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Haley Mellin: I was originally drawn to LuckyPDF by how your identity is fabricated from the images of your user base. LuckyPDF: To us, art is only interesting when viewed as a social phenomenon. That requires a polyphony of voices, and a movement of thought. We take our inspiration from other industries that recognize the benefits of working in a group. This is only made possible because of a shared belief that collaboration will create the best product. We value the effectiveness of this process more highly than the pursuit of fame or our individual egos, because we believe that it’s the best structure for creating great things. It’s important to think about how power is exercised and how it’s visible in contemporary society. Power lies in being able to organize systems.

that wouldn’t otherwise be possible, or by pushing forward a conversation about collaboration or authorship or how artists should interact with corporations and institutions.

HM: Artwork is increasingly becoming immaterial; in many ways it is moving away from the physical. You seem to have an interest in the blending of the two. You make digital patterns into real clothes and then upload and trade these once again as digital images.LPDF: It’s very easy to make images popular online. The trends are easy to spot and then to contribute to. It’s a much harder thing IRL [in real life]. People are more discerning and more cautious and things have to look good from more than one angle. If you include a can of Monster in your installation it might be more popular on Tumblr, but it’s going to look shit in a gallery. We’re keen to take the great things we see in online culture – collaboration, appropriation, and a less precious attitude to authorship, as well as a less segregated attitude to art and mass culture – and apply that as a method to our offline work.

HM: And this approach carries through to your fashion line?LPDF: Compared with art, fashion is a lot more open and the market for it is much larger. It’s also more visible and much more social in the way it’s consumed. Of course, our SS13 range still exists as an artwork, but it starts to make boundaries a bit fuzzy, and that’s an exciting place to be.

HM: Your clothes are highly patterned. You use images from the recent past to create future fabrics.LPDF: The patterns are derived from fragments of other artists’ work, from our network, and from things we found online. These image fragments were paired on a Photoshop canvas, and the patterns were automatically created using Photoshop’s relatively new Content Aware Fill feature. The fabrics reference the scavenging aesthetics of style hunters and consumer trends.

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HM: The novelist Bruce Sterling wrote, “The idea that the virtual is somehow philosophically separate from the actual is a period notion. It’s over. Done.”LPDF: I’ve heard stories from my parents’ generation, and older, that they used to – and some still do – dream in black and white. I’ve noticed elements of the digital entering my dreams – pixelation and video compression distortion, buffering wheels and dreams involving menial tasks like Photoshopping. So as virtual-based experiences get better retinal displays and faster connections, the blurring of virtual and actual will be all the more complete.

HM: Why not do all work online?LPDF: We’re interested in how the Internet has changed our lives. Relevant artwork needs to be both physical and virtual. Online is where a work will have its largest audience, so we always think about how things will exist and look online when we’re making them. It’s impor-tant to remember that the online audience is different. The online and offline may come out of the same project, but they will be experienced and understood in completely different ways.

HM: I’ve been working with that in paintings at the moment – what happens when images born online come across into physical form, and vice versa. There is a different form of decay in the digital, a different kind of patina or dust. In general, these days, dust is more rare.LPDF: We like to see our work not just as appropriating popular, mainstream, or Internet culture, but as one point in the constant flow between all of these. We’ll take the work of our friends and peers and incorporate them into our work, as with our fashion line. We hope that our work and collaborations are then used by our friends and other artists for their own purposes. We believe that it is the responsibility of creative people to work with new technology at the earliest stages of development and to propose new uses for it.

HM: And often copying or reusing artworks is central to their furthering.LPDF: We want our work to be useful, whether that’s by showing other people’s work or helping them do something

Many of our peers are using imagery sourced from the Internet. We are both taking from and contributing to the image database. It is interesting to us that other artists are legitimate appropriation sources; there is a leveling of the hierarchy of images.

HM: What brought your interest to fashion?LPDF: We’re interested in fashion products as a canvas for our work. Digital fabric prints seemed a perfect way to display fragments of works by our peers – meant as homage to or portrait of that group of people more than anything else. And we are interested in how the aesthetic of young artists and designers often gets sampled or appropriated by trend hunters, advertisements, and music videos, and how this borrowing is made more apparent by the much faster turnover in the fashion, advertising, and broadcasting industries. The patterns stemmed from the increasingly fast and throwaway aesthetic trends within art, and the more dangerous trend of categorizing and labeling of perceived groupings of artists as a trend, even if the artists concerned are making very different work. Fashion has been quite a trend itself within art, not limited to a certain generation of artists labeled as post-Internet. Even the artist Seth Price made a collection this year.

HM: How does the human-to-human connection come into your work?LPDF: Art perhaps used to be a snapshot of ideas of society. Now a shift may have happened where it is coming closer to a snapshot of relationships between societies. An understanding of web bubbles has changed people’s resistance to self-expression online. One can use different tools for different purposes – Facebook for interactions with a mediated group of peers, Twitter for public view, Tumblr for marks of taste. We don’t see the online human-to-human connection as being especially different from a physical interaction; obviously it’s easier

The LuckyPDF artist group, based in south London, was founded in 2008 and consists of Yuri PATTISON, James EARLY, John HILL, and Ollie HOGAN. The group creates websites and video programs typically showcasing other artists’ work; this platform ultimately becomes an artwork in itself. LuckyPDF is branded and directed; its signature is not passive. As with the Internet, the content of the masses creates the visual tropes of LuckyPDF. LuckyPDF.com functions in the same way as a website like Instagram, supporting individual sharing and self-promotion.

LuckyPDF works with an ever-changing network of artists, supporting them online and through a production framework that spans art objects, fashion, television, and education. With its focus outside the art world, LuckyPDF helps define artists’ identities through concise media exposure. The artist Haley MELLIN talks with LuckyPDF about the post-Internet.

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artwork, engaging but also implicating them. There’s no “outside” position from which to view the work. We don’t want a dispassionate viewer.

HM: That reminds me of a remark by the modernist architect Mies van der Rohe – “The basis of all structures is the placing of two bricks together, the placing of two bricks together is the basis of all structures.”LPDF: We bring together the elements that we feel are the building blocks of a great project and we allow them to develop and grow from there. Often we are unsure of the outcome of our collaborations with others, but we have faith that the freedom we allow ourselves in the develop-ment of ideas will create a great environment for us to learn from one another.

HM: The adult says to the child, “What’s happening on those screens?” The child responds, “Everything.” The contemporary rhythm of new ideas is the re- post or the refresh. Progress is sequence.LPDF: Something we’re very interested in is the spaces that have been most fertile for the development of ideas – the cultural epicenters and the metropolis. The generation of ideas is contingent upon rapid and frequent moments of interaction with others, to engage in conver-sation and to bounce ideas off one another in order to develop them. This is what the Internet was designed for – for the purpose of sharing research so that scientists could work in tandem. As the cafés of Paris and printed journals once were, the Internet is the best tool for exchange. This will exponentially accelerate as we join the nodes of culture.

HM: There’s a saying – “The owl of Minerva spreads its wings with the coming of dusk” – meaning that one comes to understand a situation just as it passes away. Philosophy cannot be prescriptive; it understands only in hindsight. Creativity is the opposite; it makes what is to come.LPDF: To which Marx replied…

HM: I’ve been working with more direct, user- generated forms of education – how education can be created from daily life. How does your program redefine the education model of the Internet?LPDF: The Internet is already a great institution of learning. It’s self-directed and boundary-less. Everyone is learning from one another all the time. That said, structures are important, and experiencing things in person is important, too. However good Codecademy’s courses are, they’re not the same as learning to code in a room full of other people who can offer advice and sympathy and jokes.

to read the subtleties of expression in physical conversa-tion, but if both parties understand the limits of the online connection then you just accommodate those and work around them. All things come into existence only in relation-ships. The webpage exists only when your browser renders it, but to the server, you only exist when you request the page.

HM: What is taught? LPDF: Generally we teach how to install VPNs – virtual private networks – and use Google products in China. But we have used it more as an invitation and excuse to contact and invite people whose practices resonate with our own. The School of Global Art is a conceptual framework for the world we’re interested in creating, by programming and commissioning content that is rele-vant to us and our peers.

HM: We are undergoing an abstraction of the phys-ical. At times, these days, the physical is less common and more strange than the digital. LPDF: Abstracting the physical is the most powerful tool that humans have. All art is an abstraction of the physical, but so is all science, all imagination, all human relations. Recently we’ve abstracted the physical to the point of cata-strophic climate change, financial collapse, Facebook, and drone war. But the solution isn’t to be found in some kind of truer reality. We need more imagination than ever before to solve problems. Peace requires more imagination than war, just as love requires more imagination than like.

HM: I think that we’re experiencing physicality as increasingly sincere. LPDF: Primary users of the web rarely notice the structure of it; it is simply the best resource we have for the trans-feral of ideas. Our method of working takes the networks and infrastructure that the web provides as a model for the development of projects with people in the real world. It is with this understanding that our projects will have the greatest exposure and reach the widest audience online.

HM: You make me think of a recent show Ben Schumacher did at Room East in New York and the notion of “thrownness” – Geworfenheit in German – a term used to describe how a given subject is forced or thrown into the world regardless of its connection to its immediate context. Effects of the digital screen are increasingly transparent.LPDF: Screens show things and hide them in equal measure, infra-thin and infinitely deep. They are filters, just as a window filters air but not sun. But while a window is transparent, we know exactly what can and can’t get in. The digital screen is so new a technology that we don’t yet understand what exactly we’re losing.

HM: I’ve been reading into perdurantism, which views objects as made up of image frames, as in a film. An object only partly exists at any moment, and its existence is not continual or without starts and stops. One “part” of an object is its time. This is structurally akin to a webpage or a JPEG. LPDF: Here’s an anecdote. Most people have heard of Koko, the gorilla who can speak more than 1,000 words in sign language and understand over 2,000 in English. What most people don’t know is that Koko was an avid Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood fan. When Fred Rogers took a trip to meet Koko for his show, not only did she immedi-ately wrap her arms around him and embrace him, she did what she had always seen him do on-screen – she proceeded to take his shoes off.

HM: Tell me about your school. LPDF: The School of Global Art (.org) operates under a loose open-enrollment model where anyone is free to join. We’re interested in a peer-to-peer model for the exchange and distribution of art and ideas. We inform this network when events will be happening. The most recent activity has been a series of P2P studio visits conducted with a group of curators at Wysing Art Centre on one end and students of the school on the other. Before that it was Google hangout classrooms, with us centered in an open classroom in Melbourne, but the speakers were all over the world and anyone was able to drop in on the hangout. We’re hoping to develop the website back end further and put emphasis on creating more of an on/offline community, and to use a sustainable Kickstarter-style, micro-fee model. In many respects this is how we work normally; a big element of what we do is offline but the planning and results come from and are fed into this greater online community.

HM: I wanted to ask you about self-institution-alization.LPDF: It’s important to remember that other institutions are just groups of people, too. We find that if the “professionalism” is happening at an organizational level, then the relationships between people can be more personal. When you set yourself up as an organization, other organizations treat you differently. They expect more of you, but as a result you have much more control over how your work is shown and talked about than if you were an individual artist. I don’t think anyone is fooled into thinking that we’re an institution on the same level that Tate Modern is. We’re a young community with great ambition and motivation. Many of our peers are dissatisfied with the lot of our generation. We’ve always tried to build the world around us and this has meant improvising and creating things for ourselves. We’re not waiting for the institutions to catch up; they’re largely insignificant to the development of our community.

HM: I find a large part of your work to be the engagement, or the encounter.LPDF: The platforms we create are a great way to approach people we want to work with, to learn about what they do first-hand, and help them to make something great. Sometimes we help people realize and present ideas they already have; sometimes ideas come out of long-term conversations. Our work sits between that of other people, looping back ideas and aesthetics that join things together. This applies to the audience as well; we want to tie them into the

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