We’ve been fans of the Sosolimited guys for a while now. They first captured our hearts with a remix love letter to The Creators Project (video above) where they gave our videos the Sosolimited treatment and put our content through their special brand of text and data filters. These three MIT grads were moonlighting as VJs after graduation before they decided to put their fascination with information and data at the forefront of their work and set about remixing the 2004 presidential debates. Now a full-fledged art and technology studio that focuses on experiential work, the group is still best known for their unique manipulation of live video feeds to create data-driven re-contextualizations of everything from political debates to soap operas.At the Vimeo Awards this past weekend, we caught up with Sosolimited member Eric Gunther after his talk on the Telling With Numbers panel, a discussion about how data can be used as an effective storytelling device.How would you describe the art projects that you do?
Eric Gunther:We're interested in how you can change the way people watch media and how they consume media. I mean, imagine watching a baseball game with no statistics. People expect that stuff and it completely tells the story. It's like a parallel narrative of what's happening. So, we're just experimenting and trying to do that with video.A lot of the stuff you guys do seems to be news and politics, but you mentioned working with soap operas which seems kind of off spectrum?
I think what we're most interested in is [remixing] any television program. We started out with the 2004 presidential debates because it was a big media event, there was all this attention and focus on it, and it was live. That's part of the power of what we're doing—there's no way anyone can edit it because it's happening live, which lends a lot of emotional weight to the artwork in our minds, as opposed to, say, playing a DVD. You know that this is happening now, and it forces you to question the mutability of the TV signal. Typically, it comes into your house and it's totally done and polished, and you get it and you're like, ‘I guess I could watch it.’ That's all you can really do. We're saying, 'No, you can actually tear it apart and put it back together again.'It seems that sometimes your remixing is used to enhance the content and other times it renders it almost unwatchable. What dictates the kind of experience you’re trying to achieve?
So, it's very different depending on the context. For the debates, we kind of realized it was a really important source of information for people, so we made sure that the audio was always legible, so you could always understand what they were saying. For Transmediale, we relaxed that a little bit and we started getting into these more chaotic and obscuring transformations, and now I think when we do the other artworks, like the bar installation [at Firebrand Saints in Cambridge, MA], we're going way out. The audio's going to be really chopped up and distorted, and we're going for more of an aesthetic transformation. I guess it's a very fine line between information design and an artwork and it doesn't know which one it wants to be and people get confused all the time, like they ask questions like, 'Who won [the debate]?' and they say, 'I can't understand what you're saying,' and it's frustrating naturally. I guess it's part of the fun.What are the statements you're trying to make with this artwork?
I guess I would say we're not trying to make any statements. It's funny because a lot of artwork forms very naturally, it evolves often from what's around you and that's kind of how this happened. Along the way you start to look at the artwork and start to form larger ideas about it and I guess that has happened to some degree. So I guess, we're trying to show people that you can pick apart the signal and do more with it. And this is like the first wave of video artists in the ’60s…this was their thing: challenging television. Now we have these new tools and we can do it in an insanely deep and comprehensive way. I guess we're trying to show people, 'Look at all the editing that happened before' — it changes the way you consume the stuff.You usually perform your remixes live, but for the bar installation, you’ve developed a device called the set-top box that will do the remixing for you. Why decide to take yourselves out of the equation?
We realized that we're boring ass performers to watch (laughs). I mean, we would like bounce around, but personally, I hate going to concerts and seeing a dude standing with his mouth open in front of his laptop. It's also unsustainable for us to do these performances because if we want the work to grow and spread, it has to be able to live on its own.Your work is in a bar now…where are you hoping your work will be in 5 years?
I guess we're hoping that people will pay us to make our artwork. Right now we do it because we kind of have to…it's like that force that whirls up out of you, but we also have to sustain ourselves with a lot of design projects. But there's a lot of overlap in the two worlds. We try to bring the stuff into some of our projects and we definitely bring stuff we do in design to our art projects. Yeah, I guess just being artists that get commissioned…kind of the dream I think.
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Eric Gunther:We're interested in how you can change the way people watch media and how they consume media. I mean, imagine watching a baseball game with no statistics. People expect that stuff and it completely tells the story. It's like a parallel narrative of what's happening. So, we're just experimenting and trying to do that with video.A lot of the stuff you guys do seems to be news and politics, but you mentioned working with soap operas which seems kind of off spectrum?
I think what we're most interested in is [remixing] any television program. We started out with the 2004 presidential debates because it was a big media event, there was all this attention and focus on it, and it was live. That's part of the power of what we're doing—there's no way anyone can edit it because it's happening live, which lends a lot of emotional weight to the artwork in our minds, as opposed to, say, playing a DVD. You know that this is happening now, and it forces you to question the mutability of the TV signal. Typically, it comes into your house and it's totally done and polished, and you get it and you're like, ‘I guess I could watch it.’ That's all you can really do. We're saying, 'No, you can actually tear it apart and put it back together again.'It seems that sometimes your remixing is used to enhance the content and other times it renders it almost unwatchable. What dictates the kind of experience you’re trying to achieve?
So, it's very different depending on the context. For the debates, we kind of realized it was a really important source of information for people, so we made sure that the audio was always legible, so you could always understand what they were saying. For Transmediale, we relaxed that a little bit and we started getting into these more chaotic and obscuring transformations, and now I think when we do the other artworks, like the bar installation [at Firebrand Saints in Cambridge, MA], we're going way out. The audio's going to be really chopped up and distorted, and we're going for more of an aesthetic transformation. I guess it's a very fine line between information design and an artwork and it doesn't know which one it wants to be and people get confused all the time, like they ask questions like, 'Who won [the debate]?' and they say, 'I can't understand what you're saying,' and it's frustrating naturally. I guess it's part of the fun.What are the statements you're trying to make with this artwork?
I guess I would say we're not trying to make any statements. It's funny because a lot of artwork forms very naturally, it evolves often from what's around you and that's kind of how this happened. Along the way you start to look at the artwork and start to form larger ideas about it and I guess that has happened to some degree. So I guess, we're trying to show people that you can pick apart the signal and do more with it. And this is like the first wave of video artists in the ’60s…this was their thing: challenging television. Now we have these new tools and we can do it in an insanely deep and comprehensive way. I guess we're trying to show people, 'Look at all the editing that happened before' — it changes the way you consume the stuff.You usually perform your remixes live, but for the bar installation, you’ve developed a device called the set-top box that will do the remixing for you. Why decide to take yourselves out of the equation?
We realized that we're boring ass performers to watch (laughs). I mean, we would like bounce around, but personally, I hate going to concerts and seeing a dude standing with his mouth open in front of his laptop. It's also unsustainable for us to do these performances because if we want the work to grow and spread, it has to be able to live on its own.Your work is in a bar now…where are you hoping your work will be in 5 years?
I guess we're hoping that people will pay us to make our artwork. Right now we do it because we kind of have to…it's like that force that whirls up out of you, but we also have to sustain ourselves with a lot of design projects. But there's a lot of overlap in the two worlds. We try to bring the stuff into some of our projects and we definitely bring stuff we do in design to our art projects. Yeah, I guess just being artists that get commissioned…kind of the dream I think.