Audio Interview Conducted by Allyson Drozd, June 1, 2010
Transcribed by Crystal Baxley

Ally Drozd: You just did a project based on the work of John Baldessari. The project is a book (Pseudoscience) that is composed of found images that you compiled and assembled into new compositions around the theme of pseudoscience. I’ve been thinking a lot about the relationship between images and pictures as information versus text or words as information. I'm wondering what you have to say about that because a book is usually made up of words. What does it mean to have a book that is all images?

Krystal South: Well a book that is text and is supplemented with images is totally different than an artist’s book– a book made as a work of art rather than a book to communicate something a technical of factual way. I just feel like it’s a totally different context. As far as images versus words, I think that an image can communicate a lot, especially the images that I was working with have text intrinsic to them, because they’re a lot of graphs, but then when you address the text also as an image, it changes the meaning based on the way that the text looks and the meaning of the text. I guess I was that addressing that idea when I was laying out that project, I was using images first and then using supplementary text images later, drawing connections between them both aesthetically and conceptually.

AD: I see images, like you were saying, as a different form of communication. I think pictures and words are equally capable of communication, they are just different forms. I tend to feel that visual (as opposed to verbal) representations are more closely related to perception and experience. For me, written language is a tool, a technology that is more removed from perception than images. I see pictures as a very primal, or a more bodily form of communication, somehow more than language. I know that you work on the computer and internet a lot creating, searching, finding, compiling, and combining images. I’ve been thinking a lot about technology specifically in the context of a few readings from my critical theory class: Donna Haraway's "Cyborg Manifesto," Marshall McLuhan's "Understanding Media," and Barbara Stafford's "Good Looking." I have been trying to understand how new and changing technologies function and how they affect people and the world. Every time period has it's version of a new revolutionary technology that comes with inherent paradoxes. New tools (whether visual, verbal, auditory, or otherwise) can help us to communicate with each other but in some ways remove us more from our primary experience and therefore from each other.

KS: I think the biggest difference for me with images that I see on the internet is that I don’t have a relationship with the author of the image, and by not having that I kind of become detached from the original meaning of the thing. Like a lot of times I’m not looking at the actual website for the context of the image, I’m just finding the image and being drawn to that.

AD: Like from Google images?

KS: Yeah, and I use tons of different image search engines, depending on what I’m looking for, but the biggest removal and that’s something that I’ve had to come to terms with, is like for me, taking someone’s scientific research and output and recontextualizing it, maybe they wouldn’t be willing to put it in that context, but I do think it is very important to put it in that context and to draw a relationship between an image that’s made to communicate a very specific idea but using it to represent a greater general idea, and that’s why science imagery is so interesting to me, because a science image that is a document of research, or a graph that’s used to communicate a bunch of research are trying to communicate some kind of big idea in the most simplified form that they possibly can, that’s what a graph is, trying to communicate a bulk of information into a easily understandable thing. But if you’re taking that graph and putting another graph on top of it, you’re immediately subverting any kind of actual information that could be imparted and making a purely aesthetic creation out of it. Which is not necessarily something the scientists would have intended but I think it’s important; like I said earlier, I deal with these images as aesthetic objects.

I am interested in the science behind it; the science is extremely interesting to me and should be to everyone, but the documents of that science are the way that I have access to it. So I think that what you’re saying, that an image is so powerful that I don’t have to understand complicated dark matter physics to look at an image of dark matter physics, like a particle collision, I don’t have to really understand the entirety of that idea to look at the image and appreciate it as representational of some greater idea that I find pleasing. Which I think it’s so magical that you can look at a single image and be like “oh, okay” and that opens up this world of possibility, and that’s what I see as a very beautiful.

The idea of a Google image search is, saying I’m interested in this idea and I’m going to put in this search term. I’m creating parameters for what the content is that I want to receive, and this extends to all of my ideas about the internet. It’s like an endless curatorial process, because you’re saying ok, I’m curating this word that I’m going to search, because that’s how it starts, you have to have an idea behind what you’re looking for, and then you’re given an endless supply of options and then you choose from those options: what you look at, and you choose what you keep, and you choose what you use in your actual work and that whole process, I know that it can seem maybe alienating, but I also think that it’s a very powerful experience to have that control over what images you use to represent your ideas and how you access the information that informs your work. And there’s so much available!

AD: That definitely addressed what I was thinking about. You mentioned the difference between of the aesthetic value of a graph or other graphical representation in relation to the actual information that’s being represented. Are you more interested in the aesthetic value of the image?

KS: The aesthetic is my access point to the idea. I feel like the aesthetic image is what makes me become interested in it. It’s like judging a book by its cover; you look at the cover and you make a value decision based on the title and what it looks like, and you decide whether or not you want to pick it up and open it and look at it. It’s the same for me being interested in the tau neutrino or whatever. These insanely complex ideas of physics that I’m interested in that I don’t really fully grasp but through these images and being drawn to these images I’ve slowly pieced together what particle physics is, to me. The image is my entrance point to it, and there’s so much more behind it that I can look at if I want to but I also just really appreciate the beauty of the data as being representative of the work behind it. The fact that we can record this data gives me reassurance about the ability of man.

AD: So you would go to the image database search before you would go take out books?

KS: Oh yes, for sure. Only because of the indexical nature of the internet. I can’t really go the library and say “I’m looking for a woodcut by an Italian from the 1400’s that features an image of people being hung…” or something. With the internet you have the ability to be that specific. You’re also getting as much from it as you put in. The better you are at knowing and describing what you want to find, the more likely that you are to find it. The way that it’s set up is that if you put in the right search terms, then you’ll find the image that you’re looking for or you’ll find something that you didn’t really know you were looking for. Sitting down and being like “OK, I’m in the mood to look at some images that are about this”, or in this article that I read today it mentioned this thing that I hadn’t heard about before, so I look that up. Words I don't know.

I’m always going to go image first rather than text. Through looking at image searches I find an image that I really like and I look at the original website and that has this link to this other website, I find the content and information through the image…and that’s what the internet is, where I end up finding out about texts that I’m interested in looking up at a library. If I find an image of an artist that I like, I find their website, I find a book that they’ve written that has this image in it and then I go and get it. I can refine my search virtually before acting physically.

AD: I’m just trying to translate this some because you said like there’s the indexical nature of the internet, but also a library has some form of that, but it’s very different, and I’m wondering what the fundamental difference are between those two indexes.

KS: I think that the fundamental difference between those two things are the way that the information is identified and how you access it. With a book, the Library of Congress Dewey Decimal entry contains categories within it. It says like “this is a work of fiction—this is a work of suspense fiction” and those are tags. I see those as tags, which are similar to on the internet where an image is tagged by certain terms. If I type in “aura” or something, it not only references pictures of someone’s aura, but it represents anything that contains that word. You’re getting a wider net, and one that is constantly being updated and refined and added to. What is indexical at a library is that there’s an object and an index, and a system of assessing and accessing that index to find a specific, singular physical object. With the internet it's a virtual object, a virtual index, an index which is continuously changing and more importantly, expanding with content. It’s not a stable thing, that’s why it’s good to search the same thing over and over. I feel like I’m doing the same 100 search terms in different search engines at different times and getting different results. That new, fringe content that I haven't seen before just makes me want to keep looking.

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