By Cansu Waldron

Joseph Farbrook is an American artist working across electronic installations, interactive video, augmented and virtual reality, video sculpture, live performance, and experimental projection. Known for inventing customized media platforms that merge physical and virtual art-making practices, he explores how cultural mythologies evolve and how mediated perception shapes the way we understand the world. His current body of work investigates consciousness itself, expressed through digitally designed and fabricated forms that are integrated with experimental screen-based and projection technologies.

Farbrook’s installations and performances have been presented widely, including at Meow Wolf, SIGGRAPH, the International Symposium for Electronic Arts, CURRENTS, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Watermans Gallery in London, and Cyberarts Gallery, along with numerous solo and group exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Seattle, and beyond. He is an Associate Professor of 3D and Extended Media at the University of Arizona School of Art, where he continues to research, teach, and develop new modes of hybrid digital-physical expression.

We asked Joseph about his art, creative process, and inspirations.

Can you tell us about your background as a digital artist? How did you get started in this field?

My parents were both artists, so naturally I never wanted to do that. I did get into other creative endeavors though; theater, music, creative writing. I was really looking for something where I could do all of these things. I had dabbled a bit with computers while writing electronic music. Eventually I met the artist Mark Amerika while I was a university student and he turned me on to digital art and I realized that it was exactly what I was looking for, as it could include everything that I had done previously. Interestingly enough, in the 1960s, my father was a Concrete poet and one of the first computer artists, so it turns out that I’m really following in his footsteps now, although he didn’t live long enough to find out about this.

You often explore consciousness and perception through digital forms. How do you define “consciousness” in the context of your art?

I define consciousness as this feeling of ‘I am in here’ inside this body. This feeling of ‘I-ness’. I don’t know if it is just an illusion generated by the complex biological machinery of the brain or if it is something greater than the some of its parts. I am interested in how our five senses give the brain data which the brain then uses to construct a virtual model of what’s going on around it and where it is located within this model. Our brains take all of this sensory data and tries to organize it in some coherent way like a web browser organizing the data flows of the internet. These organizations are quite arbitrary, as demonstrated in Mark Napier’s ‘Shredder’ browser. I’m interested in alternative interpretations and configurations. I want to explore alien other-than-human perceptions including machine perceptions. I wonder if some computers are already conscious by our own definitions or if we may have to change our definitions to include computer consciousness as another type. Mostly I want to expand the virtual models that we’ve constructed in our heads. Perhaps as a way of not taking our perceived reality so dam seriously all of the time.

How do you think digital media is changing our collective mythology — the stories we tell about who we are?

We seem to be looking at everything now through the mediation of a screen of some kind. We communicate mostly with email, phone, and texts now. Whenever we experience something of note, we video it immediately and so experience it through a screen in real time. At one time video was trusted as documentation so it served as a correction of our memories. Now with AI, digital media is sliding from documentation into an assumption of fiction. Simultaneously lying has gone from immoral to fashionable and has been legitimized as a way to make a living. Who we are has become a brand to sell. How many we can influence has become a prime measure of success. We also can’t help but take sips of our own Kool-Aid. We have all become performance artists.

Let’s talk about The AI Chronotopes: Moons, Castles, Trees! Can you tell us about your piece in the exhibition? What questions are you hoping to raise through it?

This work is one of my first experiments with synthetic intelligence. If indeed there is some kind of consciousness in AI, then I wanted to know what it was thinking and dreaming about. I wanted to know how it interpreted consciousness and how it might respond as an artist to thoughts and definitions of consciousness. So I began scouring many books and articles on consciousness theory by scientists, philosophers, neurologists, biologists, psychologists, etc. looking for definitions and points of view on consciousness. I presented ones that I thought interesting and provoking as prompts to image generators. I took the position that AI can be an artificial artist reflecting on its own nature and interpret its own consciousness. I curated about 100 of the best quotes and generated images (out of thousands) and a few of those images are shown in Moons, Castles, and Trees.

As both an artist and educator, how does teaching influence your own creative thinking?

So I’m not really into social media but my students are all over it. As such, they keep me informed of the latest information and popular memes going around. Students also look at things with fresh eyes and perspectives, so I always learn from them in every class that I teach. They also keep me keyed in to what’s going on with the latest generation of teenagers and so they give me a lot of things to respond to. My students keep me from just spinning in my own orbit.

Many of your installations invite interaction — sometimes unpredictable or chaotic. What role does audience participation play in your work?

I’m really trying to create experiences rather than direct the frame of the viewer or participant. In the same way an installation artist creates an immersive space, I am working with virtual installations. The audience interaction becomes another element of the work and invites a viewer to visit the work multiple times as the interaction will change each time.

Your recent projects investigate consciousness through projection and fabrication. Can you share what questions or discoveries are guiding your current research?

Currently I’m looking into describing identity through how commercial algorithms view us. I’m looking into what we are fed by sites such as Youtube, Facebook, Tiktok, etc. and using these feeds to create a digital imprint of a person’s identity by letting the algorithms describe us. These feed algorithms have gotten very good at capturing our attention and so know what our interests are and how they change over time. By looking at what they feed a person, it can act as a kind of silhouette or digital imprint of a person’s thoughts and interests.

What else fills your time when you’re not creating art?

I write electronic music, ride mountain bike trails, skateboard, and generally just try to stay active. I’m also a university professor.

Finally, with all the rapid advances in immersive technology, what do you think the next frontier is for digital art — and how do you imagine your practice evolving alongside it?

I think digital immersive art will eventually be less about objects and more about A/V experiences. I think VR headsets will eventually go away and AR devices will fade away as well. At some point smart glasses will look no different than any other glasses, but they will have the ability to fully immerse our vision like VR headsets, or create layers on top of reality like AR passthrough. In some ways it’s already happening, but the devices are bulky, cause eyestrain, are computationally limited, and the batteries die quickly. When they finally are easy to wear and just look like glasses, they will likely have killer utility apps such as corrective lenses, endless entertainment, and all the functions of smart phones. Artists will naturally want to explore this as a canvas and create art installations and reality layers. I’ve had this in mind for many years and have been making work that fits in the intermediary interfaces along the way. I see my work smoothly transitioning into each version of future delivery devices. Simultaneously I’m critical of digital content, interfaces, and devices and try to be very transparent as to how we are all being changed by them, or at the very least I want to initiate some conversation.