Rhonda Holberton, Water Striders, 2015 (installation view). Platinum cure silicone, nylon power mesh, and polyurethane foam. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Johnna Arnold.
Rhonda Holberton is an Oakland-based artist who employs digital and interactive technologies to examine “the boundaries of the observable universe” and humans’ role or representation therein. Featured in Show Me as I Want to Be Seen, on view from February 7 to July 7, 2019, Holberton’s works interrogate how digital selves manifest, and what their depiction means for physical or IRL (in real life) identity. The Contemporary Jewish Museum’s director of marketing and communications, Sarah Bailey Hogarty, recently sat down with Holberton to discuss this intersection of art, technology, and identity.
Sarah Bailey Hogarty: Let’s start with how you use technology as a medium. In your work, it seems like you're trying to push the boundaries and the limits of the software that you use. Are you trying to break it, to find the twenty-first century Bob Rossian happy accident?
Rhonda Holberton: Yeah, totally. I definitely push into the technological capabilities of the tools I use, but I'm also frequently pressing into my own capabilities. There's this kind of slippage or gap that emerges between the two that is unpredictable. A lot gets exposed when there's a glitch, when you peek behind the curtain and get to see the operational mechanisms behind it. That's when the technology becomes more of an agent in the production rather than just simply a tool. There's this collaboration, or back and forth, when the technology and myself are both pressed to our limits. That's especially true for The Italian Navigator Has Landed in the New World [on view in Show Me as I Want to Be Seen], which was the first animation I tackled.
I'd been working with the 3D scans for a while and was just creating static broken bodies. Then I had a flash of one of these bodies trying to repair itself by going through this maintenance of yoga. That was the kernel of inspiration.
Now, I had no idea how to actually animate the scans that I'd been making. I was working as an engineer and was comfortable with static 3D models, but not animated. I was teaching myself how to use this broken scan. There are places where the technology is clearly breaking in the scan, but there's also places where as an animator I'm also doing it wrong, and so it kind of slips in between these places. Then a hand dips through the floor or this impossible kind of pose emerges, and then it really starts exposing parts of itself but in layers. It's not immediately evident what's going on.
Rhonda Holberton, The Italian Navigator Has Landed in the New World, 2014 (excerpt). Single-channel HD color digital animation. Courtesy of the artist.
SBH: There seems to be a parallel between pushing the medium and pushing your own skills as a way to lay something bare, or open something up—to really get at something about who you are as an artist, or what your process is—that feels related to this search for or understanding of self.
RH: It's interesting that you say that. I've worked as a mechanical engineer, so I like to take things apart to see how they work—like breaking something or pushing into those boundaries to reveal operational mechanisms.
On the other hand, that space of understanding of self, or understanding of how something works operationally, functions in parallel. I think part of what I'm trying to define for myself when I do that is a boundary, like a limit.
SBH: We live in the surveillance age where we are constantly either self-monitored on social media or being watched on closed-circuit television or surveillance cameras. How do you think the context of constantly being seen impacts the way we think about self?
RH: I think that performance of identity has been with us for a while, maybe always. Once you know you're being seen, you're kind of necessarily splitting yourself. In this conversation, for example, there's feedback back and forth between two humans. I'm listening, I'm trying to understand what you are saying to me, and trying to relate and perform a certain amount of conceptual or linguistic framework so that we meet in the middle.
When there's a camera looking at me, I don't have the feedback from the other side, so I project psychically to who might be on the other side. Because we do that, I think what ends up happening is that we perform lots of different types of identities very quickly. I think that frequency of transition is relatively new, and has led to psychic stress on lots of people. But it’s also opened up conversations about fluid identity as we understand more about the mechanism of splitting the self, and how that self is received on the other side of the screen or on the other side of the surveillance camera.
SBH: Do you think that the splitting of self via technology or that breaking up of self to perform in various formats has informed the evolution in gender fluidity or LGBTQIA+ categorization (or lack thereof)? Or do you think they are informing each other at the same time?
RH: We feel it more through the performative action of digitally switching between selves: I am now writing an email for work; and now there is this layer of Facebook behind that; and then there's Instagram behind that; and Twitter behind that. All of these identities get performed simultaneously, with more frequency.
Another thing that's happening is we get to see others perform identity. As a viewer, we receive that consciousness of gender fluidity, that consciousness of cultural identity—even if we have a narrower scope, we still understand what it means to perform in that way. We both see it being performed while we are we're doing it ourselves. I think that the understanding through seeing, through bearing witness (and eventual generosity that might emerge), actually co-evolves with the performance.
SBH: Something weird happens during this mediation of self through the screen when the screen becomes anthropomorphized—and then what happens to the actual human self as a byproduct of that interaction?
RH: Actually, that’s exactly what I was thinking about when I was making Water Striders. The water strider is a creature that lives both on top of the surface as well as under the water. That image of someone that lives on the surface of, as well as under, a permeable boundary became a metaphor for the digital screen for me. I was thinking about the silicone blanket that covers the human form underneath very much as a physicalized screen that becomes skin. I was coming out of a long distance relationship, and the screen became this amazing site for intimacy. I would be having such intense feelings of connection with this other human, but then as soon as the Skype call ends, I'm just alone in the room.
Rhonda Holberton, Water Striders, 2015 (installation view). Platinum cure silicone, nylon power mesh, and polyurethane foam. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Johnna Arnold.
SBH: It's super abrupt.
RH: Exactly. So much of that time was me feeling like I was psychically going through the tunnel, going through the screen—but that only made sense with this kind of perceived audience. But when I turn the screen off, I'm just alone in the room and everything else is the same but I feel completely different. I was really interested in teasing that out.
SBH: This gets back to the question of splitting the self between the physical and digital worlds. We talked about the positive ramifications of that in the context of self-determination and gender fluidity, but there's also some danger there. Your work in many ways really oscillates between optimism and pessimism—how do you feel about the potential for danger in the digital schism of the self?
RH: There are lots of different dangers. I'll address maybe two: one is kind of an internal psychological danger and then one is kind of an external, economic or political danger.
We'll start with the internal danger. I think a lot of that has to do with the feedback mechanism. We're social creatures; we have to be. Digital technology promises to provide more of that interaction. But what type of interaction is it? Has it actually helped human interaction? When we become addicted, when we pull back from the physical world and push further into the digital social sphere, we don't have the natural feedback. It's easier to just throw things on the wall and see what sticks, which allows for behaviors like trolling. We see the extremes, rather than the bell curve distribution of healthy interaction.
The second danger is about the incredible value of our digital data. We're starting to see massive wealth accumulation around storing and analyzing that data—and although we're the ones producing the data, we don't own it and we can't sell it. Somebody else is making money from it. I think we could write better code to trigger algorithmic micro payments between interactions to profit the real, human owners of the data.
My other great fear is that we're engaged and distracted by something that can feel very positive, but it's still not based in the material world. Capitalism fails to appropriately account for things like water, air, environmental stability—and while we're distracted, climate change is destabilizing the material world.
But Google and Facebook are also really good at figuring out what motivates people and that could be potentially really powerful. If what we need is collective action on a massive scale, what better places to start than these companies that know so much about us. What if, instead of being slowly nudged toward a product, I was being slowly nudged toward a small behavioral change that was sustainable? Not just a massive revolutionary action, but rather a kind of daily practice that encourages me to turn the lights off. These small actions applied over a massive population could actually start shifting scales of energy.
Rhonda Holberton, /no stats the same, 2017 (installation view, far left). Single-channel HD color digital animation, sound, frosted acrylic, drywall, and wood. Courtesy of the artist and CULT | Aimee Friberg Exhibitions, San Francisco. Photo by Johnna Arnold.
SBH: A lot of your work involves making the invisible visible, or engaging with the invisible, and so much of technology is invisible—this binary code that drives everything from the back end. How do unseen forces inform your work and your practice?
RH: Bringing some of those back-end, operational mechanisms to the fore, making them visible and physical, works best in art. As an artist, I'm not expected to build a functional product. I can have the glitch. The broken parts can be exposed in ways that can centralize that conversation, or expose those things.
The things that make the world enjoyable for humans are frequently more speculative, more emotional, or have more mystery embedded in them, what I call magic, or something. Beautiful, inexplicable moments of poetry. I think that bringing those two things together, making something that is invisible visible has a little bit of magic in it.
SBH: Right. I mean, so much of technology is magical.
RH: We live in a crazy time. If we can sustain this human project, we're so close to so many weird, wild, wonderful technological events. I want that to happen, but I think if we're not careful about taking care of some of the other foundational aspects that supports that system, like agriculture and distribution of labor and all of these other things, we won't get there.
Rhonda Holberton, A/fisherman/hunts/a/shark/with/a/gun, 2017. Archival pigment print. Courtesy of the artist and CULT | Aimee Friberg Exhibitions, San Francisco.
SBH: Can you share a little bit about your Instagram account—your process and your thinking behind it?
RH: It's been kind of an art project. Before I opened an Instagram account, I was just using it to watch and to see how this whole thing worked. I found myself drawn to certain types of images, or following brands rather than people—and wondering what does it mean for a brand to have an Instagram account?
Anyway, I was having anxiety about the future, so I went go see a psychic, as you do when you're having anxiety about the future. She gave me an assignment to imagine a happy and healthy home, and I couldn't do it. But I could imagine this little tabletop, or lifestyle images, and I'm like, "Where are these coming from?" Then I realized they were coming from my Instagram feed. Even in my most meditative state, that's what was coming to the fore, which I think is revealing of a really powerful thing. We think that we're just kind of scrolling and scrolling and not paying attention, but it's in there.
SBH: Like a Dopamine imprint.
RH: Exactly, or prescribed rules about what a lifestyle should look like. Of course, I can only see this little tabletop, because you don't get a 360 view of that—you just get these little moments.
SBH: But it could be chaos all around.
RH: I ended up creating these little virtual sets—finding and scanning images that I have that dopamine reaction to—“I want that!”, and then realizing, "Oh, I already own these objects." So I make 3D scans of my own objects and then restage them in these environments where I imagined they came from—like the storefront window, or in a lighted studio scenario. In this virtual space, there's this little tiny moment that exists—a broken 3D scan in a perfect world, and behind that is void or chaos.
SBH: It goes back to making the unseen seen.
RH: Exactly. I point the virtual camera away from the void; the chaos of lights and filters, toward the 3D scans of the physical objects in my life to create images that I make visible when I repost them to Instagram.
Rhonda Holberton, Still Life, 2017. Archival pigment print. Courtesy of the artist and CULT | Aimee Friberg Exhibitions, San Francisco.
SBH: You talk about how these desires are fed to us through social media, which is increasingly about commerce rather than human connection. How do you see capitalism informing concepts of self?
RH: Right. The desire to sell a product in and of itself isn't necessarily a bad thing. But where it ends up breaking down is when we spend so much time in constructed visual environments vis-a-vis the screen, we stop taking in as much information from the real world.
My image of what people are doing, my imagination about what people are doing, how they're spending their time, and what they look like is very different than my experience out in the real world. These worlds don't align, but I am constantly overlaying a mental projection of the world—much of which is informed by human interactions on social media—on top of my IRL experience.
When we talk about brands as individuals, what does that mean? That becomes a little bit slippery and I don't think we've really reconciled how to address that. Advertising uses fear of inadequacy to sell product to us. If we're performing in the same way, then our identity stems from fear of anxiety, or as a product for other people.
See Rhonda Holberton’s work on view in Show Me as I Want to Be Seen through July 7, 2019.