Interview, Ten Magazine

Aged only 23 and 24 respectively, they hit international radars earlier this year, when their work was included in New York’s New Museum’s survey of the upcoming generation, Younger Than Jesus.

With sculpture, video, performance and web-based art, their work addresses our technological race into the future. OMG Obelisk, shown at the New Museum, lit up that SMS outcry within a monolith reminiscent of the one the monkeys dance around in Kubrick’s 2001. They’ve taken shagged-out symbols of cultural resistance, like cannabis leaves or anarchy As, and realised them as neon sculpture. In digital images, figures like SpongeBob SquarePants have been sent alone into the virtual abyss, while their real-world performances tap tribal erotics where naked women daubed in neon paint dance. In short, they’ve got a lot more going for them than baby faces.

How long have you worked together and how did you start collaborating?
For almost four years now. We met in an art-therapy class for troubled youth at the Art Institute of Chicago. Our guide noted a compatibility in our star charts and recommended we unify our disparate energies.

What is your thing for acronyms?
Well, we both grew up in advertising families. There must be some kind of inherited love of compressed Americanstyle neologisms/portmanteaux and acronyms.”

OMG Obelisk has a double life as a gif file and as a monumental sculpture.
It’s crucial that an icon can be reproduced and not lose any information. If anything, we hoped that the imperfections would be noticed more in reality. OMG is about conveying our feelings that faith in technological progress has supplanted traditional religious narratives.”

What had you done prior to Younger Than Jesus that caught the attention of the curators?
I guess our work fitted the rubric the curators were going for…  Also, Daniel prayed in front of the museum a few times.

Why is it important for you to work in 3-D as well as making digital art?
We’re more interested in it as a historical and social phenomenon rather than using computers to make electronic-media art. It’s more about the tool use and ushering in the next evolution of consciousness.

How do the performances relate to the rest of your practice? Do you always work with the same dancer? She’s great.
We began making performances as we were searching for a medium that we had no assumptions about, and it also fed off our cynicism towards performance art at that time. Now we realise it’s one of the most demanding mediums. Helgawretman.com, also Nik’s girlfriend, is the dancer; we work with her because she’s very good and understands what we want.

From TEN Men / Winter, p 52
Spring 2010
Daniel Keller / Nik Kosmas (Aids-3D)