Artist Duo LoVid on Playing With Noise

Unit Digital’s series Beyond the Code dives into the process behind today’s most cutting-edge digital artists, their influences, practices, and what they’re working on now. Artist collective LoVid, Tali Hinkis and Kyle Lapidus, sat down with Unit Digital to discuss two of their recent works: Hedgerow Expansion (2022) and Stream Processing (2023).

These remarks have been edited for brevity and clarity. For the full transcript scroll to the bottom of the page. 

Unit Digital: I think these two pieces sum up the hybridity that is at the core of your practice and the different directions and media you’ve explored over the years. Please, could you talk about this sense of hybridity in your work a little bit? 

Kyle Lapidus: We tend to work across a number of genres, materials, processes. We take the video that we produce and capture segments of that video, usually stills from the video, and recompose them, re-edit them, and then translate them into other media.

Tali Hinkis: The way we compose a piece is very much informed by what format the piece is going to be. So Hedgerow Expansion is a textile. It’s a digital process, but it’s a textile work. And it hangs on the wall like a painting. There’s a border to it, which we use a lot in our tapestry and textile work that has a connection to carpet designs and the history of tapestry. It really is composed within this frame, and the borders are really important in this work. They’re really about the relationship between the dynamic images inside of it and the borders. With Stream Processing, the prompt for that was from the curator [Alex Estorick] to reflect on the idea of the pixel. We were thinking, how can we bring in the needlework, the tangible, to something that’s going to be purely digital? It exists as a print, but it is also experienced digitally. We are working within a computer screen, but the internet is a borderless space.

UD: Can you speak a bit about your origins in the digital art space? How has your background shaped your process over the past 20 years?

TH: I started as a video artist, so I was working with physical tapes and physical machines that involved using cables and physical buttons and moving tapes from one physical deck to another. For Kyle, his background is in music and both traditional instruments, and then later on, electronic and handmade instruments. We experience video, media, sound and image as a very tactile expansion of the human body, human experience and materials.

KL: Tali had come to New York and became interested in a lot of the live music culture, and wanted to make videos the way that people were making music. I was at the time making noise music, but always expanded noise music – something that would go beyond just sound with a lot of props, costumes, and full sets.

TH: Over the 10, 15, 20 years of working together, we’ve recorded a lot of footage. We’ve had support from a handful of organisations in the US that have these ‘instruments’. You have to really physically relocate yourself for that. We have tapes and digital recordings, live recording from these sessions. We really use every little bit of those recordings because they’re finite. In some ways, we’re trying to resist efficiency. The extreme conceptual and aesthetic decision was to resist corporatization of media art and build something handmade that was fragile and that had a sense of nostalgia. We were trying to resist efficiency in some way.

KL: We were not pursuing nostalgia per se, and also we were not explicitly embracing only the advancement of technology, but we were going for something in between, looking to re-examine tools that were already somewhat antiquated. We have remained interested in analogue tools because they respond to their environmental conditions, the space, temperature, humidity.

UD: Can you speak to the digital and physical processes behind these two artworks?

TH: Over the years of working in between video performance and two-dimensional works, prints and textile, we’ve started really spending a lot of time thinking of how we can translate movement into a still image. We use this back and forth between the purely digital space to manipulate the output by scanning, photographing, painting by hand, sewing it, putting it back in, but also digitally doing a lot more twisting, contorting, playing with the image, creating these repetitive patterns and then disrupting them. 

KL: We export portions of these recordings, cut that, take stills of that, recompose them, maybe print them out again, do something else, paint on it, stitch it, print it on fabric, do different kinds of processes to it, and then may scan that back in and re-edit from there. 

UD: When and how do you know that one of your pieces is finished?

TH:  When something is complete, it has to have something always missing also – it has to have an open gate for the audience. It can’t be completely presented as a sealed space.

KL: The idea of leaving something for the audience is really important. And so from an information theory perspective, we work with both maximalism and minimalism, and these are ways of either providing so much information that the viewer has to create their own narrative for it or their own sense of it, or providing so little that they need to fill in a lot of gaps.

TH: These days, when I’m working on a composition, I sometimes Google Lens it to see what references come up. It’s like, ‘What does it look like? What does it look like to you, machine?’ That actually might inform the composition in a sense like, Oh, this looks too organised, and so we need to bring more an organic feel to it. 

UD: Welcome to Unit Digital. My name is Marcus, and I’m the Communications Manager for Unit. I’m here today with LoVid, which is comprised of Tali Hinkis and Kyle Lapidus, based in New York. And they are this pair of digital artists? Hybrid artists? We’re going to find out. This is for the Unit Digital Series, Beyond the Code. We’re going to be talking about a couple of works featured in the series from LoVid, Stream Processing (2023) and Hedgerow Expansion (2022). We’re going to get on to those in just a second. But Kyle and Tali, it’s lovely to have you with us. So how are you doing? 

KL: Great. Thanks for having us! 

TH: Good to be here! 

UD: In Beyond the Code, we’re taking out specific works from the artists that we’re working with and really trying to dive into their specificities and technicalities and understand the specific circumstances that are surrounding these pieces and how they’re born. And how your own experiences as artists working across a network of influences, really, over the past 20 years has really given rise to these pieces today. We’re looking at a piece Stream Processing, which is a digital artwork, and Hedgerow Expansion, which, as we’ll find out, is a textile-based artwork. I think these two pieces sum up the hybridity that is at the core of your practice and the different directions you’ve explored over the years. Please, could you talk about that hybridity a little bit? 

KL: So we tend to work across a number of genres, materials, processes. That’s really important for us. We often start with a live electrical signal that gets output as video and sound. And then we take the video that we produce and capture segments of that video, usually stills from the video, and recompose them, re-edit them, and then translate them into other media. We then can take those segments of media and retranslate them again in an iterative process. 

TH: I guess, usually, I like to answer that question by going really way back to when we met or even before that, when we individually started making work, the earliest works in late ’90s and 2000s. I do think that for, I guess, all artists, but artists working with technology, the first technology that you use in your life or use in your artwork really forms the way that you think about the world and the art that you want to make. For us in those days, the experience of media art in general was even more embodied than it is now. For me, I started as a video artist, so I was working with physical tapes. My first editing was on nonlinear U-matic editing stations that were physical machines that involved cables and physical buttons and moving tapes from one physical deck to another. For Kyle, his background is in music and both traditional instruments, and then later on, electronic and handmade instruments. Before we even started working together, there was always hybridity because we were producing media, but due to the devices we were using, the way the artist and the audience’s bodies produced the work and experienced the work was very physical. 

TH: I think that just informed the way we experience video and media and sound and image as a very tactile expansion of the human body, human experience and materials. Then in addition to that, the natural world at large is the bigger picture, which incorporates signals that Kyle was mentioning, but also just nature as a forest and as an energy that we keep going back to. 

UD: Wonderful. And so between the pair of you, you’re coming from more of a visual background and Kyle is coming from that audio background. So already you’re straddling those two worlds implicitly. 

KL: Yeah, and that was how we actually came together, was that Tali had come to New York and became interested in a lot of the live music culture, and wanted to make video the way that people were making music. I was at the time making noise music, but always expanded noise music – something that would go beyond just sound with a lot of props, costumes, other tools and devices that we would build sets, things like that. So this was how we came to bring together Tali’s video and the sound and signal processing work that I was doing into a live performance duo. 

UD: Wow. Could you explain quickly what noise music is and what that whole genre encompasses? 

KL: Sure. So noise is a term for a genre of abstract electronic music that, I would say, came out of partly a number of influences. But I would say punk rock had a big part of it, at least culturally. Free jazz, contemporary classical music were other inspirations that led to the development of noise. But it had a very strong DIY aesthetic, and that also was really important. This was the scene that we were involved with, and I had a label and things like that in the ’90s and the early 2000s. 

TH: I came into noise and electronic music later on, and it was just totally one of those moments for me where things clicked in terms of what technology can do, even though it’s not always using technology. I would explain it as sound that is not traditionally seen or experienced as music. It’s really shaping, challenging human perception and pleasure. And seeing where the limits are, where something could be very loud or very quiet, or you’re playing with harmony, playing with what is an instrument even. It’s a really radical way of thinking in the sense of shaking the establishment. And that has always been an important part for us, more in the philosophy as well as the sound and the images themselves. 

KL: I think there’s an important part of it that includes pushing the boundaries. So pushing the boundaries of what is music or at the time, what is performance. And that translates into our work in terms of pushing boundaries of what is signal and what can be recognised as video even. That’s how we started out. Right before we built up our own instruments to create video, we were taking apart the video and dissecting and deconstructing it.

UD: Right. And this is quite, as you say, radical motives and radical experiences, but mediated through quite analogue technology sometimes. So, is there a difference there between the output and the medium in terms of how you’re pushing these analogue technologies to their limits?

TH: Well, I want to just say that when we were saying analogue, so at the time in 2000, it was not… The music can be made on any instrument. It’s not intentional. There’s not a sense of you have to be analogue, forced or nostalgic or a particular era. I think it’s taking the range of tools that are available. And the idea is always to bring them to the maximum, like exploring weaknesses. And so we’ve done the same to some extent, with the blockchain also or any digital tools. When we say analogue instruments, we mean hardware, we mean instruments for video and sound that are created with circuit boards and hardware that we built ourselves over the years, starting in 2005. And so the radical decision then in the early 2000s to build a DIY hardware instrument was a counterculture response. We were not the only ones doing it at the time, but at a moment where, at least in New York, the world was moving more and more towards wireless, to the internet, laptop music, software, et cetera, the extreme conceptual and aesthetic decision was to resist that corporatisation of media art and building something handmade that was fragile and that had a sense of nostalgia. These instruments were designed originally in the ’60s and ’70s, but it was really a reclaiming of a space that, as young artists, we felt that there were greater forces that were pulling us away from that, creating a very authentic tool for us. 

TH: And we were part of a cohort of other artists who were doing music and visuals with those processes of either building something from scratch or doing some physical hacking to personalise machines so that they can make something unique.

KL: At the time, we were not pursuing nostalgia per se, and also we were not explicitly embracing only the advancement of technology, but we were going for something in between, looking to re-examine tools that were already somewhat antiquated. A lot of our designs and a lot of the research we had done was based on 20, 30 years before then. We were really looking to take a different direction with it, largely focusing on the inherent instability and the faults and limitations of those instruments and those tools, and using that in a way that we felt we could really delve into, and grab with our hands because of their physical nature.

TH: We were trying to resist efficiency in some way. The instruments were also designed specifically to create a space of always exploring and not necessarily always not full control. They’re moving away from the full control that the computer offers. 

UD: I was going to ask how that approach has or maybe hasn’t evolved over the past 20 years, because technology has obviously evolved a huge amount. But do you still have that same approach where you’re not looking back in a nostalgic way, you’re not looking forward in a maybe overly radicalised way, but you’re still trying to mediate between the push and pull of the flaws in the technology, perhaps, and the ideas or the idealised motivations you have behind it? Is that still the same?

KL: Yeah, I think that runs through all of our work and that interaction with whatever tools we’re using. I think it’s interesting with today’s lens to look back on some of these things. We were interested in analogue tools because, not to anthropomorphise them too much, they would do what they wanted based on their environmental conditions, the space, temperature, humidity, and they would work consistently in different environments because they would be responding to these other things. And that could include the audience in the space and other things that we would respond to as performers as well. Obviously, now, if you think about technology doing what it wants to do, there’s a lot of other connotations there as well. 

TH: At the time of creating our first instrument and really launching our career, we were very conscious of [the future and the past] and were using the term parallel a lot. We were really thinking about the development of technology that exists parallel to the way it has evolved, where right now it prioritises efficiency and profit. We were imagining a more organic, symbiotic, cybernetic future. 

KL: At the time, before this term got a lot of other uses and got, I think, a little diluted by it, we used to use the term ‘retrofuturism’ a lot. What we were interested in was looking back in order to imagine where other paths that technology could have taken, that were not influenced by efficiency, productivity, progress, and instead were taking some other shape where technology took charge and got out of control. 

TH: Not related to these works, but in some way very related, is Video Ware, which we made in 2003. These are suits made of video screens. And we were then thinking of mobile video. Video is an expansion of the body and consciousness, but this was before any iPhone device was created. We made a series of photos, and we’re actually right now in the midst of publishing them again with the 20-year gap and the evolution of smartphones and mobile technology and blockchain technology. Really interesting to think about that. Actually, Video Wear is where we first start using textile in the work. This process of recording video, taking samples or a still of it, and then printing it on the fabric, which is collage. At the time, it was this handmade collage. But that envelopment of the body from the screen and the media spaces to textile to the craft of stitching is really not that different than the Hedgerow Expansion. 

UD: Well, you brought us beautifully to the two pieces that we have. Where did the textile piece come from? Let’s maybe start, as you say, with the digital side of things. 

KL: So these both have this similar process that we were talking about before, where we take a signal, we do something with it, we output it as something, in this case, video. We then export portions of that, cut that, take stills of that, recompose them, maybe print them out again, do something else, paint on it, stitch it, print it on fabric, do different kinds of processes to it, and then may scan that back in and take that back in and reedit from there. 

TH: Over the years of working in between video performance and two-dimensional works, prints and textile, we’ve started really spending a lot of time thinking of how do we translate movement into a still image? How do we compose something in a two-dimensional space that creates a sense of motion where the eye moves across the screen, always referencing not just performance and video, but also the experience of being on the internet and in these multiple realities–overlaid realities that we’re moving more and more into. We use this back and forth between the purely digital space to outputting it in some way, scanning, photographing, painting by hand, sewing it, putting it back in, but also digitally doing a lot more twisting, contorting, playing with the image, creating these repetitive patterns and then disrupting them. 

UD: I would love to pull on that thread, pardon the pun, to talk about the signals that you’re inputting from the beginning, so then the output becomes the signal to re enter into the process, correct? 

TH: Over the 10, 15, 20 years of working together, we’ve recorded a lot of footage. We have a lot of recording studio sessions, either at home or at these specialised residencies that we go to. The nature of the analogue instruments that we work with are pretty complex to set up. We’ve had support from a handful of organisations in the US that have these instruments. It’s a pretty complex setup to get something that is new and exciting with these tools. It takes time and effort and dedicated focus time for us. Some of these residencies have their own historic tools like from Nam June Paik and Dan Sandin, that don’t exist anywhere else. You have to really physically relocate yourself for that. We have tapes and digital recordings, live recording from these sessions. We really use every little bit of those recordings because they’re finite. 

TH: There’s not something that we can just replicate forever. There’s a sense that there are these treasures that we’ve been able to slowly create, that push the boundaries of what we can do. So every work, including these two pieces, their starting off point is a couple of video sections from these recordings, and those could be dated. We start with clips that have… Some of them have really distinctive colours or even a personal memory [tied to them]. 

KL: One of the ways that we got into making static work outside of video – one of our interests that ended up being prints on different materials, including a lot of the textile work. We were interested in this idea that when you make video there’s 60 frames a second – or 60 fields a second. It’s not even the 30 frames that are consistent because it’s the two fields that are making them up. They can be different because it’s not a camera-based thing where you’re getting one moment and then the next moment in that way. The signal can vary a lot in between each frame or in between each field. They end up hitting the retina very rapidly. Whether it’s 30 or 60 a second, it’s quite a bit of information to take in. We were interested in allowing people to zoom in or to slow those down. That was the idea of taking stills from the video. We considered these relics. Part of that also was inspired because at the beginning, we were breaking the video signal, and we found that to be the time when it would produce, to us, the most interesting artefacts or glitches in some sense. 

KL: We would then capture those out and keep those as these relics of this moment and of this experience that we had. And these videos that we’re using now from 10, 20 years ago that we recorded, they’re also relics in some sense. They’re captured moments of time that we spent together in a studio working, recording these materials. Then we can harvest from those materials and make other things that then we can share with other people and can allow people to zoom in in the same way. We add the complexity of multiple frames and fields overlapping. 

TH: I can speak about Hedgerow Expansion first and stills from that. I painted a small ink painting based on that playing with what the translation of that video would look like as a painting. And the composition is putting the two together, putting the painting and the digital still together and then sewing them. I feel like we get this so much more to talk about, but it gets very nerdy into the choices of working with these systems. I guess I would say that, just generally that the process usually begins with a thirst for a certain colour, honestly. What’s something that we know is out there in the files we haven’t explored yet, something more exciting and interesting combination, and putting them together. The relationship between the two of them is that the way the composition works is that a lot of patterns, a lot of design is being made and then eliminated in the process. 

TH: There’s a lot of things that come to life, and then they are taken out for the final work. For this particular project, when Stream Processing came along, we were like, Oh, there’s a lot more material there. There’s a lot more colour, texture that we were really excited to go back into. That’s where the process started for it. 

UD: For something like Stream Processing, you’re layering so many inputs over each other and the patterns that you’re creating are so complex and detailed. You’re working at an incredible resolution there. Is that a necessity or is that an output of the way you work? You’re zooming into history, really. You’re zooming into the pieces that you’ve been collecting over these decades. So how would you explain that resolution? 

TH: Yeah, that’s a beautiful way to say it. It actually is something we’ve developed out of necessity because part of the interesting challenge of working with instruments that were made in a different technological era is that their video output is always 72 DPI. It’s not high res. Specifically, the instruments that we use output 640 by 480 pixels. Actually, the original, you could experience that big projection live, but once it’s digitised and it’s on a computer, it’s actually very small and low res. These patterns that we create are a way to go deep into it and give that crisp hi res. Like you said, it’s diving more into it, like going through time and creating these from the projected immersive space or being with the instrument to these two-dimensional digital spaces. The scale is important. We’ve been able to do it by really hatching them up and creating these repetitions. 

KL: It is interesting the idea of these limitations in terms of resolution and things like that. Obviously, with our name and everything, we came from this embrace of a low-fi, low-res aesthetic. Using those tools at the time, they were already archaic, as we described before. But what we were taking was an analogue signal, which is actually continuous and not limited in that sense with no instantaneous resolution. You could continually divide a continuous signal and you can zoom in and in. But when you encode it to make NTSC video, which is what we were doing, you impose a number of constraints on it. And so those constraints then limit you and you lose little bits of the time. That also goes to our interest in preserving and capturing these moments. 

UD: I mean, it’s phenomenally complex, but it’s wonderful. So I was going to come back to the point about the input, the output, and the feedback loops that you build into it. I feel this is a question that maybe more traditional artists, painters, have been asked since maybe the 1500s, but when do you know that something is finished? 

TH: Oh, I love that. It’s great to ask this question of the painters get asked. We never get those – that’s exciting! I have multiple answers. When something is complete, it has to have something always missing also – it has to have an open gate for the audience. It can’t be completely presented as a sealed space. Because we started with noise music, with our pursuit of pushing the perception and what is considered audio, sound, beauty. So that is always at the back of our mind also when designing a two-dimensional 2D piece. The process is usually constructing the patterns that are the vocabulary or the base reality of the work. It’s saying, Okay, this is what the work is about, these repetitions, these colours, these patterns that are going to be repeating, and you create a harmony in the background. 

TH: Then what do we do to take that into a different dimension? How do we then challenge these patterns into creating interesting contrasts and a sense of movement? These ideas are very abstracted and conceptual, but they really are at every corner of the work, physically. It does have to have a sense of background logic, some vocabulary, but then pushing it to somewhere new and leaving a little bit of an opening. I think that that’s actually something that’s always appealing to us as viewers as well, where there’s a really strong sense of process, whether it’s very visible or not. Part of what’s interesting as artists, we embrace not just current technology, but current temporary forms and contemporary aesthetics and composition. We look at art that is digital and paintings and sculpture and a lot of textile work, and we reference those works throughout history. Where we are now, aesthetically, is formally in the art world. 

KL: The idea of leaving something for the audience is really important. And so from an information theory perspective, we work with both maximalism and minimalism, and these are ways of either providing so much information that the viewer has to create their own narrative for it or their own sense of it, or providing so little that they need to fill in a lot of gaps. And we think both of those are interesting in terms of challenging our audience and providing an experience for them. So what we do is take these somewhat minimal original videos, even if they’re maximum by the pacing of them, and then by collaging them, we can create these much more intensive maximal experiences. 

TH: We had a show a couple of years ago with this big abstract piece, and a friend of ours who had brought her daughter. And the daughter was, in her mind, playing a video game on the piece. She was creating this motion, ‘Oh, something is going to slide here, and then it’s going to go up there.’ That was super interesting to see someone verbalise the way the eyes move. There’s a sense of motion [in the work] that she was just able to reference. The other little secret that I have, is that over maybe the past six years, I’ve used Google Lens regularly. It’s like when I’m working on a composition, I Google Lens it and I see what references come up. It’s like, ‘What does it look like? What does it look like to you, machine?’ That actually might inform the composition in a sense like, Oh, this looks too organised, and so we need to bring more an organic feel to it. 

KL: We want something where it conveys this sense of motion, usually from the original video, and that has a lot of that intensity, and at the same time provides a clear statement. 

UD: Finally, to bring these two pieces back together in a way, I want to ask about the actual comparing and contrasting of the final results. When you stand back yourself as the creators and look at it, and obviously you can see the blend of references, but what do you feel is the main point of contrast between the actual outputs? 

TH: The way we compose a piece is very much informed by what format the piece is going to be. So Hedgerow Expansion is a textile. It’s a digital process, but it’s a textile work. And it hangs on the wall like a painting. There’s a border to it, which we use a lot in our tapestry and textile work that has a connection to carpet designs and the history of tapestry. It really is composed within this frame, and the borders are really important in this work. They’re really about the relationship between the dynamic images inside of it and the borders. With Stream Processing, the prompt for that was from the curator to reflect on the idea of the pixel. We were thinking, how can we bring in the needlework, the tangible, to something that’s going to be purely digital? It’s going to be a print, but it is experienced digitally. 

TH: We are working within a computer screen, but the internet is a borderless space. The way the composition works is that there’s these two sides to it. On the left, where the movement goes down, is the streaming. And then on the right, these blocks are more semi-organized, really zoomed in. It has a little bit of a scientific figure feel to it in the way it’s put together where you have the image of the full thing and then capture almost the sequence of it, the little secret ingredients on the right. Something that we’ve never done before is these frames, these black boxes that I think have a really internet, web-space design. So compositionally, [the two pieces] are arranged so differently. 

UD: It’s going to be a wonderful exploration of so much of what we’ve just discussed. And I know we’ve even only just touched upon the very lightest of the complexities to the whole pieces. Thank you so much for your time and your generosity in divulging so much information about all this. Thank you, LoVid! 

TH: Thank you, Unit!