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NICK PHILIP

PEOPLEText: Mariko Takei

In the 80’s Nick Philip worked as a fashion designer and ran a fashion brand anarchic adjustment that shocked both the exisiting fashion and CG industry. After receiving the Best Digital Contents Award at San Francisco Multimedia Summit for his CD-Rom Radical Beauty, he came over to tokyo last month to exhibit his latest video installation work Post Human at NTT Intercommunication Center (ICC).

I first want to ask you about the exhibition at ICC.

It was an selection of all different works I’ve done. It was called “Nick Philip’s Selected Works“. We displayed a lot of design works I’ve done in the past and showed Anarchic Adjustment street wear line I did. Anarchic is one of the consciousness street wear lines in California. So we showed a lot of those designs, particularly forcusing on designs I had concepturized concept.

And we showed some of Wired magazines – Wired UK and Wired America – and a lot of different record labels and different Ambient musicians. And then we had Radical Beauty there with a couple of Power Books you can use Radical Beauty and also had video of some of the animations from Radical Beauty showing 3 screens making like a cube with 2 projections from the 2 sizes and 1 projections from the front. You can sit down in there. It was like completely all around you.

Then we had an internet installation called “nowhere.com” which is a collaboration piece I did with a programmer named Nic Harteau, assisted by Jeff Taylor.
That was the domain nowhere.com, which is used by spamers who use the internet to circulate the junk mail to trying sell stuff to people in the internet. Hundreds of spamers use nowhere.com to disguize the domain.

Thousands of emails everyday going through nowhere.com. The most of it spam and then they replys to spamer… angry people replying back saying “don’t fuking spam me!!”
Nowhere is often not in the email browsers and the reply form. Nowhere.com is just the default. If you don’t put any email address in, you will be like someone@nowhere.com or noone@nowhere.com.

So what we did was we had a computer that we got from day to night internet and we bounce to mails to this computer. We distributed the mail to 12 fax moters and then connected those to 12 fax machines. So we had wall longs about 35 feet with faxes, just printing out all these mails. And we had trash cans on the bottom collecting all the mail.

So they outflow just so. We used more than 50 thousand feet of fax paper. Today they took it out and I was like “Oh I need to take it on video…” It’s real time receiving, moving really quickly. Just going going throughout the show. They just throwed out more and more by the time the end of the show yesterday. That was something we did specially for this show.

Then I did also a couple of other installations. “Lightbox” installation.
It was an installation based on the idea of post humanism and the idea that technology and biology are crossing out, how we solve redefining our evolution with technolory. It was like a life sized poster.

As you mentioned that you are focusing on post human idea, can you explain more about the idea behind your work?

We got this idea called “The End of Man” which is our idea for projects based on the post human concept. “Post Humanism” is the idea that we are entering a period of technologically aided human evolution. Through the development of new technologies – artificial intelligence like Deep Blue, nanotechnology, cloning, genetics/geonome, implants, aurgmentation – we’ll be able to ask and conceivably answer some of the most fundamental questions of human existence. As technology evolves into a networked self-regulating intelligence, it becomes increasingly more like us, forcing us to question our sense of ourselves and ultimately redefine what it means to be human.

The end of man on the surface seems apocalyptic, but this is analogous to the shamnas journey of death and rebirth, the end of man as we know it and the begining of something beyond.

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