It’s a stormy day on the internet when I hop online to speak with Parker Ito. The artist’s voice snags on tinny speakers, warping deliciously from his room in London where he is preparing to put on a solo exhibition, The Pilgrim’s Sticky Toffee Pudding Gesamtkunstwerk, in the Year of the Dragon, À La Mode at Rose Easton Gallery, hopscotching its way into my corner of Sunset and Highland. Like it has every day of the last decade and a half, the medium through which we are able to communicate grows increasingly turbulent and wretched as we talk, the digital world’s once-alluring body encumbered by misinformation and banal evil by the minute. 

If this were in fact a decade ago, Ito might be introduced as an artist of the “post-internet” or “zombie formalism” ilk; his name surfaces among the vanguard of artists in the early 2010s who explored the frenetic aesthetics that arose out of the digital renaissance—a lauded group whose existentialist work highlighted the absurdity of art world economics and forecasted the looming isolationism of the years to come. However, the frameworks used to describe the group quickly became antiquated, co-opted mostly by businesspeople looking to package younger multimedia artists into digestible entities.

“I don’t think of art in those terms anymore,” Ito says, “because that’s already a given for me, and that’s something that occurs naturally. [The internet] is so integrated into the kind of way we think about our world.” It’s not a decade ago, however, and Ito is producing multimedia work that’s too exciting to slog through any sort of trite exploration of youth and scarcity in the digital era.

Ito spends the first eight minutes of the call describing the painstaking technicalities of his Rose Easton exhibition. An abridged version, for those who can’t go in person but perhaps should: the exhibition is in three parts—a sound, video, and visual sculpture combination. Ito has hacked a computer scanner, replaced the lights inside with fully programmable RGB LEDs, and programmed it to be able to control the motors and the speed of the scan heads. The scanner does coordinated 20-minute light shows where the motor changes speed with flashing, color- changing lights. Atop it, the artist has placed a glass sculpture he learned to make during a residency in Lake Como.

The glass sculpture is lit from below to produce an eerie, beautiful glow. There is a contact mic inside of the scanner, and in tandem with this scanner audio plays a piece of music composed by Ito’s friend that interpolates human voice (his own voice, to be exact) through a MIDI into a resplendent musical score.

With all of this: a diptych painting; the gallery space itself transformed into a camera obscura.

The intricacies of this show, much of it years in the making for Ito, seem to be entirely predicated on an individual’s physical experience of it—irreplicable by way of picture or video. I ask Ito if he intends the visitor to consume his show in any specific way.

He responds, “I like making shit, and the things I make are things that I don’t think exist in the world already, and that I want to see in the world. I’m rarely thinking about a kind of audience. Art is about communication—there’s not a clear message that I want to articulate from my work... I do want people to get it and interact with it, but I’m not thinking about any of those things—about what I want them to think, or see or feel.”

This sentiment is exactly what draws many to Ito’s work, which massages the collective consciousness (utilizing memes, repurposing commonplace objects like a printer) into the folds of his selfhood (compositions that mock his voice, sculptures of his body) in a way that feels striking: “[My art] kind of just ends up having a lot of me in it,” he considers. “I think, you know, there are a lot of depictions of me in my art... I didn’t realize that some people don’t think that you should be in your art. I have friends—especially male artists—who think if you’re not gay or something, it’s maybe seen as cringe to have an image of yourself in your work, but it always just seemed natural to me to use the contents of my life as the contents of my art.”

It’s difficult to come across Ito’s work and not think about John Berger’s Ways of Seeing. “In the age of pictorial reproduction,” Berger foretells, “the meaning of paintings is no longer attached to them; their meaning becomes transmittable... information carries no special authority. It is not a question of reproduction failing to reproduce certain aspects of an image faithfully; it is a question of reproduction making it possible, even inevitable, that an image will be used for many different purposes and that the reproduced images, unlike an original work, can lend itself to them all.”

Ito’s practice of transposing material, of tweaking it to personalization, of destruction and recreation, plays cleverly with the idea of “transmittable meaning.” Perhaps the meaning of any original painting or original machine, that which is regarded with a “bogus religiosity” by commercial entities, is meant to be reshaped. The sentiment might explain Ito’s fascination with and recent dabbling within the NFT medium, oft-eschewed by the proper-noun Art World.

Ito recently collaborated with Web3 art platform Zien to produce a 10,000 piece artwork project, where collectors could mint a Parker composition as an NFT and later redeem it for another oil painting, produced in a Chinese painting factory and delivered to the redeemer’s front doorstep. Enticingly complex for the zealous avant-garde art consumer and opaque enough to frighten the old-guard art snob, Ito is interested in the business because “NFT has terrible associations in the mainstream art world.”

“It’s like any scene,” he describes of NFT culture, admitting that he himself doesn’t “completely understand a lot of it.” Ito continues, grinning, “It’s just the people who are in it are really passionate about what they’re making... There are so many things in the art world that are not about the production of art—they’re about the production of other things, or being adjacent to these other things that come out of cultural production.”

Parker Ito has not created art in the type of world in which one couldn’t learn obscene details about him and his work without meeting him in person. Ito, to much of his observers and fans and critics—to myself, even—exists almost entirely as a series of digital breadcrumbs, scattered for us to snatch from the tertiary imagination inside the damp, crowded internet. In this maelstrom, message precludes meaning. I ask him to tell me something true, something that the numerous broken links or digital reproductions of his work might not be able to communicate. This article is, after all, going to be flighted online. Give me a breadcrumb, Parker.

“My Wikipedia page says that I’m born in Long Beach, but that’s not true. I was born in Ventura, so that would be important to get in there. Even if it’s a lie, if I say it in this interview, I can just cite it in Wikipedia,” he laughs. “I actually really wish I didn’t have a Wikipedia page.”

The chat is over. Back out of the digital portal. Parker will exhibit medievl Times IV at the Community Paris, then he’ll exhibit at Rose Easton. Eventually, he’ll publish his book The Ag0ny @nd th3 3xst$cy, a written history of all of the projects that he’s worked on.

Our bodies will rot and social media will go through a million iterations and the planet will heat to contention with human habitation but Parker’s work, those yawning oil paintings and strange sculptures and delicate experimentations, will remain.

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Written by Annie Bush