Naomi B. Cook
Naomi Cook is an interdisciplinary artist from Canada now based in Paris who translates data into complex revelations about humanity. She creates commentary about grander political and social themes such as undocumented ocean oil spills, the history of AI, and technology’s role in our dating life, and often strives to find the “person in the data,” a process she calls “ghost-tracing.” She experiments with different forms of translating this data such as pointillist drawings, animations, sculpture, installation, and improvisational performance. Sometimes her projects are playful, such as setting up a Hinge profile for a ghost or coming up with contemporary mythologies for invented constellations. But often, Naomi’s work acts as a sobering translation of the data that often goes unread. One of her largest projects, Disappeared Spaces, is an ongoing drawing series that aims to find the images that are hidden within “surveillance capitalism.” She showed us her pointillist drawings depicting Google Earth screenshots of places that have since been removed or restricted: images of refugee camps in Greece, a Ukrainian battlefront before the war, and a labor lodge in Singapore located on top of a factory.
Before we met, Naomi had suggested we create a map drawing of our time spent in Paris, a record of everywhere that we visited that we could look back on. We downloaded an app called Geo Tracker which traced our movements around the city and went back to Naomi’s studio on one of our last days in Paris to transfer it onto paper. Naomi was fascinated by the various ways we could look at and understand our days, presenting it as a list of data points or as a visual map. She transferred the shapes of our steps onto a piece of papyrus and carefully inked the jagged, geometric lines, making guesses about the places we had visited.
Artist’s Website
Naomi: Oh Gosh, I've had this question before, and I don't really have an answer, 'cause I'm not one of those artists who said one day "Oh, I'm an artist." I remember when I was 10, my brother taught me how to draw a tree, and I have been drawing and making stuff ever since and probably before. But professionally, it was when I opened the Red Bird just after moving to Montreal. It's a cute story, really. I was living around the corner of this abandoned factory. One day, I was walking down the street, and there was a line-up of bins full of upholstery tape in front of a massive, red-brick, abandoned warehouse. I was refurbishing a chair, so I went into the factory looking for supplies –it used to be a factory that made upholstery tassels and other fabric-related things. I found another bin full of upholstery tape, but I started looking around, and thought, “You know what, forget the upholstery tape, I'll take the whole floor." So my brother and I signed a lease, with 700 Canadian dollars, three months free, and we threw a bunch of fundraisers. And we raised a bunch of money and rebuilt the floor. Then we opened up the studios [that we called the Red Bird], which were 30 artists, the artist-run center, a DIY bike shop, and a gallery. Then people started moving in. So, maybe that was the beginning of my professional career. The place still exists, actually, and I never finished refurbishing the chair.
MR: Did you grow up around Montreal?
NC: No, I grew up around Toronto, and then I travelled for three years after high school. I was in Paris for a while with my sister. And when I returned to Canada, I went back to Montreal. Then I was between Europe and Montreal for probably 12 years. At which point, I got sick of crying on the RER back to the airport. So I stayed.
MR: You like living in Paris now?
NC: Mostly, yeah. I was having this conversation yesterday. I feel like there's this fear of political conversations everywhere you go, and it's here too; people are getting really frustrated. But I guess coming from the North American perspective, I feel it's a bit better here. There’s still healthcare. There’s still a social network. It still exists. It's not completely eroded yet. Even though I am definitely aware, applying for a visa, for example, which I still have to do every year, is not as easy as it used to be. And the politics around that have definitely changed a lot. I mean, you guys mentioned Berlin because that was the last place that SCEPTER was? I was reading an article that Ai Weiwei just put out in Hyperbolic. He had written it for some institution or a newspaper in Berlin, and they were just like, Nope, not talking about that. So in that sense, yes, I do like Paris because there's still a dialogue. I think there is still the ability to talk about things that are hard.
MR: That was something we learned a lot last summer, the political involvement in the arts scene in Berlin.
NC: It's so intense. It's a bit scary. A lot of artists are moving to Paris now. A lot of my friends are telling me that they're moving here. I was going to go to a conference [in Berlin] in April, and they shut down the whole conference because there were some political conversations that they couldn’t broadcast. It made me a bit sad because I remember Berlin 2012 when it was a bit more of a playground. And I feel like that's being lost.
RF: Yeah, so going back to your work, it's very research based and you use a lot of large data sets to deconstruct and decode the contemporary world. So how do you gather that data that you're referencing? Are you doing your own studies or just finding preexisting data sets and information?
NC: Both. But admittedly, having done this for over 15 years, it's gotten a bit harder to rely on preexisting sources. There was a lot of accessible data before. It was really easy to find, open source, etc. And now it's behind a paywall. It's not as easy to access. Everything is an AI-generated response. The network has kind of fractured. I have also collected data through personal connections with people, particularly my last project I was working on, which was very much about aggregated data on people's love lives. Not that I kiss and tell, so... [laughs] I can’t always tell you where I get all my sources from. I mean, in a way, using data as a material, there is an element of spying. And when asking people to share information, I usually try to be very respectful. So I don't name names if they don't want to be named. I might change a phone number if it makes the person sharing feel more comfortable.
RF: I feel like data is usually perceived in a very unemotional way and it focuses on the facts instead of feelings. But your work feels very emotional and embeds personal stories into these numbers and figures. So how do you go about adding emotion into something that viewers would typically see as just informational?
NC: I think this is my motivation behind the methodology that I've been building, which is called “ghost tracing.” The “ghost" is definitely rooted in a hauntological system. It's about finding the person in the data. This can be an actual person's GPS locations, or the last day of their affair, etc. Right now, I'm working with the Enron corpus, which is emails, and one of the people actually famously committed suicide after the public fiasco. Enron was an energy company from Texas, also the corpus behind all the legacy AI. They were insolvent for many years, and they were hiding the fact that they were insolvent through shell companies. This originally was very interesting, and to me relates to how data works. AI, particularly. The single-purpose entity, which is the term they use to hide their insolvency, for me feels a pretty poignant allegory. In this case, I am working with the actual emails, so there is a sorta inevitable human element to it. And then the tracing is looking at the log, the information, and trying to link it to the person. That way, I can kind of make them feel a little bit alive. I also often end up collaborating with ghosts, also the ghost as a metaphor. The Dybukk, Clotilde de Vaux and soon a female vengeful ghost. With my new research, I'm technically collaborating with a dead person because of the suicide. In the past, I used the dybukk as a metaphor for how an art object can be a poltergeist. I will admit, though, the dybukk was not a good collaborator for the Data Suite exhibition, mostly based on online dating data. I had to sage the gallery because things were falling off the table. The dybukk is known for not being a nice ghost; it was really weird. It got really spooky. I try not to be superstitious, but inevitably, maybe I am because of this process. There were disasters one after the other, and the curator got super sick. Another ghost I've collaborated with is Clotilde de Vaux. She's been really fun. She was the love interest of Auguste Comte, who formulated positivism. Around post-Revolution France, 1792. His house is in Paris, and now a museum, and I did an exhibition there in 2022. I learned about Clotilde de Vaux, who was his love interest, and she was more of the softer, humanitarian side of him. I think they had two encounters, and then she passed away from tuberculosis. Ironically, or coincidentally, through recommendations of a doctor of his, who probably gave her maltreatment, she passed quite quickly. And so he obsessed over her, and there's a throne in the museum dedicated to her. He would read to her all these letters that he had written every day. She's been a fun collaborator as a stand-in love interest. The idea of projecting something onto somebody, which I do think happens a lot online and now off. Mostly with social network technology, we have this way of putting a persona out and then projecting personas on other people. I put her on Hinge at one point. And she got a lot of interest. [laughs] It was a bit nerve-wracking because I had this idea of drawing all the people who [matched with] her. So I drew all the profiles, and every time I looked at my phone, I'd be like, oh, Gosh, there's 10 more people. The portraits take time to draw. Kept thinking you guys know she's dead, right? She's been dead for like 300 years. She's also on Twitter. You can message her, and she'll respond with quotes from her book. She has been part of my other project as well; she's a pretty good talisman.
MR: How do you deal with that feeling of power when reinlivening a person, or does it feel less personal because it's not so close to you?
NC: I don't know if I have a really good answer, because if there is a Spector behind data, you can find out information about them, and you feel like you know the Spector. One of the data sets I worked with was a woman who had broadcast her seven-minute orgasm. You can find it anywhere on the internet really easily. And the question is, is she performing or is it real? And there are all these copies of the video. But she's still a real person. Maybe that is the challenge of the archive, the ephemeral and the permanence. Our relationship to socializing with each other has now become a bit more projected. So maybe that power is relatable. I try to be careful with what people wish. Sure, I'm a spy, but I'm a spy who appreciates privacy. So maybe your question of power is definitely something that I'm trying to explore and figure out. In my current project, I'm trying to look at the ingrained power structures a bit more closely. In tech, new narratives are becoming very obvious and dominant. Trying to decode these narratives is something that I've been focusing on lately. The project I'm working on right now is called the Tocsin, using the Enron corpus. I'm hoping to sorta flip it on its head, as a participatory experience – karaoke.
MR: What do you mean it's karaoke?
NC: It’s actually karaoke. I’m actually building a stochastic lyric generator based on the Enron corpus, AI karaoke [laughs].
RF: Hearing you talk about all these projects, you’re thinking about a very wide range of ideas, from relationships and love to financial crises. And we've seen some works about more environmental themes. So how does your practice shift through all of these different ideas? Do you see that work and those changes as a response to what's happening currently around you?
NC: Inevitably, yeah. I'm driven by questions. When I was working with environmental statistics, it was at a period of time when oil had become less valuable than data, my primary subject matter. And that shift was interesting to me, and a way to learn how power systems work. I'm definitely a system thinker. I've learned to be a little careful describing my thought process, because it gets a bit abstract. I also try to do something different in each project because I feel I get locked into a certain way of thinking within a system and then need to break out of it. Working on high-frequency trading, it just felt so impersonal. Other than greed, there wasn't much human-ness. So I decided to turn to the most human thing that I could think of, sex. What is more human than the joy of sex? So the shift is a bit dichotomic as well. And then I started to realize I was looking at a very user-based interaction, and became more curious about the hierarchies that exist in the system.
MR: So in your most recent exhibition Data Suite, which explores the intimate and the impersonal found in online romantic affairs, you use a lot of data from these dating apps to create works about relationships. In the project description, you write that “data is one of the most important trending agents in our contemporary reality. The data suite proposes that this should be discussed at all levels of society.” So how do you think that the Internet is changing our way of understanding memory and all our data? When all of our data is permanently documented, how is this collection of data on our most personal elements of life, romantic or sexual affairs, changing our perceptions of love and intimacy?
NC: My feeling is that it's almost becoming collective. Memory is becoming very collective, and it can be rewritten continuously. And it can be retold. A really good example is Grok. After Grok existed for a while, Elon Musk decided, “We're gonna change the narrative.” And he's specifically rebuilding it so that he can tell a certain understanding of history. I don't know if I personally feel like one story of history is good. But this fluidity also creates certain other problems. Defining what memory is is becoming is difficult, but I feel a collectiveness is maybe kind of nice.
MR: We can all share these memories because they're all documented in this space of the internet.
NC: And how we collectively organize information is definitely related to the internet. I’m reading The Smartness Mandate by Orit Halpern. She said that it's like a reorganization revolution. I like that. A lot of people are fear-mongering AI technology, as if it is a new technology, and oh no! We're never going to be the same again.
RF: I happened to read this essay yesterday by Olivia Laing called The Future of Loneliness. It was talking about the permanence of the internet and how it's kind of used as an antidote to loneliness because it's a way to connect people. I was thinking about all of that in relation to your work, and especially your projects about relationships and how people share their identities online. Laing was saying that our identities have expanded into these different forms now. As we use and interact with the internet, we're leaving traces of ourselves in everything that we share. And so that's kind of giving up a level of control. I'm curious as to your opinions on how emotion and vulnerability and the ability to connect are influenced by the internet?
NC: Oh man, it’s getting harder. I worry for the next generation. I have a two-year-old, and I just realized recently that the way she's going to be educated is gonna be so different from my own experience. On a side note, I’ve never actually used a dating app. I've only been banned from them. So I don't really know personally, the experience of what that's like. Another thing, being very dyslexic, I can't really completely interact in a live way, openly, publicly. I used to think that maybe I was able to avoid the algorithms because I'm just inevitably coding incorrectly by misspelling things all the time. That's made me feel a bit removed from that experience of the isolation that can happen with these networks. Obviously, there is an inevitable crisis. Alternatively, I do feel like, in some ways, network technologies are starting to get figured out. It does seem a lot better than it was a couple of years ago. The sort of stuff that used to come out of 4chan, etc. It's really calmed down a lot. And I think that might be just the natural waves of how people adapted to technology in general, which was the same with television. People were so afraid of television when it first came out, and there was this huge scare campaign, like, “our children are going to be ruined,” etc. Technologies are adopted, but they're also starting to move a lot faster. Have you seen the documentary Social Studies? The director first documented the experience of young people on social networks with split screens. What she shows is what they're looking at and their emotional responses. And then she talked to them after, and a lot of them reiterated, “We don't want to do this anymore. We want off. We want to be able to turn our phones off, and we don't know how.” The problem is still there. When I was in Arles, and I was putting this show on, one of the performers I was working with is a little bit famous; he's in The Walking Dead. Roman. He was performing, and before the opening night, somebody posted a video of our run-through filmed through the window. We never even saw the person. And this girl, who was a huge fan, started following us [on Instagram]. And then on the night of the opening, a fan showed up who had travelled all the way from Lithuania, I think. [Roman] told us that he was really concerned about the girl of the account who posted the video because she was threatening to kill herself if he blocked her. It was very extreme. I think a couple of months after she started following all of us, she was liking everything from everybody. We're all weirdos. And then soon she started posting drawings and her own stuff, and she kind of stopped doing a fan page, and it started becoming her [own] page. She's actually doing okay now, maybe. She kind of found her way. I'm making a parallel, and I can't prove this at all, but maybe it was like, oh, wait, you're allowed to be a weirdo.
MR: So you also write about how through Data Suite, you've developed this methodology of art creation that you call ghost tracing and illustrating how a human component of data acts as a glitch within the machine. You talked to us a bit about ghost tracing, but I guess I'm curious about that phrasing, how the human component of data is the glitch within the machine. What is that?
NC: I think I'm trying to reclaim the term glitch. In early internet art, there was really a love of the glitch, and it always irked me because it was very anthropomorphic. It’s fun, but it didn't feel right. So, I don't believe in the automatic glitch, I don't believe in the “ghost in the machine,” or that the machine is alive. That's why I'm trying to rephrase it, that the glitch is us. I think that when a computer creates a system, it's a model. And once you put anything that's unpredictable in it, it stops working, and humans are not predictable. I really just can’t believe we will ever be fully compatible. And maybe that's my belief in humanity, that we're just ultimately too complicated to ever be predictive. This is why I'm trying to reclaim “glitch.”
MR: And then also for Data Suite, you have A Night in Someone Else's Affair, which is this performance piece which you describe as “exploring the exhibition's themes and interacting through collaboration with some of the objects and data sets in the exhibition.” So what does this collaboration with objects and data look like? And do you often feel like you're collaborating with data?
NC: With the performances, I let the performers have carte blanche. I did not want to tell them what to do. Marie Polo did her own choreography. I basically gave her all the data from my Troika project, which is based on a dataset from a woman who was using Ashley Madison. Ashley Madison is a site that is used for finding extramarital affairs. The woman was in an open relationship. So, the morality questions ended up being more vague. It's not really part of it. I mean, lying is immoral. It's simple to me. Sex is sex ultimately. You can tell that I was raised by hippies. In this case, I had a lot of information because theperson not only shared the GPS locations, but she also gave me a text document of how she felt, how she cried in the restaurant after. With her permission, I shared this with Marie to use with the expression she felt comfortable with, dance and performance.
RF: I was looking at your drawings, and you said that's a big part of your practice and what a lot of people know you for. You
NC: I love the quill. I don't draw just like this, though. I draw in many different ways, but mainly the style you are referring to I’m using for a never-ending series I am working on. There is an element of drawing the technology, yes, from the images I find. It's about being a bit in the machine. I'm drawing the pixels, basically. It is also because the quill can lend you that.
MR: How long do those take you?
NC: They can take up to three weeks to a month and a half. It depends on the image.
RF: Does that process feel meditative?
NC: Definitely, for sure. This is an image of Batam, and I'm definitely thinking of projects when I'm working on them. They're definitely my meditation. I can show you more of them if you want. There's a whole stack of them over there.
RF: In your recent drawing series, Disappeared Spaces, you draw streetviews of places where visual access by Google streetview has been denied to critique the increasing surveillance world. What places have you depicted through this series? How did you find them and why did you feel they were important to document? What have you found are places that are typically denied surveillance?
NC: Disappeared Spaces is finding images hidden within surveillance capitalism. Like in Batamindo, there are few street views, really. Gaza is a very good example. When I was looking, it was right when the war broke out, there were a lot of photosphere, but no street views, which are what people upload. One of the images was a really powerful image. I realized it was a homeless man sitting on the streets with his child in his lap. And I've looked back since, and there's nothing. Almost all of the individual uploads have disappeared, and this is actually happening in other places as well, like Ukraine. I was collecting a lot of images from the front line. These images are also disappearing. So it's kind of an archive in that way, trying to hold onto these disappeared moments. And going back to memory, I find it interesting that this collective or sort of jumbly mass of memory is also something that you can get deleted from. You can be erased. There's one image I found that I haven't drawn yet, but I can show it to you. This is at the border of Boko Haram territory. You can see the checkpoint right there. And if you follow it on Google, it's really weird. So you drive up, and then all of a sudden the car turns around and goes into the ditch and then backs up. The guard at the checkpoint is like, “oh, no, no, no. You don't go in there.” And then you can see the stitching of the “key point detection"; you can see the person getting erased into the image itself, which feels very poetic. Another is a ghost worker. I think it was in India, but it's one of those offices where people are basically image tagging all day. This is a drawing I finished in Marseille that is now a data center, and it used to be a Nazi bunker. And it's really hard to find images of the location, actually. I know somebody who's been trying to research this data center based in Marseille, and you can't get too close to the building. All the fibre optic cable comes into Europe via Marseille. Obviously, Marseille is a very clear strategic port for the French government to control.
MR: In your Watching the Watcher series, you reference internet archaeology. So I was curious if you could talk about what internet archaeology is and what histories you feel are embedded within the internet?
NC: That's not my term, but I really like it. I don't know who said it first, but it's archaeology in the sense of recovery culture on the internet. What kind of histories exist on the Internet? It's definitely its own perspective. It's not the same history you would read in a book, and it's non-linear –maybe; it is definitely always changing.
MR: Data is this verifiable way of documenting and in this volume of SCEPTER, we're trying to explore the theme of recollection while we talk to the artists and so, do you think of data as memory and what are ways that you turn memory into verifiable data?
NC: Maybe verifiable is not true. All data is cooked. My last name is Cook, which is a bit funny. But memory for sure, because memory is also subjective. It can change. It's a bit more fluid. I actually turned to data… This is probably a personal backstory, right after my father died. I was much more interested in narrative beforehand. And after he passed away, I couldn't handle it anymore. I still can't read fiction. So data felt like a way that I could grasp onto something that was really tangible, but now, working with it for a while, I feel it's so not factual. It's completely subjective, and it's full of so many narratives. That part is becoming a little bit more interesting to me now, because I feel like those narratives are getting stronger and clearer. Maybe the data is getting more and more cooked. There was this anecdote that I heard, I don't know if it's true, but I like to think so, that with generated images, the GAN models, somebody noticed that they're starting to yellow. They're getting increasingly more yellow. Like the colour vile.
RF: It’s like they're aging.
NC: Yeah, or they're just getting eaten over and over and over again. It's a bit weird. And visually, it's really funny. But I don't know. I also personally aesthetically find most AI-generated images a little bit more than cringe. I just don't really see the use of them. I guess mostly because I’m an image maker, so why bother?
MR: So you've done a lot of work with oil spill data, specifically researching data from the 90s. And you discovered that minor oil spills aren't documented, meaning the frequency and multitude of minor oil spills is unknown and this led you to create your own renderings of those minor spills, and you also researched a shipwreck using a transcript of the sailors’ stories as your data. So how can archival data play a role in shaping our view on contemporary issues and can you also talk a little bit more about this climate related work?
NC: Yeah, that's a lot of questions. How do I unpack that? When I started the project, I noticed that there was a lot of info lacking on oil spill data. It definitely held my focus and goes back to an interest in finding the ephemeral or the unseen. The SS El Faro shipwreck reveals a lot of things about human nature, but it also reveals a lot of things about how large businesses and corporations work. I discovered, after I worked with that data set, the verbatim dialogue from the black box, that they actually study [the SS El Faro] in maritime school for what you shouldn't do. Because the captain made a bunch of serious mistakes. But he was really resistant. He is quoted as saying, "We don't want to do this. This is a bad idea." And the ship actually had a series of problems with it; it wasn’t looked after. So it wasn't just his fault. You can actually technically sail a ship through a hurricane. And people do it quite often. But because the ship was in such rough shape, it didn't make it. I found out after looking at a lot of the images that there was a cast that was broken in the haul. And that was part of the reason why it sank. They study it for what the crew did wrong. But once you look a little bit closer, you realize it wasn't just the crew. It was the industry that did a lot of things wrong. What I learned explicitly is that industry makes a lot of convenient mistakes. Including the small oil spills not being recorded. Slight side note, my brother was an underwater welder for a while, ranked the most dangerous job you can do. And he would have to go down and repair large commercial ships. Often, the company would describe the unreported leaks as, “Oh, it was a teacup of an oil spill. Teacup?” It was never a teacup. A sunk ship, of course, has oil in it among other pollutants. I was trying to find one source, if somebody had put them all together, and it didn't exist. Which is very convenient, obviously. The stock market trades are also interesting because of the way finance works. Once you scale up, you can [hide] a lot of things. You see this in digital currencies and high-frequency trading. Scale hides a lot of misbehaviour. Enron is also a very good example of this. The element of scale is really useful for misfeasance. And that's how our economy works right now. Everybody wants to be a bank. Starbucks is a bank. If you think about it, they don't really sell coffee. They sell an idea.
RF: When we first walked in, we were looking at your Clover series [Champ de trèfles], and I was really interested in that when I was looking at your website. All the different ways that you've documented them and then all the research you did and talking about the root system and how it's a rhizome. So it's this part of a larger plant connected all through its roots. And you had this quote, I forget who it was by, but like, “every artist needs their flower.” And then you said that your flower is a clover because it's a rhizome.
NC: Van Gogh.
RF: I'm also interested in rhizomes. I grew up going to Colorado a lot and love Aspen trees and they’re also rhizomes. Mushrooms are kind of similar because they're interconnected through their fungus and talk to each other.
NC: Yeah. Mushrooms are smart. They're the smartest. They're the closest thing to humans. But because they're not plants. They're actually something else. ([aughs]
RF: Yeah, so I'm wondering whether you view your work in general as kind of rhizomatic as a way to find how the world and systems within it are all connected?
NC: I definitely like systems. As I mentioned earlier, I'm definitely a system thinker. But the clover, I'm one of those weird people who find them all the time. I've actually had many moments where I'm just walking, and out of the corner of my eye, I am almost bending over picking one up before I realize what I saw. Weirdly, I have an eye for it.
MR: With four leaf clovers?
NC: With four-leaf clovers, yeah. I found a nine at one point. They go up to nine and above, I am sure. It's an expressive gene, and so if you find a patch, you can just keep going back. I have some patches noted. But it's not a good time to find clovers, by the way. It's getting too cold. You have to do it right at the end of the summer when it's really hot because that's when the gene is expressed. But there's a spot right in front of Musée d’Orsay when you go down on the Seine where you can find them often. Metaphorically, I’m also making a small jab at Deleuze. I really like Deleuze. He's definitely one of my dead lovers. I have many. Flusser's another one. But I think he almost got it right with the rhizomes, but not the continuous plateau. I would like to think that a system can exist without a hierarchy. But I don’t believe I have seen it other than in the plant world. In the human-constructed world, I don’t know of an example. Online systems are rhizomatic, but not in the way that they are a continuous root system, like ginger. And actually, they're a bit more like clovers or strawberries, which are rhizomatic, but they use adventurous roots, so they sprout hubs. They send out little hubs, and then they sprout new clover plants this way. You can actually see it right here [points to one of her photographs of a clover system on the wall]. There's one right here. You can see this is an adventitious root. It goes above the ground, and then it goes back down for a new plant, still connected to the first. To me, that is a better explanation for how the rhizomic systems we create work, and I like them for that reason as well. But I also find them all the time, so I feel like I'm a bit connected to the plant in a weird way. Strawberries do this too. If you put a strawberry on your balcony and you let it grow, and you have a pot next to it, it will launch itself into the pot. Which is really fun [laughs]. Plant systems are really fascinating. We know so little about them, too. Like mushrooms controlling the weather. They are way more powerful than we are.
MR: It's very touching to me that you are memorializing the people that have been in your life by making these artworks for them. [Before we had started recording the interview, Naomi explained that a corner wall of her studio was dedicated to gold paintings she’d made as individual memorials to loved ones who had passed away.]
NC: It's therapy, definitely therapy. There's actually another one that I have to make that I'm putting off. My art godfather passed away this year on his birthday, which was really uncanny and out of the blue, and I think I'm having emotional jet lag. I'm still not coming to terms with it. I know the ideogram too. I have the symbol already because I drew that black and white drawing in the corner, my first ideogram project. They are meaning through spontaneous symbols. I drew it in his gallery where I used to sit.
MR: Would you mind if I took a photo of that image you were showing us with the border? The car that would turn around?
NC: I could actually show the whole archive. [Naomi starts flipping through a stack of Google streetview photos] This one's funny, too. It's the USS Pueblo, something, I forget the name of the ship, but it's an American ship in North Korea that they captured. And now they turned it into a museum in North Korea; there are no street views. But you can visit this remotely, which I find funny because North Korea is almost making fun. Like “I got your ship, and you can't see anything that's going on here. But we'll show you that we got your ship.” It just makes me laugh. And so you can actually make this virtual tour that somebody uploaded and hasn't been taken down. This is another one in Boko Haram. I find this one such a beautiful image. It feels really painterly. I am really fascinated by “Key Point detection”, which has both nefarious and mundane applications. It is how the 360 image is stitched together, kinda like the eye of the robot. These images aren’t perfectly symmetrical, and then they also become a little bit curved. It feels a bit more like a painting in a way. This one's the Olympics in Greece, but it's been turned into refugee camps. That's another refugee camp, which is in Greece. This was in France, and it doesn't exist anymore. That's been totally taken down, because it was ephemeral. And where the people are, I don't know. That one was after the flood in Lebanon. This one is a flood in Africa. So it's wiped out the city. And there's this line right there. What else is there? These are just the ones I've printed. I should show the drawings too. [starts pulling out drawings of these images] This one is the Ukrainian front before the war, which feels poetic. A lot of these images feel sort of poetic in a way. There’s an element of I guess history, memory, what is happening and what you see.
MR: And you found them just by exploring?
NC: Exploring, yeah. I mean, it's usually news-driven that I look into these places and also other people's research. This one is the ACMII headquarters in Taiwan. It's the machines that make the machines. The Silicon wafer printers. And then this is a labour lodge in Singapore on top of a Chinese factory right on the coast. And labour lodges are basically how the country can use cheap labour because it imports labour for all the undesirable jobs. Most of the lodges are registered, but they have terrible reputations; broken toilets, really terrible living conditions, bunk beds, twelve people in a room. This one's unofficial, so it's not registered. And it's right on top of this factory, and you can look down and see the idling trucks, no air conditioning. There’s one fan; they're sleeping on the floor. It's also weirdly a really pretty image. [flips to another image] This one is an image I found in Chernobyl, in the Soviet Cultural Center. And this person is standing on the floor where it's all opened out, which looks like a target, and he's wearing camouflage. It's very weird information. This one's Gaza, a soccer team in Gaza. This image is still up. I can still find it. I can't find that one. That one is a settlement. I think it's a building that's being reconstructed, and there are these feet. It really feels like someone came to visit a previous place. That one is after the ship exploded in Lebanon, in Beirut. No, it was a warehouse. And at the time the photosphere was taken, it just exploded. You can see the shoreline. It's right behind, and there's this person reconstructing their house. There are plenty more, but…
MR: I feel like you're kind of like an investigative journalist, you're uncovering and translating them to something that people can actually witness and think about in a more poetic way than just an investigative story.
NC: I hope so. But also sometimes I get accused of trauma tourism. Because they're not my stories. But I guess the other side of that is that they're disappearing, and that's why I keep doing it. I kind of struggle with that sometimes. It's not my story. I'm hoping I can do justice to it, but then at the same time, the fact that it's disappearing and it's not there, it's like, what else do you do? Because it feels like it will change really quickly.
MR: I've learned so much from you. It was really inspiring to hear what you are thinking about, this idea of working with people who aren't around anymore is something that has really been resonating with me and something I want to explore. And I've also done a Google Earth project. There's an eeriness to it and the ghostly presence in the internet. I had done an installation and in the photos that I took, when I turned up the saturation or the highlights, I'd see this glowing light, and it almost looked like this ghostly presence. So it was after I did this whole project, I was like, there's still more to talk about. There's still this energy of somebody who is present.
NC: Maybe you were catching him. I mean, the more and more I work with ghosts, the more I actually believe they exist. One of the things about working on these [gesturing to the ideograms] is I usually light a candle, and I open up all the windows, which is a very old tradition. Even if ghosts don't exist, you're still haunted. There are old traditions of dealing with that. They're really useful tools, like a liberation. I love liberations. Where you throw wine or whatever you're drinking down on the ground when you talk about somebody who has passed. It's universal; all cultures do it. Even the Greeks had cups designed when they would have symposiums; they would open up at the bottom and let the wine out. Everybody does it. I probably need to spill a lot of stuff on the ground after you guys leave. I've made my ghost very hungry, and a hungry ghost is not a good thing.
- Palace of Vulture Energetik, 2024 (photo courtesy of artist)
- Video still from A Night in Someone Else’s Affair, 2025
At Belle Beau Arles (video courtesy of artist) - Quadrifolium, 2020 (photo courtesy of artist)
- Border artwork our collaboration left: ink drawing, right: geo coordinates
- Social Studies by Lauren Greenfield [documentary film]
- The Smartness Mandate by Orit Halpern [book]
- Jon Raffmann [artist]
- AiDS-3D [music]
- Kevin Munger [scientist)]
- Marianne Dollo [curator]
- Galerie Anne-Sarah Bénichou [Paris gallery]
- Galerie Papillon [Paris gallery]
- Galerie Poggi [Paris gallery]