Q&A with Marcin Ramocki

(image courtesy of moma.org)

This week I caught up with gallerist, documentary film maker and artist Marcin Ramocki just before the MoMA premiere of his new film, Brooklyn DIY to talk about DIY, his gallery and the future of new media art.

What interests you about DIY?

When I was a kid in Poland, we could not afford to buy games like Atari so we had to learn how to hack them, how to fix the code, how to open it…circumventing the system that’s based on money. My first documentary, 8BIT, is about circumventing customer electronics, trying to use electronic gear as a tool of culture and music and art making. That’s actually when everything came together for me. I have this obsessive idea of manifesting my freedom through being able to use all of these things that mean to manipulate me in the way that I want to use them.

The latest project, Brooklyn DIY, is a shout out to my neighborhood, which is disappearing right now. I just wanted to capture this very fragile moment in the history of Brooklyn where things were really happening here. To use the metaphor that Sarah Schmerler uses in the film, “Williamsburg is the place where the wood grows for the furniture.” That’s why I started looking at 20 years of its history (1987 to 2007). It’s based on people who are activists of sorts, painters or sculptors that run a gallery, write about art and organize events. Williamsburg was full of people like that. It was DIY. You want to have an art world? Make art, show it, buy it, then write about it because nobody else is going to do it. The ability of a human being to do whatever the hell they want in a situation is really uplifting to me. That’s the essence of DIY. Hell I’m going to do what I want to do, whether I have the money to do it or not. I guess that will be the point of it all. That sentence. That’s the story of my life.

The gallery that you founded, vertexList, is interested in work that “reveals codes of post-capitalist culture”- does your own work do that?

What became particularly important to me was the archaeology of this new media. In 2007, we already had two generations of new media gear behind us. We could go back to Ataris or Mac Plusses and start saying what were they good for? What do they do? How do they change our thinking? How do they change culture? This became the main focus of vertexList until recently, when that archeology simply ended, at least in my perspective. I spent 5 years digging…and bringing it to focus, and now I’m like, okay that’s done. We’re going to find something new.

So what are you doing now?

Well after the archeology is over, you’re ready to play a little bit with the poetics and the aesthetics of this matrix that exists on the internet. We’re entering the era of free for all poetics of Google and Facebook- that’s what I’m fascinated with now. It’s not a direct poetics, but a poetics that requires a little preparation and history to understand it. So the most interesting stuff is happening on the internet now, and whether those things will be able to transfer themselves to gallery spaces I don’t know, it’s too new.

What would you consider to be one of the more important things going on right now?

Okay, there is this wave of blog art. I think surf clubs are the shit right now. That is the most interesting stuff in the art world, flat out. I don’t even look at any other art right now because this is the only thing that wakes me up in the morning.

What are some of your favorite surf clubs?

Nastynets, Spirit Surfers (which I’m a part of), Loshadka, Double Happiness (of course),

Out4Pizza, SuperCentral, and ClubInternet.

How do you think they are affecting change right now?

All of these progressive galleries (the New Museum, Otto, vertexList, Postmasters) are trying to think of a way to shift this material from virtual to real life, to see if it is still possible. I believe it is.

Would you rather show in real life or on the internet?

For me there is no difference because the essence of this whole artistic activity of surf clubs is a symbiotic gesture…You can make that semiotic gesture anywhere because, at this point, the internet is everywhere. It’s changed our thoughts already. If I want to know who you are I’m going to Google you and know everything about you very fast. It’s no longer external to the physical. I think that the physical and the virtual have merged. That’s kind of crazy but very exciting stuff. Kevin Bewersdorf (of Spirit Surfers) talks specifically about driving down the highway in Texas, having the illumination that oh my god. I can make a post right here on the highway without my computer. It’s all real and virtual at the same time.