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and physical space in these moments. The audience can simultaneously glimpse what the character is thinking and how he sees things, almost like a wrinkle in the fabric of the film. The insertion of the new into the context of the normal seems so totally plausible. That’s what I’m most interested in. I think architectural representation might begin to co-opt such techniques— which seek, unlike special effects and animation—not to supplant reality, but rather to extend it into something “hyper” or beyond what it is now. That’s what I’m exploring my own work right now, and it’s a question I’ve posed to your Networks studio in this week. With any luck, we’ll see some interesting things in the review today. D
Roth was invited to Taubman College to give a lecture titled “Art & Hacking” as part of the Aesthetic lecture series.
people are talking about. I never got comfortable answering the question of what is art or design. I think those questions get to be very loaded very quickly depending on who you’re speaking with. So while I understand them, some mornings I wake up and feel I’m a designer and others I feel I’m an artist. I definitely think of myself as an artist for practical reasons. I forget who had that description of what makes someone an artist, but I think it was that if you have a studio, you’re an artist. If you pay the rent by making art, maybe you’re an artist. But I think the part about architecture being interactive is a no-brainer. But they already give the architects a whole category. It’s okay to keep interactivity separate. Dimensions 26: So what lead you to pursue an MFA instead of Masters of Architecture?
Evan Roth: Great question. I would definitely say yes. First of all, I think architecture is inherently interactive. It reminds me of a question I was getting a lot, for which I still don’t have a good answer. It’s an even broader one, which is “what is design?” I self identify as an artist, and in winning a national design award, I think I may have been one of the only artists ever to be in that camp. I also think the category is relatively new.
Evan Roth: I’ve never done anything as hard as undergraduate architecture. I’ve never had as many sleepless nights as that period. Everything seemed easy after that. I did a four year program in architecture at Maryland and then worked for two years in Washington, D.C., at a fairly progressive place that mostly focused on interiors. But they did some cool work and I was into it. I was totally absorbed in architecture. When I would travel it was all I looked at. Then I ended up moving to Los Angeles, because at the time there was a lot going on with Morphosis and Gehry’s office and Eric Owen Moss—all these cool firms that were really hip at the time. So I decided I was going to go out there and intern for them. I was super young. I had my portfolio printed out and ended up getting a job with a guy who was the project architect on Bilbao. He was the architect that lived there during the whole time it was being built and then struck out to start his own practice. It was just he and I basically, working for a year.
So what is interactivity? You could argue that a painting is interactive. It just depends on what level of interaction
But the whole time, I was coming home at night and experimenting with Flash. It had just been released and
Dimensions 26: You recently won the Smithsonian’s Cooper Hewitt Design Award in the category of interaction design. Do you consider architecture a form of interaction design? Are these professional definitions outdated? Either way, what elements or practices could each field benefit from borrowing from the other?
Roth
Evan Roth is an American artist based in Paris who visualizes, subverts and archives transient and often unseen moments in public space, popular culture and the Internet. He applies a hacker philosophy to an art practice that often involves technology, humor and activism. Roth’s work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and has been exhibited widely in the Americas, Europe and Asia, and the front page of Youtube. He is co-founder of the Graffiti Research Lab and the Free Art & Technology Lab (F.A.T. Lab), a web based, open source research and development lab. Roth and his work have been featured in multiple outlets, including NPR, the New York Times, Liberation, Time, CNN, the Guardian, ABC News, Esquire and Juxtapoz. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Architecture from the University of Maryland, College Park.
Interview
An Interview with Evan Roth