Parker Ito and Dean Kissick

Issue 02 sees à la mode artist Parker Ito speaking to thought leader and confidant Dean Kissick

Parker Ito and Dean Kissick, longtime friends, chat again on Parker’s forthcoming project on Zien, ParkerIto.net, covering, not least of all, its claim to radical newness in the long history of painting. They also discuss Photoshop, White Cube and changing feelings about the internet. This is Issue 02 of Art of Conversation, chronicling periodical conversations between artists and their chosen interlocutor. Published by Zien, a Web3 platform to transform online art collecting.

Parker
Do you have specific things you want to talk about? Or do you have any thoughts about what we should cover?

Dean
I think we can flow freely. But what would be interesting and useful for me is to hear the latest with the project and to know about what you're exhibiting. Then we can just go in any direction. So let's start at the very beginning. Do you know how many paintings, if we call them that, that you're going to be exhibiting in London?

Parker
The project with Zien is called ParkerIto.net. There’s an exhibition in London with work from Henry Sprite. It's just five paintings. We decided to make an initial batch of them for this exhibition that me and Henry Sprite are doing. So I made five images that were specifically going to be turned into paintings. I'm learning about the technologies used to produce these and the challenges of using a generative program to create layered collages. I still don't understand a lot of how it's done. You can make a file with a million layers in it, but if everything doesn't line up in a certain way then it just looks like a bunch of shit jumbled on top of each other. Or there might not be enough variation. I'm trying to figure it out. I'm taking a little break and then I'm gonna go back to it these next couple of days and really focus on it.

Dean
Do you enjoy the process?

Parker
Yeah, I do. In the last several years with the paintings and images I've been making, with the exception of maybe the last year, there wasn't a lot of Photoshop. Photoshop was such a big part of what I was doing from 2012 to 2016, so it's nice to get back into that zone. I found all these old files from during that period when I was making collages a lot and turning them into paintings. I've spent so much of my life in Photoshop, it's kind of crazy. It was shocking how much I had on my computer.

Dean
Let’s talk about those 2012 onwards works. The works you were making on Photoshop, can you describe them, what they were, how they were made? I'm assuming they were big paintings, like the ones I saw in the White Cube show and the Chateau Shatto exhibition and some other group shows.

Parker
The works from that period are the most emblematic of that kind of style of Photoshop collage painting. I was very lucky in 2013 to start working with assistants. One of my goals around that time was to make paintings that felt like a lot of different things simultaneously. It was not ever really landing on one thing or one kind of aesthetic or one kind of mood. So I started making these double sided paintings and I feel like the large ones that were shown in my Chateau Shatto and White Cube shows were the most successful. I would make these super dense Photoshop collages and then my assistants would paint them. A lot of it was really similar to how you would prompt an AI, this was pre-commercial AI but there was a lot of prompting where I would say, here's this thing that I've marked up in the collage and I want you to paint it in this particular style. I had some assistants who were really knowledgeable about painting history and styles. So I'd say, paint this hand like a Guston or a Balthus and they could do it.

Dean
I didn't know you were directing them to paint in certain styles, like in a Guston way.

Parker
I had one assistant who was a real painting nerd. I’m an art nerd in that I love art and love looking at it and I'm excited by it. But painting nerds are really specific because they're thinking about the construction of a painting and that's not something I ever really think about. I think about paintings more in terms of images. I had one assistant in particular who was really a fucking painting nerd and he would know what this painter does and how they do it. At that time, I was trying to make stuff that looked like it was made by several different people. That’s something that is really not common in people who use studio assistants, instead they're trying to basically make a unified voice that can be attributed to a singular artist. That was why when I did my show at White Cube, the show title is crediting basically everyone who works in my studio plus all my fabricators. A lot of people thought it was a group show. I feel like there's a lot of parallels to how people are thinking about AI. The more successful uses of AI sometimes just comes down to who understands how to prompt better, who understands the references better. The bigger your pool of stylistic references sometimes the more successful it is. So a lot of what I do now is just show these programs a specific image to pull a style from and then say here’s another image, just paint it like this in this style.

Dean
Is that what you're doing for this project?

Paker
There's going to be a little bit of that because I want to incorporate it. The thing about this project is it's a new frontier in terms of thinking about how one would generate images to be constructed and how one goes about making these things. At every stage it feels like there's a variable that can be tweaked, so it becomes really complicated because I don't know where I should start or stop. I feel like what I've produced so far has been pretty simple, but once I start to get more into the zone…

Dean
I remember going to the Chateau show, you had the whole gallery but also the warehouse next door. That might be the craziest show I've ever been to. It was deranged. You spent a year or maybe more than a year on it?

Parker
It was multiple years.

Dean
And you spent a lot of money. You kind of seemed like you were losing your mind. In a good way. It was just deranged, in the warehouse especially. In the gallery it was deranged because of how strange the system you set up was but the system had a kind of internal logic. Like this is an artist's complicated but sort of coherent logic of things that are connected in their mind. It was total visual overload. There was so much stuff. So when you're talking to me about simplicity vs complexity that's what it reminds me of. You have done this crazy overloaded stuff before and now there is a possibility with this collage based NFT of hyper complexity. In a new series that came out recently, Mifella 2, from what I gather it's this insane number of traits made by all these different people who contributed traits, much like your White Cube show. The system can create these completely overloaded images that don't look like the avatar or that don't make sense compositionally and are a mess but they're supposed to be a mess. It goes back to what you were saying about how hard it is to control these systems, you don't want things to look the same but you want to have some kind of compositional clarity or rules. I like these kind of anonymous NFT artists, I like the kind of images they're making. They’ve pushed the number of traits, the number of different components to over the top levels, to slightly ridiculous levels of complexity.

Parker
I read about it on Twitter. I think the Mifella 2 people said they had something like 1200 individual distinct asset layers. It seemed like a lot to me and I thought, “Is that a typical amount of assets for a PFP project? Is that what it takes to make one of these projects interesting?”

Dean
No, I don’t think so.

Parker
Because the one I'm currently working on has maybe 120. So I thought I’m gonna need to do a lot of fucking work.

Dean
I think 120 is a lot.

Parker
I do feel like I want to push it more and add a lot, but I don't even know what to do to it right now. I don't even think my computer could open something that has that many layers. I guess you could like chop it up. I want to focus in on this and really push the format. Because I spend so much time in Photoshop there is a compositional focus that is super specific and is about making something that looks right, looks correct, looks good. That’s about being nuanced and tweaking little things, trying lots of options and really working through a composition. But when you put a bunch of assets in the generative engine and run it, it does something really different. There is something kind of liberating about that. I might just turn the thing on when I get to my studio later today and run it and see what it makes, see if it's even interesting.

Dean
You definitely should. Run the machine. It is very interesting to me this kind of model of creating these machines or systems with which to create a certain type of image, or just to create a series of images without knowing what they'll look like. I don't even think of it as a way of making art. This kind of trait based NFT system, a lot of that stuff is not art, it's not supposed to be art, but then the idea of using it to make art, a new kind of art, is very interesting to me. It’s like a new approach to collage, something with a lot of similarities to the first form of collages from Picasso and Braque around 1913. But it's also different in significant ways. I'm interested in that form. I'm interested in seeing what's possible, how it can be pushed, how it can be blown apart or how it can be concentrated down into something more clear. Both of those sides, the chaotic end of things and the side of trying to make all this disparate stuff somehow cohere are interesting projects to me. And now you're using these to make real physical paintings. Can you tell me about this series you're making? How did it begin? We should also talk about the original Parked Domain works and the process of making those works using that image.

Paker
The first Parked Domain Girl painting I made was in 2009 or 2010. I made one for the very first solo show I had which was in San Francisco. The painting actually got vandalized. Someone wrote on the face with a pen, I think they wrote “Jesus is not green”. The show was in the Mission district and there's a lot of people in the Mission who may or may not be on drugs and I think they probably wandered in to use the bathroom and were having a spiritual experience with my art and scribbled something on the painting.

I was kind of a normal internet user growing up. I feel like a lot of people who were in the net art scene had a very specific relationship with the internet or gaming when they were teenagers, or they spent a lot of time in chat rooms but I never did any of that. My main use of the internet for many years was just shopping. When I got to college, it was the first time I had my own computer. It's weird to say but I think I realized that I liked the internet then which I hadn't realized before. Now I don't think people think in terms of whether they like the internet or not. But in college, I was like, “holy shit, I love the internet.” From there I got into the net art scene and doing all that shit and was spending so much time on the computer. I started school in 2006 and the first several years that I was in school, I was just seeing that Park Domain Girl image constantly, it was everywhere on the internet. I'd seen it for about a year and never thought about what it was. You came across it whenever you visited a domain that had expired. It was something that you weren't seeking out, you just came upon it accidentally and it signalled to you that whatever you were looking for was not there. So I was thinking “what's the fucking deal with this image?” I did some research on it and thought I want to make paintings of this. At the time, I was also very motivated by trying to have this ubiquitous jpeg associated with me as an artist. That's kind of a weird motivation but it became like an avatar.

I don't even know why I decided to make paintings in China but that was a part of it initially. The thing I think people don't realize about that project, which I think is the most interesting and weirdly proto-NFT thing, is there was no cap on how many I was willing to make, I wanted to make as many as possible. Someone would email me and buy a painting and I would send the painters in China the order, then they would paint it and send me back a photograph of the painting to basically say it was acceptable. Then I would just have that sent straight from the factory in China to wherever the collector was. I never saw a lot of the paintings in person, I never touched them, I never interacted with them as physical painting art objects. So that jpeg that the factory sent me was the only record of this thing existing and that was really kind of where the art was, that was more the art than the actual paintings. I don't even know where some of those paintings are now. I did that for a couple of years. Then I decided that I wanted to start using the jpeg as a kind of base. So instead of starting a canvas with a blank slate, I would start with a pre-made painting I had made in China of that image, that would be the starting point. I made a bunch where I was painting various layers on top of the image. A lot of them had my name on them, that was a kind of reoccurring thing like a watermark, Parker Ito in some sort of cursive font. I couldn't even tell you how many of those paintings there are.

Dean
What kind of numbers?

Parker
I would guess there's maybe 50.

Dean
You were just selling them straight from the website?

Parker
I’d say half the Parked Domain Girl paintings were sold like that. I had other painting series with lots of works that were sold in the mainstream art world through galleries and other avenues. Someone random person would email me and say they liked the project, I want to buy one of these paintings. It was a similar thing to ParkerIto.net where it was scaled, so the bigger the painting the more expensive it was and cheaper ones were smaller. People could buy a painting for pretty cheap, because I was a college student and I didn't really have a market. You could buy a Parked Domain Girl painting for $200. I just wanted to make them and more than anything I was really excited by making them.

Dean
Did you also use the image for your real website?

Parker
There was a moment where the template for my website was just that format. Which is also what this project is now. I have like a million websites. My main website used to be ParkerIto.com and then I changed it to Parker.sex two or three years ago.

Dean
Why did you do that?

Parker
I just wanted to have Parker without my last name. I also wanted a new email address. So my email is now PP@Parker.sex. But it fucked up my SEO. Parker.sex is on the second or third page of Google, which is annoying and I don't know why because ParkerIto.com was at the top for so long. I think my Wikipedia is the first thing that comes up now. So yeah I had made this other website called ParkerIto.net. I never finished it but that was the Parked Domain Girl template with this image of me as the Parked Domain Girl in this kind of neochibi style. Part of this project with Zien is also about finishing this website.

Dean
Which is also what Milady is right? Remilia described Milady as having a neochibi aesthetic. That's actually how I know the word neochibi.

Parker
Yeah, it's big head, big eyes, big features, but kind of minimal and not very expressive. Many years ago I was involved in this summer group show in New York where they paired a bunch of artists up to make portraits of the other artists. I got asked to be in the show and I collaborated with Body by Body, they were my artists.

Dean
Great artists. Some of the greatest artists of all time.

Parker
They made neochibi versions of me. I gotta find them maybe I can use them in this project. So when I got asked to do this NFT project, it was basically an excuse to finish the ParkerIto.net site because I never really finished it. That’s what the project is called. I usually do these projects that try to be some sort of container for everything I've done. I've been going through all my archives and pulling out all these assets from old things and incorporating them into this new master file that is going to be used to generate all of these painted versions of the Parked Domain Girl.

Dean
We should say more about the project.

Parker
It’s going to be a website that you visit and the site itself takes on the original Parked Domain Girl template, which has a text area and the singular image. The text area was always these links to other related material. I've been generating all of this text that is related to my work, which will be generating randomly, so every time you visit the site ParkerIto.net the text will change and it’ll be various things that I've written and that I’ll continuously be changing. Next to that is the image which will also change each time you visit the site. The images are where the NFT images are going to be and if you click through the image, you'll be able to access an archive that has all of the images from the project. Then you can not only acquire one of the images as an NFT but also have that turned into a painting. There's four sizes that we decided on. One of the issues is that some of the images are so complex and dense in terms of information that they could potentially be challenging to turn into a painting that's below a certain size. Also people just can't paint things that computers can make, or if they can it's very time consuming. It’s a weird challenge trying to get these Chinese painters to paint these super dense collages. I don't know what they're going to look like, it's going to be another kind of filter that’s placed on top of these existing things. Obviously looking at an NFT on a computer and going to a gallery to look at a painting, that's two different experiences.

Dean
People can paint the images that a computer can generate, it’s just very hard. That would be a different project. It's a different kind of challenge. I don't know who’s set up to do this but maybe like, Julie Mehretu, if they had dedicated teams of master painters just all working away to create a perfect pixel by pixel rendition of a generated computer image.

Parker
It’s kind of what Koons does. I mean in terms of the quality of the painting and how it's meant to just look literally like the Photoshop collages he makes with all of the artifacts and shitty Photoshop edges that he doesn't check. But those paintings take like two years to make, it's a team of people and a very specific scale that he works in. But to have it done in like a month in China in a factory it’s going to look very different.

Dean
Yeah, of course. Man versus machine. Japanese American artist versus a Chinese professional painter. That's good. It’s globalization mixed with physical and digital worlds.

Parker
There’s a lot of people who’ve used Chinese painters and there's a lot of projects that I'm less excited about where they've used them. It kind of just feels like they want to make paintings but they can't find another way to do it so they just hire these Chinese painters. I don't think I would be doing it if I hadn't already done it with this project all these years ago. I don't know if I'm doing a good job of explaining how that's different. I don't know if I have the brain energy right now to explain how it’s different, but it feels different to me. It feels like this is much more meaningful. There's also the possibility of me making as many paintings as there is images generated, which could be 1000s. That's part of the project that I'm trying to bridge the gap, I’m trying to take the generative aspects of NFTs and overlap them with the possibilities of fine art painting production. In a way it’s very much about that. Instead of trying to just make a painting out of an image and then not tell you how this is made, but you can tell it's made in China because it looks a certain way.

Dean
Not everyone can tell though.

Parker
I guess because I've worked with the Chinese painters so much I know what it looks like.

Dean
I think the idea of making paintings on demand makes sense, especially if those are generated paintings and particularly if they end up being huge mints. That is a new approach, a new way of making a series, one that could become extremely large, one of the largest series ever. It relates to this moment that we’re already in of mass overproduction of images. Too many images are produced, we see too many images. But there's also mass overproduction of art. Most of those works, paintings, are made painstakingly or reasonably painstakingly and then positioned as these unique objects with aura with value, but only because of the overinflated nature of the contemporary or ultra contemporary art market and art world.

It's just the number of galleries in New York, the number of artists, painters and the number of people that are willing, or at least were until not long ago, to buy these works and to keep all of these different galleries in business. You also have this massive over proliferation of hand painted artworks themselves. So in this moment, where there's a total over proliferation of images, one solution or approach is just to make a huge series of painted on demand images with 120+ traits. It makes sense to me.

Also in some ways the project is an archive of the history of your work. So it's like a randomised museum of Parker.

Parker
It’s like journey through time. From all the way back to when I made the first Parked Domain Girl paintings to now, which is a 14 year period. In these new works a version of the Parked Domain Girl, whether it's sort of me or some other modified version is the central, I guess, PFP figure. Then it's all this other shit happening around it that is from an archive that extends back to 2010. I really don't know what it's going to end up being like.

Parker Ito’s ParkerIto.net drops on Zien on Thursday, August 22nd.