Ann Hirsch

About the work of Ann Hirsch

• How would you describe your practice? I'm a culture jammer. I look at technology from a social lens. I often immerse myself and try to get a sense of the “scene” that technology is creating and then I make work in response to that. I most often respond to the way gender is operating in these scenes and my work is rooted in deeply personal experiences and thoughts. The works can take many forms—video, performance, drawing, memes, websites etc, just depending on what form I feel will capture what I’m trying to say best. How long have you been making art, and how did you get started? I've been doing trained art classes since I was 12, and I always really loved drawing and painting. But I don't feel like I really started making art until college. But I don't even consider the art I made in college my real art. My real art started in grad school. I'll never show anyone anything I made before grad school, but I definitely was making art before that. I went to college at an art school within a regular school. I studied art in college, but that was all just “practice art.” Which people, communities, works have been influential to you? What ideas are most important to you? There's a lot of women artists that I really love and look up to. The big one is Cindy Sherman, everyone likes Cindy Sherman. Then, Jill Magid. When I met her when I was in grad school, that was really, really important and influential for me. I was like, "Oh yeah, this is what I'm doing," because I never felt like anyone was doing what I was doing, and then I met Jill Magid. I was like, "Oh, she's amazing." I also, in college, really loved Andrea Fraser. I was really influenced by Laurel Nakadate. So, women working with performance, video, specifically how it relates to gender and race, performance. That's the stuff that I gravitated towards. Why did you start working with software, the internet? I always was obsessed with the internet, as soon as I could get my hands on it. What did we have? What was it called? Not ICQ, Prodigy. We had Prodigy in the early 90s. Even that, I was in 1st grade, but I was just like, "What is this?" It was a really old form of internet. The only thing that I did on it was play this Centar game. But, I just loved it. Then AOL, in the mid-90s, that's all I did in middle school. I had to be on AOL. The whole thing is, the internet used to be the place that you escaped from real life. So, I always really loved that escape. Whereas now, the whole thing is, the internet is the place we want to escape from. Post-internet is the time when the internet is something we want to escape from. But, I'm fascinated by both of those things. I'm fascinated by the escape into, and also the escape from the horrors of the internet. Why is it so horrible, and scary, and terrifying, and thrilling all at the same time? Even though to watch someone be on the internet is really boring, what's going on in that person's head is probably fucking insane. Outwardly, it looks like nothing. Inwardly, it's a volcano or something. Do you identify with the term ‘post-internet’? I identify with post-internet the way that Gene McHugh has defined it. I also identify with the group of people that make art at that time as being my community of artists. But I don't identify with what post-internet art became, which was just very market, during the flipping era of art. Basically, a lot of post-internet artists just took the internet and just put it in a gallery. I never really related to that specific movement.