048: Bill Posters

Absurdist reality. This is probably the best way to sum up 2020. You put your head down, phone down and take a nap and 20 minutes later you have Kanye West running for president, Donald Trump spending 15 minutes on leather bottom shoes and the twists and turns of a global pandemic that is shifting the way we experience public life. Almost nothing about our life 10 years ago even exists now as we slide further and further into a digital reality, and we ponder what comes with this evolution as we try and make sense of, and experience, truth and reality. Within our new technological and digital lives is a lot of misunderstanding. How does big tech mine our personal information, what is a deep fake, what are my rights and what are the laws that protect me. One of the artists who is challenging this lack of understanding is British artist, Bill Posters, an activist who spent years on the streets with his "Subvertising" interventions and now famous the world over for Spectre and his series of Deep Fakes that portrayed the likes of Mark Zuckerberg, Donald Trump, Kim Kardashian and others as true-tellers of the 21st Century. As most certainly... they are not. "My work is about raising awareness of human rights and critically interrogating power relations between corporations, governments, people and the artist," Posters told us earlier this year in our Summer 2020 Quarterly. "With deep fakes, you are operating ethically in a difficult space. There are insufficient laws in place to appropriately protect people’s personal data." In this wide-ranging and engaging conversation, Radio Juxtapoz spoke with Posters to learn how graffiti informed his subversive works on the street in the form of Subvertising and Brandalism, how he began to critique and utilize tech in his practice and the ways that activism can create empowerment in the face of Big Tech. "I also think that deep fakes are the perfect art form for our absurdist reality," Posters says... and he couldn't be any more correct. The Radio Juxtapoz podcast is hosted by FIFTH WALL TV's Doug Gillen and Juxtapoz editor, Evan Pricco. Episode 048 was recorded via Skype from San Francisco/London/Manchester, July 2, 2020. Follow Bill Posters @bill_posters_uk