Interview: Travess Smalley

The work of multimedia artist and all-around digital maverick Travess Smalley really fucks with my sense of scale. Mountains nest within mountains, Magic Eye patterns might be topographic maps of lava planets, and neon galaxies of abstract forms easily meld into the molecular substructure of THC. There’s no solid distinction between part and whole. A weird alchemy is at play here: everything in Smalley’s world seems perpetually caught in the process of becoming another aspect of itself.

His vibrantly visceral objects of inscrutable origin are fundamentally maximalist and endlessly nostalgic for an era that never happened but, with luck, still might. They appear equally at home wherever you encounter them: in the nowhere-place of the internet, the walls of a gallery at CTRL+W33D’s rad recent “Troll” exhibition, or the centerfold of a fancy magazine. Intrigued by the output of this cryptic chameleon, I sought answers from Mr. Smalley himself. He was kind enough to illuminate a few of the many mysteries surrounding his craft, and share some new pieces:

One thing I really love about your work is that it seems to completely embrace the digital medium with all its limitations and delirious possibilities. Has your style evolved as new technology and software has become available to you, or do you find yourself mostly experimenting within the boundaries of the tools you have? Are there projects you have in mind that you haven’t yet found the means to achieve?

One of the big developments in my education came through a professor I had when I studied painting at Virginia Commonwealth University, Pete Baldes. I was in his Large Format Digital Printing class and it was the first time where I started to consider the objects I interacted with on a daily basis as my mode of artmaking. Up until that point, I had been in painting classes that seemed archaic and forced.

Pencils, crayons, glue and scissors made sense; I’d used them since I was five. I’d had a wealth of experience to draw on when using those supplies. But when I got to art school, oil painting did not make any sense to me whatsoever. The first time I had seen an oil paint set I was in my late teens. The desktop PC and the home office printer/scanners––seemed a lot more relevant to what art would be for me, how I could make art and how it would come from the things around me. In Peter Baldes’s class, I experimented with the computer desktop as artwork, that the organization of files could be art.

In terms of how evolving software or technology affects my work, I’m constantly trying to learn programs (currently Blender, Google Sketchup, Brushes, Maya, PHP) but at the same time, learning new programs comes from a strong desire to extend and diversify my daily computer practice. I spend time in After Effects now than in Photoshop. There are definitely projects on my mind that I haven’t yet figured out how to bring into a material reality. Those projects become a kind of other practice that’s different from the drawings I make in a day or the Photoshop files I create at night.

Thinking about how to make these ideas exist, and the problems I run into, doesn’t necessarily result in them ever actually coming to completion or even a start; but thinking about it, and problemsolving, influences other projects and ideas that I do make. Monumental projects act as milemarkers or destinations, but usually on the way there I end up working on new projects and experiments that lead me in other directions.

Your work runs the gamut between serene abstractions and disorienting digital landscape collages. Do these different styles serve distinct purposes for you as far as self-expression and the impression you’re trying to convey or do you see it as all part of one continuous creative process?

The short answer is that I see it all as one clear and continuous process. In my practice there have been very few pieces of finished artwork, but instead are documents and moments along a path of structural tests, program explorations, art history lessons, and formal questions.

Is there ever such a thing as too much or not enough in your images? Is there a line where thing become too overwhelming or minimalist?

That’s something I always consider. I perpetually overkill. The computer helps that, though. I just keep saving states of things. I overkill drawings much more often than digital files. With the digital, I can undo and go back to earlier versions.

My friend and fellow artist Harm van den Dorpel has offered me one solution for this problem. He created a program called symbolicbehavior that allows me to take screen captures in the midst of working and they are directly uploaded to a private online portfolio to look through. So even if I “overkill” there is a chance that a state of the work is out there that I do like.

Had you done much collaboration before joining forces with Max Pitegoff to form Poster Company? Has working with him changed the way you think about your role in the production of your solo material?

Yes, I have had many artistic collaborators and I find the collaborative process essential to learning, thinking, and understanding how others see and create. I have collaborated on drawings, paintings, digital files, unfinished books, installations, performances, curation, shows, and websites.

When I’m working with others, we are performing a new and unique form of visual communication. A language based on addition and subtraction, applying and erasing, reinterpreting forms, mimicry, questioning each other, and freely criticizing. Often all done in silence. These collaborations often teach me whole new ways of thinking about drawing, form-making, and visual language which then informs the work I make for myself.

Drawing partners especially become strangely intimate for me. Everyone has there own way of drawing, doodling and filling the page. To be present through the whole thing gives me a glimpse inside there head, seeing the hesitation in certain lines, the intensity in their shading, the smudges of graphite created from careless skids of the hand. It can be quite romantic.

As someone who doesn’t know much about the creation of digital art, when I look at your work I just see a pure end product. It could’ve been uploaded straight from your subconscious for all I know. Am I missing something vital by not being able to appreciate the process or do you prefer that the audience engage your art on a holistic/symbolic level?

One of my favorite kinds of viewership is the kind that is completely stumped by what they’re looking at, where nothing’s clear––how it was made, when it was made, why it was made. For me, a work like that is much more contemplative. Thinking about Georges Melier’s early films, the idea of special effect, where the medium itself was new and the possibilities within it may have been completely new and indecipherable to the audience––that’s appealing to me. So no, a viewer’s ability to understand the process behind a piece doesn’t matter to me. I’m somewhere between neutral and really not wanting them to think about the process, or try to understand it. But maybe a better word than ‘holistic’ would be ‘universal’––but not in a religious sense, more in a final scene from Men in Black-sense––you know, where the universes are inside the marbles inside other universes, etc.

How did you first become interested in working in the digital medium? Were there any major inspirations or influences?

My first digital artmaking as a child was probably with MS Paint and KidPix. I used them to render animated characters of my youth. I also spent many summer nights designing new buildings for SimCity. As a kid, I really wanted to know how Sonic the Hedgehog the game was made––who made it, how, the software involved. I spent summers coming up with video game ideas and I didn’t know who to write to with them, so I just sent them to Electronic Gaming Monthly and GamePro magazine, the envelopes covered in drawings of levels. I never got any replies.

The final epiphany I had from this era in my life was to make a game where the entire game was codes––in order to start the game, you had to find the code. In order to do any and every aspect of the game, you had to know the codes to put in. I then realized that this was the basics of computer programming. I was about eleven or twelve at this point. From there I kept mapping out new levels for new games even as I went through high school. Although I became familiar with photoshop in middle school, I didn’t start using it for artmaking until that digital printing class with Peter Baldes. However, I was comfortable with it, and it made just as much sense as pen and paper.

How do you prefer to present your material in a gallery setting? Does it loseWeight Exercise or gain anything in the transition to a physical format?

The artwork I show in galleries is partially culled from the digital work online, but also from my studio practices of painting, drawing, and sculpture. These physical works are often responses to the digital work I’m making. And the digital work is often a response to physical work (a drawing becomes a photograph that is edited digitally, color corrected, printed, traced, scanned, and becomes the idea for a new animated GIF) I try to document the physical work I make, but the end photograph tends to be something totally different from the gallery object. What I hope to bring to every show is a visible thread through my recent thoughts.

Are you currently working on any major projects?

A lot of things have been completed or are nearing completion. I have a book of digital diagrams and half-tone abstractions titled Comics being released by the small press Medium Rare in late summer/early fall. A set of digital prints I made will be included in the next Sen-Oren issue and show in Gothenberg, Sweden. I’m currently in a group drawing show called The Pencil Show at Foxy Production in New York City. I’m also involved in a few other open-ended collaborations with artists abroad.

Max and I are working on a Poster Company book, and looking into how to publish it. Poster Company recently designed a poster for the second issue PWR Paper. We are also working on an installation at EFA Project Space in September.

I’ve recently discovered that I need to keep a calendar.