A conversation with Jonathan Harris

(All images belong to Jonathan Harris ©)
12 min read

Crickets chirped constantly and serenely somewhere in Vermont when Jonathan Harris, the award-winning internet artist and designer, joined us on Zoom, it was 11AM there in the countryside. Meanwhile I was in Northamptonshire where the wind lashed the house and rattled the fences and Manuel was in his studio in London.

Jonathan had joined us to discuss his work, work which had captured the imaginations of both myself and Manu and in many ways inspired this residency.

One evening after a few glasses of good wine and good food I was sat on Manu’s sofa in his flat and I mentioned The Whale Hunt. I explained that this was a website like very few I had seen – a beautiful cross between photojournalism and computer-science and data-visualisation and, most importantly for me, human stories. With this website – which presents the Inupiat people of Alaska as they wrestle the leviathan from the sea – you can follow the stories of multiple people through thousands of photos Jonathan took himself, mimicking his heart beat, while living with them for nine days. To me this ripped open the storytelling medium. It did something that books could only dream of doing, being so limited as they are in the physical sense.

Manu was stood up and full of energy and told me it sounded like a project he loved called The Cowbird.

That’s the same guy as The Whale Hunt, I said.

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I can offer you guys a bit of a preamble about my personal experience with books, said Jonathan. Behind him were white walls and shades of blue furnishings and oak shelves and windows and bookcases and the place seemed quiet. One of the main reasons that I started working with code to begin with was I was robbed at gunpoint. I used to keep very elaborate sketchbooks with water-colour paintings and plants and writing and all this stuff, they were really tactile, beautiful objects and I would bind them by hand, and then I had this robbery happen while travelling in central America and I got beaten up pretty badly, I had a gun put to my head and my sketchbook was stolen along with a lot of my other things.

I had been studying computer science in college, he continued. But I hadn't used it as an art medium yet and I thought: I'm tired of making things that can be stolen, like a book, so I'm going to work with code, and no one can steal that. Once it's on the internet it's permanent. Ironically, fast forward 15 years, a lot of the internet technologies that I used to make those early projects are now either obsolete or will become obsolete very soon. So, The Whale Hunt for instance, by the end of 2020 flash will no longer be supported. Basically, those projects will also be stolen, except not by someone with a gun but by corporate policies. So it's just ironic that in a way it kind of started with books and then went away from them and then I realised that actually books are probably the most permanent thing and they can survive through time so well because they don't rely on any technology other than physical matter.

Jonathan has an art background – he paints and creates colourful landscapes and used to keep water-colours in his notebooks. He explained that before the robbery he hadn’t been totally absorbed by computer science yet and although he was taking it as a course requirement at Princeton he hadn’t taken it any further until after the robbery when he realised that with the internet it felt like nobody could steal your work.

He told us about being asked to create a personal homepage while studying and he found that by putting photos of his paintings online he could send the hyperlink around and had a really easy way to share his works. This was a moment he describes as an epiphany.

Nowadays it seems so simple. But at the time it felt revolutionary that there was this way to introduce people to my artwork that didn't require being with them physically. I just felt like, wow, this is going to be such an exciting frontier that's opening up and I'd love to learn about how to create for it.

There were two sides of him – the computer-science side and the art-making side. He resolved to put these together when he received a fellowship at Fabrica in Italy and decided to use computer science as an art medium and created his first project: Wordcount (2003).

Wordcount is a visualisation of the 86,600 most popularly used words in the English language ranked in order. The bigger the word the more it is used and the smaller the word the less it is used. Some of the patterns that emerge are humorous or perhaps insightful. For example, the word “God” is only six words away from “War.”

It was when he came across Listening Post a work by Ben Rubin, a sound artist, and Mark Hansen, a statistician, that Jonathan realised how art and data could really meet.

Listening Post (2001-2) used algorithms to scan internet chat rooms in real-time and take words from them. Then 231 electronic screens in an 11x21 curved wall displayed a word each while a computerised voice reads the words over each other and a monotonous drone fills the air.

That piece got me thinking about mass internet data as an expressive treasure trove of human sentiment and shortly after that I created ‘We Feel Fine’ which was very much inspired by listening post. 

This period saw Jonathan create many projects which he now refers to as the early, data-visualisation part of his career. We Feel Fine (2006) scanned internet for uses of the words “I feel” and “I am feeling” to create a dataset of people’s feelings as they expressed them into the void of the internet, which in 2006, was yet to become what it is now and was altogether something more innocent.

We Feel Fine, tried to use data to express something inherently human. Each data point was a person’s feeling and the user could filter down to very specific points by gender, age, weather, location and more. It was this mixing of the macro and the micro levels that Jonathan had wanted to achieve and is perhaps his most unique offering to this art form and medium – the ability to switch between the micro and macro. To be able to go from how an entire country “feels” down to what a girl in her 20s in America feels and back out again. This is what books cannot offer and is perhaps unique to the internet medium.

After We Feel Fine followed a period of exploring this unique dynamic. The Whale Hunt (2007) and Cowbird (2011) carried on from this data visualisation and viewer-controlled-filter storytelling. But the problem was he had created something so complex that he wasn’t sure people were using it to its full potential – barely scratching the surface of the micro and the macro.

There was this simple phrase that actually Golan Levin first introduced me to, Jonathan told us. This concept that a good tool should be instantly knowable and infinitely masterable and so he gave the example of a piano and pencil which are things that are instantly knowable – like a four-year-old child can use them – but infinitely masterable. You can spend your whole life trying to master these mediums and still be learning when you die and so with those interfaces that I was designing back then I always wanted them to be instantly knowable and infinitely masterable. They should be self-evident and fun and playful to explore but they should have incredible depth. The downside of that approach is that most people only stay at the instantly knowable part, so there are whole dimensions of these projects that were impeccably thought out and designed that people would never see because people wouldn't find them, or they wouldn’t think to go there.

To Jonathan there was another issue. While he spent years on these projects and won awards for them, he began to feel they just didn’t go as deep as he wanted them to go. He found that the artworks he admired most – be it an Andrei Tarkovsky film or a Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen song or a poem – touched him in a way that his projects and those of his peers just didn’t. Trying to resolve this led to a period of creative block.

It wasn’t clear to me how the internet medium could be used to go deeper, he said. I wasn't making any new work and I was really confused about what to do next and ultimately in that period I started doing a lot of reading and exploring philosophy and meditation and other states of consciousness and through some experiences I had during that time I had this experience of radically breaking open the frame.

And so from Brooklyn and the bustle of the city where everyone knows what everyone is doing and rushes everywhere and stops and wants to talk and know what you’re doing and is wonderful in its own way, Jonathan moved to his family’s quiet property in Vermont where the crickets chirp.

He began to see life as the canvas and suddenly art was no longer about rectangles, be it a frame or screen. Instead, moulding a life that he was happy in became the work and then what came from that be it videos or paintings or woodwork or websites would be all the better and deeper. He began to follow a new philosophy which he calls “The next clear thing”. By just doing what feels right at any time – be that artistically or in relationships and life – then magic can happen. It was just about being open to experience and turning up.

Slowly, Jonathan returned to website art but this time instead of endlessly open and complex, his newest work – which he is creating now – follows a more linear path which is in some ways more like a book.

So, myself and Manu ventured to ask, as the wind battered my windows, what he thought of physical books. Jonathan was so rooted in storytelling through the internet and produced only one book in his career which ran parallel to We Feel Fine, we wondered what his thoughts were towards storytelling through the codex as opposed to the digital, the unphysical.

I think books are not going to go anywhere, he said. There's a certain amount of simplicity to books. Do books fulfil some unique need that we have as human beings that other mediums don't? I don't know, I haven't really thought about that. It's wonderful just to be next to the fireplace on a cold winter’s day sitting on the sofa reading a book – and sitting there with an iPad is not the same experience at all.

He looks away and thinks.

Maybe another interesting element is there’s a way in which screens are like windows into a different reality because they have motion and they have interaction and so they're like portals into some other space that's not a physical space where you are, your body is somewhere holding a laptop or holding a phone but when you gaze into the phone, you're sort of going into this other place that has its own set of dimension whereas with a book you're still solidly in the same physical reality that your body is in because the page is not changing, it's there in the same way the blanket is there and the apple is there, and so there’s a way in which books coexist with the environments in which they live, that screens do not, screens have a disregard for the environment where they live, whereas books are part of that environment and in fact they add beauty to it.

We had never thought of it in that way. With a screen, be it a phone, a laptop, or tablet you are staring at a screen, yes, but within that screen is an entire world almost an eco-system. You’re aware that you can click somewhere else, go on Twitter when a notification pops up, there are people on there, and it is its own reality. You’re reading a New Yorker article but somewhere you’re aware that the dimensions of what you are looking at are so much deeper that you could drift off onto social media or follow an advert. The internet is its own environment and reading is only one part of that. You are not starting at a flat screen, you’re staring into something so big you can barely comprehend. And with the page of a book? Nothing. You are there and you are with the book and the words.

So why the internet for Jonathan?

The internet is a way to connect with people and connect ideas I'm creating with people. I guess I could also publish books, he laughs. I see the beauty that's possible in the internet even though it's so rare to find it, I feel like most of my experiences with the internet nowadays are very poor.

The internet is a dark place these days and he tells us that what we all call truth is now so mailable and the internet has been at the forefront of this decline. Dark, pessimistic, false stories have spread, and he points to President Donald Trump as fully understanding this new “reality” while the Democrat Party cling on to a noble 20th century mentality of shouting – No, that’s not right, you can’t lie like that. The internet, he believes, needs more light and more beauty.

Jonathan’s view of the internet, he thinks, is probably a little stuck in 2005 – it is a browser and a mouse and that is what informs much of his works. But he hopes that this vision is something that sticks around because artist’s like him have barely scratched the surface.

I remember the early days of pre-Google, pre-Facebook. You would discover things by your friends emailing them to you and it was like you'd stumbled into a secret, like when somebody had found a really beautifully made internet experiment and you went and it was like a secret room you'd been invited into. I felt like a lot of the early projects of mine had that quality also, when people found them they were like “wow this is amazing that you created this” but we've become so bombarded with information now that we've become so numb and desensitised and usually people are selling something like there's usually some motive behind it, it's rare that people just put something up for the beauty of it now. Sometimes, yes, but it's pretty uncommon, I still love that gift and putting things out there in the spirit of a gift.

He continues to work with websites but now the act of creation is wider. The internet is one communication tool of many, but it could be a book, a video, a painting, whatever feels right, whatever is the next clear thing. What is important is doing things in the right order and living a life in which he is happy to live in, living kindly for the planet, those around him and the wider community. He wants to host designers on his land in Vermont and work on bringing some joy back to the internet and tell stories that will be the light magic against the dark. Through reading, philosophy, creating and living, there is an air of peace around Jonathan and our conversation was insightful. When it was over we said our goodbyes and left him with the crickets chirping somewhere in Vermont.