With our festival this year, we wanted to give a platform to those artists who embrace controversy and confrontation. If you could offer a stage to one (radical) artist yourself, who would it be and why?

I have long been interested in the work of artist Daniel Keller. He and I are on different sides of a political debate but we share the same frame for what process is economically and technologically unfolding in the 21st century. We have an abundance of shared cultural and historical references and I find that my understanding is always enriched by his input.

We all have to deal with things we don’t like or that make us uncomfortable, from doing chores to having difficult conversations. On a more lighthearted note: what is something you hate dealing with, and why? 

I run a non-profit arts organization called Do Not Research. Someone always has to sweep up after events and often that responsibility falls to me. Sometimes work is just work but it’s still necessary. That extends to a lot of topics economically, socially, culturally, etc. 

As part of our current exhibition The Cake Is a Lie, we have on display your piece E-deologies: eight flags representing hyper-specific online communities. How did you devise the visual component of each community icon, and moreover what value do you believe a physical flag has to a specifically digital community?

e-deologies is a series of found images online. They are most often made by teenagers jamming together different political ideologies to create their own customized and bespoke belief system. Often, this generation of young internet users will use print on demand services and hang these flags in their bedroom in a way that gen X or millenials, like myself, might have had a poster of a band. Materializing this images is a way of showing social media’s impact on the real world.

Your essay ‘Politigram and the Post-left’ addresses the rapidly evolving climate of political discourse within the digital age and across social media, introducing the ‘Politigram’ as a community of radical political accounts on Instagram. What do you think is the relationship between ‘trolls’ and earnest narrators of political belief in identity formation?

Before the context collapse of large scale networks, trolling performed an important social function within small scale message boards. Within these communities, indeterminacy was essential to the process of meaning making. Shitposting was a way of proposing ideas that existed potentially outside the bounds of the Overton window and whose delineation helped to define the moral and ethical codes of the collective. Often uncertain of what they themselves believed, users would push an idea to its hyperbolic extreme in an attempt to find their group’s collective limit. Once breaching the consensus codes within their community, they would privately scale back to calibrate where they in fact stood on the issue. This process worked reasonably well on gaming forums in 1999. Not so much today.