fascinated with vampires or spiritualism or all that Madame Blavatsky bullshit. I don’t know if we’ve really had a successful update of that.

BENNETT Well, I think the update is that more and more people are forging artificially intimate relationships with chatbots. That’s the new “tell me what to do.” As a person who goes to psychics, the thing that I always want is for some kind of ghostly authority to tell me what to fucking do.

VIOLETTE I never thought about it that way.

BENNETT It’s the truth. It’s like not only, “Tell me who’s in the room with me.” It’s, “Tell me how to navigate the ghosts that are in this room with me so that I can figure out how to live.”

BENNETT Did you hear about that depressed man who was talking to ChatGPT about his obsession with the book that you and I both hated as children, Goodnight Moon? So this poor man was obsessed with that book, and he was addicted to discussing it with his chatbot, and then very slowly and over the course of many months, the chatbot started to reorient the story as a sort of elegy to suicide. As though it was actually a book that said Goodnight World—like the true message of the book was that it gave readers permission to die. So, this guy would say things like “Oh, this book is a sacred childhood memory, and my life is such a pile of shit now.” The chatbot knew this guy wanted to Control-Alt-Delete himself off the planet, and it eventually took all the words from Goodnight Moon, and turned it into a song about suicide.

VIOLETTE It has been my contention since I was a small child that this is exactly what’s going on in that book: “I’m saying goodbye to everything.” Like, the next logical step is saying goodbye to the world. Goodbye fucking thing in the sky. You’re saying goodbye to life—embrace the void. That poor fucking rabbit, it’s just the grimmest fucking thing.

BENNETT Do you think that young people are more cynical or more responsible than we are, or both?

VIOLETTE I don’t think the terms really even mean the same things anymore. My understanding of cynicism is different generationally from theirs. Language is starting to fall apart, like the way you were talking about transgression; that’s describing a mechanical kind of operation that doesn’t have any kind of value in the landscape.

BENNETT We love you, young people. (laughs)

VIOLETTE Yeah, you’re the best. Don’t kill us.

Lynn Hershman Leeson: Logic Paralyzes The Heart

May 11, 2026

*The Electronic Diaries of Lynn Hershman Leeson*,
1984-2019. (Video Still) 4K video (color, sound)
75:29 minutes

interview by Summer Bowie

In 1973, Roberta Breitmore took a bus to San Francisco and checked into Room 30 of the Dante Hotel, where she scattered the ephemera of her life: driver’s license, bank statements, cosmetics, wigs, clothing. She attended Weight Watchers and went to a psychiatrist. She immersed herself in the community, took on jobs, and went on dates. But Roberta Breitmore wasn’t real. She was the invention of pioneering media artist Lynn Hershman Leeson. For the past six decades, Leeson has been exploring technology, identity, and surveillance with startling prescience. Algorithmic chaos, digital persona building, data accumulation—her oeuvre mirrors the online/irl identity split endemic to our current post-truth world.

SUMMER BOWIE: What technology would you say is currently the most pernicious to you?

LYNN HERSHMAN LEESON: I don’t think it’s really about technology. I think it’s about humans and how they use it. You could have a technology that appears very innocent, naive, and useful, and then it gets turned into something pernicious, depending on what a person or a company wants to achieve, and the technology is constantly changing.

BOWIE: There’s an element of horror you explore that examines everything from the darkness of our inner psyche and how it plays out in the technologies we build, to the ways technologies are shaped by their users. But in early works like your Breathing Machines (1967-68), you also explore how horror can be used as a mechanism for overcoming fear.

LEESON: You have to be aware of the possibilities of what these things can be turned into, depending on who’s using them and how they’re adapted in culture. You can’t control everything. Or really, very little.

BOWIE: Computer technology is so often characterized as a masculine pursuit, and while it is dominated by men, half of its users are women, and women’s contributions are hardly ever recognized. Most people still don’t know that the first computer algorithms were conceptualized by a woman.

LEESON: Yeah, exactly. People forget that. It’s easy for a male-dominated culture to try to own everything, but this is something that was bred by Ada Lovelace and other women. So, it can’t be completely pulled into the ways that culture wants it to. I think you have to sustain those parts of it that reject and don’t want to be absorbed into a different kind of culture. I think we also need to make people aware of how influential women were, even though they were not often noted historically. Mistaken credits, especially those that were misattributed to men, need to be scrutinized and corrected.

*Conceiving Ada*, 1994.
(Video Still) 4K print from 35 mm film (digitized), color, sound
84:54 minutes

BOWIE: In 1997, you released your film Conceiving Ada, which is a sort of speculative historical reimagining of Ada Lovelace, who designed the first algorithm for a machine in the early 19th century. Yesterday, Meta and YouTube were found guilty of intentionally designing their algorithms to be addictive for children. I’m really curious about what first drew your interest in algorithmic computer technologies, and how much of this you saw coming.

LEESON: Well, I was doing a documentary on the history of the telephone when I became aware of Ada Lovelace. I had never heard of her before—I don’t think many people had. And, of course, I went to the library and looked her up, and there was only one tiny book on her. I just felt that this was critically important, something that would change our whole world. So that’s what drew me to make that film about her. I didn’t know algorithms would take over our lives or become so addictive. I just knew that it was a critical factor of communication on a global scale in a way that had never been possible.

BOWIE: In the mid-1970s, when you created Roberta Breitmore, we were in a very analog state of government surveillance. One of the things I find really interesting about this project is that you were able to procure a driver’s license, a social security card, a credit card, blood samples, dental x-rays, and other documents for her. How were you able to procure such a robust proof of identity?

LEESON: Well, I just felt it was important to create examples of what would be considered reality and what would be taken seriously. I didn’t explain anything to anybody. I just applied for them, and I got them automatically, because nobody was doing anything out of the ordinary with identity in those days. So, they just believed me. That’s who I was and what I needed.

BOWIE: Were you ever nervous about falsifying information with government agencies like the DMV or Social Security Administration? And were any of them more difficult than others?

LEESON: No, it had no precedent, so people did not expect falsified information in those days.

BOWIE: The other thing I find really fascinating about her is that you were living out the life that you constructed for her. Knowing how our ad consumption, media diet, and social interactions play such a vital role in shaping our identities on a very core level, did attending Weight Watchers meetings, going on dates, and reading beauty advice in women’s magazines start to seep into your own psyche at times?

LEESON: Not really. I mean, I made every effort to keep her separate from me. I was very aware of what she was doing, as opposed to what I was doing, and of how she reacted, versus how I would react to a situation. Because I was so aware that she had her own reality, I tried to clarify that in everything she did—especially since people thought I was schizophrenic and that I couldn’t tell the difference.

*Seduction of a Cyborg*, 1994.
(Video Still) Video (first digital video projection), color, sound
6 minutes

BOWIE: And then, with CybeRoberta (1995), you created a doll version of Roberta Breitmore, who is a very early nanny cam. She broadcasts video footage taken from her eyes onto the internet. I remember covert domestic surveillance being far more controversial in that era, as the technology was becoming commercially available. Did you ever expect it to become so socially acceptable over time?

LEESON: Yes, I knew it was coming. And it will, in the future, integrate into our lives even more.

BOWIE: At this point, constructed identities have become so inextricably integrated within our social landscape. Do you think they are a necessary byproduct of the surveillance state?

LEESON: I think so. It’s a means of protecting ourselves. We create these other representations of ourselves, but the core remains hidden.

BOWIE: Is it even possible at this point for these avatars to meaningfully protect us, or does it just give us a false sense of peace while the surveillance apparatus sifts through every trace of our existence?

LEESON: I don’t think that anybody can get away from that because it's so deeply ingrained in our culture. Everything is surveilled.

BOWIE: There have been a number of studies and articles over the last few years citing the negative effects of social media on young girls in particular. Do you feel like they’re especially predatory toward young girls?

LEESON: I think it’s that young girls need to communicate in a broader sense than just through technology, and probably in a greater way than anybody else. So they’re more prone to use it and to be affected by it—more than other people who have a wider range of possibilities.

*Construction Chart Drawing*, 1973. Ink on gelatin silver print
9¼ x 6½ inches (23.5 x 16.5 cm)

*Roberta at Gallery Opening*, 1976. RC print,
10 x 8 inches (25.4 x 20.3 cm

BOWIE: In A Room of One’s Own (1990-1993), you created a series of voyeuristic moments via the kinetograph, yet you interrupt this scopophilic impulse so that any pleasure in voyeurism is frustrated in various ways. Can you talk about the purpose of that intervention?

LEESON: I didn’t exactly mean to incite frustration. I could only do so much in that piece. I think I was just trying to make people aware of how we’re all being surveilled. I don’t think many people are really aware of the lengths to which our lives are captured by other people. And you can’t create an infinite protection of surveillance. There are limitations. And certainly it’s based on the technology that’s available and becoming available. Even now, people are not aware of how fully surveillance owns them. Technology becomes more and more capable of capturing our privacy.

BOWIE: Whether via tabloids in the past or social media now, we have this craving for “behind the scenes” access, and, of course, those private moments are their own reconstructions. There’s a very zero-sum tension between the desire to access somebody else’s privacy and the desire to protect one’s own.

LEESON: And then there’s also the question: if privacy even exists anymore. Or can it exist now in our culture? And what does that mean?

BOWIE: That’s really the enduring question of this issue. Your Synthia Stock Ticker (2000) is a simple yet poignant visual representation of the relationship between global finance and the emotional morale of a nation—two paradigms that are deeply interconnected and interdependent. How would you say the advent of social media has affected that relationship?

LEESON: I think more people became aware of that relationship. Social media makes it more easily manipulated in a way that can control the value. We rely on these external factors as a basis for who we are, rather than having it contained in any more secure way—something that’s constantly being manipulated by external forces and shifts, by things that people want to happen, which then affect personal privacy.

BOWIE: So much of your work revolves around the symbiotic relationship between technology and identity, and many of your works were created in real time alongside technological developments that were either nascent or, at times, still theoretical. What was coming up for you as you observed this relationship develop over the turn of the century?

LEESON: Well, I was lucky. I live in the Bay Area, so I was privy to ideas that people were working with. And as different elements of technology became reality, it just seemed to me that they affected who we were, how our perceptions operated, and even how we perceived ourselves.

BOWIE: It becomes an interesting mirror through which we observe ourselves. Aside from our literal use of the selfie cam as a mirror, our smartphones have become a definitive intermediary between our identity and its projection. As both the projector and the screen, our sense of self is defined as much by what we put onto the internet as it is by the response those posts receive.

*Synthia Stock Ticker*, 2000-2002. Custom software, LCD, glass and electronics, first use of stock date and behavior as net motivation, 15 x 11 x 11 inches (38.1 x 27.9 x 27.9 cm

LEESON: And how much we know about how the internet works and how we place ourselves in it.

BOWIE: In your 2002 film Teknolust, a bio-geneticist uses her own DNA to create three self-replicating automatons, one of which was named Ruby. Contemporaneously, you were commissioned by SFMOMA to create Agent Ruby, an artificially intelligent internet entity that converses with online users. She was basically a proto-chatbot. One version of Ruby is a cyborg in the corporeal sense, while the other in more of an uncanny cognitive sense. What did you ultimately want her to do for people?

LEESON: I originally wanted to create this other entity that could be online and communicate with people. I didn’t have any expectations about what she would do. So, everything was a surprise, and she kind of grew into fitting a need that culture had in communication. And also, it brings people in more direct contact than before. Our histories become public. I do not think privacy exists. I wanted Agent Ruby to be a guide for people to access the possibilities inherent in surveillance technologies.

BOWIE: Last year, a survey conducted by the Center for Democracy and Technology found that about 20% of teenagers either knew somebody or were themselves in a romantic relationship with a chatbot.

LEESON: That doesn’t surprise me. And I think it can also become dangerous if it’s not checked, because they assume that it’s a real being in their communication, and it could imply doing destructive things that people sometimes follow.

BOWIE: On one hand, I see a culture that has lost its ability to hold people in community and to support one another through an increasingly complicated world. So, I see how it fills a dire need for people who aren’t socialized to talk about their feelings or ask vulnerable questions.

LEESON: It becomes an aid for that for sure.

*Room of One’s Own*, 1990-1993. (Detail). Transferred laser disc, miniature furni-ture, surveillance system, cameras, projection15 x 16 x 35 inches (38.1 x 40.6 x 88.9 cm)

BOWIE: On the other, it feels safer, more private, even though it certainly isn’t. OpenAI has been developing an “adult mode” that would allow users to sext with ChatGPT. It’s currently on hold because there’s concern that it will create an unmitigated mental health crisis.

LEESON: People will lose the awareness that it’s just a computer and start interacting as if it were another human being. And that’s really dangerous.

BOWIE: How does it feel to see these technologies emerge, many of which are versions of ideas you had been theorizing from the late ’80s into the turn of the century?

LEESON: It feels frustrating, particularly when I’m not acknowledged. You don’t do these things just to be acknowledged, but you know how hard they were to do, and it’s like your ideas and what you’ve contributed are being stolen and put out without any reference to the origin.

BOWIE: How do you think the feminine approach to technology acts in contrast to the masculine?

LEESON I think it’s just a respect for individuals, for the eye, and for not being absorbed into cultural commodities—sustaining an individual presence that is aware of what’s around it, but also sustains itself and its own possibilities. It doesn’t lose those things.

BOWIE: How would you like the cultural understanding of your work, and your contribution to both art and technology, to be understood and carried forward?

LEESON: Well, I’ve got all of my records at Stanford, and they’re poised to assume everything I’m doing and incorporate it into their library, making it available. So it will be preserved as my work and then used as cultural changes occur in the future. You can’t predict how it’s going to go.

Lil Yachty

May 11, 2026

interview by Christelle Oyiri
photography by Jesper D. Lund

Lil Yachty—born Miles Parks McCollum in Atlanta, Georgia—crashed onto the scene a decade ago with bubblegum trap melodies and a renegade spirit, rewriting rap’s rules through playful chaos, genre-bending sound, and a cold refusal to fit any archetype. His albums have gone multi-platinum, with songs streamed in the billions. Paris-based artist and curator Christelle Oyiri, known for her sharp, culture-warping lens as Crystallmess, sits down with Yachty to discuss image and influence in a hypervisible age.

CHRISTELLE OYIRI: Hey, what’s up?

LIL YACHTY: I’m chilling. I’m chilling. I’m in LA. You in New York?

OYIRI: Yep. Do you live there?

YACHTY: No, I live in Atlanta, but I started making my last album, Let’s Start Here, in New York. And then I started working with No I.D. and a couple other producers, so I switched to LA, but I usually record albums in New York. I mixed that album with Tommy Elmhirst and it took six months because I would come in, he’d play me mixes, and he would just completely rearrange my songs. It’s like, bro, you’re supposed to mix the song; not just completely change it, but that was his thing. I heard he did that a lot with Frank [Ocean] and I heard they would get into it a lot ’cause he’d just add his own 808. I love Tom. He’s expensive as fuck, but he is good. And I love New York, man. There’s almost nothing I love more than sitting on a bench on a sunny day, and just people watching, but also just meeting people. I like New York because people are more prone to be like, “Yo bro, I love that album,” and they’ll keep going about their day. Versus being weird, like following you or sneaking pictures. In Atlanta, I don’t really go outside as much.

OYIRI: It’s very suburban in a way. It’s a homebody type of city. But you also have a complex relationship with New York. You’ve openly challenged New York culture multiple times. And you know that because you're smiling ear to ear right now. (laughs) Whether it’s about New York’s fashion sense, which I thought you were a bit misunderstood.

YACHTY: A hundred percent!

OYIRI: Or whether it’s about the Sugarhill Gang comment. Do you think that people reacted a certain way because you were wrong?

YACHTY No. I wasn’t wrong. And actually, what happened after that was a whole discourse on Twitter about old rappers having wack verses. I saw it all day. All these weak-ass old verses started going viral for being garbage. It’s still trending right now, but people hate me, so they made what I said a problem.

OYIRI: Do you think it’s about people hating you? Or do you think it’s about the fact that you’re challenging what is seen as cultural authority, and you’re exposing how fragile this narrative is? Because I don’t necessarily think that The Sugarhill Gang was trash. They were gangsters, essentially, just rapping.

YACHTY: I also don’t think they were trash. I was kind of trolling, but people be sensitive. And it be fake woke. Capital F-A-K-E woke. They wanna sit so high and mighty. Also, bro, a lot of people on the real, and I know this, they don’t know me, right? Especially if you older, you don’t keep up with me. You ain’t following my career. I feel like a lot of people don’t even know, like, when it come to rapping, I really get down. You know what I’m saying? And I was a little aggressive with my comment, but it’s like, come out-rap me then, right? You supposed to have that confidence as a rapper. We rappers, you know what I’m saying?

OYIRI: You have to have that bravado, yeah. And you’ve grown up in the public eye. When you first came out, you were seventeen. Do you think people have ever seen you for who you are? Or do you think they’re always projecting another identity onto you?

YACHTY: There’s two sides, right? I used to feel like I only got hatred. And then around Michigan Boy Boat and Let’s Start Here, I started to get respect as a rapper and as an artist. People started to defend me. Now I get love and I don’t ignore it. I appreciate it. So I don’t wanna say they don’t see me. I have such a community that stands by me and supports me and I fuck with those people. People show me so much love everywhere in the world.

OYIRI: It also comes from the fact that the people are in the know now that you’re also a very good A&R. You mentioned Michigan Boy Boat, which was released a little bit before the mainstream break of the Detroit/Flint sound. Since you’re often at the forefront of what’s gonna be popping before everybody jumps on the wave, I wanted to ask what you think is the next wave for rap? Because last year, we heard a lot of discourse on rap not streaming as much, people being tired of rap, other types of regional sound being more popping than rap, et cetera, et cetera. Where do you think rap is heading?

YACHTY: To be honest, (sighs) I can’t quite call it right now. Like, I’m paying attention and it’s interesting, man. The day before yesterday, I watched a PlaqueBoyMax Song Wars…

OYIRI: …Oh, I watched it too, with 63OG.

YACHTY: I watched it, and man, I didn’t know anyone. I don’t know where we’re going next, but there are so many guys that are trying things. And you still got Playboi Carti, you still got Uzi and YoungBoy doing his thing, and you got Tyler still in it. And Drake’s about to drop, you know? So, it’s still there and I still pray that Frank is coming. So, we still have the creatives who understand and are trying to do something new.

OYIRI: I feel like you were often framed as somebody that was rejecting tradition. That’s how you were introduced to the scene, right?

YACHTY: Interesting.

OYIRI: In a punk way. You came through with your red hair and everybody was pissed off at you. You were literally a kid and people saw you as somebody who was rejecting the way things were done back then.

YACHTY: Which wasn’t even the case. I just had an opinion. It started with me saying I felt like Biggie was overrated, you know? That was the first thing I said as a kid that really drove people insane. I’m from the South. I didn’t hear Biggie. It wasn’t what my father played. My father played Dutchavelli, OutKast, Ludacris, you know what I’m saying? I fucked with Soulja Boy, Lil B, iLoveMakonnen, and shit like that. No one’s ever shied me away from saying what I think, and no one ever could, because I’m unapologetically me, and I mean no harm.

OYIRI: Do you feel like you said that because you were challenging the New York bias in hip hop?

YACHTY: I wouldn’t say I was challenging. I was a child. I was talking from personal experience, not from truth or fact. From personal experience, Biggie was overrated to me. And that’s ’cause I was a kid and I hadn’t heard him, but Biggie is amazing. I don’t regret it, though. It shaped the trajectory of my career. I’m such a firm believer that everything happens for a reason.

OYIRI: There’s this whole cultural phenomenon of streamers broadcasting their life 24/7. I know that you’ve participated on some streams, like most rappers today, to promote and connect with younger folks. Do you think rap is becoming less about music and more about who can stay visible the longest? And what is your opinion on streamers and surveillance in general?

YACHTY: I’ll say this. I love that the next generation has made a way to be successful that fits their means. I never hate on success. Especially not Black creators. The taste level is changing. To say, for better or for worse is not for me to say, but it is changing. It’s visibly changing and the culture, when it comes to hip hop, is a double-edged sword. We are giving too much power to the opinion of certain streamers. I wish people challenged themselves to have their own opinions. That’s where we’re having problems.

OYIRI: Yes, because when your generation came through, y’all submitted to the opinion of the media powers that be, like radio personalities, journalists, magazines. And it’s good that streamers can empower themselves without having to go through institutions. They can be their own bosses, and I think that’s what you’re championing. But we’re the first generation that wakes up and completely pores over other people’s thoughts from the moment that we wake up to sundown. So, I think it’s responsible to ask people to take one hour in your day and listen to your own thoughts.

YACHTY: I think longer than one hour, but yes.

OYIRI: There’s so much noise that it’s hard for people to listen to their own thoughts and own their opinions.

YACHTY: I don't think it’s hard. I think that if you wanted to, you could. It’s easier to listen to someone else’s opinion. Easier to shapeshift. A lot of people don’t have their own balls.

OYIRI: But don’t you think that it’s hard because you’re an artist and the purpose of an artist is to be an individual, to be inclined in world-building? An artist is supposed to be a leader.

YACHTY: Yeah. But that's not always the case. It’s in you. You can’t make it. It’s from birth, you know, and it’s a lot of pretenders. At the end of the day, it can be in anyone, it comes natural to artists, but it’s in anyone. You ain’t gotta be an artist to have your own opinion. Sometimes, we get put in a chokehold by social media. And nowadays it’s such a negative place. Everything nowadays is either the best thing ever or the worst thing ever. There’s no in-between. The culture either says, “We love this,” or “This is fucking shit. Don’t ever do this again.” Any time something’s bad, everybody’s shitting on it.

OYIRI: It’s true. There’s less and less place for nuance. I wanted to talk to you about in-betweenness. The sound that you’re developing with Concrete Boys has an important soulful element that is super elegant to it, and at the same time, it includes more of a trap-driven sound. Where do you envision your next sound?

YACHTY: Well, for myself, I’m working on some shit, and it’s super cool and I’m feeling it and I think that a lot of the fans will be happy. Every time I drop anything, I always see these two specific comments. And so I’m gonna try my best to deliver those things. Unfortunately, things take time. When I made Let’s Start Here I was at arguably one of the lowest points of my career.

OYIRI: How so?

YACHTY: Well, I just wasn’t getting booked and I wasn't performing. So, I didn’t have a lot of money coming in. I was about to have my first child, so I was nervous as fuck. But I also had a lot of freedom, because nobody was checking for me. Now I got all these shows and these fucking campaigns and songwriting for all these people. I never have a big window to really work.

OYIRI: You’re also very prolific. And you always step out your comfort zone. You did a psychedelic rock album, you did a podcast, you’re also an A&R. You’ve been working with other people. You’ve been giving people your juice. You’re a father. And you face challenges with being known as a label boss. And at least you’re transparent about it instead of trying to appear perfect. What did you learn from that specific time?

YACHTY: You can’t go harder for someone than they go for themselves. I also learned that when someone is giving you red flags, don’t ignore it. I’ve always been a loving and caring person. I’ve always over-extended. I learned that it probably wasn’t best for me to go into business with my friends.

OYIRI: Maybe do more boundary work?

YACHTY: Maybe. Not really. Boundaries for what? I did what I was supposed to do. You can’t control how people react. You can’t control people’s ulterior motives. You gotta move at your own risk, you know? You just shouldn’t expect. If I’m gonna do something with somebody, it’s outta the kindness of my heart, but never because I expect something out of someone. Nothing is promised.

OYIRI: We saw each other at the Loewe show and the Loewe team was telling me about how precise you were with what you wanted to wear, and how they didn’t have to put much together. You came with your own sense of style and with a really good level of taste. What is your experience of fashion as a Southerner? How do you cultivate this sense of fashion?

YACHTY: It’s one of the biggest things, right next to music. I grew up watching my mother get dressed for work every night. My mother loves clothes. My father loves clothes. It’s just in my blood. My sister loves clothes. The mother of my child loves clothes. My kid loves clothes. It’s just a fantastic way to express yourself. Either it’s in you or it’s not. You either got it or you don’t. I’ve been blessed to be in a position where I can afford to indulge heavily, and that’s what it is.

OYIRI: You mentioned your kid several times in the interview. How do you find the balance between fatherhood, a personal life, and work? And did fatherhood change your perception of the world?

YACHTY: It’s really hard because it’s never the right time for anything. I try to really grind out during these young years that she won’t remember. But it is hard to balance a personal life, a work life, and fatherhood. And I’m not perfect. I’m learning and I’m trying to be better. But it’s amazing. There’s nothing like being a father, having a daughter. The bond and the connection. For real. My daughter’s so sweet and crazy. I don’t just live for me anymore. It eliminated a lot of ego. You know, I think before I make certain decisions that could put my family at risk. I’m just more conscious.

OYIRI: How do you deal with fame? When I was in high school, Gaga released The Fame Monster, which is arguably her best album. We don’t even give enough props to this album. I’m sure you would love it.

YACHTY: The Fame Monster. Imma listen to it.

OYIRI: Are you sometimes yearning for anonymity? Just for a few days?

YACHTY: Sometimes. Like when I was in the ER with the mother of my child and they stole a picture of us and TMZ leaked to the world that I was having a child. In that moment, I really did wish that this wasn't a thing.

OYIRI: That moment was robbed from you.

YACHTY: Yeah, but otherwise, no man, I like being who I am. I know how to control it. If I want to be seen, I go to this place. If I don’t want to be seen, I don’t go to that place. That’s why I don’t do fashion. You know, that was the second show I ever been to in ten years. I was never there. I never went to parties. It wasn’t my thing because I don’t fake kick it. It’s just not my thing. If I like you, I like you. If I don’t, I don’t. I don’t really care to mingle. Most people who do fashion can’t even dress at all. They got stylists and all that.

OYIRI: Are you a no-stylist type of person?

YACHTY: I’ve never had a stylist. I’m not the flyest nigga, but I’m a fly nigga, you know what I’m sayin?

OYIRI: I love the humility.

Kim Petras: Teknolust

May 11, 2026

romper VINTAGE CHRISTIAN DIOR
jacket DSQUARED2

interview by Oliver Kupper
photography by Paulo Sutch

Grammy Award-winning German singer-songwriter and pop provocateur Kim Petras wields a virtuosic ability to craft psycho-pop playgrounds populated by meticulously constructed cyborgian female identities—from the iconic blonde bombshell to the horror heroine. Her new album, Detour, functions as both a kaleidoscopic mixtape and a bold testament to her unparalleled skill in both persona building and destruction.

OLIVER KUPPER: I want to start with the music video for “I Like Ur Look,” because it really sets the tone for your new album, Detour, and the visuals around its branding. The video opens with you staring at a computer screen, which connects to the themes in our issue: living in a world where we are constantly watching and being watched.

KIM PETRAS: Well, in the video—and just in my life—the internet and screens have a really nostalgic quality for me. I associate a lot of childhood and teenage memories with being in chat rooms with my friends and things like that. I also sort of clumsily started my career on the internet, realizing that I could connect with people through it. And I’ve been making music on computers for most of my life, since I began as a bedroom artist. So in that sense, it’s been the ultimate tool for me. Aesthetically, with that video, it’s really about wanting to be a version of myself that’s more likable than I think I am. It’s about trying out different personas and personalities to impress someone you feel is better than you and has this fixed, confident identity. I’ve always felt like I needed to invent images and versions of myself in my art, because I often thought the real me was too boring. So I created these characters through my music, videos, and performances that felt more captivating than I am. Living through them makes life more bearable—it gives things a kind of logic and also offers an escape.

I’ve always had this strange desire to create characters who don’t feel human emotions as intensely, or who can just get whatever they want, or who are hypersexual and don’t care what that means. On one of my records, I even sing about killing people. It’s all part of building these exaggerated personas. With the new album, it’s interesting because I feel like all those characters finally come together and form a kind of “super version” made out of all the others. “I Like Ur Look,” in particular, feels like a kind of starting point. It reflects the idea of being moldable—being signed to people who tell you what you should be, what works, and what doesn’t. You internalize that and think, maybe if I just adjust myself and become all these different versions, I’ll be successful, or lovable, or whatever it is. That mindset really runs through the video. Even when I write songs, I’ll put on an outfit, even if I’m just in my home studio. I sort of get into character first. Everything is connected to the idea that, in my art, I constantly feel the need to become a character, which I actually love doing.

KUPPER: The internet not only mediates our lives but can also shape who we are and algorithmically influence our behavior, which is interesting when it comes to building characters.

PETRAS: When it comes to algorithms, though, I think they’re really scary. My biggest issue with them is censorship, especially right now. I almost feel like I need to stay somewhat outside of the algorithm in order to see it clearly. In the past, I was very online and deeply inside it, but over the last few years, it’s felt important to keep some distance so I can observe it without getting completely absorbed. What scares me is that algorithms tend to push everyone toward the same influences. People start seeing the same things and eventually become a kind of monoculture. These days, I’m careful not to look at it constantly, because even if you don’t want it to influence you, it does. For me, it’s important to stay outside of that system so I can stay true to what I actually like—curating my own references instead of being fed them. It’s tempting as an artist to look at what everyone agrees is cool or acceptable and just follow that, but I’ve always wanted to go in the opposite direction. I’m more interested in pushing against what’s socially acceptable and exploring the more taboo side of things.

KUPPER: I think the most exciting thing about your work is that you create this kind of pop playground that feels totally your own. Madonna touched on something similar in the ’90s—playing with the sacrilegious and the sexual, especially with projects like her Sex book —pushing ideas that went against the norms of the industry.

PETRAS: That’s definitely something I’m really interested in. I’m also a huge defender of bad taste. I think a big component of pop music is really good taste mixed with really bad taste. A lot of the stuff everyone wants to scream out at a party is usually the stupidest thing. The repetitiveness, the structure of pop, the fact that it can feel calculated—that’s all a little bit bad taste. But that’s what makes it interesting to me. I like playing with what people consider bad songwriting or “not art” and putting that into my music in just the right way. Because I think that’s what makes pop pop.

KUPPER: Do you feel like what you do leans more towards an art project or a pop musical project? Or is it somewhere in between?

PETRAS: I like to think of myself as an art project. It’s really freeing to think of yourself—your body, your image, all of it—as art. I think anyone can do that. There’s something liberating about approaching your life that way. So, at the center of everything for me is the art. That’s what I care about the most. But I’ve definitely dabbled in pop commercialism and been curious about it. I’ve tried to learn how that whole system works. I’ve even put out projects where I thought, okay, I’m going to let people in the music industry tell me what to do. And that, in itself, becomes a kind of commentary, especially when you place it in opposition to my other music. It raises the question of what happens when labels—or people who think hits are the only measure of success—start directing the artist. To me, that’s just as interesting as an artist doing exactly what they want.

For me, success is about moving people—making something that resonates, something people talk about, or something I personally feel proud of. If I write a song that I think is perfect, that feels like success. It’s about executing the vision and seeing it through. But for a lot of people, success means numbers and money. And I can’t say I’m completely anti-commercialism. I do want to play big shows. I don’t want to self-sabotage. I want to make things people can relate to, because that’s part of what music does—it puts emotions out into the world so someone else can hear it and think, I feel that too.

jacket STYLIST’S OWN
glasses l.a. EYEWORKS

At the same time, I’ve always resisted this songwriting idea you hear a lot in places like Nashville—that the most creative thing you can do is just “tell the truth.” That idea always kind of enraged me. I’ve never believed that truth-telling is the only creative principle. A lot of songwriters seem to follow that rule, but I’ve always been more interested in creating alternate universes than just describing what’s right here in front of us.

KUPPER: Speaking of alter egos, do you feel like your new album is almost like a super group of all of your alter egos together in one musical arena?

PETRAS: Yeah, I do. Especially vocally. I think you can really hear it in the way the vocals are treated—the different textures and characters that have built up over time. It feels like the repertoire of characters I’ve created over the years, all the ones I love, coming together. So, in a way, it does feel like a kind of “supergroup” of my characters. But at the same time, it’s also rebelling against every version of myself that came before it. This is probably the least perfect pop vocal record I’ve ever made. There are a lot of cracks, a lot of imperfections in it, and I’ve actually come to find that really refreshing. I’ve done the polished, perfect pop vocal many times before—that felt like chapter one of my career as an artist. It was about figuring out how to achieve that classic sound of pop perfection.

Now, it feels like the only way forward is to break that perfection and do the opposite—be raw instead. You can hear it in the mixing, the processing, everything. It’s intentionally opposing that earlier approach. In a way, it also mirrors the music world right now. Nostalgia is so huge—so much music sounds like a nostalgic ’80s song. And I love that too, I really do. I’ve enjoyed working with those sounds. But for me right now, that’s probably the least interesting thing I could be doing. This project feels like an opposing mirror to that. Nostalgia feels a bit boring to me at the moment, and I want to make something that feels like the future rather than the past.

Ironically, when you start thinking about the future, you end up looking back too. For me, that optimism about the future really lived in the early 2000s. That period has always been fascinating to me because it was such a formative time. In a funny way, that’s, in and of itself, nostalgic too—it’s just a different kind of nostalgia. The kind that sounds like people imagining the future. To create something that feels forward-looking, you often end up pulling from a different moment than everyone else. But honestly, with this album, most of the songs didn’t start from a sonic reference at all. They started with the songwriting—the lyrics, the ideas—and then the sounds came later. That’s new for me. Earlier in my career, the track and the production would come first, and then I’d write songs on top of them. This time it was the opposite: I had the songs first, and then we built the instrumentation around them. It made the whole process feel really different from anything I’ve done before.

KUPPER: Do you feel like there’s more vulnerability in that?

PETRAS: Yes. It’s a very vulnerable moment for me as an artist. My career started with this feeling of knowing that I wanted to be a performer and a songwriter, but also relying a lot on other people’s opinions about how to get there. Now, it feels like the rug has been pulled out from under that. I really don’t listen to anyone’s opinion except my own and my friends’, and I just want to make the music I actually want to listen to. Of course, people have opinions about that—like, am I ruining my career or not? But I actually find that really interesting, because I’ve always thought the downfall of an artist can be just as fascinating as their rise. So, there’s a bit of an orchestrated downfall happening here, even in the imagery. The hair is messy, the wigs are thin and synthetic—and not expensive wigs. The makeup is smudged, and there are bruises on my legs. It’s not that polished, perfect look anymore. I’ve always found the destruction of something perfect you built to be incredibly interesting.

glasses L.A. EYEWORKS
dress FANCI CLUB
bra AGENT PROVOCATEUR

KUPPER: That’s a rare epiphany for an artist.

PETRAS: Well, the new album is called Detour because it’s about being at a fork in the road and not choosing either path. Just going off road, saying, “I actually don’t want to stick to any road. I just want to drive this pretty pop Corvette I have off a cliff and see what happens.” Maybe none of the roads get me where I want to go, and right now I just need to take a detour. I’ve always been super sure of myself, but there was a period where my compass felt broken. Being on a number-one song with someone didn’t feel like I “made it.” Winning [a Grammy] doesn’t feel like I’ve “made it.” The only thing that feels like I’ve made it is singing songs with my fans, in whatever size rooms, and creating, being in the studio constantly. That’s where I really just want to be. Also, having a life outside of my career is something I care about now, which I never did before. It feels clumsy—my life has been nonstop, just working a lot and loving the speed of pop star life.

KUPPER: How do you deal with fame and hypervisibility?

PETRAS: Well, it’s something I’ve always strived for. In the past, I thought I needed more visibility. I needed my image to be perfectly crafted. There was so much conversation about marketing, about having a brand, like “Oh, a rebrand that’s perfect can really change your career if you just package it nicely.” And honestly, that’s just so boring to me now. The idea of the perfect brand has lost its appeal. Someone being “crafted” feels inauthentic to me. I never wanted to lock myself into a box: this is my image, this is my perfect little package that I sell. Because that box can easily become a prison. I’m really interested in breaking that character. That’s more shocking to me than doubling down on branding; making it simple, digestible for everyone. Not that I don’t love personas in general, because it is an escape for me. This is also a persona. It’s not suddenly the truest, most authentic version of me. It’s still calculated. I’m consciously trying to break the character, which is also a character. The character that wants to break itself.

I also think hypervisibility now isn’t exclusive to celebrities anymore. Everyone is hypervisible, surveilled all the time. Everyone can relate. I’ve been in songwriting sessions where people say, “It’s not relatable if you sing about being famous.” And I’m like, “Well, everyone has to manage their brand and image now. Everyone.” To be successful, to be popular, to be liked—everyone builds a brand. So for me, my friends, and even my fans, there’s this urge: I just want to throw away how everyone sees me. I want to get away from it. And that’s what this album is about.

KUPPER: Do you think that the delay in releasing the album gave you a chance to think about different approaches to how you were going to release it?

PETRAS: I think it actually was a blessing in disguise. Everything started to fall into place—especially in terms of the album’s narrative. That earlier phase, even the look, feels like a version of me that wanted to conform, to become something more easily likable. But with the next release—the official single—it’s like I’m driving that image straight off a cliff. So in a way, the delay gave me the perfect jumping-off point. I also dropped a kind of super-deluxe version before the album—what we called Pretour. We put it on YouTube and SoundCloud since I’m not allowed to officially release it, so you can’t really stream it in the usual places. But those songs are basically the map of how I got to the album. I actually think it’s a really cool way into the project: giving away the deluxe before the album even comes out. It lets people hear the extra songs that led me here, and gives you a deeper way inside the world.

KUPPER: Your song “Pop Sound” has that line: “Made for the masses, made for the money / Made for the thrill, factory girl / It’s an illusion, it’s an oasis.” It really encapsulates how a pop star exists within the machinery of the music industry.

PETRAS: To a certain extent, that is me—how my career started was very calculated. I’m going to create this character because she’s marketable, and we’re going to sell her. It feels really cathartic that the song goes there—pulls back the curtain and just says it outright: I am a product. I made myself a product, and now I have to deal with the consequences of that. At the same time, it’s also kind of a love song to music—to the craft itself. That line: “all week I tweak for your sound.” It’s about the discipline, the obsession, everything that goes into building the perfect pop product, really laboring over it. But with me, there’s always also the trans layer to it—having literally taken control of my body, and people projecting onto that, saying you’ve gone against nature, you’re manufactured, you’re fake. So the song touches on that too—on pop, on perception, on what it means to make decisions about your own body.

KUPPER: Can we talk a bit about these personas you’ve created across albums—from the horror-pop era to the blonde bombshell? Which ones do you feel most connected to? Who feels the most distant from who you really are? And who were the hardest to step into—where did they come from?

PETRAS: I think they’re all coming from different places. But honestly, none of them feel that distant. My whole music career, and why I’m an artist at all, is because I needed to invent characters in order to be myself, to express myself. Early on, I felt like I wasn’t interesting enough. I wanted to be more confident than I am, more expressive. I’m actually very shy, and I don’t always feel like I can be those things in real life. So creating a character—someone who can go on stage for me—unlocks that flow state. And that’s what I’m always trying to reach, because just thinking and being can feel overwhelming.

So, all these characters come out of that desire. If I put it behind an image, a mask, something defined, then I can perform it. I can access what makes me feel alive through that. First, there was the blonde bombshell—bratty, “I get whatever I want,” that whole thing. That early phase was very much about this exaggerated idea of the German girl going to America: vapid, blonde, hot, rich, skinny, and that’s all she cares about. That was iteration one.

KUPPER: When did things get dark?

PETRAS: That vapid blonde character developed a shadow side—like, what if underneath that, she’s actually dark? What if she’s killing for power, for fame? What’s behind the mask? After that, it shifted into something more exposed—clarity—where it’s like, okay, this is my actual inner world. Those other things are characters, but now I’m talking about real feelings. And then, that opens into hypersexuality, which was a whole other break. Before that, sex wasn’t really central to the work. But stepping into that space—being able to say whatever I want, to perform this totally sexually free version of myself—felt like breaking the character again. Even though that version isn’t fully me either.

In reality, I come from a more complicated place: a religious upbringing, a lot of family trauma, being told early on that my transition was something perverse. I have these very vivid memories of being questioned, of people trying to define me in that way. So that inevitably fed into exploring sexuality in the music. I think a lot of people saw that shift as breaking the “pop princess” image, which I’ve always been interested in doing. But it also gets you labeled really quickly—and those labels stick. It’s strange how, in some ways, the world still feels very sanitized, almost like the 1950s, in terms of what’s acceptable. There’s a line, and it’s very clear when you cross it. So, that era was kind of like, let’s just break everything. Because I admire people who are sexually free, who can just be whatever they want. I find that inspiring. But at the same time, there’s still this idea that being open about sexuality is somehow harmful or corrupting, especially for younger people.

When I think about my own childhood, it was just about singing ridiculous pop songs with my friends—it was fun, it didn’t define my life. So, it’s interesting that this fear still exists, especially when you think about how long this conversation has been going on. At the end of the day, it felt worth exploring. But it’s also not that serious—it’s not some grand political statement. It’s just fun.

Hito Steyerl: The Island

May 11, 2026

interview by Perry Shimon
photography by Marta Marinott

Artist and essayist Hito Steyerl looks at how images move—who controls them, who gets seen, and under what conditions. In books like Duty Free Art and The Wretched of the Screen, she follows the image as it slips between circulation and control. Her exhibition The Island, which was on view at Osservatorio Fondazione Prada, Milan, continues that thread, building a space where images feel unstable—never just representations, but active agents in systems of surveillance, extraction, and power.

PERRY SHIMON: It seems to me that AI is not so much an epochal new technology but rather a continuation of Silicon Valley monopoly capitalism and another wave of expropriating the knowledge commons so as to manipulate behavior and accumulate maximum profits. Is it possible to have any technological developments under capitalism that are not used against people and the environment in order to maximize shareholder profits and unlimited growth?

HITO STEYERL: Let’s set up a double-blind experiment; one situated within capitalism, the other outside. Then we will know for sure. The issue is that this is currently impractical for us. So, for now, following Neurath’s boat paradigm is probably a viable experimental strategy. Neurath’s boat strategy: One needs to fix and gradually rebuild the boat plank by plank while out on sea and stay afloat at the same time. I’d prefer to just get another boat. But for now, the dry dock is out of reach. Another angle would be to define the current postcapitalist return to state defense monopoly capitalism as already different from capitalism. An authoritarian version of Stamokap (State monopoly capitalism), something which is no longer capitalist and no longer keeps up any pretense of competition and free market. Perhaps we may end up missing trad neoliberal capitalism as something benign in comparison.

SHIMON: Your written essays and lectures tend to be very lucid and cut through the marketing hype that occludes the underlying financial motivations of these tech companies and contemporary art speculators. Your installations render these same issues in complex technospatial assemblages. I suppose at the level of accessibility, the writing and lectures are more durable and are able to circulate further. What are some of the things about the installation form that you find attractive? How do they show up in The Island?

STEYERL: It’s just two different forms. I think, coming from cinema, that experiencing it in one specific place and time with other people is a powerful format; it still activates some of the collective viewing it was originally based on. The expanded cinematic form doesn´t circulate well, but has other merits. For example, forcing people out into shared IRL space, awkward encounters in elevators, unpredictable stuff happening in the subway, etc.

SHIMON: Identifying counterexamples to platform capitalism online, the best example I’m aware of is Wikipedia: a massively co-produced knowledge commons run mostly by volunteers and providing a beloved, widely used resource to the world while operating within structures of transparency and accountability. Is this a model for search, social, mapping, and LLMs? Can you see any movements or strategies for implementing this? Perhaps in a particular region like the EU? Do you have any thoughts on Switzerland’s Apertus AI? Is this a step in that direction?

STEYERL: Definitely, one should try to have public models and run them as data commons or cooperatively. There will be new problems for sure, but at least they will be new. Don’t overestimate Wikipedia, though. It is full of spooks, especially in smaller states who eagerly uphold nationalist narratives. Paid bots—it feels like the war in the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup between the fictional countries Freedonia and Sylvania.

Hito Steyerl, Stills from: *The Island*, 2025
Single channel HD video, Cinema; Quantum noise holograms; Archaeo-logical projection spheres; Documentary videos. Duration 26 minutes (Single channel HD video); installation dimensions variable. Image CC 4.0. Courtesy of the artist, Fondazione Prada, Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York, and Esther Schipper, Berlin/Paris/Seoul

SHIMON: On a fundamental level, is the reproduction of statistical probabilities an acceptable enough definition of intelligence? And as more people adopt this corporate epistemic regime, does that both stall the production of new and differing knowledges as well as train an analytically impoverished generation of passive prompters? On the other hand, does this kind of statistical inference have more narrow and specific uses and benefits?

STEYERL: I don’t care about intelligence; it is a fundamentally racist term. I think all of the above are already happening, including people finding convincing use cases for statistical machines beyond what we know already to be useful–some kinds of modelling, process optimization, simulation, big data processing, pattern recognition, and analysis. Plus, of course, a lot of corporate-induced, top-down epistemic impoverishment and imposed bullshit.

SHIMON: I get the sense that AI excels at producing the kind of throwaway, platitudinous writing necessitated by the white-collar, professional-managerial positions the late David Graeber called ‘bullshit jobs’—which is actually a very useful study of this class of work. As AI agents act on behalf of both information producers and consumers, are we simply heading towards a full automation of bullshit jobs? And more significantly, what does that mean for the growing masses of immiserated precariat that the professional managerial class will soon be joining?

STEYERL: Yes, good point. Immiseration or retraining as massage therapists. Agentic unemployment.

SHIMON: Is employment in the plantation-industrial mode favored by modernity aspiration at all? Or even existentially survivable? Are you aware of any clearly formulated alternative modes of organizing society that prioritize health, safety, happiness, free time to be shared with loved ones, and remediating the ruins of the ecological devastation brought about by the modern modes of production?

STEYERL: Yes, there are many. How, or if, they actually are able to function is another question, or the question itself may be dysfunctional somehow.

SHIMON: There seems to be a limitless amount of enthusiasm and support for science fiction-themed art works these days within liberal institutions. My concern is this distracts from clear political agendas and broad coalition building. It seems to relegate alternative political imaginaries to the realm of fantasy and elite cultural institutions. Do you see any examples of science fiction works informing political action? I tend to find it more common that dystopian science fiction seems to influence future technocrats. What kind of affordances does the genre offer you in The Island?

STEYERL: From the days of Thomas More's Utopia (1516), science fiction is inseparable from political imaginaries. Very different ones too, from colonial to fascist to revolutionary. [Alexander] Bogdanov’s Red Star [The First Bolshevik Utopia (1908)] as an example of the latter. There is everything, from a moron like Lovecraft to authors like Octavia Butler or Ursula Le Guin. Darko Suvin's works give you interesting insights about this whole spectrum, I wholeheartedly recommend them to anyone.

SHIMON: In your recent Tehran summit lecture you mention the collapse of the division of labor between capitalists, politicians, and the media, citing the example of Elon Musk in the US who is all at once. There was a recourse to an open question of whether these emerging technologies are inherently fascist as well as an acknowledgement that the speed in which these technologies are evolving and acting on the world make them resistant to stable theorization. I agree to some extent while acknowledging a consistent trajectory and continuity of power relations. Have you settled on a position regarding the fascist question in regards to these technologies?

STEYERL: For now, owned and controlled mostly by different types of authoritarians. In 30, 50, 200 years, probably a completely different story.

SHIMON: In your “Roko’s basilisk: [artificial stupidities and existential risk]” essay you cite the Biosphere 2 project as an early model for both space colonization and the reality show, the latter being categorized as both an artificial performance of the socially constructed idea of natural selection and perhaps less obviously a performance of extinction—which seems to be the inevitable trajectory of our current growth-oriented economic model. You go on to call this a kind of “survival spectacle” that impacted the development of many other cultural forms and then muse on what kinds of cultural knock-on effects will result from the push towards artificial general intelligence. Since the time of writing this essay, have you tracked or anticipated any developing cultural mutations as a result of the developing AI imaginary?

STEYERL: I was always fascinated by this picture of a protest in front of Refik Anadol’s work at MoMA. Sixteen climate protesters were arrested who were condemning MoMA’s Board Chair’s ties to the fossil fuel industry. They seemed to create a human power cord to the massive LED screen. Don’t ask me how, but I think this situation has the potential to mutate culturally in ways which are hard to anticipate as of yet.

SHIMON: Here on Earth, we have infrastructural crises like automobilism, petrocapitalism, and industrial animal farming—to name a few. There seems to be an ongoing call for more planetary data collection and processing to make better-informed decisions. I’m concerned this is simply a marketing tactic by the technology sector and the becoming-planetary technocracy. I’m not convinced any of these infrastructural problems are truly suffering from a lack of data. Furthermore, the epistemic arena of data sovereignty appears susceptible to a never-ending disconsensus and calls for ever more data collection. Rather, it seems to be a question more of political will. Beyond identifying the acts of mystification and diversion from technology companies, what other epistemic refoundation should be taking place?

STEYERL: Gödel argued that the axioms of a system cannot be verified within a system. Meaning that you cannot compute the rationale for using computation, or the objectives of an economic, or basically, any system. You cannot answer the question of why you need more data by providing more data. It’s just a bad infinity of ever more data otherwise.

SHIMON: Your prolonged attention, critical interrogations, and speculative interventions seem to require an almost constant countersurveillance of this technological regime. It occurred to me while reviewing your essays and projects that there is both a lucid stream of critical explication and also some rather monstrous hyperarticulations or caricatures of these technologies. Have you given much thought to this bifurcation of approaches? I found myself wondering if your art practice is not a sublimation of the psychic maladies attending this degree of attention and countersurveillance to such horrific themes.

STEYERL: Maybe. I am not in possession of the truth or authoritative reading of my works, so if you say so, then why not? How do we test your hypothesis?

An Interview of Hart Lëkshina

May 11, 2026

interview by Anna Frost

In Boy World Effigy II, the Los Angeles-based artist duo Hart Lëshkina (Tati Lëshkina and Erik Hart) cast a historic Danish boys’ choir as a study of collective order and individual freedom. Their multichannel video installation, shown at Copenhagen’s O—Overgaden Institute of Contemporary Art in 2025, unfolds across multiple synchronized screens. Each visual and sonic element is carefully choreographed so that even apparent moments of dissonance are deliberately integrated into the work’s unity. The viewer is enveloped by a field of voices, gestures, and glances as the piece shifts from harmony into measured unraveling, demonstrating a system that remains tightly controlled, even as it breaks.

The work incorporates systems of watching and being watched: the choir’s synchronized formations resemble regimes of observation, while slips and asynchronies expose the seams of control. The installation turns the gallery into both a stage and a monitoring room, implicating the viewer as an active surveillant whose gaze assembles meaning across channels. At the same time, the piece probes internalized surveillance in the ways discipline and self-regulation form subjectivity, so that the effigy functions like an avatar under continuous scrutiny, alternately performing compliance, vulnerability, and resistance. By collapsing aesthetic choreography with techniques of observation, the work asks whether visibility protects, annuls, or remakes the person at its center.

Hart Lëshkina
Scroll 1, boy 3 (*Boy World Effigy II*), 2026
C-type prints with oil stick, and charcoal on paper

ANNA FROST: How did you first get the idea of working with a boys’ choir?

ERIK HART: Youth choirs are something we have been researching and circling around for several years. Our practice often engages with power structures, avatars, personal agency, constructed realities, and the emergence of the self through the performance of the other. When we began thinking about these ideas spatially and physically, the choir felt like a compelling subject.

TATI LËSHKINA: We were particularly drawn to working with a youth choir because this age group presents a moment when identity is still in flux; not yet crystallized as much as that of adult performers. While our work is not about youth or coming of age, we often find that younger performers retain an openness and a less resolved, more fluid, and unstudied relationship to self-presentation.

FROST: How do you think this subject matter shaped the work?

LËSHKINA: A choir functions as a single body, and it is often described as an instrument, yet it is composed of many distinct voices. That tension was compelling to us and the choir—it became a metaphor for how identity forms within structure. It holds cohesion and dissonance simultaneously; discipline produces harmony, but harmony requires surrender. Breath, tone, posture, and timing all must align. The individual voice exists, yet it must continually calibrate itself against the collective.

Hart Lëshkina
*Boy World Effigy* IIinstallation view,
O-Overgaden Institute for Contemporary Art, Copenhagen, 2025

HART: Within the performative sequences we constructed, we were interested in observing the subtle moments when an individual becomes aware of themselves as both participant and subject, both inside the structure and slightly outside it. In that sense, the choir is not simply a subject for us; it is a mechanism—a living system in which the self and the structure are constantly negotiating space.

FROST: How intentionally do you design moments of vulnerability for the subjects versus allowing vulnerability to arise spontaneously?

HART: We do not approach vulnerability as something to extract or stage. What we construct are conditions and frameworks. Sometimes those frameworks are structured with a clear beginning, middle, and end. Other times, they operate more like prompts, fragments of text, behavioral scores, or spatial instructions that participants must navigate. The architecture might be defined, but what unfolds inside it is not fixed. For us, the situation has to be actively inhabited. It cannot feel predetermined. We are less interested in directing an emotional outcome than in observing how individuals move through a system we have proposed. The framework establishes rhythm, alignment, and pressure. Within that structure, there is always something uncharted.

LËSHKINA: Vulnerability tends to surface in that uncharted space. In the hesitation between gestures, in the recalibration of posture. In the moment when someone becomes aware of themselves inside the choreography. Often it is subtle rather than dramatic. A breath that falls slightly out of sync. A gaze that lingers. A recognition of being seen.

HART: We remain responsive to those shifts. The process is reciprocal. If something unexpected emerges, we adjust in real time. So, there is intention in the architecture of the situation, but not in scripting fragility. We build the container. The interior remains alive. Vulnerability is not imposed. It arises through navigation, through friction within structure, through the tension between control and surrender.

FROST: Where does this work place itself in your overall practice?

HART: Boy World Effigy II sits in close dialogue with many of the conceptual threads that run through our work. We repeatedly return to questions around collective identity, systems of behavior, and the subtle mechanics through which individuals locate themselves within larger structures. At its core, our practice examines how individuals are shaped by systems they both inhabit and reproduce. We are drawn to moments where identity feels unstable, where the boundary between authenticity and performance begins to blur. Much of our work operates within that tension between interiority and external structure, between instinct and choreography. Our broader practice often stages constructed environments in which figures appear suspended between roles. They are neither fully autonomous nor fully controlled. There is often an undercurrent of ambiguity around who is leading, who is following, who is observing, and who is being observed.

LËSHKINA: Boy World Effigy II intensifies these ongoing concerns. Conceptually, it brings together several threads that have long been present in our work: the collective body, ritualized behavior, the aesthetics of discipline, and the quiet negotiation between agency and conformity. We have always been interested in how power circulates, through gesture, posture, repetition, and shared codes. The choir becomes a concentrated site where these dynamics are made visible. In this work, that ambiguity is amplified through the structure of the choir itself. The collective voice produces unity, yet each individual must continually modulate themselves in relation to others. It becomes a choreography of mutual surveillance and mutual dependence.

Hart Lëshkina
Video stills from *Boy World Effigy II*, 2025

FROST: Could you elaborate on how the installation’s spatial and sonic structures reveal some of the core principles of the work?

HART: In Boy World Effigy II, the choir is not simply a subject but a living architecture. It embodies structure. The individuals inside it enact a system that is at once protective and constraining. That duality mirrors a recurring tension within our practice: systems that nurture while also demanding surrender. The installation format allows these ideas to unfold spatially. The four-channel structure creates simultaneity rather than hierarchy, while the eight-channel sound circulates through the space, shaping the viewer’s physical and perceptual experience. Video, spatial composition, and sonic choreography operate together as a single organism. They are all independent structures that function as a whole.

FROST: How does the concept of surveillance appear in your practice?

HART: Surveillance enters our work less as a literal device—we are not usually depicting overt systems of monitoring. Instead, we are interested in the internalization of being seen. Across several projects, we construct environments and personas where figures are acutely aware of one another. Individuals observe and calibrate themselves in relation to others. Posture shifts, gestures become slightly heightened. A performance emerges because the presence of the collective generates a field of mutual awareness. It operates through proximity, repetition, and shared codes. In group formations, choreographed sequences, or ritualized behaviors, there is often an undercurrent of self-regulation. The body adjusts itself before it is corrected. The performance precedes the command. We are interested in that moment where discipline has already been absorbed.

Surveillance also appears in our work through the idea of the avatar and the projection of potential selves. In contemporary digital culture, identity is constantly mediated through screens, software, and platforms. Social media, gaming environments, and commodification of the self encourages individuals to construct versions of themselves that are simultaneously curated and monitored. One becomes both subject and spectator of one’s own image. The self is performed in anticipation of being seen and quantified.

We are drawn to that loop, the way projection becomes a form of self-surveillance. In our work, figures often appear aware of their own image, as if inhabiting a version of themselves that is slightly externalized. This tension between embodied presence and projected persona mirrors broader digital conditions where visibility and validation are intertwined. Spatially, we sometimes destabilize the viewer’s position. There is no singular point of control. Perception becomes fragmented or distributed. The viewer is implicated in the act of watching while simultaneously feeling watched by the image or the environment itself. Surveillance becomes reciprocal.

LËSHKINA: We like the idea that systems reproduce themselves through participation. Surveillance is not only imposed from above. It is sustained laterally, through imitation, alignment, aspiration, and desire. That tension between agency, projection, and self-monitoring continues to surface in different forms across our practice.

Hart Lëshkina
Video still from *Boy World Effigy II*, 2025

FROST: How do you build the peripheral world around a work, and how does it feed back into the piece?

HART: When we make a work, we are always building a world around it and a psychological ecosystem, both before and after it takes form. Creating on the periphery is part of our process, not something separate from it. The work develops through an expanding system of materials, ideas, and interventions that exist in dialogue with one another. This includes text pieces, drawings, manipulated images, collage, painting, and collected artifacts that we alter and work with over time. These elements are not supporting material but part of the same body of thought, each holding equal significance within the work’s evolving language. For us, this process is ongoing. The peripheral world continues to evolve alongside the work itself, shaping how it is experienced and understood, and ultimately becoming inseparable from the piece.

Hart Lëshkina
*Scroll 3, boy 5 (Boy World Effigy II)*, 2026
C-type prints with oil stick, and charcoal on paper, digital print on vellum, oil paint and ash

FROST: What attracts you to the tension between beauty and dysfunction?

LËSHKINA: Beauty is not something we set out to pursue when making the work. It is not a goal or a guiding principle. If moments read as beautiful, they emerge as a byproduct of form, alignment, or atmosphere, not as an objective. What draws us is the space between cohesion and fracture. We are interested in the instability beneath surfaces that appear resolved. Harmony is compelling to us precisely because it contains the possibility of collapse. A system that functions smoothly is also one that demands calibration, repetition, and containment. Within that structure, dysfunction is not an interruption from the outside. It is latent and embedded.

Rather than opposing beauty and dysfunction, we are interested in the space where coherence begins to destabilize. It is where realization occurs: an individual or environment conveys both its participation and its function within a structure, and its distance from it.

Hart Lëshkina
Video stills and installation views from *Boy World Effigy II*
O-Overgaden Institute for Contemporary Art, Copenhagen, 2025

FROST: How does the type of anonymity that digital-ness allows for affect the capacity for vulnerability or authenticity?

LËSHKINA: We do not experience digital-ness primarily as concealment. We experience it as a space of projection and rehearsal. What is often dismissed as anonymous or unreal can, for many individuals, be the first site where unrealized selves are articulated. The avatar, the curated image, and the constructed feed are not simply masks. They are speculative embodiments. The face someone constructs online is sometimes closer to the face they wish they woke up to. Digital space becomes a laboratory for identity. It allows desire to take form visually before it is fully lived. That process carries vulnerability. To project a potential self publicly is to expose aspiration. That gesture is fragile.

At the same time, digital-ness operates like a contemporary ritual system. It has its own choreography. Posting, editing, archiving, scrolling, responding. These are repetitive gestures performed daily, almost devotionally. Visibility functions as belief. Validation becomes a kind of communion. Participation is both voluntary and expected. In that sense, it resembles a social religion, structured by codes, aesthetics, and collective witnessing.

What complicates this further is that digital identity is both fluid and enduring. The self can be revised, stylized, and reimagined, yet it is also documented and stored. The projection becomes an archive. The archive becomes memory. Authenticity is not something that exists outside of this structure. It is negotiated within it. Identity is iterative. It is performed in relation to others. Digital-ness does not simply obscure the self. It becomes a stage where aspiration, embodiment, surveillance, and longing intersect.

Hart Lëshkina
Thoughts, Prayers (*Boy World Effigy II*), 2025
Archival Herning Kirkes Dregenkor letter head with ink

FROST: How does the horizontal reorientation alter the emotional relationship between viewer and depicted subject compared with portrait/scroll consumption?

HART: With much contemporary media consumption, it is experienced through an infinite vertical scroll, often designed to be consumed in isolation. What is usually compressed into the solitary gesture of the hand becomes spatial, architectural. With this work, vertical media is reoriented and unfolds across a horizontal plane. We imagined a horizon the viewer could inhabit and gaze up rather than control. The handheld world expands beyond reach, and the viewer is no longer manipulating the media; they are confronted by it.

FROST: The fragmented style and speed of the work prevent the viewer’s possibility of seeing everything. How does this partial visibility shape the emotional narrative—what is revealed versus what remains occluded?

LËSHKINA: The fragmentation is deliberate. It mirrors conditions we are living within, where perception is continuous, layered, and interrupted.

All artworks: Hart Lëshkina, *Boy World Effigy II*, 2025/2026 ©. Courtesy of the artist

HART: Digital media is consumed in fragments. We scroll, swipe, and screenshot. We absorb partial narratives and move on. Attention is distributed. There is rarely a singular, stable vantage point. That rhythm of acceleration and disposal shapes how images are digested. We wanted the structure of the work to echo that condition, while slowing it at selected moments just enough to make the viewer aware of it.

The four channels operate simultaneously. Something is always unfolding beyond your field of vision. You are forced to choose where to look, knowing that you are missing something elsewhere in the peripheral. That impossibility of total comprehension produces tension, not through spectacle, but through awareness of limitation. The off-screen space holds pressure. The unseen is not absent; it is presence withheld. It suggests that the system extends beyond any single image or moment. Cohesion is felt, but never fully secured. The viewer experiences the work in fragments, in overlaps, in partial alignments. That condition reflects both the internal dynamics of the collective and the broader digital environment in which perception is constantly mediated, accelerated, and incomplete.

FROST: What are your future plans for this project?

HART: We are currently in the process of developing a book with stills from this work, which we anticipate releasing in late spring. The work was conceived to function primarily within an exhibition format, as a physical and experiential installation. That immersive condition remains central. However, from the earliest stages of conceiving the scenarios, we were acutely aware of the still image. We understood that certain frames would hold independently, that they could sustain their own internal tension within the sequence of a book. In the book form, the images will become more fragmented. Without the audio and the motion, the viewer will encounter a quieter but more porous structure. The pacing is determined by the reader’s own rhythm. We like the idea that the absence of sound and motion leaves space for projection. The viewer supplies their own internal soundtrack, their own sequencing, their own interpretation of what precedes or follows each frame. In that sense, the book will not replicate the installation. It will reframe it. Hopefully, allowing the work to function through stillness, through gaps, through the space between images.

Boy World Effigy II will be shown next at the Sound and Art Festival SPOR in Aarhus this April. From there, we are planning to show the work in Paris and Los Angeles. The project was conceived to adapt to various sites, and we are currently in dialogue around how it can evolve within different architectural and cultural contexts. We are also in the midst of developing a new sound work, which we intend to show this summer in Europe, and have been finishing a couple of bodies of mixed-media and installation works we plan to show next.

An Interview of Gus Van Sant

May 11, 2026

interview by Hans Ulrich Obrist
photography by Roman Kova

Gus Van Sant’s films are subtle, poetic studies of rupture—elegies for the marginalized, fissures in the mythology of the American Dream, and quiet reflections of the inequities that shape it. Now, a first monograph from Blue Moon Press brings his expansive, lesser-seen painting practice into focus, revealing a parallel language running alongside the films. His latest feature, Dead Man’s Wire, turns to a true 1970s hostage story, extending his long-standing interest in the strange, fragile edges of American life.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST: So, what were your beginnings in filmmaking? I’m always curious about how it starts, especially for artists who didn’t necessarily set out to be filmmakers.

GUS VAN SANT When I went to art school in the mid-70s, everyone was a painter. That was kind of the default identity—you were a painter. But at the same time, everyone was trying to do other things. It was a very open environment in that sense. The guys who became Talking Heads were there, and they started playing music. Painters were moving into photography. There wasn’t this strict separation between disciplines. In my case, I started doing films. But that wasn’t because I had always wanted to be a filmmaker. I actually really wanted to pursue painting. That was my main interest. Film was something I began experimenting with alongside that. It felt like an extension of what painters were already doing in the ’60s—people like Stan Brakhage, who were literally painting on film, scratching on film, treating it as a material.

OBRIST: Structuralist film, that whole approach.

*Untitled*, 2016, silkscreen on linen, 108 x 78" (274 x 198
cm), photo by Ben Marvin

VAN SANT: Exactly. It was very material, very hands-on. So, when I got to school and realized there was a film department, I thought, okay, this is great—I can play there. But once you entered the film department, there was this expectation that you would stay there. They wanted you to focus, to specialize, not to keep moving between mediums. For me, though, it never felt like traditional filmmaking. Everyone was doing something unique. Some people were doing documentaries, others were doing animation. There wasn’t really a single model. I think I was trying to see if I could make something that resembled Hollywood films, but coming out of that experimental context. So I started working with characters, with storylines, and gradually it began to move more toward what we’d recognize as narrative cinema.

OBRIST: Are there any student films from that time that you still consider valid, or that you look back on as important?

VAN SANT: There’s one—my senior project. It’s called Late Morning Start. It’s about twenty-five minutes. It’s technically a student film, but it actually looks kind of good. I still feel okay about it.

OBRIST: Does it have a plot, or is it closer to that Brakhage style?

VAN SANT: It doesn’t really have a plot. It sort of follows one character to the next. It’s more like drifting between people. Almost like Elephant, actually. And later, I realized that Elephant was kind of a return to that structure—it’s like my senior project again, in a way.

OBRIST: So, already there, at the beginning, you can see elements that reappear later.

VAN SANT: Yeah, definitely. I think that happens a lot—you circle back to things you were doing early on, even if you don’t realize it at the time.

OBRIST: And then painting—because you mentioned earlier that you originally wanted to be a painter—you returned to it later in a more focused way.

VAN SANT: That happened unexpectedly. James Franco had taken My Own Private Idaho and recut it into his own version, and he was going to show it at Gagosian. This was around the time he was hosting the Oscars and also doing art, so there was a lot of attention on that crossover. They asked if there was anything I could put on the walls to accompany the film. So, I made some big watercolor paintings. And through that process, I realized, okay, maybe I should actually start making paintings again—not just casually, but seriously.

OBRIST: So, it wasn’t a gradual return. It was more like a re-entry through a specific moment.

VAN SANT: Yeah, exactly. Before that, I had been making paintings, but mostly as gifts for friends. Small things, personal things. I wasn’t thinking of them as part of a larger practice.

OBRIST: I remember seeing one of those, actually, many years ago, when I went to Prospect Cottage, the Derek Jarman house. It was a small painting, and I later found out you had given it as a gift.

VAN SANT: Yeah, that sounds right. I was doing those kinds of paintings back then. I remember giving one to Derek when he was sick, toward the end of his life. We met at the Berlin Film Festival and worked on projects together.

*Untitled*, 2016, silkscreen on linen, 54 x 52” (137 x 132
cm), photo by Ben Marvin

OBRIST: That was actually the first painting of yours I ever saw.

VAN SANT: Oh, that’s interesting.

OBRIST: Have you since exhibited the paintings more formally?

VAN SANT: Yeah, those early, larger works were part of an exhibition at Vito Schnabel’s gallery in New York. That was one of the first times they were shown in a more public way.

OBRIST: You mentioned earlier that you started very young with art.

VAN SANT: Yeah, around eleven. We had a really good art teacher who made a big impression. He was painting in class—acrylics—and we were all kind of copying him, emulating what he was doing. We were making abstracts, semi-abstracts, sometimes fully abstract. It felt very free. We were also doing silk screens. We’d make posters for school dances, things like that. There was already this combination of fine art and practical design. And I’ve continued doing prints—I still do silk screens.

OBRIST: And then, later, when you moved to Los Angeles, Hollywood Boulevard became a kind of subject for you.

VAN SANT: When I first moved here, I lived right on Argyle, near Hollywood and Vine. At that time—and still, in some ways—Hollywood Boulevard was like a center—like your town. You could walk up and down, go to the library, the post office, and find food. Everything you needed was there, and a lot of the people there were in a similar position—just arriving, trying to get work in Hollywood. There were musicians playing on the street, people performing, trying to get noticed. A lot of people without steady work just improvising their way through the day. I still live relatively close, so it stayed in my mind. I started thinking about that street as a kind of ecosystem—the people on it, the routines, the atmosphere.

OBRIST: And the characters—you have these recurring figures.

VAN SANT: It was kind of crazy. You’d see people dressed as Batman or Superman, buskers, people who had been there for years. Some kids hanging around cafes, sometimes homeless, sometimes just drifting. At one point, I started writing a version of My Own Private Idaho based on those kids on the street. They were fictional, but inspired by what I was seeing—kids playing video games in stores, hanging out in cafes. The street itself was almost like a stage. Movies were playing in theaters, people were sleeping inside them, and at the same time, something like Star Wars would have a premiere.

*Untitled*, 2011, watercolor on paper, 24 x 18” (61 x 45.7 cm), courtesy of Gagosian Gallery, photo by Douglas M. Parker Studio

OBRIST: So, the boundary between cinema and life is very thin in that environment.

VAN SANT: Yeah, exactly. It all overlaps.

OBRIST: And your painting practice evolved alongside that. You moved into different materials—large resin paintings on aluminum, larger formats.

*Mona Lisa #1l*, 2022, oil on linen, 150 x 96” (381 x 244 cm), photo by Ben Marvin

VAN SANT: Some of the later works are on aluminum panels, larger, more constructed. They’re still often based on photographs. Over the last fifteen years, I’ve made a lot of different series. There was also a pixelated series that started as an experiment—I just wanted to see if the image would show up at all. And then I kept going, and it became a whole body of work.

OBRIST: And the pixelated Mona Lisa series—there’s this idea of repetition and variation in the Deleuzian sense.

VAN SANT: Some of them are deconstructed versions of the Mona Lisa. Others only resolve if you view them in a certain way—through a phone, or from a distance. So perception becomes part of the work.

OBRIST: Do you think of those as optical experiments?

VAN SANT: Yeah, in a way. It’s about how the image comes together—or doesn’t—depending on how you look at it.

OBRIST: And drawing—does that remain central?

VAN SANT: Most of the paintings start as drawings. I sketch them out, and then I scale them up.

OBRIST: And your photographic portraits of actors—that’s another thread.

VAN SANT: Those were originally very practical. At the time, there was no internet, no easy way to look someone up. If an actor came in, you’d take a picture so you could remember them. Otherwise, they’d just disappear.

*Untitled (Hollywood 5)*, 2019, watercolor on linen, 84 x 66” (213.4 x 167.6 cm),
courtesy of Vito Schnabel Gallery, photo by Argenis Apolinario

OBRIST: Have you thought about film beyond the cinema space—installations, environments?

VAN SANT: Only really through collaborations. With Franco, we showed the entire rushes of My Own Private Idaho—like twenty hours—in an installation. That was interesting because it changed how you experienced the material. But I haven’t fully explored that idea myself. It would be interesting to use film as an environment.

OBRIST: And unrealized projects—you mentioned there are many.

VAN SANT: Yeah, hundreds. That’s pretty normal, I think. A lot of them get started—you write something, you work on it for a week, and then it stays in that one state. There was one about Warhol that eventually became a play in Portugal. Another called The King’s Story is set in medieval times. It’s a story about a lowly character that attracts the king’s attention. And one I really like is about a retirement home—Kirkland Only Hearts Club Band. That came from my father being in a rest home. The people there had these incredible pasts—bush pilots, adventurers—and then they all ended up together in this one place. That could still be a film, or even a series. There are others—a vampire story, a fashion story set in Paris. Too many to count.

OBRIST: And your most recently completed film?

VAN SANT: It’s called Dead Man’s Wire. It’s a true crime story. A man abducts his mortgage broker because he believes the mortgage company is stealing his idea for a mall. It’s set in the 1970s in the Midwest. He builds this device, a gun attached to a wire around the victim’s head. So they’re physically connected. If the victim moves, it could trigger the gun. They’re together like that for three days. It’s almost like a Samuel Beckett situation—two characters bound together. He demands that the news broadcast his statement, so he can speak directly to the public. Eventually, he gives up, gets arrested, but becomes something of a local celebrity and receives a relatively light sentence.

*Untitled*, 2016, silkscreen on linen, 48 x 38” (122 x 96.5 cm), photo by Ben Marvin

*Untitled,* 2016, silkscreen on linen, 84 x 120” (213 x 305 cm), photo by Ben Marvin

OBRIST: And what are you thinking about next?

VAN SANT: There are a few things in development, but I’m most excited about doing a rom-com. I want to write it myself. That’s the part I enjoy the most, when it comes from your own writing.

OBRIST: Do you write everything on a computer?

VAN SANT: Yeah. It’s just faster. You can edit as you go, move things around. I sometimes wish I still wrote longhand, but the computer makes it easier.

OBRIST: And your scripts—sometimes they’re entirely yours, sometimes adaptations.

VAN SANT: Exactly. My Own Private Idaho is completely mine. Drugstore Cowboy, I adapted it, but it was based on an unpublished manuscript written by James Fogle while he was in prison. So, sometimes I’m adapting, sometimes it’s just my own ideas.

OBRIST: Have you ever written poetry?

VAN SANT: Not really. But I’ve written songs, and those are basically poems. I made a few albums in the early ’80s. One was a collaboration with William Burroughs, The Elvis of Letters. Another was 18 Songs About Golf. I had one of those four-track recorders—the one Springsteen used for Nebraska. That was a big revelation. You could just record at home very simply. It was very DIY.

OBRIST: And golf—there’s a recurring connection.

VAN SANT: Yeah, I grew up with it. My family played. I also worked on adapting Golf in the Kingdom by Michael Murphy. That became another unrealized project for me.

OBRIST: So many of these ideas remain open, still possible.

VAN SANT: Yeah, that’s the thing. They don’t really disappear. They just stay there. There was also a project I was developing about the world of spiritual healers, as a kind of business structure. Like an art fair, but for spiritualists. They’d have booths, agents, managers, their own philosophies. It was fictional, but based on real dynamics in that world.

OBRIST: That sounds like something that could still happen.

VAN SANT: Yeah, it could. A lot of these things could.

OBRIST: And now, you’re returning again to writing something entirely your own.

VAN SANT It’s been a while, and it’s the most fun. So I want the next one to come from that place.

Cristine Brache: The Earliest Subjects of Technological Looking

May 6, 2026

Cristine Brache, *Apprehension*, 2025. Oil, ink, and encaustic on cotton and wood. 121.92 x 91.44 cm / 48 x 36 in

It’s here, everything—
Everything anyone ever
Dreamed of, and more.
But love is lost:

The only sacrifice
To live in this heaven,
This Disneyland
Where people are the games.

– Dorothy Stratten

Interview by Summer Bowie

Dorothy Stratten, a blonde bombshell ingénue of the late 1970s, was plucked from obscurity while working in a Vancouver Dairy Queen at the just-underripe age of seventeen. Her preternatural beauty caught the eye of small-time pimp and nightclub promoter Paul Snider, who quickly realized that she was his ticket into Hollywood, though naturally, he convinced her it was the other way around. Within two short years, she found herself married to Snider and a valuable asset to Hugh Hefner after successfully transitioning from Playmate to screen actor. In 1980—her final year—Stratten was named Playmate of the Year and cast opposite John Ritter in Peter Bogdanovich’s They All Laughed, a film that follows a group of male private investigators who blur the line between surveillance and seduction. During production, Snider, suspicious of an affair between Stratten and Bogdanovich, hired a private investigator to confirm it. Stratten ultimately filed for divorce, serving Snider with papers along with her first voluntary alimony check. He responded with brutal violence: maiming her face, raping her, and killing her with a shotgun, and then raping her again before taking his own life. In the aftermath, Bogdanovich published a memoir, The Killing of the Unicorn: Dorothy Stratten 1960–1980, recounting her final year. Teresa Carpenter’s investigative feature for The Village Voice was later adapted into Star 80, Bob Fosse’s film starring Mariel Hemingway as Stratten.

It was when Cristine Brache discovered Stratten’s poetry that she realized how much of her story had been lost in the shadow of her titillating centerfolds and violent, untimely demise. Spanning the three stories of Bernheim’s London townhouse, Brache’s Centerfolds draws inspiration from Stratten’s life as a case study demonstrating the power of the gaze in extracting our identities. Employing a combination of encaustic paintings, interactive sculpture, and a fragrance of increasing potency on each floor, Brache exhausts the male gaze with her indefatigable focus on its mechanisms. The Well is a sculpture of a miniature house with a chimney that serves as a long viewfinder through which one watches a short video. In it, a cartoon Playboy playmate waxes philosophical about the role of the well across cultures throughout history. She then proposes the lens as a proper metaphor for the well in our current age. Much like the fragrance, the video has an accelerating power that cuts off quickly, yet remains heavy in your memory, offering a potential counterbalance to the subtle extraction of our egos as we scroll to the bottom, accept, and continue.

SUMMER BOWIE: Dorothy Stratten’s story is so fascinating because it’s rare for somebody to posthumously regain relevance. This exhibition recovers a lot of the volume that her legacy has been missing and offers a refreshing lens for observing it.

CRISTINE BRACHE: The project really began when I discovered her poetry. I’d known about Dorothy Stratten for years, but reading her writing revealed an interior voice that’s almost completely absent from the story most people know. Her life has largely been narrated by three men with specific agendas, so poetry is one of the few places where her subjectivity actually survives. What struck me was how surprising that felt. A gorgeous blonde woman could be endlessly photographed—her beauty is such a topic—but the idea that she might also be a poet seemed almost illegible.

BOWIE: One of the things I found very compelling about the video component of your Well sculpture is that, unlike its visuals and the rest of the show, the text actually doesn’t address gender at all. It speaks from a very universal perspective on the consequences of excessively reflecting, or, more currently, reproducing an image.

BRACHE: That wasn’t a conscious choice, but when I thought about the well in relation to the many myths it has across cultures, I saw a parallel to our current relationship with the camera lens, this idea about gazing or wishing into something that can reward or punish you. There’s the Japanese myth of Okiku, which is about a maid who serves a samurai and winds up haunting him from a well. In the video, this is offered alongside other Western ideas of the well and gazing, like the myth of Narcissus, and it ends with a scene from Snow White where she sings into a wishing well. It all, in some way, embodies our relationship to the lens—what the lens generates when a person looks into it, who’s looking at the resulting image, and who’s looking through the viewfinder. Between all of this voyeurism and surveillance, there’s so much that is being consented to and risked, and so much that gets lost through the visibility of the subject that was captured, especially as the image circulates. There’s a deal you’re making when you consent to being photographed, like when you wish into a well. It’s the same when you consent to looking at an image. You’re signing onto something that feels like a cautionary tale.

BOWIE: In all of it, the role of the technology is to weaponize the subject’s consent when they engage with it. As an ancient technology, the well performed this role metaphorically; as a more recent technology, the camera does this very literally; and now we’re consenting to tools of mass surveillance that weaponize our ignorance in ways beyond imagination. Women have acted as this canary in the coal mine under the surveillance of men. It’s a formula that has played out across racial lines as well, but the power dynamics have now been extrapolated under surveillance capitalism between all of us and the billionaire class that monitors and monetizes every banal thing we do.

BRACHE: Gender is so implicit to me, and how I’m read has everything to do with it. We’ve made a lot of progress, but everything you’re saying also operates under the umbrella of misogyny. Every decision that we make and all of these technologies have a misogynistic position from the start because society is consciously and unconsciously still misogynistic. People often say that pornography predicts the next wave of technology—film, VHS, the internet, AI—but I think that’s less about pornography itself and more about the fact that the images being circulated are overwhelmingly images of women for male consumption. Women become the earliest and most normalized subjects of technological looking. In that sense, the camera and earlier image technologies were already rehearsing the dynamics of consent, exposure, and control that now exist, at scale, under surveillance capitalism. The story of Dorothy Stratten is also situated in a moment when people were only beginning to develop the vocabulary to talk about things like domestic violence. Ms. magazine ran its first issue on battered wives in 1976. So her experience was incredibly isolated. But that isolation also mirrors something structural: women’s lives have often been the site where these power dynamics become visible first. What’s different now is that the same logic of observation and monetization has expanded outward. The surveillance once directed most intensely at women’s bodies is now applied to everyone through data collection and platform economies. In that sense, misogyny isn’t separate from surveillance capitalism; it’s one of the places where its logic was rehearsed earliest.

Cristine Brache, *Repose*, 2025. Two panels, Oil, ink, and encaus-tic on silk and wood. 50.8 x 81.2 cm / 20 x 32 in

BOWIE: The ’70s was an era when filmmaking was becoming more affordable, marking the beginning of American New Wave cinema with directors like Bogdanovich, DePalma, and Scorsese radically changing the form. However, the misogynist underpinnings of cinema were still very much in place. Women were just starting to become aware of the male gaze, to understand why it felt so alienating, and everyone who didn’t see themselves reflected in the identities on screen were developing what bell hooks called the interrogative gaze. You also have a way of alienating the viewer from the image. Can you talk about the role of the encaustic layer?

BRACHE: I call the thicker encaustic works you’re describing “frosties” because I like to think of the subjects as being stuck under a frozen lake. You feel like you can almost reach them, but can’t. The more you look at them, the more they vanish. Having that icy material quality is a way of articulating the weight of passing time and, conversely, being stuck in it. The physical separation that encaustic creates between subject and viewer is also an attempt to capture the yearning, frustration, and false ownership viewers feel when observing a subject of desire. With Dorothy—she died so young, she didn’t leave many of her own words behind, and then men filled in those gaps. Encaustic felt like the appropriate medium to create space for her lost interiority because no words are involved, only color, texture, and emotion. The images also feel vintage, which relates to time. I think a lot about mortality, because she was world-famous when she died, and now almost nobody knows who she is. As individuals, no matter how well-known we are in life, we are still inevitably forgotten. That’s really painful, but also beautiful. It’s a lot to process as a human.

BOWIE: That rapid consumption of her really accelerated her demise. This encaustic layer feels, as a viewer, like you’re being denied something that you’re trying to consume. It’s acting in favor of the subject herself as a form of protection in this really beautiful way.

BRACHE: Exactly. The silk ones are more vibrant. That’s for the Star 80 series, where I have the diptychs of Dorothy and Mariel Hemingway side by side. I wanted those to be overly seen, in the same way those specific images were. There was that overexposure. When thin layers of wax are glazed with oil, it looks more vibrant than traditional oil painting, especially in person, because the light is penetrating it in a different way.

BOWIE: That series starts with the two women placed side by side, looking almost indistinguishable from one another. Then, the images of Dorothy become progressively more X-rated, while Mariel remains very R-rated. There’s a protective role Dorothy plays for Mariel as the cautionary tale.

BRACHE: It’s a very clean, visual way to talk about how a subject can get lost through image circulation. Dorothy provides the source of the context. She’s totally exposed. Then Mariel presents this R-rated version because her body can’t be shown in the same way without losing that rating. Dorothy is the one who gets alienated the more she’s iterated. It comes back to this idea of Dorothy Stratten losing her interiority. It was also my way of talking about the vulnerability of being seen. The more you’re seen, the more alienated you become. The image is recontextualized repeatedly until the original intention is completely lost.

BOWIE: Yes, but this exhibition goes beyond addressing the tension between presence and erasure. The repetition of the images also estranges the subject from the purposes they once served. Can you talk about the way that you’re subverting the role of hyper-reproduction, so that rather than erasing the subject, you are erasing the purpose of projecting her image to begin with?

BRACHE: I’m aware that I am also using her image, but it’s with a different intention. A lot of my work deals with documenting stories that would otherwise be lost. I felt really horrible about Dorothy’s story. It’s very painful to me what she must have lived through. It’s a very sincere gesture to her, but I don’t want to take any ownership or to perpetuate the things that I’m commenting on. There is a scent included in the exhibition, which I made in collaboration with perfumer Marissa Zappas, as a way to have something in the space that can’t be circulated, documented, or repurposed. You can’t take the scent with you. You experience it in your body, and it functions more unconsciously. It’s even further removed from language than an image.

BOWIE: Would you say that it serves as somewhat of a parallel to her poetry?

BRACHE: Those are the few words that are hers, and I don’t want to have a stake in her. I just want to remember and honor her story.

BOWIE: I feel like the scent speaks to her invisible power. It’s a very apt way of embodying her because the olfactory sense is the greatest generator of memory. Much of the work captures what you call “the fleeting ruptures where the performed self breaks down or momentarily turns inward under the pressure of constant display.” Would you say that this experience, which was once unique to traditional celebrities, is becoming more universal in our age of social media?

BRACHE: Well, we do surveil ourselves constantly, everybody has a livestream at their disposal. All of this is collapsing under our current age of hyper-visibility, but major celebrities still have very specific psychologies that I couldn’t ever understand. The ruptures you’re talking about relate more specifically to my Playboy Bunny series, which I find are very controlled: The suits only come in one size, and they come with a manual that includes many, many rules. It was Hugh Hefner’s hyper-tailored fantasy of feminine beauty. Today, with hyper-capitalism and hyper-surveillance, we’re all constantly performing. We have fewer opportunities when we can put the mask down, even momentarily. The bunny suit perfectly encapsulates these ideas, and they’re usually posed next to men in suits, which articulates a dynamic in a very iconic, universal way. We take those images for granted because it’s like Mickey Mouse. Everybody knows Mickey Mouse, but when you look at it really, it’s saying so much. Beyond gender, with the performativity required of us online and day to day, you have to be careful about what you do and don’t say. There’s little room for error or grace. I’m really interested in candid moments at the Playboy Bunny clubs, where Bunnies might be caught off guard. You may have all of this stuff controlling you, but at least this moment is yours. That’s the pressure that everybody lives with now, and it’s really depressing. I feel it all the time myself.

BOWIE: The algorithmic takeover of our lives has created these demographic profiles for us that, in some ways, mirror the bunny suit. They squeeze us into these narrowly defined archetypes. We tend to lose sight of who we are and what we actually want when all of our data is collected and then projected back onto us in the form of products that appeal to our deepest insecurities. It’s only when we find a moment to reflect on the source of that disquieting tension that we can actually see the disparity between our own shape and the mold we’re spilling out of. I wonder if it’s not the very loss of ourselves that motivates us to consent to this unprecedented state of surveillance. We’re desperate for someone to tell us who we are, even if it’s a bot, but the more we give ourselves away, the less there is to know.

Cristine Brache, *After the Pageant,* 2025. Two Panels, Oil, ink, and encaustic on cotton and wood. 167.6 x 127 cm / 66 x 50 in

BRACHE: What you’re describing is how the more we are externally defined, the less abstraction we’re left with. The abstraction that we have inside is the spiritual aspect. We all consent to this reality. The more we define our reality, the less space we have to articulate or engage with abstraction—these spaces between words and meaning that aren’t yet defined.

BOWIE: You talk about how acknowledging that she chose to take her clothes off and stand in the spotlight “is not to claim that the conditions were neutral, fair, or free of consequence. It’s simply to reject the fantasy that purity ever existed as an alternative.” This feels like the pithy response to the idea that people wouldn’t need to be surveilled if they were trustworthy, or that they shouldn’t mind being surveilled if they have nothing to hide that society hasn’t yet internalized.

BRACHE: That expectation of purity is a mechanism of misogyny that puts the onus on women to resolve the moral implication, when really, all of these decisions that women make—“moral” or “immoral”—are simply coping strategies in a misogynistic environment. The thing that really complicates it is that women do enjoy self-objectifying. They enjoy feeling sexy, but there’s so much danger in that. They risk being preyed upon, so we hold them responsible for the consequences, or what might happen to other women who emulate them. In Bogdanovich’s book, he’s constantly criticizing Stratten’s choice to be in Playboy. There’s a dynamic of him being disapproving of her spreads, and her being disappointed with his reaction. It complicates his fairytale story of her as this princess who couldn’t have wanted to do that, because it doesn’t resolve the ending for us, the tragedy.

Cristine Brache, *Muse*, 2025. Oil, ink, and encaustic on silk and wood. 101.6 x 76.2 cm / 40 x 30 in

BOWIE: It’s interesting because in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Laura Mulvey wrote about film as a medium that satisfies two forms of pleasure for us. One being scopophilia, the pleasure of viewing and voyeurism. The other being this reflection of our idealized ego. As viewers, we project ourselves onto the subject we’re viewing and derive pleasure from simply imagining ourselves in their position. But we only get to engage with it from that voyeuristic perspective. As a result, our envy of their firsthand experience causes us to resent and judge them. We’ve coded this form of pleasure as uniquely feminine, but it’s not. Exhibitionism is not a gendered experience, so we resent the gender that we assigned to it.

BRACHE: I totally agree with that. It’s interesting how much we project on celebrities, especially celebrity women. They’re damned if they do and damned if they don’t. All of our expectations are constantly contradictory.

BOWIE: I’m curious about this idea that you play with of resisting exploitation by exhausting the gaze. There’s something very fascinating about that because the very purpose of Laura Mulvey’s essay was to demonstrate how the very analysis of pleasure and beauty is what destroys it. I feel like you’re doing the same thing by exhausting the gaze, by forcing people to reflect so deeply on their own act of viewing.

BRACHE: There was this feeling I had in painting these nudes of her, where I was like, Is this inherently wrong? Because she’s naked and she died tragically, there’s this feeling of disrespecting the dead or re-exploiting her. But I felt compelled to do it because censoring her own choices is worse than just showing them factually. The presumption of her wanting to be censored is disrespectful too. So, I have to go with what I have in front of me, which is evidence that she was proud of these images, and she obviously consented to them. I think that whoever views the work will have the same conflicted feelings I had in the process of making them. We have to deal with our own projections, even if we don’t realize that’s what we’re doing. We’re dealing with our own feelings about it, rather than what is true about her choices. People are either very into them or apprehensive about them. But almost all the women who have seen the paintings love them. (laughs) That says a lot to me.

BOWIE: Did observing other people viewing the work change the way that you feel about it, or even just how you view the work?

BRACHE: I wouldn’t say my views changed because I’ve sat with these images for so many years now, and I’ve really thought about them a lot. I like to be extremely careful with what I choose to depict. But I’d like to think again about my video, The Well that you mentioned earlier, where it’s just this conversation with the lens, or this consenting to the lens, or choosing to engage with the lens. It’s the same when you’re choosing to engage with the work. There is this unspoken agreement that you’re making, and you may or may not be aware that you’re making it, but you’re definitely going to have feelings related to the engagement. It’s a very interesting dynamic that we have between looking and being seen.

Cao Fei: The Final Landscape

May 6, 2026

Read an interview of artist Cao Fei on her new exhibition, Dash, at Fondazione Prada in Milan.

ART / FASHION/ CULTURE / MUSIC / FILM

Daily Journal

Otherwise Part VIII: Quotidian beauty, hospitality, and artful life in relation

about a day ago

Proportions by Chiara Bottin & Debora Brune

about 4 days ago

Arming the Mind: Nina Hartmann's "Actualization Machine" @ Silke Lindner

about 6 days ago

Instagram: @AUTREMAGAZINE

@lilyachty on fame for AUTRE surveillance - interview by @crystallmess Photographs by @jesperdlund

Marcel Top for AUTRE SS26 “Surveillance” Issue In conversation with Zoé Samudzi

One year ago @miakhalifa in @missclairesullivan who was just selected as one of ten finalists for the CFDA Vogue Fashion Fund Photographs by @sicknethi #missclairesullivan #miakhalifaِ

GUS VAN SANT INTERVIEW BY HANS ULRICH OBRIST AUTRE 22 SS26 “Surveillance” Issue

Extremely honored that our interview of @bjork by @hansulrichobrist was included in the catalog for @bjork ‘s exhibition at the National Gallery Of Iceland (@listasafnislands ) Also @bjork at her opening wearing @newbottega by @louise_trotter_ by @vidarlogi #bjork #iceland #hansulrichobrist

@kimpetras at her most raw, personal and free. DETOUR out today. Read an in-depth interview in AUTRE’s SS26 “Surveillance” Issue out now

$Cristine Brache’s Centerfolds revisits the life of Dorothy Stratten—not as tabloid tragedy, but as a meditation on the violence of the gaze. Drawing from Stratten’s overlooked poetry and fractured legacy (her brutal murder), Brache$

Cristine Brache’s Centerfolds revisits the life of Dorothy Stratten—not as tabloid tragedy, but as a meditation on the violence of the gaze. Drawing from Stratten’s overlooked poetry and fractured legacy (her brutal murder), Brache transformed Bernheim’s London townhouse into a sensory study of surveillance, seduction, and extraction through video sculpture, encaustic paintings, and scent. Autre SS26 “Surveillance” issue out now Interview @summer.bowie #dorothystratten #playboy

Art in the age of machine vision. Autre SS26 Surveillance Issue out now.

The mouse designed to resemble a vulva, the clitoris as a direct like to the matrix. Mindy Seu for Autre’s SS26 Surveillance Issue In Mindy Seu’s book and performance, The Sexual History of the Internet, examines how human sexuality has driven the design of our digital tools and how the Internet was built by sex work workers. Photographs by @steventaylor interview by @proto_m4ra #mindyseu

A special report…

Ariana Papademetropoulos and Nicolas Godin of @airfrenchband for AUTRE SS26 “Surveillance” Nicolas Godin, one-half of the French duo Air, created a soundtrack for a strange new millennium. @arianapapademetropoulos is an American artist whose first solo exhibition in France, Glass Slipper at @thaddaeusropac , features dreamlike, reality-defying paintings. The show centers on Water Based Treatment, an experiential aquarium sculpture featuring a shoal of kissing fish and a score by Godin, inspired by 1970s ambient sound therapy tapes. Together, they discuss the liminal spaces their work inhabits. Photographs by @rob.tennent #air #sexyboy #arianapapademetropoulos #nicolasgodin

AUTRE #22 SS26 Surveillance Issue. Our institutions have been coopted by the surveillance state. Ord3r Now 👀

RYAN GANDER for AUTRE Surveillance. Featured in “Still Joy—From Ukraine Into the World” at Palazzo Contarini Polignac during the Venice Biennale British artist Ryan Gander explores alternate realities, perception, and the uncanny through everyday objects. His upcoming exhibition, One Hundred Things Twice, at the Salzburger Kunstverein is part of the museum’s 2026 program CAPTCHA Realism, examining a world where humanness must be verified by algorithms. Interview by @mire_la_ of @salzburgerkunstverein #ryangander #venicebiennale

Maja Malou Lyse (@habitual_body_monitoring2 ) for the @danishpavilion - A musical built inside a sperm bank: where image, desire, and performance collide at the edge of a fertility crisis. In Autre’s SS25 Desire issue Zoe Chait spoke to Lyse about the erotic spectacle of her practice. 🎥 @zo03e #fertilitycrisis

FLORENTINA HOLZINGER for Autre Surveillance. SEAWORLD VENICE, as part of the @austrianpavilion , opens this week. Curated by @noralmes , SEAWORLD VENICE “an underwater amusement park, sewage treatment plant, and sacred building.” Read the interview in Autre’s SS26 “Surveillance” Issue

interview by Nora-Swantje Almes

interview by Oliver Kupperwith Nadya Tolokonnikovaportraits by Pat Martin

interview by Alissa Bennett

interview by Summer Bowie

interview by Oliver Kupper photography by Paulo Sutch

interview by Perry Shimon photography by Marta Marinott

interview by Anna Frost

interview by Hans Ulrich Obrist photography by Roman Kova

Interview by Summer Bowie

interview by Oliver Kupper
with Nadya Tolokonnikova
portraits by Pat Martin

interview by Oliver Kupper
photography by Paulo Sutch

interview by Perry Shimon
photography by Marta Marinott

interview by Hans Ulrich Obrist
photography by Roman Kova