[This pre­sen­ta­tion becomes more of a video essay than ​“talk” and this tran­script should be con­sid­ered more of a find­ing aid to the spo­ken con­tent than any sort of replacement.]

Golan Levin:And we are back with our penul­ti­mate lec­ture for the Art && Code: Homemade fes­ti­val of 2021, dig­i­tal tools, crafty approach­es. And it is my great plea­sure to intro­duce Hannah Epstein, also known as Hanski, who is a fyberspace artist. She inte­grates the tra­di­tion­al craft of rug hook­ing with dig­i­tal tech­nolo­gies, cre­at­ing digitally-augmented arti­facts and inter­ac­tive nar­ra­tive instal­la­tions, or gamestal­la­tions. She joins us from her dual homes on the fringe of the Internet and in a church she is ren­o­vat­ing in rur­al Nova Scotia. Hannah Epstein.

Hannah Epstein: Hey. So, thank you Golan for that intro­duc­tion, and thank you for hav­ing me here for the Art && Code: Homemade con­fer­ence, festival.

Yeah, so basi­cal­ly my name is Hannah Epstein. I think some­thing is weird with the— I think it’s glitch­ing. Are you guys— —your end?

I think it’s just a bad con­nec­tion. I made a back­up video, so just play that until I fig­ure out what’s going on here. 

Hey. My name is Hannah Epstein, and I make art on the grave­yard of the 21^st century. 

Hey, let me just check my email here. Power bill…no. Family, no. Super scam, no. Okay, delete that. 

Hey, final­ly! [The AOL ​“You’ve got mail!” notice plays] Fuck.

Oh, Golan.

[Alternating as ​“Golan Levin” and herself:]

Hey Hannah, this is Golan Levin here. 

Oh hey, Golan.

You know, I nev­er knew, was it uh…is it Hannah or ​“Hahnnah?” I was nev­er sure.

It lit­er­al­ly does­n’t matter.

So, ah…I was won­der­ing if maybe you would wan­na come do a pre­sen­ta­tion at this fes­ti­val I’m doing.

Okay, I’ll do it.

Cool. Well that’s great. See you in cyber­space. I’m Golan Levin. Bye.

Home…made, home…made. Like what does that even mean any­more? Literally every­thing is home­made now that we’ve been impris­oned there. Even my sis­ter. She’s a lawyer. She’s basi­cal­ly prac­tic­ing law in a home­made court­room while rid­ing an under-desk ellip­ti­cal. If only an artist with a lot of fore­sight did their 2017 MFA the­sis show about this exact top­ic. Oh yeah. I did that. 

[Back to Hannah stream­ing ​“live”]

So, I think I’m back now. I bring up my the­sis project because I want to show that my work has been con­cerned with the con­cept of home—

The home is a threat to total­i­tar­i­an pow­er. It seeks for ways for you to open the door and let it in. 

The project was called Work From Home and it start­ed The Family™, a mock ver­sion of the YouTube fam­i­ly phe­nom­e­non, where real fam­i­lies would upload con­tent of their dai­ly lives to YouTube, col­lect fol­low­ers and likes and sub­scrip­tions, and basi­cal­ly cash in on adver­tis­ing dollars. 

It seeks for ways for you to open the door, and let it in. 

I’ll show you next how I’ve actu­al­ly been work­ing from home for the major­i­ty of my work­ing life, pre- any kind of pan­dem­ic. Hopefully through­out the talk you’ll see how my expe­ri­ence in dif­fer­ent home set­tings has affect­ed work production. 

The last years of the home as an unadul­ter­at­ed space to launch critique. 

You only need one take. This footage you’re watch­ing was shot in 2012 a cou­ple years after I had moved to Toronto. I was liv­ing in a six-person room­ing house and mak­ing a lot of rug hook­ing and exper­i­men­tal video games. My home was a very direct launch­ing pad to all of these projects and allowed me to find myself as an artist out­side of the school system. 

So I live here with six oth­er peo­ple. So there’s like an array of things that have been col­lect­ed over the years from oth­er iter­a­tions of six peo­ple that have lived here. Once you put togeth­er this envi­ron­ment maybe you would under­stand the video games and art stuff that I make. It’s unliv­able, like on a sur­face lev­el, and at the same time it’s like the most heart­warm­ing place I’ve ever lived. 

[voiceover in com­put­er voice:] Welcome to PxXXYborg. Welcome to PxXXYborg. The series of tests you are about to under­take are part of an exper­i­men­tal pro­to­type in con­scious­ness map­ping software

[Hannah:] PsXXYborg is like, it’s actu­al­ly like a brain­wash­ing mech­a­nism. So we put it inside the back of a van, peo­ple would go in one at a time, and they would answer a whole series of ques­tions to cre­ate a mod­el of your psyche. 

Unadulterated space to launch critique. 

PxXXYborg starred a charis­mat­ic tech­no cult leader, basi­cal­ly an Elon Musk type, who encour­aged peo­ple to shed their meat husks and upload their consciousness. 

[Cult Leader:] I’m sick of it. And I know you are too. War! Poverty! Illness! This world has gone mad. It has gone mad! And that’s why you are here.

[Hannah:] The goal was to real­ly like, put peo­ple into a cube assault­ed with sort of brain­wash­ing pro-technology rhetoric the whole time. Hopefully I’m try­ing to get them to con­front what it is to exist in a tech­no­log­i­cal world. 

Enter Carnegie Mellon. 

Grad school was the first time I was mak­ing work out­side of the home. The first time I had a stu­dio. Inside the stu­dio it was impor­tant to me to try and retain the essence of what it was that got me to grad school in the first place. 

The com­mod­i­fi­ca­tion of the home­made aes­thet­ic in a mil­i­tary indus­tri­al complex. 

So I made projects like choose-your-own-adventure cloth­ing, Destroy Evil, which was an inter­ac­tive instal­la­tion; peo­ple were encour­aged to destroy what­ev­er they thought was evil. Or Shark N’ Hoops, where peo­ple flew around these RC-controlled sharks. 

I even­tu­al­ly start­ed mak­ing these inter­ac­tive rugs like here, Feed The Ducks. 

[Back to Hannah stream­ing ​“live”]

Hey yeah, I’m back again. I decid­ed to go change my clothes. So I think it’s impos­si­ble to talk about work­ing from home with­out address­ing the domes­tic sit­u­a­tion we have in these cir­cum­stances. And for me, my domes­tic sit­u­a­tion changed dras­ti­cal­ly after grad­u­ate school.

Home sweet home. Home as the place where women his­tor­i­cal­ly expe­ri­ence a lot of exploitation. 

I moved in with my boyfriend who had just sold his app com­pa­ny. We lived half the time in a pent­house con­do in Toronto, and the oth­er half in a mod­ernist box in Venice Beach, LA.

Namaste. Personally, right now, I have a mul­ti mil­lion­aire boyfriend, and I have no money. 

This was actu­al­ly a pret­ty cre­ative time for me. I was able to put togeth­er two solo shows. The first show was Monster World and it sold out in a cou­ple of days and was reviewed by the LA Times. The sec­ond show was Do You Want a Free Trip to Outer Space? 

[Steve Turner:] This is a show from Hannah Epstein, who is a Canadian-based artist. All the hooked rugs that she made, each one by her­self, illus­trates her voy­age to out­er space and back to Earth. 

Hooked rugs and video games as Trojan Horse-style incur­sion tech­nique into the cul­tur­al tem­ple known as the art gallery. 

Superficially I had achieved suc­cess, although I was expe­ri­enc­ing a lot of iso­la­tion and lone­li­ness that peo­ple now, under the con­di­tions of the pan­dem­ic and lock­down, are start­ing to become famil­iar with. 

Sometimes I think about what it might be like if I was the rich one and my boyfriend was the poor one. Like what if I went to work and he stayed home all day and did some light dusting. 

Today’s craft will be an exten­sion of soci­etal oppres­sion into the domes­tic space.

So I left. 

With no sol­id ground stand on, I bounced around from New York to Iceland to Israel and Italy, all while try­ing to put togeth­er my next solo show Making Bets in a Burning House. The show was def­i­nite­ly about me pro­cess­ing a break-up with a tech­boy. But it also sym­bol­i­cal­ly was meant to focus on cul­ture’s cur­rent­ly fraught rela­tion­ship with its own Silicon Valley boyfriends. 

One room of the show had the hand-made hang­ing on prison walls above a lava floor. In the sec­ond room you dis­cov­er you’ve been under sur­veil­lance the whole time, being watched by a cam­era that tracks you with an AI sys­tem. And all the works in the room are made by an AI. 

I fed all the images of all the rugs I’d ever made into a gen­er­a­tive adver­sar­i­al net­work, and I had those print­ed and made into phys­i­cal objects, basi­cal­ly real­iz­ing the AI’s predictions. 

There’s noth­ing that’s sacred to tech­nol­o­gy but it’s insa­tiable desire for growth and consumption. 

The only hand­made object is a worm whose tail points to a fake iPhone. If you were to pick it up the home but­ton would zap you, the snake in the vir­tu­al Garden of Eden. 

Stay safe, stay home. Where we can keep an eye on you. Right, guys? 

And so yeah, I was like, basi­cal­ly, this is the apoc­a­lypse. I need to get as far away from any kind of densely-populated city as pos­si­ble. So, Nova Scotia. And I need to like, cre­ate this safe place so that when my friends are like, escap­ing America because their coun­try is col­laps­ing, I have a refuge I can offer them. What bet­ter place to build a refuge but a church. 

Driving down the coastal high­way Lighthouse Route 3, you approach a tall white building.

The home is a threat to total­i­tar­i­an pow­er. It seeks for ways for you to open the door and let it in. 

You approach a tall white building. 

Oh hey, Welcome to my church. It’s most­ly like a church-slash-studio. This is where I hang out and smoke cig­a­rettes and read books. I want­ed to try spray­paint­ing all the walls, but that turned out to be a ter­ri­ble idea. 

This is my col­lec­tion of beach rocks that will even­tu­al­ly be an out­door fire pit. 

This is where I’ve been doing a lot of the shoot­ing for the video that you’ve been watch­ing so far. This is where the mag­ic hap­pens. Is it weird to green screen in front of a green screen? 

This is my like, one attempt at a paint­ing and I…nailed it. 

I still do a lot of rug hook­ing. I basi­cal­ly sit here and kind of imag­ine myself as a rug hook­ing priest. And I imag­ine that the thing that I’m mak­ing is my sermon. 

I want the new work to be as epic as pos­si­ble. I want to abuse as many sacred cows as I can. And I want to play­ful­ly call out total losers. 

I also have a bit of a col­lec­tion of antique hooked rugs that I’m start­ing to build. This is—

Man Offscreen: Hello.

Epstein: Hi. 

MO: Hi there. Um, I’m just here— My aunt was down yes­ter­day to look at a church pew?

Epstein: [mut­tered to cam­era] Record this, please record this.

So, obvi­ous­ly because I have a church, it means I also have a graveyard. 

Graveyard of the 21^st century. 

And actu­al­ly, Amazon owns this grave­yard and they’re still in pow­er and I’m not gonna say any­thing bad about them. 

Grimes and Elon, a life togeth­er, an after­life together. 

Okay, like… I’m sor­ry. I’m sor­ry. I don’t hate tech­nol­o­gy. I real­ly, you know, I don’t. I use tech­nol­o­gy all the time like. Like, I’m shoot­ing this on an iPhone. I’m on the Internet all day. I basi­cal­ly am con­stant­ly per­form­ing on Instagram. I’ve been inte­grat­ing cir­cuits into tex­tiles to make them react with sound when you touch them… 

I do a lot of pro­jec­tion mapping. 

Like, I use tech­nol­o­gy. I just like, see what’s hap­pen­ing and I just don’t want any of the stuff that I make to be a par­ty to what is essen­tial­ly a new type of feu­dal­ism that’s aris­ing like the vir­tu­al empire, where we’re all these peas­ants till­ing the con­tent fields. And I under­stand it’s an inescapable rubric at this point, but I just like refuse to real­ly believe that. 

So, basi­cal­ly if I was gonna give some kind of con­clu­sive state­ment it’s that for me the idea of home­made is real­ly about mak­ing a home space. What that means to own your own space. 

And this is my room. This is like my inspi­ra­tion. This is from the east coast. And I think it’s sup­posed to be a Mexican style of fight­ing mask or some­thing. But this is to me like the weird­est shit ever. Like that sense of igno­rance. Like I don’t know what I’m mak­ing but I’m acci­den­tal­ly mak­ing some­thing amazing. 

[as ​“Golan Levin”:]Okay, wow. Hannah, Hahnnah…Epsteen, Epstein, I don’t real­ly know. Um…wow that was uh…definitely a unique take on the very sim­ple ask for you to come here and talk about the home­made. So… I guess my first ques­tion is…uh…

[long pause]

I’m Golan.

---

Golan Levin: Right, my first question. 

Hannah Epstein: I’m… I was hav­ing a heart attack. Did that work? I did­n’t watch—

Levin: It total­ly worked.

Epstein: Okay, good. Because I’m like—

Levin: Yeah no, every­one is in the chat, um… Yeah.

Epstein: I was hav­ing a total freak­out think­ing that it was­n’t gonna work. 

Levin: No no, it total­ly worked. It total­ly worked. Everyone’s here for you. Everyone’s here for you. 

Epstein: Okay good. Good, good.

Levin: I want to chan­nel their ques­tions, which we have a good amount of time for. 

Epstein: Can I just say that I’ve like…killed myself mak­ing this video. And—

Levin: It’s amazing. 

Epstein: So like, the questions…I like, will try to answer them. But I feel very brain­dead and inca­pable so, try. 

Levin: No, it’s good. It’s clear you were up for some time to make that. 

Epstein: Yeah.

Levin: The cura­to­r­i­al com­mit­tee is very proud. A sim­ple tech­ni­cal ques­tion, in a way. First ques­tion, very sim­ple one, is what kind of time com­mit­ment is rug hook­ing? Do you do it by hand? How do you feel about tech for rug hook­ing like tuft­ing guns? 

Epstein: Yeah, so rug hook­ing is def­i­nite­ly what I spend the major­i­ty of my time doing. And so that means basi­cal­ly any­where from like three to six hours a day. So it’s very labor-intensive. But in a way it’s like a way of doing labor and leisure at the same time. So I’ll be rug hook­ing, but I’ll also be watch­ing movies, or lis­ten­ing to pod­casts and just like, con­sum­ing media as I’m doing this slow process, very much respond­ing to and react­ing to media. 

The tuft­ing gun is some­thing that I was ini­tial­ly very attract­ed to because it’s sort of like the elec­tric gui­tar and I feel like I’m play­ing acoustic. But I’ve sort of remained true to just the hand-made, the hand-hooked, very like…in touch with like this…like my body is the machine is what I like to say. And so feel­ing very much in tune with like the body’s pow­er to cre­ate things and not try­ing to extend it to a tuft­ing gun. I mean, also I did­n’t want to build a new frame and did­n’t want to get the new mate­r­i­al to do it. I’m sort of stead­fast in this method­ol­o­gy that I’ve already devel­oped for myself, so.

Levin: There’s a lot of ques­tions about the church.

Epstein: Oh yeah.

Levin: First of all, Maddy, whom you know, asks, ​“Does Amazon lit­er­al­ly own the church?” There was a lit­tle conf—there was a lit­tle bit of blur­ring of real­i­ty and irre­al­i­ty there. What the deal?

Epstein: No. That was just a joke to imag­ine like a future. But yeah, sor­ry. That was a joke ques­tion, too.

Levin: Do you actu­al­ly have a graveyard?

Epstein: I do have a grave­yard. I mean it’s not my respon­si­bil­i­ty, but my neigh­bors are all dead. So, yeah.

Levin: You live next to a grave­yard or your prop­er­ty includes a graveyard?

Epstein: It does­n’t ful­ly include it. But like it—I mean—

Levin: Does your prop­er­ty par­tial­ly include it?

Epstein: It like, bor­ders onto it and there’s sec­tions of it that are mine. But yeah, like who real­ly owns a grave­yard. I like to call it the raveyard—

Levin: [choke laughs]

Epstein: —because maybe we could have like a big big par­ty there. 

Levin: What are your plans for the church?

Epstein: Okay, so I’ve been con­vert­ing it into a liv­ing space. So you saw in the video there this guy com­ing in ask­ing about the pews. The church was full of pews—obviously, it’s a church. And I just had them all cut out and put on the front lawn. And so it’s been a way for me to get to know the neigh­bors. Like all the neigh­bors are stop­ping by and ask­ing me if the pews are for sale. So that was a real thing. So just cre­at­ing a stu­dio, get­ting it down to very brass tacks. And then also hope­ful­ly a res­i­den­cy, hope­ful­ly a gallery space. You know, these are all part of the plan. 

Levin: A res­i­den­cy sounds great. How did you start rug hook­ing? It’s unique.

Epstein: Yeah. So, I did my under­grad in folk­lore. And then…

Levin: In Canada. 

Epstein: In Canada. And then I decid­ed I need­ed a real skill, so I learned how to rug hook. So that was when I was 25. I went to a woman. She opened the door and she was like, ​“So you’re the new hook­er.” And she brought me to her base­ment and taught me the one skill I’ve been using since then. So yeah, from 25 and now 35, it’s been ten years of rug hooking. 

Levin: But in grow­ing up in Nova Scotia you’ve men­tioned to me that you had rug hook­ing arti­facts around you.

Epstein: Yeah. It’s a tra­di­tion­al craft. So it’s here every­where in peo­ple’s homes. They just sort of take for grant­ed— Just the imagery is more typ­i­cal­ly these real­ly sweet pas­toral scenes of like a lit­tle house or like a chick­en, and wel­come mats. They’re not like…naked James Franco. 

Levin: How has the church and/or COVID informed your recent-most work?

Epstein: Okay well, some of the work is a very much direct response to COVID. Like I have one piece where there’s Chinese let­ter­ing and it trans­lates to like ​“There’s noth­ing to see” and there’s a woman danc­ing in front of a giant pile of skulls. And so that’s a very direct response to our cur­rent sit­u­a­tion. But I mean…like I’m try­ing to say in the video, I’ve been work­ing from home for a long time so the sit­u­a­tion— Everyone’s com­plain­ing about iso­la­tion they feel; this is some­thing that I’ve been going through for a long time. You just get cra­zier, is basi­cal­ly my advice from some­one who’s been doing it for a while. 

Levin: The pro­jec­tion map­ping on the church. Is it indoors or outdoors?

Epstein: Outdoors.

Levin: How are your neigh­bors enjoy­ing that?

Epstein: Loving it. So I’m right on this thing called Rails-To-Trails, which is where they con­vert­ed all the old train tracks to hik­ing trails. But because I’m in the coun­try it’s a lot of peo­ple on ATVs, like real yahoo types. And so they’re zoom­ing by, and I basi­cal­ly put on these shows for them and they’ll stop and they’ll honk a lit­tle bit.

Levin: You men­tioned that you have a church bell. Do you ring the bell when you do the aug­ment­ed pro­jec­tions on your church? 

Epstein: Oh, I should. I should. No, I rang it on New Year’s Eve and some spe­cial occa­sions. But…yeah.

Levin: Kelly Heaton asks a ques­tion I don’t com­plete­ly under­stand. ​“Have you explored hook­ing a oui­ja board rug?”

Epstein: Oh, no. But that’s real­ly inter­est­ing. I def­i­nite­ly like to do a lot of projects that inter­act with the spir­i­tu­al, mag­i­cal ener­gy realms. And so…

Levin: Yeah, y’all should meet. 

Epstein: Yeah. Hit me up, Kelly. 

Levin: I think there’s such a won­der­ful wealth of things on the— Have you been to the Discord? Have you seen the—

Epstein: I just like, put my phone away and I was just pac­ing, hop­ing the video worked. 

Levin: Yeah. So, we have a Discord chan­nel that if you would drop in you’ll be able to see much more about it. 

Epstein: I’ll be in after this, for sure.

Levin: Maddy asks, ​“Do you fore­see col­lab­o­ra­tions with your neighbors?”

Epstein: Hm. Yes, actu­al­ly. So I’ve been play­ing some online chess recent­ly. So chess has reemerged in my life. And there’s a folk artist around the cor­ner who makes these large wood­en sculp­tures. So I was jok­ing about maybe set­ting up a sort of chess board in my back­yard and hav­ing him build— And then hav­ing a sur­veil­lance cam­era, because I have an out­door sur­veil­lance cam­era, set up above the chess board so you could sort of log in from your phone and have the over­head view of the out­door chess­board from the sur­veil­lance systems. 

Levin: Other ques­tions. What’s been your favorite con­tent to con­sume late­ly while mak­ing? Have you been watch­ing Queen’s Gambit or—

Epstein: I just watched that, yes. That’s part of the inspi­ra­tion for play­ing. I mean, I love pod­casts. I lis­ten to a lot of Red Scare. It’s hor­ri­ble that Anna Khachiyan was deplat­formed from Twitter the same time as Trump. Yeah, so Red Scare and Tim Dillon. I real­ly like him. He’s like a con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry comedian. 

Levin: Hannah, you have um…set a new bar for a con­fer­ence pre­sen­ta­tion. The audi­ence can under­stand when I first heard that you were going to be mak­ing a video I was like ​“Oh no, what’s this.” But I was assured by many peo­ple I had noth­ing to wor­ry about. And I’m so grate­ful for the incred­i­ble ener­gy that you have put into this. In the Discord— I guess we still have one more minute. Maybe a quick ques­tion here that’s just come in on my phone here, ​“My fiber­craft­ing part­ner wants to know if you do arm exer­cis­es to keep from get­ting them hurt. She’s learned she has to pace her­self sometimes.”

Epstein: I mean, I just sort of stretch my wrists and maybe wear an elbow brace. But I’m kind of like, when the machine breaks down the prac­tice breaks down, so. 

Levin: Thank you so much for your incred­i­ble ener­gy. Have a well-deserved rest. In just a few min­utes we’re going to pick it up again with Kelli Anderson, for our final pre­sen­ta­tion. And a big hand to Hannah. Thank you so much, Hannah. And we will meet up again in about five min­utes for Kelli Anderson’s presentation.

Epstein: Thank you so much for hav­ing me. Really, thanks for being open to this.

Levin: You bet. Thank you. Good night.