Adam Torres and Michael Masucci discuss Sovereign Tech Summit.
Subscribe: iTunes / Spotify
Apply to be a guest on our podcast here
Show Notes:
Sovereign Tech Summit is taking place Saturday June 29th in Santa Monica, CA. In this episode, Adam Torres and Michael J. Masucci, Artist, Curator, Commissioner, Santa Monica Arts Commission, Co-Founder DNA Festival, Founding member of EZTV, explore the upcoming summit.
About Michael Masucci
Award-winning independent director and artist. Experienced Curator with a demonstrated history of working in the various aspects of arts-based practices ranging form experimental video art & installation to the broadcast media industry. Exhibited internationally at galleries and museums and guest speaker and universities and conferences including CalTec, University of Helsinki, UCLA, USC, Claremont Colleges, SIGGRAPH, Hacker Halted and Hack in Paris. Trained mediator and currently an Arts Commissioner for Santa Monica.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you’d like to apply to be a guest in the show, just head on over to missionmatters. com and click on be our guest to apply. All right, so today’s guest is Michael J. Misushi, and He’s the DNA Festival Santa Monica co founder.
He’s an artist and curator and commissioner over at Santa Monica Arts Commission, and he’s also founding member of EZTV. Michael, welcome to the show. It’s a pleasure to be here. Thanks so much for having me. All right, so I understand that you’re going to be participating over at the Sovereign Tech Summit, and you referred over to us by Kate Lynch, and the summit’s going to be taking place on Saturday, June 29th.
First off you excited about the summit? Like, can we expect? Well, I’m absolutely excited. I think it’s a great thing to Kate and her colleagues are doing. I think it’s an important time as technology is evolving so rapidly and in so many different directions that we check in with a number of different thinkers and a number of different ways to consider not just the technical innovation, but the sociological implications, the ethical concerns, the legal concerns, because when technology evolves, everything else evolves with it.
However, it usually. Lags behind the technology. And so the legal changes, the societal changes, the ethical concerns all seem to take a backseat to this rapid and just pervasive innovation that we now take for granted. And one step further , on this summit, a little birdie told me maybe that you got a performance that you’re going to be doing too.
Can you share a little bit about that? I think you’re the closer. Am I off on that? Yeah. So one of the things I’ve been doing over the decades is that rather than do very dry. Conventional lectures, and I’ve spoken all over the world and all throughout the United States. What I’ll do is something that I hope is informative.
But also, makes people think more on a gut and visceral level. So, I call these things performance rants. So, I mean, I don’t get angry, but I get very animated and very emotional, and it’s not unlikely for me, out of nowhere, to suddenly do a soliloquy from Shakespeare in the middle of my talk, or quote the Bhagavad Gita.
Or go in any possible direction, because the point ultimately is that all of human culture is interrelated. And the more we take a synthetic approach and bring in to the sciences great literature, bring in to art great science, the more we mix it all up in something very informed by performance art, which is a A mainstay here in Los Angeles, among the many claims Los Angeles can say in terms of its contributions to art history, is this very evocative, sometimes very controversial work that isn’t really theater.
It’s something all to itself called performance art. And and so I’m very informed by that, very influenced by that. So Rather than get up and quote a bunch of statistics and, and things like that, I like to basically put on a little bit of a show. Yeah, , that’s what I’m talking about. And I want to go a little bit further as well into what you’re doing over at the festival.
So the one that you co founded. So, so how did that come about DNA Festival? Okay, so I’m as you mentioned, a co founder of something called EZTV, and I always have to give this disclosure and disclaimer. It’s not to be confused with the illegal BitTorrent of the exact same name, but I’m the co founder.
Founder of a 45 year old art movement here in Los Angeles that understood very early in the game That computers were going to change everything including art. So DNA Festival is the culmination It’s our 45th anniversary and it’s our 40th anniversary of of working with an international group called SIGGRAPH, which is basically like the American Medical Association for Computer Art.
And so Santa Monica College about four years ago offered us the chance for this anniversary year to do , a one month retrospective going back 40 years of all of this computer art that we showed. But then Banded from one month to now. It is still about one month show, but then there’s going to be interspersed all the way through November 17 different events scattered over, I’d say a dozen or so venues all throughout Santa Monica.
And what we’re calling the creative corridor in which we want to show anything and everything having to do with digital art. So digital art isn’t just about Pictures, it’s music, it’s theater, it’s holography, it’s architecture, it’s screenwriting, and so we want to make this an annual event. And so the three largest organizations in Santa Monica, Santa Monica College, Bergamont Station Arts Center, and 18th Street Arts Center, come together to create this, what we hope to be an ongoing thing that we expect in a few years will be an internationally recognized festival.
Wow, that’s amazing. And I noticed a theme in your career in this really, you know, this intersection of art and science and technology, , like, how did all that start for you? Like, cause you’re, you’re pretty early on even in looking at it as art based on , like when, when you were thinking about what you, when you founded this, like , that’s, I don’t think we were even considering those.
I don’t think so. How did that start for you? Yeah, well, first, I’m not the first generation of computer artists. There were a few dozen people scattered around the world as far back as, but as you’re saying, it was very much on dozens. You know what I mean? Dozens is nothing. Well, because computers weren’t very accessible back then.
Of course, of course. So it was a very privileged, very rarefied thing that over the decades became more and more accessible. So for me, My dad’s dream was for me to be a scientist, not an artist. He was actually quite heartbroken when I went into art, but, but early on. So I went to a high school for people who supposedly were smart and high school at the time had the first computer in a high school in the United States.
So I was reduced to computers. I’m an old guy. I 1960s. And And even then, we could see these things could make, make images. And then, so for a while, I did entertain the fantasy of being a, a scientist, specifically a medical scientist. And I got an internship at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, where I was introduced to the Wang computer.
And and it just kept computers were always in my life, but I, I didn’t think of them like, well, I am a computer artist. I’m an artist and I use whatever tools make sense. So I’ll just assume play my electric guitar. Or use an electric drill to make a set as I will to use a computer. So I’ve always been melding all these things.
And so it always just was to me, just tools. I never thought of it as technology or anything like that. It was just what’s the best solution for a given project. As it’s evolved, I’m curious as to what you think about it now, like present day, like , you’ve watched this evolution and this is possibly getting into the a little bit of, of what people are going to see as well at DNA festival.
But like, , what do you think about it today? Like where it’s evolved to, like now when we’re talking about things like digital assets and streaming media and like all these other things, like, what do you think about it today? Well, I’m all for it. I think we’re, we’re entering a renaissance. I think the, the, the medium and the, the art movement has matured.
I think it still has a long way to go, but I think now. It’s not something that people no longer look at you funny If you say you’re a digital artist, they know what that means. They may like digital art They may not like digital art, but they know what digital art is and that’s actually a recent development In many ways the whole things with blockchain and nfts Even though in some senses nfts became a bad word because a lot of people got burnt it did Introduced to a wider audience the fact that You can make images many different ways, and we take all this for granted.
, we look at our smartphones, and we have them at our own when it’s a supercomputer. It’s a supercomputer that’s a production studio. You can make movies on it. You can make recordings on it. You can transmit live. You can broadcast. You can Publish it. So we take all that for granted. What I’ve seen over this lifetime is that we just absorb the new tech as if it was nothing.
It’s like, look back 20 years ago. So little of what we’re doing right now with Zoom or anything like that was even known. And it’s good to point out that artists have always been at the forefront of the experimentation with these things. So I just mentioned Zoom. It was actually a bunch of artists, specifically a group called Electronic Cafe International in Santa Monica, that did many of the early experiments.
In what we would now consider Zoom, where they would have a dancer in Maryland and a dancer in San Francisco dancing with each other on a TV set, or transmitting information back and forth, poetry, music, every kind of art was being transmitted over very, very crude versions of streaming technology. Going back, To the late seventies, and it took decades for rest of the world to catch up.
But many of the ideas in art and science are conceived by artists and then implemented by engineers. And that’s very important to know. Think of the notion of perspective. Imagine engineering without the ability to conceive, imagine, and draw perspective. Well, engineers And perspective artists did, and I think imagine medicine without all of the imaging capabilities, cat scans, cat scans, or digital images, all of these things came from this blending of art and science, which to me has always been the case.
To me, that’s nothing new. can’t make the great things in ancient Egypt without a lot of knowledge. Of geology, engineering, mathematics, and it’s the largest sculpture in the world. It’s an art piece, but it’s also equally a piece of art, of engineering and science. , tech is moving, I guess, with AI and otherwise, I mean, it’s moving at, we could argue, a faster pace than maybe it has the past, depending on who you ask.
Let’s talk about the ethical side of things and societal implications of like, as tech starts is advancing, like, you know, rapidly, like, what impact do you think this will have on art or art will have on it? Like, where do you see this going? Well, it’s a big big conversation and concern in the art world is AI.
There are some major art fairs that have banned AI from being allowed in it. There are others that now give awards for AI imagery. People are all over the map, but one thing is certain. Ideas like intellectual property, copyright, all of these things have to be revisited, because when you make an AI image, and you are not making an AI image, a number of algorithms are scouring the web, finding source material, repurposing it, editing it, and creating an image that Some people put their names on, but those images are derived from other people’s property.
So there were lawsuits going up through the system by artists who have noticed their work being sourced in other people’s work and saying, well, you can’t do that without permission. So just like in early hip hop, they had to deal with what do we do about sampling? Originally a hip hop artist would sample somebody, put it on their track and release it.
Then a bunch of lawyers got involved. And now when you look at the credits of that song, it lists all the people that were sampled and they all get a piece of the action. So something like that is probably going to need to evolve where we can see that. You can’t just take people’s work without their knowledge, without their consent, and it’s up to them, possibly without compensation.
So there are many ethical questions. There’s also the, the employment question situation. So now I know. Several lower end graphic designers who are completely out of work because small mom and pop businesses that in the past would have had a line item budget for a graphic artist can now go on any one of a number of AI programs and make a very compelling professional looking image for nothing.
So there are already people on the lower end of the industry that are unemployable. And all throughout Hollywood, there are a number of technical effects skills that have been rendered obsolete. Almost overnight. So there’s a great revolution that’s happening in, in certainly the, the area I’m familiar with, which is the more the visual aspects.
So areas of graphics, special effects, filmmaking, editing, they’re all being tremendously impacted by these new tools. Now, that doesn’t say don’t use them, but it does mean we need to have a conversation that as we eliminate entire job sectors, what do we have to offer and compensate with retraining with?
I mean, how do we deal with the fact that the tools are evolving so quickly? As I said earlier, society, the legal and the ethical concerns have to then catch up. I think everyone should have a seat at the table at the beginning that before something just gets unleashed, they really think about what is this going to do?
And they bring stakeholders representing those communities in and say, okay, how do we how do we not make a tidal wave? You know, in business, there’s a phrase that’s considered a good thing, which I always found a bit violent, disruptive. You know, every, Tech company wants to be disruptive. Well, that’s a particularly aggressive choice of words, you know, but it does speak to the reality because it does disrupt and disrupt affects people’s lives.
So when you disrupt an, in an industry, a lot of people go home without a paycheck. And so how do we retrain, repurpose, re evaluate skills? How do we value The human being over the stock price to me, that’s a one that’s not welcome. in many industries. Yeah, I think, you make some good points there.
And I think this is going to be one of the stories specifically in relation to art that we’re going to just be following and it’s going to be a big part of. Our lifetimes for sure. , and things are just moving so fast when you talk about like people losing jobs and things like this. And we think about like what generative AI is doing or anything like like the way you said I don’t need to say lower level.
You said kind of more of the entry level, basic, like graphic design type. Jobs are pretty much gone now and now you’re now really the, you know, kind of some of the higher end stuff and the, the things where you really need a solid, solid creative team like those aren’t replaced yet, but who’s to say at some point in , I mean, this stuff’s moving fast.
Who’s to say sometime in the next 10 years, who knows what it’s going to look like. Both has me both opposite optimistic on one side, like, wow, it’s going to be interesting to see like advancement. But then I like the way you also mentioned like, Hey, we have to be responsible with this, right? Like, like what, and what this next evolution of this is going to look like, it’s critical.
There’s a author and thinker out there that I’ve known for a very long time named Winshore Tao. And when in 1991, when testified in Congress about this newly adopted thing that people are grabbing on to call the Internet. And he was very positive about it, but he also correctly pointed out the world we now take for granted.
Financial scams, terrorism, bullying, all this stuff. And some blowhard congressman looked Wynne in the eye and said, Mr. Schwartau, why would bad guys ever use the Internet? And people are saying the same thing. About the world we are emerging into to and win is going around the world. He’s in Paris as we speak, going around the world, telling people, yes, it’s going to be great.
And there’s going to be out of much more advanced level. All of the things we have seen in web one and web to bullying, terrorism, financial scams, all kinds of defrauding, all kinds of bull. In all kinds of political manipulation, it’s all going to happen in a much more hyper realistic, much more immersive, much more compelling way.
So we need to prepare for it. Now, the first time I spoke about artificial intelligence, I’m certainly not an expert in it. But the first time I spoke about it wasn’t that long ago. It was in 2018 in Paris and I look back at what I said, and it’s like all irrelevant. I never predicted at this point that ChatGBT was going to be free and ubiquitous.
That mid journ, that all of the, that, you know, Bing’s image creator, that all of these things were just going to be a little option on your desktop. I never imagined three years ago, That we could do what we do today. So when you say 10 years from now, I haven’t a clue. And I believe anyone who thinks they do is a fool.
Because futurism has been one of the worst predictors. Throughout my life, , when I was young, we were promised flying cars and hotel vacations on the moon by the 1990s, you know, we were promised a world where poverty was going to be eliminated because we can, where war was going to be eliminated because it’s just smart.
Where racism and all of the different biases against different identities was going to disappear because it just makes sense. All of those predictions did not happen. And the one major prediction that they failed to do was no one when I was young. predicted the internet. So 10 years from now, I’m not going to even touch that.
I don’t have. Love it. Michael we’re about out of time for this episode, even though I could bet we got so many different, so much more to cover. That being said though, if somebody is listening to this or watching this and they want to follow up and they want to learn more about your work and follow you how do they do that?
Maybe the best thing at the moment is through the D Festival website, which is one word d festival sm.com. And there’s a link there where you can get in touch with the people in the festival and they can certainly get anything to me. I think the email is [email protected] or you know. Look, look for the EZTV Museum online.
I’m out there. Amazing. And for everybody listening to this, we’ll put the link in the show notes so you can just click on the link and head right on over to the festival page. And speaking of the audience, if this is your first time with Mission Matters, this is a daily show, meaning each and every single day we’re releasing new episodes, new content.
New thought leaders, new ideas and hopefully new inspiration that help you along in your journey. If you haven’t done it yet, again, hit that subscribe button or that follow button, because we want you to get the notification so that you get the next episode and Michael, again, thank you so much for coming on the show today and best of luck with the performance and the upcoming summit.
So thanks again. Thanks so much. It’s been a pleasure.
