“I tell my students to always have something in a gallery or on the way back. Or at the very least, you need to receive a rejection letter every week, because that means you’re hustling and putting yourself out there. You need to have something always in the air. And you have to make stuff happen, not wait for it to come to you.”
David Bowen is a studio artist and educator whose work has been featured in exhibitions at ZKM Karlsruhe, Fundación Telefónica Madrid, Eyebeam New York, Ars Electronica Linz, BOZAR Brussels, Science Gallery Dublin, Itau Cultural, São Paulo, Laboral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial Gijón, The Israel Museum Jerusalem, The Cranbrook Museum of Art Detroit, Intercommunication Center Tokyo and Center for Contemporary Culture of Barcelona.
David Bowen spoke with Darren Lee Miller via Zoom on Thursday, August 18, 2022.
Dee Miller: The first time I saw your work was at the Mattress Factory Museum in Pittsburgh in 2015. When Tim and I began discussing ideas for this exhibition, we connected Space Junk to the golden records that were included on the Voyager spacecraft that NASA launched out in space as a beacon to communicate something about our species. But also, those spacecraft will become junk floating in space when they stop working. When I saw your installation, I understood it to be a kind of combination of modern geolocation technology with low-tech objects, tree branches that look like dowsing rods. Instead of potentially communicating with extraterrestrials, your piece was showing those of us on Earth that there's an aspect of our life that's already living in space. You use wooden sticks to literally point at orbiting garbage. How do you feel about the conceptual connections that I’ve drawn, and my reading of your material choices to bridge science and pseudoscience?
Bowen: All the work generally starts with formal contrasts. I've been thinking about the difference between natural and mechanical systems, and for me it's not a dichotomy at all. I mean, in the Anthropocene, especially with Space Junk, how and when did these objects become natural? I think the oldest thing up there that we're still tracking is Explorer One, which was our answer to Sputnik. Explorer was supposed to be up there for 2000 years. But it ran into some unanticipated resistance or drag, and now it's only going to be up for 200 years. Things in lower earth orbit are in a constant state of decay. They're moving really fast, like 17,000 miles an hour to maintain orbit, and I like thinking about how they kind of are eventually going to be on a trajectory of their own. So obsolete objects in lower Earth orbit are what I’m tracking, not the space station or things that are way up there in geosynchronous orbit like the satellites used for GPS. Those are not going to decay. They may still be there when the sun explodes. I've done a couple projects about Voyager. I don’t think it's just another piece of space debris, it's way more poetic than that. It’s even a character in the first Star Trek movie.
Miller: I’ve always thought of the Voyager spacecraft as a kind of time capsule.
Bowen: In the movie, Voyager comes under the care of an entity that wants to help on its exploratory mission. It becomes so data hungry that it is gobbling up everything in the galaxy. I relate to longing for more information, and my work is about visualizing data. There are sites where you can track which piece of orbiting debris is going to reenter next, and where. You can plan to go and watch it streaking across the sky, which is wonderful. And these human-made things becoming natural phenomena are pretty cool.
Miller: I want to come back to a word you used earlier: decay. When you talk about objects decaying, you're talking about their orbits right? They eventually re-enter earth's atmosphere and crash into the planet?
Bowen: Yes, the ones in low Earth orbit do that, like rocket bodies and things that we shoot up there and don't think about. They eventually encounter the atmosphere, and the friction basically makes them burst into flames. If they don’t incinerate completely, then they hit the Earth, usually out in the ocean somewhere.
Miller: I was also wondering if by decay, you meant that they literally degrade and break apart.
Bowen: I don't think so. I read about this in the Atlantic, and there's just not much to intervene with them in the vacuum of space, unless they crash into each other. I read that the Chinese government is shooting at low-orbit debris, which seems like a bad idea because then there will be even smaller pieces that are harder to track. But the things that are way up there are really untouched. They're on a trajectory that's not going to put them in contact with anything. I'm thinking a lot more about physics, the power and energy that it took to get them up to that particular speed and orbit. That's why I mentioned Explorer running into some friction that no one calculated, and slowed it down enough to where it's not going to be up there for 2000 years.
Miller: Decay is a slow spiral.
Bowen: Yes, ultimately barreling to its final death.
Miller: How do the pieces in this exhibition operate? I know you're using data that you can gather publicly, but then, how do you make them actually work?
Bowen: There's a website that's tracking everything as far back as Explorer 1 right up to what’s being launched now. It gives you two pieces of data. One is altitude, and the other is azimuth. Altitude is the degree above the horizon, and azimuth is the angle or direction away from a north or south compass reference point. Both of these are based upon the position of the observer, which are recorded as latitude and longitude. So I'm using these data to orient the twigs in the installation to point in the direction of Explorer as it orbits the earth. I wrote what's called a scraper using Python script. The code goes to the website, finds and pulls the data to map the altitude and azimuth onto stepper motors so they can track it, tracing arcs across the sky in real time. Each motor is controlled with its own arduino, and the data is coming to them from a laptop running behind the scenes.
Miller: Until you described it I hadn't considered that, depending on where in the world you install this, it's going to be pointing in different directions because the altitude and azimuth are going to be in different places depending on the installation’s latitude and longitude.
Bowen: Absolutely. The first thing the scraper does is input its own GPS coordinates, because the computer knows where it's at. It uses that as a relational reference to what it's pointing to. Installing it on the other side of the world would be very different. I did iterations and experiments where they were tracked as they went below the horizon, because they're going all the way around. Have you ever played around with the stargazing apps? What is cool is that you can look down through to the other side of the Earth and find out what's going in that sky, too. I decided not to do that for this installation because I wanted to be site specific.
Miller: It sounds like most of the information that you're using is in the public domain. But have you ever tried to gather data that were not in the public domain? Like, has anyone from the NSA or FBI ever knocked on your door?
Bowen: No, I am just interested in what's readily available. I like accessibility. Even though anybody can get the same data on their computer, I think there's still a mystery to it. And there's still wonderment. I do embrace that mystery.
Miller: I think what you're talking about is a sense of reverence. Like when you're looking at a rainbow, or at the milky way. And even though we can explain these things, they're still quite beautiful.
Bowen: You can see a satellite if conditions are right. And it’s pretty easy to see the International Space Station with the naked eye. But the mystery is important to me.
Miller: You talked about the Voyager project being poetic, and I think it had utopian impulses. But Space Junk monumentalizes garbage, which is an absurdist gesture, and also kind of embarrassing for humankind. It got me thinking about all this stuff we are throwing away into an environment that we still don't know an awful lot about. And all this orbiting refuse is going to have negative impacts on our ability to continue launching things into space.
Bowen: I think about how we're fucking this place up pretty bad. I also imagine what it might be like after we've driven ourselves to extinction. Earth will be fine. Life will continue. It'll find an equilibrium. It's more about us, I guess. And that's sad. I can see your face as I say this and I'm not trying to upset you. But yeah, I have pieces that are more overtly about the huge amount of trash floating in the ocean. And today it’s 80 degrees and humid in Duluth, Minnesota, and it's not supposed to be this rainy or this hot. These are the more immediate ways the Anthropocene comes into play. I think it is important to consider orbiting debris, to elevate the mundane or to remind us of all the energy that was put into getting shit into orbit. Crazy amounts of energy. There was a spatula floating up there for a while, and a glove, shit that just got away from an astronaut when they were working on something. The 17,000 mile per hour spatula! I also get the romantic “science and exploring and questing for knowledge” narrative that comes from things like the Webb telescope. Lately, there's an awareness building, and some newer rockets are designed to come back and land to be reused.
Miller: My concern about the immediacy of anthropogenic climate change is what it means for our ability to continue to feed and house all human beings, which we weren’t universally doing very well even before the planet’s life-support systems began crashing. It’s an urgent problem. I'm connecting the themes and processes in Space Junk and what you just mentioned, garbage in the ocean, to your 2021 piece Wilderness. That piece is an installation of 13 disposable plastic grocery bags whose floating movements in the gallery are determined by data you gathered. It made me think of the enormous trash gyres circulating in the world's oceans. Please describe the data collection process, what you hope to communicate to viewers, and what kind of experience you want them to have.
Bowen: I did a residency in 2019 on board a research vessel that went across the Pacific, from Astoria, near Portland Oregon to Honolulu, Hawaii,. I was collecting data about the movement of the ship. They were scanning the sea floor, and I got the 3-D models from that, but my favorite place to go on the ship was on top of the “monkey deck,” like 3 stories up. It was the highest place I could go to look out at the Pacific, and all you see is a lot of blue and a 360 horizon. It made me feel like I was in an untouched place, and I was like, maybe things are OK. But then I’d look down and see a floating bucket or a flare gun or a piece of rope. My delusion of wilderness was shattered by those objects floating by. I had an older laptop with me, back when they used to have spinning hard drives. Those laptops had accelerometers in them, which would know when the computer was being dropped. I hacked into that to get data about how the ship was rising and falling on the ocean swells. I mapped that movement onto the bags. So they're literally showing whatever the Z of the computer was when it was on the ship.
Miller: Where was this installed?
Bowen: There's a local gallery where I set it up, and also the Minnesota Museum of Marine Arts. Because of COVID, it wasn't traveling much. I installed it next to another piece showing the 3-D seafloor models, the two pieces in conversation with each other.
Miller: Were you able to observe people in the gallery interacting with the piece
Bowen: Quite a bit, actually. One the iterations was installed in a storefront window, and people would walk past on the sidewalk. It was lit from below, drama!, like looking into a fishbowl. There were a lot of comments about how they looked beautiful, like jellyfish. I'm hoping that there's a push-pull with Space Junk, too, a formal beauty paired with a bleak reality.
Miller: What have been some of the opportunities or limitations or both of communicating these ideas or creating these experiences while you're working within the white cube of a contemporary gallery space.
Bowen: I was just talking about that today when I shared this work-in-progress. This robotic arm has a little chainsaw on the end of it, and it's controlled by a houseplant here with some sensors on it. Data from the plant controls the robotic arm that's connected to the chainsaw. The thought is that the plant will be protecting itself to a certain extent. It was a great studio visit until they were like, “How the hell are you going to show this thing?” And I was like, “Fuck if I know?”
Miller: OK, wait. What kind of inputs are being measured from this plant
Bowen: You get variable resistance from the leaves. I've done a piece where I flew a drone with a plant. Basically there's a ground, a negative in the soil.
Miller: This reminds me a little of making a potato into a battery.
Bowen: Yeah, so I'm basically analog reading each of the leaves and going straight to the analog pin in the arduino. You get variable resistance that's random as hell, it's really like all over the place, which is exactly what I'm looking for but I don't know how I'm going to show it. There’s a piece I did right after Sandy Hook, Fly Revolver, where a blank gun is controlled by flies. The gallery in Vancouver was supportive, but I don't know if you've ever shot a gun. It's really loud, unnerving. I didn't really realize what I had made until I set it up in that context where the public's coming and it's not such a controlled environment like my studio. The gun might go off in five seconds, five minutes, five hours, you just don't know. But you do know it's gonna be really loud. And I guess what I'm trying to say is that it didn't really come across in public the same way I’d experienced it in my studio.
Miller: That reminds me of Wafaa Bilal’s 2007 performance-installation, Shoot an Iraqi, where he put himself in the gallery on the receiving end of a paintball gun fired by internet users. I think he ended up giving himself PTSD through enacting that piece.
Bowen: A very brave, scary thing to do.
Miller: And perhaps not fully considered, like you said about your gun piece. A lot of your projects translate environmental data in one way or another into a visual representation or some kind of immersive experience. You're saying that sometimes those results can be a little bit random, but I think the thing that's constant is where you're looking for the inputs, and sort of maybe how you're using those data. Do you see your works in conversation with earlier work by others that we might think of as part of the Environmental Art movement like Olafur Eliasson, Agnes Dennis, Andy Goldsworthy, or even someone like Smithson or Richard Long?
Bowen: Absolutely. Eliasson’s work is fascinating, very influential. In terms of the environmentalist aspect, I think of it as kind of a collaboration. For example Smithson’s earthworks are designed to just kind of exist. I have the romantic notion that I'm taking my hand out of it, which is ridiculous, because I'm coding it all. There's an Icelandic artist who did a piece where he was painting, not knowing when a gun would be shot into the air behind him. The piece is about the mark he made when he flinched. This sort of reflexive movement, serendipity, and chance is also an important element in John Cage’s music. That’s what I’m striving for.
Miller: Do you have an anecdote that you would like to share about some unexpected thing that happened?
Bowen: I have an installation called Tele-Present Water that uses data from National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration buoys. They're out there in the Pacific on the Atlantic, used for ship navigation and to measure wind speed, wind direction, and so on. The piece uses data from the buoys to recreate the undulating ocean in the exhibition space. The gallery called me on March 11, 2011, and said, “Something odd is happening.” That was when the tsunami hit Japan. I don't think the tsunami actually hit the buoys, but maybe the ocean rose or fell beyond what the buoys would normally report, and it was recorded as an error? Or maybe too many people were hitting up the NOAA site that day and the system just got overwhelmed? We aren’t sure, but that mystery about what's happening on the other side of the planet is humbling.
Miller: CCAD is a small art school. In addition to experimentation and idea building, we focus on improving the craft of students' work. A lot of our curriculum is focused on making objects and services for sale. I'm going to maybe go out on a limb and guess that it probably doesn't work that straightforwardly with your installation works. Can you talk a little bit about making a living as an artist creating these kinds of experiential environments?
Bowen: I'm an art school kid, and I talk to my students about this, too. I do sell work occasionally. And once in a while I get something into a museum collection. Maintenance is always an issue with this type of work, as I'm sure you will find when it comes to you all. Early on I was making drawing machines, and I remember thinking, what is the work here: the drawing or the machine? Ideally, it's everything. I am very fortunate right now to have gallery representation, and they handle my European and international things. And a lot of what we're doing right now is pay-to-install work. That's the business model we use for income. I tell my students to always have something in a gallery or on the way back. Or at the very least, you need to receive a rejection letter every week, because that means you’re hustling and putting yourself out there. You need to have something always in the air. And you have to make stuff happen, not wait for it to come to you. It also depends on where you're based, how expensive your rent is, and how much public funding is available for the arts. So you find a way to cobble it together. One minute you feel like you're getting your ass kicked and you can’t keep up with all the things you’ve got going on, and then the next minute, it's like, where's it at? What's going on? What is the next thing?