Over the past few weeks I have had the opportunity of interviewing Douglas Easterly, one of the members of the artist collective SWAMP, an acronym standing for "Studies in Work Atmospheres and Mass Production". SWAMP is a group concerned with providing a platform for "negative feedback"1 particularly focusing but not exclusively on North American society, the mass media, and the technology market. Their artistic practice includes elements of media collage, robotics/cybernetics, biometrics, and performance, to all of which the process of collaboration is crucial. The concept of collaboration lends a critical element to an art work, the idea of community as opposed to the individual. Within the construct of a community the interests of the whole are more vital than those of the individual, hence in this type of artistic practice the idea of the lone artistic genius is ignored, and the work becomes a piece of social interaction and coordination. This according to Easterly "works in tandem with our [SWAMP's] general philosophy of art making; that art should be a revolt, not only against authority, but also against the traditional ideas of the artistic genius and virtuosity."2

My questions of SWAMP's artistic works and practice focused on the various roles that technology plays within the construct of their ideologies and productions. Technology has acquired a central, if not life sustaining, role in most of our lives. It frames the way individuals, communicate, interact with the environment and other beings, their means of consumption and for some sustains them in a more direct physical manner3. In accordance with SWAMP's idea that "art should be a revolt", they have produced works that use advanced technologies in an attempt to subvert their use and form a critique of human technology interaction, and the behaviors and attitudes that are created within this matrix. This social critique is the basis of SWAMP's subversion of technology. Within this framework it is no longer left to governments and global industry to solely apply the use of technology, but rather acts to question the very uses applied to technology by these entities and how its usage affects our social environment and ecosystem. Parallel and inter-linked with this discourse in this dialogue is how societal ideals of growth and progress are applied to the technology market and how Easterly and the other collaborators of SWAMP approach these ideologies in their practice.

The following is the body of the interview I conducted with Douglas Easterly in March and April of 2005:

Daylen Luchsinger (DL): What is the relationship(s) that you see existing between technology and ecosystems?

Douglas Easterly (DE): Technology has an interesting relationship with ecosystems. Cold environments would not be on the list of human ecosystems without the technology of fire, evolved through time into broilers, HVAC's and parkas. So technology can expand an ecosystem, but more often than not - especially over the past century, it destroys the ecosystem, not only for humans, but other life forms. This is due to exponential growth of technology without any valuable negative feedback. Classical cybernetics tells us that negative feedback can be brought back into a system for the purpose of having useful data to govern continued activity. The thermometer in an air-conditioned room, or our perceived view out of a window while driving a car, for example. What is really lacking in our culture, is the powerful voice of critical theory conditioning our social and economic practices that are running amok, distressing our psyche and ecosystems. So in summary, SWAMP work is an attempt to provide critical theory as negative feedback to a system that is teetering on possible future self-extinction, which currently tortures many of our living neighbors, human and other, world-wide.

Footnotes:
1 E-mail interview with Douglas Easterly, March/April 2005
2 E-mail interview with Douglas Easterly, March/April 2005
3 An example of this physical dependancy is the relation between the body and a pacemaker, as it regulates the heart and blood circulation.