10 Questions with Michael Filimowicz

Dr. Michael Filimowicz (artist name: Myk Eff) has exhibited in many new media shows such as SIGGRAPH Art Gallery, Re-New, ARTECH, Archetime, Intermedia, and IDEAS, and currently streams his digital images on the Loupe Art platform. His work has also been featured in journals (e.g., Leonardo), many monographs (e.g., Infinite Instances and Spotlight), and a textbook (Reframing Photography, Routledge). He is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Interactive Arts and Technology (SIAT) at Simon Fraser University. He has a background in computer-mediated communications, audiovisual production, new media art, and creative writing.

filimowi.cz | @vjloopzone

ARTIST STATEMENT

'Virtual Photography' is the series name for these 2D very high-resolution digital images (in 4K UHD and 8K UHD-2) produced in the game design environment Unreal Engine. The images cover a wide range of aesthetic interests, including the reimagining of photographic practices within 3D computer environments. Virtual photography works with the new forms of mimesis and semiotic indexicality involved when manipulating virtual objects textured with ultra-high resolution scans of real objects and environments. Thematically the artworks explore a wide range of human dimensions through narrative, cinematic, psychological, and philosophical ideas unique to each image or image set (as some of the works are diptychs and triptychs). The images also include various forms of abstraction, which have historical connections to more experimental photographic practices such as photo-sculptures and lightbox constructions. What we generally call 'game engines' might be better understood as 'reality engines' given their immense power to simulate many aspects of the world. Through lighting and shading effects, textures of materials, the physics of movement, photogrammetry, and related technologies, these reality engines extend the traditional vocabularies of both representation and abstraction. While philosopher Stanley Cavell has claimed that 'A painting is a world; a photograph is of the world,' virtual photography short circuits this is/of difference by encompassing both media ontologies.

INTERVIEW

First of all, introduce yourself to our readers. What is your personal history and your background?

One way to answer that is to say I was 'old new media' who became a 'new new media' in my practice. In grad school in the 90s, digital audio, photography, and video were considered to be new media, but obviously, these are not such new media technologies any longer, though of course there continue to be significant innovations such as 360-degree video, 4K and 8K resolution shooting and so on. 

I had an industry career in the early 2000s where I worked on ~250 documentaries, so that was linear audiovisual media work, but when I came to Canada to teach in the School of Interactive Arts and Technology at Simon Fraser University, my expertise expanded to include interactive audiovisual work. I'm from the States originally (St. Louis and Chicago areas in the Midwest), but since my father was from Poland, I am also a Polish/EU citizen. My bachelor's degree was in literature and philosophy, my master's in fine arts, and my Ph.D. in interdisciplinary design.

You come from computer mediated communications, audiovisual production, new media art and creative writing. How did you start experimenting with art? And how do all these different experiences interact in your work? 

I think early on, in my 20s, I had some fantasies about combining everything into some kind of 'gesamtkunstwerk' type of project that would integrate everything. But I eventually discovered William James' concept of 'eachness' and decided to give up this integrationist approach and instead just let each art medium be itself and integrate only when it feels right, or an idea requires it. For example, the concept for my interactive photography project, Cursor Caressor Eraser (realized in collaboration with two other artists) came to me all at once while on a long road trip in the American Southwest desert. So some ideas for projects come already 'prepackaged' for some kind of intermediality, otherwise I am fine with just leaving each idea to its own independent medium without trying to bring in other media even though I easily could.

I'll tell you an odd story about my art school grad days in my 20s that I think illustrates an aspect of my approach. I would tend to rent apartments on Chicago's South Side where I could find large three bedroom units that were inexpensive to live in. Even though I had three bedrooms, I slept in the living room on a sofa bed because one bedroom was the library and writing space, one bedroom was a photography (analog!) darkroom, and the other bedroom was the music and sound studio. I was very conscious at the time of intentionally wanting to develop interconnections across very different mediums by capitalizing on neural plasticity.

And how would you define yourself as an artist today?

Sometimes when I submit work, I am asked to provide an artist statement that encapsulates my practice at a holistic level, but for me, that's always an uncomfortable and reductionist act. I find it hard to explain how the forms of writing I've published (fiction, nonfiction, sci-fi, travelogue, experimental autobiography, psychogeography, peer-reviewed academic essays, etc.) somehow coherently mesh with my visual artwork (experimental video, virtual, digital, and interactive photography, public art), and the music and sound design side (electroacoustic, electronic music, film soundtracks). On my Loupe Art channel I briefly summarize the totality of my work as:

 "a multi-disciplinary artist working in the areas of digital 2D, audiovisual and interactive media, as well as creative writing and public art. The main theme of his work is Mediation, as each of his works treats the computer as a Meta-Medium, which unifies or transgresses any particular medium, such as sound, text or image." (source)

So there I am basically saying that, since with computers all media is materially just data, I migrate across data types via many different kinds of software, and the computer-as-meta medium introduces general conceptual and practical plasticities of practice.

~2500 years ago, ancient Greek philosophers made a distinction between ends and means. The universities of the Middle Ages translated this distinction into curricular concepts of the Liberal (ends-oriented or 'final') and Mechanical (practically oriented) Arts. In the Beaux-Arts period, this evolved into precursor notions of what today we call Art (which is "fine" arts because it is "final" and ends-oriented) and Design (which provides novel utilities). Art in this period was understood to provide forms of intellectual pleasure, while the Design crafts attended to useful productions.

It is a premise of my practice that such binary distinctions are no longer useful. Every 'art and design' or 'art vs. design' academic institution today in some way is founded on this old Greek categorical scheme. And it is doubtful that the Greek philosophers themselves ever intended or foresaw that their categories would be used in this way toward hardening academic disciplinary boundaries. Today's computational and new media practices have made such a binary conceptual categorical scheme obsolete.

Let's talk about "Virtual Photography". Can you explain to our readers what it is and how you came up with this idea? 

I'm a non-gamer who loves game engines, in a nutshell. While these software environments like Unreal Engine have developed primarily for the creation of interactive games, they are also used widely in a lot of other areas like architectural visualization, simulations, motion graphics, and multichannel broadcast. I think of them more as reality engines, since they powerfully model real-world physics, materials and textures, lighting and shading, digital humans and animals, and so on. 

Developing games takes a very long time, and is usually a team effort. Since I am not a gamer, I use these technologies primarily as representation devices, including forms of abstraction and non-objective art. Even though my abstract works aren't representational in the usual art theoretical or historical sense, the materials, textures, volumetric lighting, etc. are representational in a strictly mimetic way.

An aspect of virtual photography I really enjoy is that these are 2D images that could be fully immersive if you simply plug a head-mounted display into a computer's USB port. These are 3D graphics-based 2D images that you can experience as VR, but maybe because I am originally an 'old-new media' artist, I am happy to be doing 'classic' works by which I mean a 2D image that you look at and contemplate on. One game I'm playing with the viewer is to deny them the pleasure of immersing themselves in VR and be forced to cognitively interact with the images instead of as 2D planes to view.

I find a lot of interactive work is still at too early a state to be very interesting, since you often just have to wave at the sensors or jump around like an idiot in front of a webcam so that the system generates simplistic trigger-responses. I am always yawning at these images of people making an interactive artwork change some parameter-output because they wiggled their arm or something. Also, having a game controller with a dozen buttons or a PC game with dozens of keys to hit, to me it's very tedious. But then I have this literary bias because I'm kind of an old school film and novel sort I guess, who finds those traditional media with long histories often more rewarding compared to shooting zombies or jumping up and down to make some pixels wiggle on a screen in a boringly triggered way.

In your work you mix game-like images, visually reminding of virtual reality and video games, with pressing themes and everyday issues. What messages do you try to convey? And how do you think this virtual reality you create can help you convey those messages?

I think of each image as its own project, because virtual photography is a medium or a general form factor for images, so the content can be anything. Each image is like its own game, and would require its own individual art statement. But since I create too many of them, I have mainly discussed virtual photography as a general medium so far. 

When creating these images, I find that I am mainly drawing from my knowledge of photography, cinema, architecture, and 3D graphics on an aesthetic level. On thematic and conceptual levels, I am drawing on poetry, philosophy, literature, and psychology, and, as you say, contemporary events or even sometimes personal events. The philosopher Stanley Cavell argued that 'A painting is a world; a photograph is of the world,' and virtual photography short circuits this is/of difference by encompassing both media ontologies. That has radical political potential in some ways, because the distance between the imaginary and real is elided. 

For example, it's a very short step these days from a 3D image in a virtual environment to a 3D printed structure in the real world. Literally, the fantasy you model in a virtual space, with the click of a few buttons in an efficient workflow, can be inexpensively made part of the real world with 3D printing equipment in the building construction world. That's pretty wild, or radical, or at least, very different from past media because it would have been almost impossible a few centuries ago to translate a utopian painting into a utopian building.

Recently I've come to realize that some of my work seems aligned with the solarpunk aesthetic so I'm becoming increasingly interested in this utopian possibility (though, not naively utopian— we do, however, need to not wreck the global environment! Is that too dreamy an ideal??).

And how did you evolve this way of working?

It's a side benefit in some ways of the pandemic. When everything shut down in April 2020, I had a non-teaching semester followed by a year-long sabbatical, so I had a lot of time sitting at home to explore some new media technologies that I'd been interested in for a long time. I didn't get into learning Unreal Engine and its related technologies (Quixel Megascans, MetaHuman Creator, TwinMotion) with the idea in advance of doing virtual photography. Once I realized how tremendously deep this game design environment is, and realized you need a lot of people working a lot of years to do a quality game, I started thinking about what I could do as just one guy sitting in my home office with a lot of free time on his hands!

How important are new technologies for your work? And how do you keep up to date with the latest trends and innovations? 

I have a mild addiction to online learning, MOOCs, and so on. I dedicate a lot of time to working through tutorials on platforms like LinkedIn Learning, Udemy, edX, even YouTube videos or tutorials on companies' websites (e.g., Epic Games has great tutorials on its software products). Because I teach interactive media and design, simply teaching this material all the time keeps it present in my headspace. In addition, we get an annual grant at the university for professional development, which I tend to spend on hardware and software, followed up by going through lots of tutorials online to practice the skill sets. 

Over the past year we have witnessed a lot of changes in the art world as well as in our lives in general. What is one thing that you miss about your life pre-Covid, career and art wise? 

The logistics of working with other people were more difficult, but a lot of that is coming back now with the dual vaccination regime. For example, I did a music video last year working with a dancer. That was shot outdoors, so it worked out fine, but I have a green screen room at home in my basement, and only recently have I been able to consider doing an indoor video dance shoot. 

Before the pandemic, I was already a very strong advocate of online learning and taught some online courses, so for me, online teaching isn't a negative thing. I'm also autistic, and my teaching comes across better online since there's a lot of interpersonal communication in a classroom that can be challenging when you have autism.

And what is one new thing that over the past year you have discovered? Did you participate in any online exhibition or event? 

I did a Ph.D. from 2012-2018, which pretty much put a stop to making and exhibiting art for over half a decade. Just in the last few months, I've started exhibiting art again, in themed exhibitions and film festivals, because of the amount of time my pandemic-sabbatical gave me to produce new work. 

Some of these shows have made me personally very thrilled, such as having a Loupe Art streaming channel, or having a music video selected as part of Wasteland Weekend, a 5-day party in the California desert based on a post-apocalyptic theme, or just having my work shown internationally in the UK, Italy, Greece, Spain, and Germany this Fall, or as part of a multi-city international event like the Conscious Cities Festival.

I think the main thing I discovered in the past year is that I will be very happy as an artist spending the next ten years producing virtual photography and music videos!

Finally, what are you working on now, and what are your plans for the future? Anything exciting you can tell us about?

I think I partly answered this in the previous question. I continue to oversee two book series as a Routledge editor, Sound and Design and Algorithms and Society. Editing books is a practical way of using my Ph.D. skills since I am a member of the teaching faculty at my university, which isn't a position where a research agenda gets supported. As I mentioned earlier, I have this bookish or bibliophilia streak, so I plan to keep up the publishing pace. I am also going to get back into creative writing, which I haven't published in a long time, probably doing some experiments in the sci-fi genre.