with Maggie Dunlap
What is your general reception when exhibiting?
Maggie Dunlap – I’ve found in my “leaked” work, the audience almost always believes the images and narratives I’ve created to be true. They take it at face value and demand police involvement. Ask for updates, zoom in and dissect the why’s and hows of the validity of the “snuff.” Digital autopsies are performed and they share their findings amongst each other. Thus far, the ethics of looking at pictures of dead naked women are rarely questioned. In work, I’ve shown as capital A-Art that has no clear moral imperative and where my intentions are more obscure, the ethics of looking at pictures of fake-dead women are always questioned.
How do you perform a "digital autopsy?”
MD – I just provide the bodies.
Is there an innocent image?
MD – I don’t know if there’s an innocent image, but I do know there is no such thing as a truthful one.
Do you think there is a possibility of owning full privilege over an image online? Does it matter?
MD – No and no. NFTs are an interesting gesture to me in that they attempt to do this, being (famously) non-fungible and all. I think the best digital work, nft or otherwise, knows it cannot be owned and that knowledge is encrypted in the work.
Is your work with censorship and banning predictive? Do you see a future in exhibiting and shitposting in a world of manufactured intuitions more or less framed by non-human, almost “more-than-human” devices?
MD – The “banned” work wasn’t intended to be banned. Maybe this is me being naive, but I didn’t expect what I made to be so swiftly censored. I wanted to utilize the internet and its users as actors in this digital performance, but it ended up being a battle to even have the images seen. As for the second question, this is probably for the theorists and critics to discern, they are our best and worst predictive software.
I sense a conduit between the online "redacted" symbolic and the manifested "leaked" real. Both obscure themselves to a forbidding veil that conceals the imagined and authentic. Both are not easily discernable by the viewer. This is to say: what happens online is also real, but is moderated through a reflective barrier that watches, defaces, censors, and/or regulates. There exists a level of moderation at every move. Is the dynamic of miscommunication and 'being mistaken' present in your newer work?
MD – Absolutely. Using the internet as a medium means you can’t control the environment or context in which your work is being seen, as opposed to showing in a designated art space where a certain audience is attracted for a certain reason. I used to find this frustrating, that I was unable to set a tone or create a world for my work to safely live on the internet, so I gave up using it as a tool for documentation. Some examples of misinterpretation or “being mistaken” that were the most inspiring for me were getting my own work sent to me by Instagram followers saying things like “this is so you.” or using my name as shorthand for a certain aesthetic. Being a hashtag in a caption next to #lanadelrey #ddlg #palegoth #traumacore. What inspired me to start this particular crime-centric body of work—there’s a photo that circulates every few months on instagram, tumblr, pinterest, etc that is usually labeled as a Richard Ramirez crime scene, but it’s really a nan goldin photo. All of these opportunities to misidentify or mislead might be what makes the internet so frustrating for some, and exciting for edgelords and shitposters like myself.
Interview Jasmine Reiko
Photography Aidan Zamiri
Excerpt from Issue No. 3 (2022).