I would like to start with a very beginning about your work in the exhibition, Mood Disorder, and ask you perhaps to describe the work. >> Mood Disorder is an artist book and it shows basically what happens when I put a photograph of myself kind of like this. And this kind of generic stock pose of what depression would look like. And I put that onto the Wikipedia page for mood disorder. I was kind of playing these stereotypes of how depression looks in stock imagery. That's what influenced me to make that image. Websites, journalists, bloggers begin to use it because they could legally use these copyright free images. They don't have to pay royalties. And they began to use it to illustrate mental health issues, depression, sadness, anti-depressant pill articles. And then, what I did was I use Google reverse image, where I took the image and did the reverse image search and refound all of these articles that had used my image. The Mood Disorder piece is the image in, I don't like to say circulation because it's not really, it's more propagation. So it's the image propagating over the internet, maybe changing the black and white, changing color, getting cropped, going in to different languages, Danish, Norwegian, German, Arabic, and Thai, I think I found. And then using Google, I collected all of these sites and then made this artist book. >> So what does it mean for an artist to actually claim ownership for something that is so widely distributed? >> I mean, I think authorship, to author a work is to kind of delineate like an artwork and say, this is an artwork that I'm entering into a kind of public discourse on photography or an art making. And it's just a way of defining an artwork. For me, I don't really believe in maybe what the author meant 100 years ago, the author as a sole creator. because like I said, lots of people were helping the production of this work that aren't getting credited. >> How do you fell that photography has changed in the 21st century with this further increase, both in the production but also circulation of images. >> We're so complicated because photographers are everywhere. People today almost use photography to almost perform themselves for the public. So when people on Instagram, on Twitter, the images they make or an extension of their sensibility that they're sharing with the world wide web. It's like saying who they are, which I don't think photography. I think that was the case before. Like for me, I'm using Wikipedia and that's specifically a copyright free website. So, these are images that can freely circulate. And so, in my project, I'm playing with that space of open circulation. I'm actually participating with Wikipedia how a normal user would, you upload images which I think is relevent, but in this process, a lot of Wikipedia editors caught on to what I was doing and over a course of a few years, there were these discussions, conversations which ended up with me being officially banned. And after that ban became official, the Mood Disorder image was taken off of the Mood Disorder webpage. And so, it no longer circulates from Wikipedia. But it still will circulate from the Internet, hopefully, maybe. [MUSIC]
