This article is part of Hyperallergic‘s Pride Month Seriesfeaturing an interview with a different emerging or mid-career transgender or non-binary artist each weekday throughout June.
Deep in the rural Chiricahua Nde (Apache) lands of what we call southern New Mexico, non-binary trans artist and writer Everest Pipkin resides on a quiet sheep farm, reflecting on collective care amidst a society in ruins as they tend to their garden and their animals. In observation through isolation, Pipkin considers the garden as the place of both pleasure and consumption, calculating the balance between a utopian space and its intrinsic limits. Through game design, interactive browser add-ons, helpful web tools, and narrative text and images, Pipkin uses data as a medium to expand on the dichotomies of the larger “garden” and the often violent ways in which we preserve its beauty and generosity. . In the following interview, Pipkin describes their continued interest in the natural world as manifested in their works, the psychological ramifications of reducing humanity to data sets, and notions of queerness as not an exposition of gender identity, but rather a deeper questioning if not subversion of relationality.
Hyperallergic: What is the current orientation of your artistic practice?
Everest Pipkins: I’m an artist, writer, game developer, and resource maintainer for a variety of projects and tools on the internet. In general, my work follows the themes of ecology, toolmaking and “data” (although never with the full knowledge that data is simply the aggregated information of people). I am also interested in fantasies of apocalypse or system collapse, and the desire to undo the world into a world of collective care that so often drives them.
Much of my current work concerns the garden as a site of utopian thought (as well as dystopian process). I am interested in gardens as a place of pleasure, even of hedonistic pleasure, of consumption which is not intrinsically extractive, of exchange of labor and of fruition; in gardens as a site where humans can plant and other non-human interactions; in building a transhuman community. A site that, at its core, asks for work and gives in return.
Likewise, however, the garden is a site of ecological disturbance and violence. It’s a constant war against slugs, aphids, rabbits. It is a place of imported plants and approved cultivation types. Weeding, pruning, harvesting early. The world is walled off. The contents of the garden are confined, isolated, domesticated and used. The garden is called beautiful. The garden is put on postage stamps. The garden becomes the pretext to supplant people. The garden is political.
I have an exhibition opening in Leicester next week on these themes, particularly as it relates to the walled garden game worlds (all game worlds) that float in rounded isolation. Opening hours and information are available here.
H: In what ways, if any, does your gender identity play a role in your experience as an artist?
PE: Gender isn’t usually my subject, and sometimes I bristle at the idea of doing homosexuality through my work, as if the prism of my life is so painted with otherness that what he sees always becomes marked. Because so much of my time is spent in isolation (in the studio, but also in my wider life – I live alone, very rural), the performative genre is not part of my everyday fabric. Most of the time, I don’t witness, I don’t play and I sink into my body like I sink into my bed; easily, with great tenderness.
But in this a landscape is not a countryside as long as it is not framed by a human vision, gender is of course part of my frame (even if it is not always the subject of what is contained within). All the themes of my work must pass through this window, informed by statements such as “I have remade and relearned to live in this body as an adult, a process that is ongoing”; “The line between me and the environment is blurred at best; the self gets lost in the texture (and I like it that way)”; and even “I am one of many animals in this world, and in this vast relationship of connections, there are so many thousands of ways to be present and to witness, what is my sex for a crow?”
And, in truth – despite my pungency – some of my past work To addressed the topic of gender identity directly, especially in works like “seashell song(2020), which examines what it is to be a person’s voice as it is mediated through a data set, captured and honed alongside others, to be fused into a tool or a weapon where individual identity is shattered to instead form a mass, as if this mass could contain the “truth”.
In this way, the contemporary condition of ‘collecting’, where bodies are fragmented into commercial units of self, bought and sold in bundles of information which may include; eye, voice, browsing habit, words, name, attention, consumer report, heart rate, history, thumbprint; in this, the fragmented dataset becomes a transhuman body, a more than human body, a chimera. My interest in “data as a medium” is partly driven by the horror of it, the misery of being watched, of being collected, with no real possibility of revoking consent. And also, in truth, by the closeness of it — the touch of me against the whole world.
And there are the real echoes of queerness in my work. It’s in the works on the connection – as seen in “TV Default Filename» (2019) and «The Cloister(2020); on desire and distance—demonstrated in “The barnacle goose experience» (2022) and «end of the world game(2022); on touch and mediated touch – explored via “Anonymous animal» (2021) and «Sweet Corruptor; “on refusal — exhibited through”Image Cleaner» (2020) and «The anti-capitalist software license(2020); on gifts — through “gift set» (2020) and «Drift Mine Satellite“(2023); on the search in “sun grazer(2023); and, of course, about love (which is absolutely everything).
H: Which artists inspire your work today? What are your other sources of inspiration?
PE: My touchstones are, as always, environmental writers (Robin Wall Kimmerer, George Gessert and some of John McPhee), information, tools and technology theorists (Ursula Franklin, Tung-Hui Hu and Shannon Mattern ), utopian (but never technocratic) science fiction (Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia Butler, and Josephine Giles), game developers digging around the edges or using the resources of “commercially viable game creation streams” to produce broken, subversive or otherwise barbed projects (Robert Yang, David Kanaga and Lilith Zone), musicians and performers who bring weight and presence to the texture of the moment in such a way that sound becomes shelter (Ryuichi Sakamoto and Fever Ray), and writers and theorists talking about the capacity of digital spaces to be or mean something profound to those who live there (Austin Walker and Em Reed).
Beyond that, I derive great support and joy from my neighbors, human and non-human, who make the life I live possible. Dawz, Ray, Olivia, Clover, Zephyr, Louise, Dorkis, those whom I call and for whom I call. They are the web of my security and have anchored a once floating existence in the world.
And of course, I live among animals and plants (those on my own farm, which I care for, and the wild ones, which I watch over). Their lessons of calm, patience, need, presence and contentment are the substance of my days.
H: What are your hopes for the LGBTQIA+ community right now?
PE: I wish us not only to survive in this current moment of horror, but to flourish that does not stop with or even stem from the LGBTQIA+ community or identity. That is, our struggles are, and must be, mutual. They must be inextricably linked to all struggles for liberation.
My greatest fear is that we will lose this solidarity, this radical potential, and instead be successfully fragmented by fear – that some take refuge in “one of the good minorities”, others lean on the wealth, connection or whiteness to achieve safety, while others still have no retreat from the threat and are now alone. That in this terrifying now where the non-normative is under attack legally, medically and physically, we are led to turn our backs on our power.
If we lose this solidarity, we lose ourselves. I want us to be prosperous because the world is prosperous. That is – I want homosexuality not to be a condition in which we are labeled and suffer, or even as a condition in which we are labeled and find individual joy, but as one (among many) of gifts For the world. Queerity as a methodology of being that can inform, intersect and become part of the struggle necessary to undo capitalism, to excise colonial power, to live after returning to the land, to see the abolition of prisons and the police. It can never be the only unique paradigm (and it never is the only paradigm!), but it could be one of them.
As they say, with the rising tide rising; there is no liberation in isolation.
I want us to be part of the ocean, not the boat.
