Ben Hall’s resumé says: “Benjamin Hall is an artist working in film, new media, animation, installation, creative computing, printmaking and writing. His work is concerned with the expectations and formatting issues attached to ‘content-creation’ and the communities that form around them, on and off the internet”.
We had a talk about his art and the way it’s used to cope with reality, and to revolt against the ruling powers of the society. And remember: keep looking for your own Maitreya!
Where do your fantasies come from?
I’ve been asking myself this question a lot recently, in different ways. An example; my recent short adventure game ‘Brassknocker, 1979’ (commissioned by the Brewhouse Theatre, Taunton) was an adaptation of a series of sightings of fabled cryptid ‘the Beast of Brassknocker Hill’ which swept a community in my native county of Somerset in the 1970s and 80s. I unearthed a collection of newspaper clippings and eyewitness sketches from a local record office, and upon reading accounts of the cryptozoological hysteria that gripped the village found myself asking; ‘what were these people really looking for?’ Somerset has a strong oral folklorish and Arthurian tradition, but in the UK these forms of knowledge, mysticism and fantasy are too often dismissed as unscientific, outdated and ridiculous. I saw in the newspaper clippings something I’ve felt myself – there are gaps in modern existence. When everything is quantified, capitalised and computed, space to dream, fantasise and be in touch with spiritual forces are disavowed and diminished. I think that on some melancholic level when that community was frantically hunting for the local Beast they were really looking for a connection to their spirituality and to things outside of empirical thought.
I feel the absence of this spirituality, and the pain of this gap is the space in which I fantasise. I suppose it stems from my personal history with mental illness – anxiety and paranoia specifically. Confusing blends of claustrophobia, agoraphobia and doomsaying (I am a Zoomer, after all) lead me to fantasise and hunt for my spirituality with hyperactive urgency. I guess I’m saying I fantasise because I don’t trust the ruling powers of the society in which I live – dreaming becomes a means of survival. I am also in the process of writing an upcoming short film provisionally entitled ‘What are we really looking for when we look for aliens?‘ following a group of UFO spotters taking the example of Scottish esotericist Benjamin Creme and his search for a transcendental cosmic entity named Maitreya. I don’t want to label these groups as mere fantasizers, but I feel in some sense we all have our own Maitreya – a fantastical spirituality that we know we’re missing, on an innate level.
Do the aesthetics of the late 90s influence your works?
I was born in 1998 under the sign of Y2K – doesn’t that make me an aesthetic of the late 90s? But yes, undoubtedly. There is a specific cultural moment that occurred in that period in the CRPG (computer role-playing game) genre of videogaming, exemplified by titles such as ‘Planescape Torment,’ ‘Baldur’s Gate’ and ‘Neverwinter Knights.’ Beyond their impressive audiovisual presentations, wonderful scriptwriting and fun mechanical systems, these CRPGs represent a form of player empowerment that has sadly been fazed out of not just the gaming industry but the arts in general. In role-playing gaming there is this idea of a ‘setting;’ a narrative world that games take place within. These settings can be licensed out to different creatives to make their own stories in (such as Black Isle Studios paying for the Planescape license to set ‘Planescape Torment’ in), as well as of course allowing ‘dungeon masters’ to create their own stories in tabletop games of Dungeons & Dragons.
Of course, as videogames, players are able to interact with these CRPGs in whatever way they allow, meaning every player will have their own experience and create their own narratives. In this way these pieces of art are created collaboratively by large communities – everyone is empowered to make their own stories within the structure supplied, and the work becomes plurally authored. Also, many late 90s games shipped with powerful in-engine tools for players to make their own game modes, levels and content within the structure of the original product, further enabling audiences to express themselves creatively and narratively. Popular games like DoTA, Team Fortress 2 and Day Z would not exist if late 90s gamemakers hadn’t empowered their audiences to make their own works in this way; it is undeniable that the medium has developed essentially as a community practice. Maybe what I’ve described isn’t an aesthetic, but my works are significantly indebted to these progressive people-powered practices that were prevalent in the late 90s.
What is/are the message/s you’d like to spread through your art?
I suppose my art is all part of that search for spiritual meaning and mistrust of the overlords I described earlier. In digitised societies, we are living through a neoliberal conflation of predictability and chaos to the point where as people we are having our agency and capacity for self-actualisation subtly stripped away. When, as users, we have no comprehension of how the platforms and algorithms we interact with daily work (or if they work at all), how are we supposed to effectively critique, improve on and oppose them? With the advent of ‘black box’ neural networking in the field of artificial intelligence, this proposition becomes more complex than ever; I want to draw attention to this, and enact a productive counterpoint to this most terrifying of trends. A key word for my art has become ‘access;’ enabling anyone to have a valid and personal experience of the work and to create their own stories and creative moments within it, much as in the late 90s CRPGs I spoke about earlier.
I think there is inherent value in mass access that the arts industry either fails to see or deliberately ignores in favour of propping up antiquated power structures and revenue streams, or for toxic and discriminatory reasons. It was recently described to me this way; if someone somewhere mined the metals in my laptop, do they not have a right to access and have their own unique experience of the artwork I make on it? A peer once called my art ‘neurotic institutional critique,’ and while this certainly triggered a characteristically neurotic panic in me, I find it to be an apt summation of my endeavours. I want to help myself and others embed our perspectives alongside each other, machines, animals, the planet, the stars and the supersensible. Caring is radical!
Could you please explain the project “DS2020 Simulator“?
I had a conversation with my disabled Grandma in my native Somerset last year about my (then) upcoming BA graduation show at the Glasgow School of Art, where she apologised and said there was no way she could ever make it up to Scotland for the show and would just have to look at some photos. Knowing how diminished the experience of arts can be when viewed in photos, and knowing how powerful open-source web development tools are today, the fact that she was unable to have a valid experience of the show because of her disability infuriated me. So, I conceived ‘DS2020 Simulator,’ a virtual recreation of the graduation show built as a videogame in development software the Unity Engine, that would be released for free with the aiming of crossing barriers medical, financial, geographical or otherwise. I put it on the backburner, but when in March this year said graduation show was cancelled due to the ongoing pandemic and my university failed to offer any replacement or satisfactory alternative (save a barely functional website) I assembled a team of 11 incredible students (and generous others) to create the show.
We opened a call for work to all affected BA fine art and design graduates, and received an unbelievable 136 submissions of huge diversity. We worked closely with the submitters, using our skills with 3D making software to help them translate their planned graduation show installations into virtual space. The 136 installations featured sculpture, photography, text, sound, video, painting, fashion design, textiles and much more, as recreated using techniques such as photogrammetry scanning, texture mapping, cloth simulation, 3D modelling and much more. When we launched the show for free to download for Windows and Mac in May, we also ran a parallel charity drive which raised over £500 for foodbanks in Glasgow. The show has been visited by over 3000 people internationally (far more than would have seen the original physical show) and was featured in several publications and platforms, including myself being interviewed for BBC One and BBC Radio Scotland. We wanted to give our graduating cohort the chance to collectively celebrate and promote our talents which our university continues to deny us, and I hope in this we succeeded. I certainly got a lot of very touching feedback from many of the exhibitors saying how happy they were that they got to execute their plans in some form, even if it wasn’t in the format they originally wanted. To return to my previous points about audience empowerment and accessibility, the bottom-up approach we took with ‘DS2020 Simulator’ I hope to carry forward in my own work as well as see more of in arts programming in general, as well as see more online exhibitions be creative with their interactivity as opposed to taking the form of static and patently unsatisfying websites.
Please, tell us more about @icebreakerbot/helpful conversation start
Oh yeah! I made two Twitterbots (Twitter accounts run by a computer algorithm) in late 2018; @icebreakerbot to generate conversation starters and @reflectionsbot to create musings on the year that was ending, ready for a quiet moment at a New Year’s Eve party. At the time I was reading a lot of prose poetry, concrete poetry and especially metafiction (Flann O’Brien, Gilbert Sorrentino etc.) and had become obsessed with knotty and multilayered linguistic problems.
I also love Twitterbots, which are at once a symptom of the algorithmic revolution and really entertaining, exemplifying a cyborg-y acknowledgement of the limits of AI and a human capacity to joke about the architectures of our oppressors. These twin interests – dense tangly literature and meme-ready shitposts – meant making my own bots made perfect sense. I have spoken about my anxiety earlier; at the time I was just recovering from a depressive spell and was finding conversation difficult, so making a bot to help me talk to people by supplying semi-sensical icebreakers was a form of self-help, I suppose. I quite like them! All the bot does is fill out one of several generic templates I wrote with verbs, nouns and adjectives from vast lists of words I downloaded from the internet. They’ve been tweeting twice a day for two years now, and will continue to do so until Twitter dies or the world ends, whichever comes first.
