After 5-Year Video Art Hiatus, Trisha Baga Returns with Best Film Yet 

It happens to every artist working with technology: you develop a way of working, but it involves a tool that is eventually rendered obsolete. Arguably, the situation is only amplified now, as tech companies black box their products, making them more difficult to customize; as they plan and accelerate obsolescence; and as they move toward subscription software models with automatic updates. 

Trisha Baga, an artist who came up in the art world with 3D videos that explore the surreal encroachment of technology on daily and domestic life, managed to keep an old computer with unsupported software going for five years before eventually taking a five-year break to focus on painting. Now, they’ve returned to video with their best piece yet: MORE, on view at Société in Berlin through January 17. The work collages different worlds—homes and caves, Epcot and aquariums—sometimes right on top of each other in a manner that feels cohesive and chaotic at the same time. It’s all very seductive, but simultaneously, you are made to see the seams. Recently, I visited Baga’s Ridgewood studio where we donned 3D glasses and watched the piece before chatting about the hiatus, how painting impacted their video making, and why AI is a bad dad. 

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and concision.

Art in America: What prompted you to take a break from making video art?

Trisha Baga: The technology I was just using to edit 3D video stopped being supported. In 2020, I was having to use a computer from like, 2011. Eventually, it just got too slow, and made the process not that fun. 

For this piece, I had to learn new software that has a totally different logic. And now, the computer is a completely different thing. It’s so much creepier. It keeps trying to make decisions.

Did it feel natural to come back to video?

It felt really natural, but also really hard with the sleep schedule of having a toddler, because my best editing hours are between like, 11pm and 4am, which is exactly when he needs me to hold his hand. I couldn’t really predict when I would get to work on it, or how long a studio session would be. But while making the work, I eventually figured out a way to think about it while I was hanging out with my kid, Homer, and to film with him. He’d get excited and be like, “It’s time to make video art! Where’s my tripod?”

Amazing! Were there things about painting that you feel like you brought back into this part of your practice?

I feel like every time you use a medium a lot, you start thinking through the metaphors of that medium. I know that Mollusca & the Pelvic Floor, I also have cereal getting thrown at you. I need it for some reason.

The cereal is serial!

Ha. Actually after painting, I started thinking of the cereal as binder, and the video content as pigment. Not just cereal but dots, like stars and dust and rotating space garbage, things that move your eye through the whole space. 

But what really prompted me to get back into video again is that the iPhone started filming in 3D, and so I just started collecting footage. One scene shows a party with 20-year-olds dancing at Gracie Mansion that I shot right before de Blasio was getting kicked out; a friend invited me. 

The light in that scene is wild. Did you set it up?

Yeah, I call it the time traveling flashlight. I have this projector setup that basically has the same aspect ratio as my camera’s view when I have both devices on the same tripod. So I play a loop of white light that moves across like a scanner bar. 

I use a lot of flashlights, and I know that metaphorically they convey a lot, but also on a very practical level, they help me composite many spaces.

Because the dark backdrops can blend into one another when you overlay or cut between scenes. I noticed that for sure—like when your toddler is exploring an adult abdomen and you cut between that intimate scene and spelunkers in a cave. They feel like parallel worlds. 

I also think that technique really creates a video world that feels rather surreal and untethered from reality, not unlike in your paintings. When I was younger, I really thought that all serious art was video, and painting was inherently old school. Later I realized I missed out on so much by having that attitude. Was that part of your life at all?

I have a complicated relationship to painting, because I’ve always made fun of it, but I also love it. You just make way more money as a painter than as a video artist, so I can’t not make fun of it; it’s like making fun of my rich friend. It’s healthy for it! [laughs] I do think painting helped me think of this lighting technique, which I didn’t expect; it almost made the work feel cohesive. Now, I almost think of the video as four large paintings in sequence; there are often four layers, either like intercut or overlayed into each other, and that’s a different way of thinking about a scene. It’s almost like I started from the flat, rectangular space and then edited into it, rather than thinking of sequence as being one shot, then another shot. 

In your work, domestic life is often made weird and surreal through technology. So it’s fitting that you were able to shoot spontaneously on your iPhone around the house and as part of your everyday life. There also seems to be a parallel between you training your toddler about the world, and training AI.

Kind of. Obviously the morals are just so different, so I’m just letting those things contrast. I think about my work more through process. I sourced all this found 3D footage, and plenty of it is science fiction stuff; I started just smushing it all together until it was just about the emotion. I’m using those scenes to get at this anxiety about technology, in sci-fi’s very dramatized way. There’s also footage I found from random YouTube users… so many dads on excursions. 

There’s a voiceover from The Martian with overlays of a breast pump churning, where I’m hoping to tell two simultaneous stories about the loss of a home. Matt Damon is gaming out how to make food on Mars, and a newborn is learning how to eat without an umbilical cord. It happens right after the scary scene in my parents’s house so it refers to a personal moment of loss for myself as well. It’s a lot about hunger and survival

I was struck by the questions posed in the narration, like: “What does a hug feel like? What does it feel like to sleep?” It’s almost like the questions a kid would ask—like “why is the sky blue?”—that’s impossible to explain, but these are specifically: What is it like to have a body? Information AI can’t know.

The first section starts out as data collection, and then it turns into therapy; in one scene, where I’m in my parents’ home in Florida, and the therapist’s voice becomes increasingly untrustworthy. Then it flips into a computer voice asking: “What is it like to taste? Is it like looking at something but with your tongue? What is it like to have parents? Will you be my friend?” And that’s when Mark Zuckerberg comes in…

Would you describe your process as collage-like then?

Yes. I collect a lot of things, and then I play them all together, and there’s always a lot of fat to trim and bridges to build. I can’t really work from writing, because then I start thinking in language too much. Eventually, I find I am sort of building the metaphors, figuring what recurs and what things stick to each other. 

The films evokes all these things that are hard to contain with language—like sleep or a hug, but also CAPTCHA that asks you to select a vegetable, then has curveballs, like tomatoes and avocados. 

Yeah, things AI can’t understand about experience or that can’t really be conveyed or understood through a spreadsheet.

My plan going into this more generally was to make something about parenting, the invasiveness of technology, and infancy. I was thinking about how infancy is so much of psychotherapy, and is this experience of being dependent that shapes you. Also, I was editing with the baby monitor on. 

I realized that the overlaid, out-of-sync arcs of like dependency have something to do with technology convincing us to become dependent on it. We’re sort of becoming the baby. What are we giving up in that, and how much power are we giving it? Because it’s not a great parent.