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**Spencer Chang:** And yeah, part of me making it this overwhelming experience was I thought there was this paradox for the Internet Archive that has archived all this human content, and we also know that it's one of the big sources that a lot of AI companies have trained on... And I sort of imagined an LLM training on... |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. It's like the LLMs fire hose of what it had to consume. |
**Spencer Chang:** Yeah, exactly. So I don't know, there's interesting empathy with the machine; a bit of that experience as well that I was trying to get at. |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. That is interesting. So I'm not sure how long you've been around... I've been around for the majority of it. Do you remember Flickr? Were you a Flickr user? |
**Spencer Chang:** I do remember Flickr. Barely... |
**Jerod Santo:** Barely. Alright. So you're quite a bit younger than me. That's fine. A lot of people are. Flickr had this really cool thing... And of course, for those who don't know Flickr, it was kind of the original web 2.0 image site where you're sharing your pictures. And it was very popular, very good, built by ... |
**Spencer Chang:** Yeah, they have the basic sorts of like - you can sort by views, and stuff like that... But it's almost like because this is historical content... Like, I'm wondering what you saw on a given day on Flickr, when you would turn on that filter... Because this content isn't something that people are acti... |
**Jerod Santo:** It's funny that you say stumble upon. Now, do you remember Stumble Upon? |
**Spencer Chang:** I don't know if I was -- I don't know if I knew about it when I was using the web, but I do know about it. Yeah. |
**Jerod Santo:** So Stumble Upon used to be -- it was a Firefox extension. I'm sure it's still out there, in some form or the other; probably bought by three different private equity companies at this point. It was just for fun and discovery. And it was a Firefox extension, and probably other browsers too, that you wou... |
\[12:03\] And they had curation, I think, and they were trying to send you interesting stuff, which is kind of why you appreciated it... Because you're going to stumble upon some pretty cool stuff. It wasn't terrible. You're almost guaranteed to enjoy what you're going to land on. And your website reminded me of that, ... |
**Spencer Chang:** Yeah. |
**Jerod Santo:** So they hired you to build this. |
**Spencer Chang:** \[laughs\] That would've been nice. |
**Jerod Santo:** They asked you to build it? |
**Spencer Chang:** Oh, you mean -- |
**Jerod Santo:** Not Stumble Upon. The Internet Archive. |
**Spencer Chang:** \[laughs\] |
**Jerod Santo:** Oh, you mean Stumble Upon? Yeah, I don't know who they are or where they are. I'm saying you -- this wasn't... You caught a random hair. This was like -- or a wild hair. |
**Spencer Chang:** Yeah, well, they asked me to make an art piece to celebrate... They recently hit a trillion web pages, and I was trying to figure out what is the best -- what could I make though. |
**Jerod Santo:** Did you have to pitch it back to them, or did they just let you go wild? |
**Spencer Chang:** It was pretty -- just a lot of flexibility for the artistic vision. |
**Jerod Santo:** Cool. |
**Spencer Chang:** Yeah. As long as I used the archive content, or it was inspired by it... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, like "Use our stuff somehow to build something cool." |
**Spencer Chang:** Yeah. |
**Jerod Santo:** And you certainly did. |
**Break**: \[13:20\] |
**Jerod Santo:** Is this a common thing for you? Or do you pick up grants, or - what do you call them? ...people give you money to create... Or is this an uncommon thing? |
**Spencer Chang:** Yeah, I wouldn't say it's common, but I guess I now wouldn't say it's uncommon... Yeah, I'm sort of still even now figuring out what it means to be this independent artist, designer, technologist... It's been almost three years now of doing this full time. I started in January of 2023. |
**Jerod Santo:** Really? |
**Spencer Chang:** Yeah. And I used to work as an engineer in tech, and I found my -- I mean, every now and then I'll sort of get these commissions from very different organizations; sometimes they'll be more arts-based, sometimes they'll be more technology-based... Yeah. |
**Jerod Santo:** And you've found this more interesting than your engineering job. |
**Spencer Chang:** Yeah, I sort of stumbled into it. And I wouldn't call it a break from my engineering career. |
**Jerod Santo:** Sure. |
**Spencer Chang:** \[16:13\] I think it's actually just like -- it felt like the most natural progression of it. So I worked at Coda for three and a half years, which - for those who aren't familiar, is in the document database editing space. And I got into that because I was very inspired by a lot of the research and ... |
**Jerod Santo:** And you're pretty good at it, because it's allowing you to live, which - the stereotype of the starving artist is not just a stereotype. There's a lot of artists that don't make any money off of their art, but it's nice that you're able to create... You kind of live at this intersection of art and tech... |
**Spencer Chang:** Yeah, I feel very grateful that I am able to make a living doing this. I'm honestly not sure... It still feels weird to be able to say that. I think it's very -- not as steady of a path, compared to working a standard engineer job. But yeah, I've found ways to think about making a business creative a... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. A couple of weeks ago I was talking to two guys in the Ruby community, who are longtime open source maintainers. And we were talking about that push and pull between sustainability, finance, your hobbies, your passions, and the unfortunate, sometimes, result of parlaying your passion into a job. ... |
**Spencer Chang:** Yeah. |
**Jerod Santo:** Have you felt any of that, where it's like "I love making art, but I don't want to make art today, because I have to, because somebody hired me to"? |
**Spencer Chang:** Yeah... I have felt slivers of that tension. Only in the space where I've had to be the most business about it, which is - I have a shop for these Internet Sculptures I make, where I put digital experiences into ceramic and other material objects... Just because that involves a lot of manual labor. I... |
**Jerod Santo:** \[20:17\] So everytime you get an order, you're like "Dang it." \[laughter\] |
**Spencer Chang:** Yeah. Sometimes it's just like "Okay, I'm spending several hours making all these by hand. Dang." |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. You start doing the math, like "How much am I making per hour on these pieces of art...?" Well, let's go there, because that stuff is so cool. |
**Spencer Chang:** Thank you. |
**Jerod Santo:** You have this concept that you put on your website of creating communal computers, that people gather around and play, connect, and create. And it seems like that particular thing that you're making is very communal, and is melding the real world with the digital world. Can you tell us more about them,... |
**Spencer Chang:** Yeah. So they're effectively like design objects or art objects, that you would picture putting up for display in your house. I have one that's a ceramic fortune cookie. But what makes them special is I have put RFID tags in all of them, and program a specific digital experience that fits the sculptu... |
I sort of just stumbled upon it. I was taking a ceramics class with my partner, and just making stuff for fun, and I was feeling this issue of telling people my website whenever I met them... And I literally was just like "Well, it'd be really nice if I just had something I could give people my website." |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. "Here's my website" and you hand them a token, or something. |
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