“I used to think that everything had to happen on a short timescale, but I think I’m much more interested now in things that take some time to make, and that can develop into a document that reflects how special the experiences were. ”
Ben Kinsley’s projects have ranged from choreographing a neighborhood intervention into Google Street View, directing surprise theatrical performances inside the homes of strangers, organizing a paranormal concert series, staging a royal protest, investigating feline utopia, collecting put-down jokes from around the world, and planting a buried treasure in the streets of Mexico City. He has exhibited at venues such as Queens Museum, Cleveland Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) Cleveland, Mattress Factory Museum, Centro di Cultura Contemporanea Strozzina in Florence, La Galería de Comercio in Mexico City, and many others. He has been awarded residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Skaftfell Art Center in Iceland, and Askeaton Contemporary Arts in Ireland. His work was featured on NPR, The Washington Post, Artforum, Wired, Hyperallergic, and others.
His work, “Street With A View” is included the exhibition, “1000 Miles Per Hour” at Beeler Gallery at Columbus College of Art & Design (CCAD) that showcases the powers of space and perspective through contemporary photography and lens-based practices. “Street With A View” introduces fiction, both subtle and spectacular, into the doppelganger world of Google Street View. On May 3rd 2008, he and his collaborator Robin Hewlett invited the Google Inc. Street View team and residents of Pittsburgh’s Northside to collaborate on a series of tableaux along Sampsonia Way. Neighbors, and other participants from around the city, staged scenes ranging from a parade and a marathon, to a garage band practice, a seventeenth century sword fight, a heroic rescue and much more. Street View technicians captured 360-degree photographs of the street with the scenes in action and integrated the images into the Street View mapping platform. This first-ever artistic intervention in Google Street View made its debut on the web in November of 2008. As of April 2014, Sampsonia Way was replaced with updated imagery. It is now possible to “go back in time” in Street View. Select “May 2008” to see images from this project.
“1,000 Miles Per Hour” is part of the 2022 FotoFocus Biennial, a monthlong celebration of photography and lens-based art that unites artists, curators, and educators from around the world. The 2022 FotoFocus Biennial, now in its sixth iteration, activates over 100 projects at museums, galleries, universities, and public spaces throughout Greater Cincinnati, Northern Kentucky, Dayton, and Columbus, Ohio in October 2022. Each Biennial is structured around a unifying theme; for 2022 that theme, World Record, considers photography’s extensive record of life on earth while exploring humankind’s impact on the natural world. I conducted the following interview with Ben via Zoom on Tuesday, July 19, 2022. The transcript has been edited for concision and accuracy.
Dee Miller: I noticed that you studied in Germany for a semester abroad when you were at the Cleveland Institute of Art, and then on to Carnegie Mellon University for your MFA. I'm curious, how does that all influence what you make?
Ben Kinsley: I grew up in Granville, Ohio, where my parents still live. I graduated high school in 2000 and went to CIA directly from there. At that time, there was a brand new media art program, and nobody really knew what that was. It was still the early days in digital media art (YouTube didn't exist yet, Web2.0 was on the horizon) and we were trying to figure out what this whole interactive media thing was all about. I got into sound and installation art, and I went to Germany to study sound design for a semester. There, my work became much more about doing things out in public spaces with sound and musicians, and it got me thinking about participatory performance. That led me to Carnegie Mellon’s “Contextual Practice” program, which focused on art existing outside of gallery spaces. So I went there for my MFA. My partner Jessica Langley is an artist too, and we went to Iceland for a year after grad school. She was a Fulbright fellow, and we spent some time in Europe, and we lived in Berlin for a while. Now I'm in Colorado Springs where I teach at the University of Colorado.
Miller: Can you describe how you coordinate collaborative community participation in your work? I think a lot of our students focus on the craft of making objects so they may be less familiar with your process.
Kinsley: I'm glad that I had a background in craft for what I do now. At CIA, they had a big design program, they even had enameling as a major, things like that don't quite exist anymore. I learned glass blowing, and at the same time I was working on a computer making animations. So from early on I was really trying to meld craft with digital, and I was thinking about how to take the experience outside of the computer. When Robin Hewlett and I did the Street With A View project, I had been doing a lot of performance work in public spaces. In 2006 I was a resident artist at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. People who live in the neighboring community didn’t really come to the residency, but co-existed with it every summer. We were on a lake, they could see us, and I wanted to do something that connected the art residency to those communities. So we ended up staging a play on the shore for people to watch from their boats. I had people in canoes going around serving drinks and snacks, handing out playbills. It was really pretty magical, like a barn raising, a community event. But now we're in this world where we have to document everything to get the next residency or exhibition. How do you merge participation and documentation? I think the Street View project solves that problem. There was a community performance for the camera, and the piece lives on as an experience through the document. I'm amazed it was 14 years ago that we did that project, and it's still being exhibited. Someone two days ago emailed me to ask for photo permission to put it in a book that they're publishing. I can't believe it still has legs, but your question about craft is important because these things live on. I used to think that everything had to happen on a short timescale, but I think I'm much more interested now in things that take some time to make, and that can develop into a document that reflects how special the experiences were.
detail of “Street with a View,” image courtesy of the artists
Kinsley: I've been working this past year on a project called Tree Talks: Populus tremuloides. It's a series of four events, one per season, focused on understanding the quaking aspen from a multitude of perspectives. In summer, I invited a US Forest Service employee who studies Aspen decline. At another Tree Talk, we had a mycologist talk about how roots are connected by mycelium. There was an ornithologist describing flammulated owls that nest in holes created by woodpeckers in Aspens, and then a native artist-activist talked about the spiritual and metaphysical side of trees. A poet who studied with Pauline Oliveros led us on a deep listening walk. All of these events are meant to expand how we think about this tree, to help us make connections. The four in-person experiences are pretty intimate, with a limited capacity of about 20 people per event. Last winter, we snowshoed in and we sat in a circle to have conversations. It's not being videotaped, but I am recording the audio, and in the end, those lectures will be released to the public through an online archive. I'm also documenting through photography, and I'm doing a lot of field recording separately from the talks. I think it's gonna take another year to make a vinyl record with a companion photo book - tangible, aesthetic objects you can sit with and listen to as another kind of way of knowing, another way to get to this place of understanding. The different media help to extend the knowledge sharing, conversations, and hearing the sounds out there. I'm putting contact microphones in the ground to get all kinds of vibrations and things like that. So what I'm really thinking is, “How do we actually know something? Or how do we learn about something through all these different inputs?” I don't want it to just be a podcast or an audio file, something you listen to on headphones. I want it to be meditative, an intentional experience where you sit down and spend time with an object and images and text and sound.
Miller: I was looking online at the Tree Talks and the Mushroom Rambles as you were talking just now. It sounds like what you're doing, rather than being didactic, is collaborative knowledge building, a practice that’s integral to my pedagogy. And it got me thinking about what kinds of objects might come out of that process. The images that came to mind were, maybe this 12 inch vinyl could look like tree rings? Or the dust jacket could be made from thin veneer? I think a tactile sensibility would be important. It reminds me of the book, The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben. He wrote about mycelial networks that connect trees. That also reminds me of Richard Long, although his experiences were kind of solitary, where he would leave marks in the landscape created by nothing more than his feet. Do you see yourself as part of an art movement? Are there artists with whom you identify? Do you see this work as part of some kind of lineage?
Kinsley: I studied with Jon Rubin at Carnegie Mellon. He was my graduate thesis advisor and my teacher, and we've collaborated on projects together. I'm influenced by his approach and the way he thinks about context as being part of the creative material for making a work of art, as he did with Conflict Kitchen. Lenka Clayton, who's also in Pittsburgh, is an incredible artist, and Nina Katchadourian’s work inspires me. They each explore how we can make art relevant to people’s lived experiences. I teach in Colorado Springs and a lot of our students are local or first generation or military or non traditional. Most of them, even if they declare art majors, have never been to a gallery or museum, or even to Denver. So Art feels like a kind of gatekeeping, a threshold you have to choose to go through. How can we insert our experiences in daily life, or use ordinary occurrences as the inspiration for making? I think of Fluxus and “happenings,” and different spaces for art to exist within. Jessie and I run a gallery space in our front yard called, “The Yard.” We live in a ‘50s, suburban neighborhood not far from downtown. It's a lot of retired people, definitely not a space where you expect contemporary art to exist. For four years we have been staging exhibitions with contemporary artists, pushing our front yard to be a different kind of space. The parameters of the front yard are wind, weather, sidewalks, dog walkers, and so on. We prompt the artists to consider how the work they make in this space is going to be different from work they would make in a studio or a gallery. It’s opened up conversations about art with people who might not normally feel comfortable talking about art. Someone even wrote a review on the Nextdoor App. We've heard from a couple of the artists that this was a really different way to think about their work, and this led to them getting larger public art commissions. The context becomes a big factor in the work that is made.
Miller: You've been talking about broadening access to art spaces, and there's a kind of irony in bringing your work into the white cube of Beeler Gallery. But when I look at your projects – the impromptu performances, walks in nature, how you're amplifying microscopic sounds and encouraging people to engage with what they can't see underground, prompting folks to share anecdotes and family histories around mushroom gathering – it’s not just participatory, your audience is an active author of the work with you. They're your co-creators. Is reflecting on the ways in which we're all connected a central theme in your work?
Kinsley: I have thought about that. One of my biggest artist inspirations is Brian Eno. He's written some amazing texts, and his 1995 book, A Diary With Swollen Appendices really resonated with me. It still does. He talked about creating frames, and was like, “okay, what are the parameters of the experience I'm interested in building?” For instance, he got into algorithm composition, and was trying to figure out how to put himself, as the composer, in the position of a listener hearing it for the first time.
Miller: John Cage was interested in this too, right?
Kinsley: Yes. Cage has been another big influence for me. Creating situations that go in a direction you're not expecting, and where you can discover with the audience is one of the things I'm interested in. When I introduce the speakers at each event, I am really excited to learn, too. I don't really sell artwork. It's funny, do you ever get those spam emails where people are like, “I saw my husband looking at your work and I want to buy him ‘Tree Talks Event Number Two,’” and I’m thinking ‘Sure, I would like to sell this ephemeral experience to you, but how? Ha!’ These are experience-based things, and it's important to me that I'm part of that experience. I set up the situation, and then I am also a participant.
Miller: I’ve totally received those emails and I'm like, “Of course your husband wants this photo of me wearing nothing but baby oil and high heels.” You're not making commodity objects for sale in galleries, though maybe the vinyl record and book will be more like that. Do you receive grant funding or professional development from your university to do this work? If so, have there been instances where the mission or goal of the granting institution has influenced either the way you propose a project or the outcomes that you delivered?
Kinsley: Most recently, with Tree Talks, I received grant funding from my University, which really only covered the cost of the events themselves. I also partnered with an organization based in Denver, Black Cube Nomadic Museum, who helped produce the series and will be supporting the record publication. But I still don’t have enough funds to cover the full cost of production. So, I was looking for more funding to be able to press the vinyl, which isn’t cheap. Like, I don't know how anyone can sell a record for $10 when they cost much more than that to make. Anyway, I applied for another regional grant before I started the project, which was location specific for projects occurring within a certain radius of Denver. One of my first location choices for Tree Talks was outside of that radius, so I ended up choosing Kenosha Pass because I was trying to qualify for this grant. It is also one of the places where Aspen trees are in proximity to different cities along the front range. In the end, I didn’t get that grant, but Kenosha Pass ended up being a great location. I do have to piece together possible opportunities and partnerships and sometimes adjust projects to fit. We’ve done this a bit with The Yard as well. Our 2020-2022 season was grant funded and our curatorial process was influenced a bit by the stipulations of the funding.
Miller: For the piece in this exhibition, Street With A View, did you actually reach out to Google and partner with them?
Kinsley: At first we wanted to do it in a more guerrilla way, but then it was like, are we just gonna stand outside our house for months on end and just wait for something that might never happen? One of my advisors’ college roommates worked for Google Pittsburgh, so Robin and I threw together like a pitch, sent it to him, and he passed it up the chain. The head of Street View in San Francisco got back to us and then, a couple of weeks later, we're on a conference call with Google corporate, realizing the only way we'd ever be able to do this would be to collaborate. Because, even if we got our performances recorded on their Street View cameras, they control what they put online. They could just reshoot the street. At first we said, “whenever you're coming down the street, just let us know and we’ll do our thing.” And they said, “it doesn’t work like that.” So we ended up coordinating with Google. They sent a driver to Pittsburgh with the newest camera technology at the time, and they agreed to photograph the streets for us on a specifically scheduled day and time. It was really important to Google that this not be publicized ahead of time because they didn't want a bunch of press there, and we didn't either. We wanted it to be grassroots, an event for the people on that street. The Mattress Factory Museum was a collaborator because it’s at the end of the street and they have a good relationship with this community. We went door to door, brought in a local barbecue place to set up a block-party lunch, and it was a fun, little street festival. We didn't put anything online and we said, “please don't post this anywhere,” because if it gets out there, Google won't do it. Somebody didn't get the memo and they blogged about it. The Tribune got wind and started calling us asking, “when is this happening?” I said, “if you publish this, it will ruin the project. If you wait till after it’s over, we'll give you first dibs on the story.” But the Tribune ended up publishing a story anyway, because they found out we did not have a permit for what they called “a parade,” and they called the city on us. Then I got a phone call from the head of Street View, and he’s angry because they saw it in the newspaper, because Google sees literally everything. This was my graduate thesis project and I was sweating on the phone, envisioning my MFA project falling through. So, to calm him down I kind of lied and said, “No one reads that paper.” And so we moved ahead. Then on that morning there were torrential downpours, terrible weather, and the Google guy shows up, all the street residents show up. We're all at the Mattress Factory under tents, waiting for the storm to pass. The Google driver was like, is this happening? And none of the media showed up because they didn't think it was going to happen. Then there was a clearing for about two hours, like the eye of the storm. We were able to do three takes, had the barbecue, cleaned everything up, and then it started raining again for three days straight. Google had us sign a contract and they own the rights to the images, which is fine. And they wouldn’t promise the images would go live or stay online. We just had to trust it would work out, and fortunately it did!
Video still from "Street With A View,” image courtesy of the artists
Miller: I think it’s lovely they archived it for you. I don't have to go into the Wayback Machine to see these. I can just go back in time on Street View.
Kinsley: It's not exactly the original version. At first, it was the one place they didn't have blurred faces, because we had everyone sign releases. At some point I think they reconsidered their liability and they blurred everyone. And then eventually it got updated and replaced. For a while it was a patchwork. You'd go down the street, see the parade as you navigate, and the next click would show new views from a different year. Then, a couple blocks later, the parade pops back in. When it was fully replaced, they added the “go back in time” option. The video I sent CCAD allows you to see the whole thing in its original form, navigating the street and seeing all of the people's faces.
Miller: Since your work is so relational and participatory, do you have an opinion about the role of the artist in society?
Kinsley: When we made Street With A View, I was interested in spectacle, and I've moved away from that. Now I am much more interested in what kinds of questions are raised when we share knowledge. When I talk to scientists they say, I've been studying this my whole life. This is my career. And the more we study this thing, the more we realize we don't know as much as we thought we knew. The more things we try to learn, the more mysteries open up. And I think art works in a similar way. Academia affords me that option more so than my previous freelance career. Working gigs, everything had to happen quickly. I'm trying to kind of push against that.
Miller: Through shared experiences?
Kinsley: And what happens when we look closely at something, slowly over time. How can we, as artists, create spaces for other people to have moments of wonder?