• Andreas Buchwaldt Artist Website

Artist Interview Transcript:

Andreas Buchwaldt interviewed by Dr. Philip Gurrey

My name is Andreas Buchwaldt. I'm an installation and digital media artist. The title of my thesis show at Western, part of my research project, is called General Strike Simulator, and it's a recreation of a section of a Toronto streetcar, that's traveling through the route from Spadina to Union Station, amidst a general strike.

The relationship between activism and my art practice kind of goes back to a moment where I had secured some funding and was able to work as a full-time independent artist so...I moved to Montreal which is kind of a cultural hotspot in Canada. I met some labour activists there as kind of a social engagement. And so that's actually where I started kind of within some sort of grassroots movement.

And then at the same time, I was discovering work that had labour as its subject matter. And so those things kind of gelled together. This thesis project hasn't really been about activism so much, in terms of, like, I just wanted to take a chunk of time to think about my own place in the world and take an interest in mediation. Just like how protest movements are depicted in public life, whether that's cinema history or documentary or video games or news media, and just, you know, my thesis is quite bulky, just trying to cover as much ground as possible.

But it's really been helpful in terms of just understanding how movements start, how they're kind of conveyed to a public. When I was kind of scouring art history for work about labour, Jeremy Deller's The Battle of Orgreave was absolutely like a turning point for me.

It kind of shifted everything in terms of what was possible and the scale of it and then all of the literature that had been written about it both positive and negative, was just a really interesting moment. And then trying to transfer that work into my own experience of the world and, you know, I come from, you know, I had a great childhood, but I grew up in kind of like, you know, Midwestern suburb. We played a lot of video games. And I was always interested in how that medium could be reappropriated as an adult.

An earlier project I did, just like directly inspired by Deller, was to re-enact a famous protest in Canadian labour history in a video game. That was the asbestos strike. And, so you could...you took the role of a miner on a protest, trying to block scabs from entering the mine. And using archival footage and trying to recreate that, of course, like Deller using real participants.

And I obviously can't really get my hands on, or work with a lot of these miners, they're all deceased, whether by natural causes or from the asbestos that they mined. Yeah, trying to, you know, build upon Deller's work and thinking about, you know, the present day and what it could mean to instead of looking into the past to use simulation technologies to project forward, because that's what they're actually best at.

Simulation is often used to, like, predict the future or, you know, forecasting, whether it's like weather or economic forecasting. Or, you know, a lot of my research has looked into scientific applications of simulations. So chemical reactions and particle physics and you can kind of set something up in a computer system that can tell you what will happen potentially.

The work contains a lot of readymade and fabricated elements, both in the structure itself. It's, a building system called slotted angle iron or dexion posts, I guess. And it can be cut and bolted in a myriad of ways, kind of like a Lego or Meccano. So you can impose your own structure on it. But essentially you're dealing with, you know, the nuts and bolts of it, literally.

And then yet the digital simulation as well is a mixture of, you know, prerecorded sounds from other protests that have happened globally. And, AI is doing a little bit of the heavy lifting in terms of generating the actual, characters on screen. So some of those are essentially I give them a photograph that I've designed of a person, that I'd like for them to create a 3D model of, and then it just kind of generates that for me.

I think video games get a bit of a bad rap in terms of kind of why they were developed and how they're used generally, but it's a little bit of the relationship between like Hollywood cinema and independent and experimental film. There are just a host of amazing indie games that are exploring different things in terms of, you know, political subject matter or, kind of, sexuality and gender and problem solving. And then like just on an experiential level, a lot of them play with time so you can rewind time and speed it up, or there's all these different elements that, you know, if people were, you know, not so off-put by this notion of video game, there's a lot there to discover, creative experiences to be had. There's so much richness, I think, to be had with what can happen between characters on a screen and watching them interact. And so I think that's where my practice is heading even more into the digital, maybe the installation component will disappear for a while and just focus purely on the digital, a lot of my research pointed to this notion of emergence as like just like a philosophical concept.

DeLanda talks about emergence as something. Chaotic and full of life emerging from, simple elements. His most basic explanation is talking about the weather as, you know, molecules of air. And at what point are there enough molecules of air that you finally can call it weather or a weather system? And so I think, I'm really interested in what a digital simulation could look like, where it's more vibrant, more full of life.

The characters in General Strike Simulator use something called flocking. So you kind of treat the characters like birds in a flock or a school of fish. So they're very basic movement mechanics, and they can kind of drift and float around like a crowd. But there's so much more potential, I guess, is the answer. The notion of like particle systems or flocking or emergence and simulation technologies, is really a double-edged sword.

Like it's a little dramatic, but, it's kind of a war being waged on the average person, I think using digital simulation or sorry, simulation technologies in terms of predicting user or consumer behavior and, all of the data that we're giving over to corporations that are better at monitoring and predicting us.

So I think that will be an undercurrent that I'd like to explore. It's really interesting when protest, transfers over into the digital, sometimes it's effective, sometimes it doesn't quite work so well, like this notion of boycott, which has been kind of historically not so productive. In certain cases it has done well, but with kind of communication technologies and the internet, the boycott is getting stronger than ever. And there's all sorts of things emerging. Something called data strikes in terms of, digital workers withholding data from a major corporation. So that's an inversion of picketing, within a digital space. And we kind of have no choice. We have to start developing languages in digital space regarding protest.

In terms of what I hope people will take away from General Strike Simulator, I guess I made it, I made it for myself. For a future that I would like to see happen. So it's a kind of a wish fulfillment in terms of just seeing bodies mobilized on the street. Collective action.

And, you know, something you kind of saw with Occupy Wall Street, but it wasn't maybe sustained or as productive in the end as we’d all hoped. So I hope people would get some molecule of energy, a little rabble-rousing, from sitting in that streetcar.