Liz. Isn’t nostalgia something where, once you engage in it, you automatically paint things in a light that wasn’t necessarily the light of the day back then?

I have this weird feeling that I might not be a very nostalgic character. There are moments when nostalgia hits you, but to me it’s usually not a very giving feeling, to put it in modern terms. It’s very close to melancholy and sadness. And I do like sadness a lot. I really enjoy it, as any woman with a monthly cycle.

Of course, there is the early web nostalgia of the 1990s, when the web was very small and you could basically talk to anyone because it was such a small circle. You would just find each other. It was like a small party. That was great, but it’s not something I’m nostalgic about because it was only good for a certain period of time. I wouldn’t want it back. Been there, done that. It was great, thank you, and moved on.

Liz. UBERMORGEN never came from the idea of the web as a utopia. We always saw it, not necessarily as a dystopia, but clearly as something that could become a huge manipulator.

I remember in the 1990s we were sometimes genuinely angry at people who said, “The internet is going to solve everything.” People are still people. People can fuck everything up. Back then you needed maybe one asshole in a hundred to fuck things up. Now, thanks to technology, you need one asshole in a million, and you can produce a trillionaire. Great. That’s progress. (laughs) So I can’t really be nostalgic for that.

Liz. We love playing with technology. I was never interested in hardware. I was a child who didn’t play with Lego because I couldn’t stand all those little pieces. It was too constructive. You have to put this there and that there. It didn’t feel free. Software is more malleable.

We’re building a new website for something at the moment, and I’m doing it with somebody else. I was trying to explain to this person how you build a website from our perspective, and I told him he had to watch R.AF. to understand it. It sounds absurd, but it isn’t.

Websites are infrastructure. Technology is infrastructure. Infrastructure is always contested. It has to be protected. It can be attacked. I’m not saying this from some paranoid web-admin mindset. That’s simply how you have to understand infrastructure. The power of technology was always something we worked with. It’s just much more visible now. In the early days of the web, you could fuck with people through the browser. Open some shit, fuck things up, close the browser. You can’t do that anymore. People react as if you fucked with their children. They get offended over pixels.

And that’s maybe something I am nostalgic about. Everything you do as a digital artist is ultimately just pixels on a screen. The great thing about this work is that it isn’t that relevant. And that irrelevance gives you freedom.

I’m glad art isn’t more relevant. If it were, it would be much less free, because then it becomes politics. And in politics you can’t have ultimate freedom. You need rules. You need accountability.

Liz. Maybe I’m nostalgic for people using that freedom in art simply to make things. Today, in almost every exhibition we do, there is some problem: “You can’t do this, that’s offensive. Why would you do that? Maybe we have to change this.”

We joke that we prefer the Chinese version, where you send the work to the censors first and it comes back. Except, of course, you don’t actually send it directly to the censors. You send it to people who decide what might be acceptable to the censors. And before you even send it to them, you’re already thinking about what might be acceptable. It’s layer after layer of self-censorship. The joke is that the people who see the best art are the Chinese censors because they get everything fresh. What a great audience. Maybe we should produce only for the censors of the world.

In a strange way, the censors have more freedom than the people being censored.

Liz. The channels for attention have become streamlined. But from a net art perspective, that’s also just another system that can be hacked. How we work and what our work looks like has changed because it depends on the technology available. But we are still net artists in the sense that it’s about examining technology, using it off-label, finding the little holes where you can make things happen that aren’t supposed to happen.

One thing we really learned during the pandemic is that art and culture are things people cannot live without. The theaters closed. You couldn’t go to concerts. People were like, “No, I’m dead.” And yes, you’re right, you’re dead. There’s a reason there are prehistoric paintings in caves. Artistic expression might be one of the few things that is genuinely human in a way that distinguishes us from other animals. Although I’m looking forward to orca art, I have to say.

And to come back to nostalgia: you can create these feelings again. Coherence, togetherness, this feeling that we are all here together. You just have to find the right niches, these little doors of attention that people can enter. Maybe that’s why we aren’t particularly nostalgic. For us, these moments keep happening.

Liz. If it’s about nostalgia, there have to be seals. UBERMORGEN has used seals for a very long time instead of a logo. A seal represents the authority of some obscure entity, often a state entity. Imagine the President of the United States standing at a podium without the seal. Suddenly he’s just some guy standing there.

Liz. One of them is our current UBERMORGEN self-portrait. I’ve wanted to do this for a long time because I really like graphics, in the sense of graphs. It represents us as different columns in a graph. I think it’s my absolute favorite self-portrait. It’s a neoliberal self-portrait: just data visualization. I used the colors from our website in 2000. Nostalgia. The other is a fake Greco-Roman coin showing two women kissing. It’s called Nostalgia. Of course, it’s a double entendre. It’s this funny idea of how much men love watching women have sex with each other, while at the same time, in the context of nostalgia, they might be longing for a time when they still imagined they could somehow be part of it.

Liz. We work with AI a lot. One thing that always annoys me is when you work with Midjourney and it asks you to personalize your style. I’m like: No. That’s the last thing I want to do. I don’t want to create a personal style. That would be horrible.

Liz. Because AI is constantly rehashing old imagery and creating semi-new things from it. And in a way, I think that’s great. UBERMORGEN is so copyleft that our attitude has always been: Fuck it, reuse everything. But copyleft comes with the condition that you don’t exploit the things or the people whose work you use. I’m not saying it’s cool for huge companies to take photographs we made and make money from them. That’s bullshit.

But I also look at all the terrible NFTs people make, all the really bad art and really bad AI art, and think: people are expressing themselves creatively. Of course, much of what they produce is bad because most people aren’t great artists. But if you go to a pottery class because you enjoy making a bowl, most people there are going to make a terrible bowl. They still love their bowl. That’s what it’s for. It doesn’t have to be critically acclaimed.

I love all the slop. I could do with fewer naked, big-boobed women, obviously, but that’s reality. I’m a fan. I’m not somebody who says, “Oh no, this is destroying good art. People are only making superficial images.”

One thing I particularly love is that AI can make really great advertising. I find it absurd when people get angry that big companies use AI images in advertisements. Did you really think they cared about great photographers? What did you think advertising was?

Liz. I think there has long been a misunderstanding among some people working in the commercial creative world. A lot of people thought they were somehow irreplaceable. But if you work in a commercial environment, you are always interchangeable. That is part of the basic idea of a commercial environment.

And that must really hurt. I’m not making fun of these people. Imagine you’re a great illustrator and suddenly your work is no longer needed. That’s painful. But the same thing happened to the dinosaurs. Of course we lose something. Every time something disappears, we lose something. An individual illustrator will create images that AI would never arrive at because they can be genuinely original. AI doesn’t work that way.

That is sad. But it doesn’t make me nostalgic. That’s simply not my mindset.

Liz. But we used Amazon too. Criticism doesn’t mean you don’t use something. That’s not the point. If I don’t use it, I don’t know it.

Liz. No. But it’s not as if Google appeared and two years later we made projects making fun of Google. It takes time. It takes the right moment. It isn’t about attacking something. It’s about finding where the confusion actually lies. The trilogy with Amazon, Google and eBay was largely about pixel money: these enormous companies that are so valuable, while the value is manifested in real jobs. Amazon obviously creates real jobs, but many of them aren’t professions. And people need professions to build a life. Another stupid robotic job where you just move shit around doesn’t give somebody a sustainable life. So those works were about much more than simply criticizing a company.

With AI, I’m still playing with it and trying to figure out: Where is my biggest beef? That isn’t necessarily a public process.

For the show we did in Romania, for example, we made a pattern with ChatGPT. I wanted a wall tapestry, a fabric pattern combining neo-fascist Silicon Valley figures with Nazi aesthetics. But I explicitly didn’t want swastikas. That wasn’t the point. It would have been too obvious. ChatGPT told me it couldn’t use Nazi aesthetics and then produced a pattern full of swastikas, combined with Silicon Valley insignia. And I thought: Thank you very much.

I tried to make it more subtle, but it kept doing the same thing. You try to tell it the difference, but it can’t really understand that distinction. Criticism doesn’t always have to be deadly serious. That’s important. And for us it’s never: “Now I’m going to criticize this.” It just happens. I have something AI-based in progress at the moment, but I don’t think it will become an artwork. I think it will be more forensic.

Liz.  And sometimes I wonder: Is AI really going to wipe out humanity, or is this partly men being terrified that there might be something they cannot control? I know I’m not the person who can stop AI. That isn’t within my sphere of action. Data centers are something we need to be very realistic about: where we build them, how we concentrate them, where they make sense and where they don’t.

But I remember the rhetoric when the internet arrived: “The internet will solve all our problems.” Now AI arrives and people say, “It’s going to kill us all.” Personally, I would ask for a little nuance.

Liz. In English, there’s this idea of the “student body,” which doesn’t really exist in German in the same way. It would sound very strange to talk about an AI student body. But if you think of all the students studying together as an entity that develops collectively, I thought it was important to introduce an AI student into that body. An AI student has completely different abilities. It can learn incredibly quickly, it will almost always be faster, it can produce really good results very quickly. But it doesn’t have a life. It isn’t a person. Showing it a nostalgic piece of music means nothing to it.

If you see an AI student as an opponent, it’s the perfect opponent for an art student because it constantly makes you feel that you aren’t enough. But at the same time, you have to be able to say: That isn’t me. I think that’s a really useful setup, especially for young people. When you’re growing up, you want to become yourself rather than somebody else. Of course, wanting to be somebody else for a while is a completely healthy thing, especially as a teenager or post-teenager. But eventually you have to find yourself and become comfortable with who you are, the decisions you make and the path you’re taking.

From that perspective, having an AI inside a university student body makes a lot of sense. And then there’s the absurdity of it. Does an AI need a university