Making Together: Nancy Baker Cahill on Creative Collaborations and Enacting Equitable Futures

Hannah Scott: The C/Change project is all about creating space through digital means – space for people to share ideas they may not be able to speak about freely in their geopolitical contexts, space for people to connect and collaborate with others they may never encounter in their physical location, space for people to work together to create better futures for both our planet and our digital landscapes.

Within that context, I’m thinking about augmented reality and its ability to transcend this semi-porous border between the physical and digital and create this in-between space. What are the unique experiences this medium offers, both for you as an artist and for audiences?

Nancy Baker Cahill: My relationship to the medium initially grew out of necessity. I had been creating a lot of artwork in VR, and quickly learned how high the barrier to entry was. That’s just never been my goal — I wasn’t trying to create some sort of scarcity. I was working with a development team at the time, and I told them I was concerned that I had no means of exhibiting this work. This was back in 2016. They said, “Well, have you ever considered AR?” That turned out to be a seminal turning point for my practice. The team helped me develop the 4th Wall App, which I originally created in an effort to challenge what public art was and could be. On the one hand, I wanted to share my work, but I also wanted to invite audiences to participate in the work and to decide whatever context or content they wanted to create with these assets that I had made. In other words, I wanted to work collaboratively with an unknown and unseen audience. The results of those anonymous collaborations were breathtaking. They were just wildly imaginative in every possible arena, and that was extremely exciting to me. But it wasn’t until Tanya Aguiñiga was messing around with the app down at the US-Mexico border, where she does all kinds of incredible activist and performance work, that I grokked the poetics of the medium. Tanya put one of my AR drawings in the United States and then pulled it through the border wall. That was a game changing moment. Right after that happened, I went back to my team, and I said, this miraculous thing happened! How can we open up this conversation to include other artists? And they said, “Well, we could think about geolocation.” That was the beginning of the Coordinates platform, which is part of the app. Tanya and my friend Debra Scacco, who is also an amazing artist, were the first to sign up for this experiment to try to take works outside of the white cube site it in locations where it would have added resonance and value. So that launched one of the greatest odysseys I’ve had as an artist, and the project now spans the globe.

I had a moment back in 2019 when I spoke to this incredible art lawyer at Stanford University, Ticien Sassoubre. I was asking her about permissions, because one of the things I quickly learned is the subversive potential of a medium that is invisible to the naked eye, but that has enormous impact once you use the visual prosthetic of the screen. I had asked her about the possible liability of the 4th Wall project, because I really liked working in this very sort of nimble and guerilla way with a lot of artists. She said, “Look, AR is this in-between space that will be monetized, policed, and censored. So be careful when you use the language of site interventions. Instead, consider speaking about a shared cultural thought space.” That has turned out to be another critical turning point because that’s the space my collaborators and I are really interested in. AR really creates an uncontainable space; it’s an unlocate-able space, it’s a kind of philosophical space, a space of consciousness, of memory. One of the things that I find most powerful about the medium is that it’s hard to forget. Even if you revisit that space, and you don’t have your device, presumably, that memory, the memory of that exchange, that coupling stays with you. I don’t know where else you can replicate that particular experience.

HS: It feels like the narrative that the tech industry pushes is one of permanence – the things that happen on my screen are encoded, encrypted, immaterial. But this kind of ephemerality, of adding dimensionality to a place, that you’re speaking to is a really beautiful counter narrative.

NBC: Yes, one of the things I’ve been thinking a lot about in my own practice is the kind of position AR occupies in the history and lineage of land art. I see a lot of my larger AR artworks participating in the conversations initiated by feminist artists which ran counter to the mostly male land artists of the 1960s and 70s. Their work and practices, while perhaps magnificent in their own ways, were so disruptive and in many ways disrespectful to the earth they plowed, moved, and removed, and also to the sacred lands of Indigenous peoples. I would like to think that AR allows for really profound conversations about different types of ecologies — not strictly environmental ecologies, but all types of ecologies. At the same time, the Global South has suffered enormously from the extractive goals of the tech industry, particularly as it applies to the creation of these devices that allow people to view AR pieces. I would never pretend that our devices, the vector through which we experience this work, has no cost.

AR really creates an uncontainable space; it’s an unlocate-able space, it’s a kind of philosophical space, a space of consciousness, of memory. One of the things that I find most powerful about the medium is that it’s hard to forget. Even if you revisit that space, and you don’t have your device, presumably, that memory, the memory of that exchange, that coupling stays with you.

HS: What has your experience creating art across many different contexts taught you about building generative, socially transformative art ecosystems?

NBC: I’ve learned that it’s hard to be a single person with an app. If I had the resources, if I had the means, I would love to open this project up to the broadest possible audience. Making it free is super important, as well as not collecting any user data, given the extractive aims of surveillance capitalism. I will also say that one of the great privileges has been collaborating with strangers. Having on-the-ground collaborators, who I may not know personally but who share this common goal to do something impactful, and to express a particular point of view or position together, has really given me a sense of optimism.

HS: I don’t know about you, but I’m sort of struck right now by how the current hype cycle of AI that dominates our Twitter feeds and consciousnesses seems to repeat many of the same missteps as the rise of social networking companies — “move fast and break things” seems to be back in vogue. I feel that AI offers many creative possibilities, but the imaginations of the loudest voices in the room seem to be limited to automating or accelerating things humans already do. As someone who works with and develops emerging technologies from VR/AR to cryptocurrencies, I’m wondering if you can share any strategies for resisting the dominant narratives of these technological developments and pursuing a more liberatory path?

NBC: Anytime I engage with any technology, I approach it from a place of criticality. Given that so many of these incredibly powerful tools come to us from these massive corporations, we have to be very, very careful and intentional when we use them, and ask the tough questions. Who is this serving? Who is it harming? No tool is neutral, so how could they be deployed, subverted, or used subversively to be less extractive and more empowering. With machine learning models and their accelerated release to a largely uninitiated public, I think they are intended to create new dependencies. And with new dependencies, of course, comes capital. It’s going to take Herculean efforts on the part of developers, corporations, artists, and individuals to put guardrails around what would otherwise just be Pandora’s box. We’ve already seen certain artists doing this taking this leadership role in insisting on regulatory or opt-out measures, which I think is extraordinary. I’ve been hearing the term “alien” thrown around a lot, and I think I prefer calling it a synthetic intelligence, or maybe just a different type of intelligence. What might happen if we think about working with AI in terms of multi-species flourishing and honoring different types of intelligences?

HS: You’ve brought up multi-species experiences and ecologies a few times. How do those themes become meaningful fodder for AR explorations? What do those two things have to say about each other?

NBC: I have such a passionate interest in civics and really feel that none of the systems we’ve developed work particularly well in terms of ensuring equitable futures. So how are we going to survive not only the political and social pressures in which we find ourselves, but how are we going to survive a sixth extinction? For myself and for many other people, mycelial networks offer a new type of model and moral economy where the needs of the whole organism supersede the needs of any individual part. That seemed really compelling to me, so I use mycelium as a kind of metaphor in my ideas, writings, and projects, some of which are in AR, some of which are not. I had all these ideas that tried to think outside the box about how this new way of being could be modeled — I even came up with this idea for an AI symposium called the Myceli-GAN. Then last year I had a fellowship at the Berggruen Institute’s Transformations of the Human program, which was really an examination of what the post-human or transhuman looks like through art, technology, and philosophy. I was invited to create a “future human,” to imagine what a future human might look like as part of the symposium, What Will Life Become? It was one of the most exciting weekends I can remember — there were just so many thought leaders talking about the themes that we’re talking about today.

My piece for the symposium was created in the Bradbury Building in Los Angeles, which is considered one of the first socialist buildings — it has five storeys, a big open atrium, and a glass roof. The reason the roof was glass was because they wanted each floor to receive equal amounts of light, so that no one person was privileged over any other. I thought that was a beautiful, poetic container for a future human. But I also felt that it would be very powerful to use scale to further de-center the human. Corpus, which, of course, refers to a body but also to a dataset, is a five-story future human that stands in the atrium of the Bradbury. They are made of machine, organic material, microbiota, and electricity. The soundscape is a human heartbeat, a fetal heartbeat, a whale heartbeat, the heartbeat of the cosmos, which is two black holes colliding, and all of it was interpolated through an AI. So all Corpus does is stand there, shifting his weight and breathing audibly. It was a feat of engineering that I cannot even describe to you. My development team poured weeks and weeks into precise measuring, because all of that gorgeous French ironwork is repetitive, and there’s no way the camera could lock on. So we anchored it to the best of the technology’s ability. I still can’t believe we pulled it off. Regardless of where you were on any floor, you would see it in the proper perspective. It was an opportunity for me to speak about the interdependence that will be required to survive. We can’t divorce ourselves from the knowledge that we ourselves are microbial, that we depend on other species as much as they may depend on us. I felt that AR as a medium was perfect for igniting a kind of collective imagination, and for doing something that was very participatory and inclusive in a semi-public space. I wanted to prompt these tougher questions about who or what humans could adapt or evolve into. In a way, it’s speculative fiction. But I think that part of the beauty of speculative fiction is that it allows us to imagine alternate futures and to explore ideas that are otherwise untenable in our current conditions.

HS: It’s really powerful to see this speculative thinking and futuring substantiated into something that one can experience and with which one can have an emotional, embodied experience.

NBC: Yes, one of the things that’s been really exciting to witness since I did Desert X in 2019, and then certainly with Corpus and Mushroom Cloud, has been the ways in which people participate in the work, that they put their bodies into it, that their actions become part of a performance. That feels really important to me as well – that the work doesn’t feel exclusive, that people want to write themselves into that text. I think that’s another one of AR’s great assets and cultural values.

In a way, it’s speculative fiction. But I think that part of the beauty of speculative fiction is that it allows us to imagine alternate futures and to explore ideas that are otherwise untenable in our current conditions.

HS: One of Signals themes this year is feminist technologies, which can sometimes feel like a contradiction of terms. What does approaching technology through a feminist lens offer you as an artist?

NBC: Or is it cyber feminist? I look to Donna Haraway, who urges everyone to make kin. A word I learned in her Staying With the Trouble is this beautiful word, sympoesis, which speaks to the idea of co-making, of making together, which strikes me as a deeply feminist practice. I will argue that right now is a moment of existential crisis for anyone with a womb in America. What’s going on legislatively in this country right now is not just a backlash, but a medieval backsliding. It’s a deeply disruptive march toward authoritarianism and fascism, but it’s grounded in the denial of body sovereignty to more than half the population. And that to me is a 911, compounded by the anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ legislation. All this argues for more intervention, not less. So I have an AR piece that I’m planning that will directly address this issue, and I will continue to be outspoken about it as an artist. I also just participated in a sale at Sotheby’s, which was organized by Nadya of Pussy Riot and Unicorn DAO. Nadya’s another example of someone with a huge platform who took the opportunity to reach out to a bunch of artists who aligned on the same goals and who together raised over $100,000 for Planned Parenthood.

HS: Something that deeply inspires me about your work, both in terms of initiating collaborations and in your work itself, is that it takes direct action in the world. It uses the affordance of the medium of AR to create situations that exist outside of the white cube. I know you just gave us a little sneak peek of an upcoming piece, but is there anything else you’re working on or thinking about now that you can share?

NBC: Well, I’m delighted to share that the Whitney Museum has commissioned and is acquiring an ArtPort video, which will be connected to a monumental AR intervention at the Whitney on-site. I can’t speak to the subject matter yet, so stay tuned. I also have my first mid-career solo exhibition coming up at the Georgia Museum of Art, and then it’ll travel to a number of different locations through 2024. It will connect drawing on paper to AR through this somewhat Byzantine, but I hope really compelling, journey from 2D drawing, to 3D sculpture, to 3D digital objects, into immersive media, and then into AR. It’s a progression that I identify as a Ship of Theseus. What remains of the original as it goes through all these different permutations and translations? That question is really important to me because I’m always trying to connect the almost Paleolithic impulse to make marks on a wall to cinema and to storytelling more broadly, whether it’s in immersive film or AR/VR. There’s another project I’m not allowed to talk about, but that’s really exciting to me. I can say that it is a really large-scale project on climate justice. I also have some public art projects coming up, one through West Hollywood Arts in 2024, an election year, and one project in Lancaster, California, where I’ll be working on another climate justice piece in the Prime Desert Woodland Preserve.