Meet our Guest with Nancy Baker Cahill

Nancy Baker Cahill, courtesy of the artist.

For this story of Meet our Guest, we interviewed Nancy Baker Cahill, a new media artist who examines power, selfhood, and embodied consciousness through drawing and shared immersive space. She is the Founder and Artistic Director of 4th Wall, a free Augmented Reality (AR) app developed together with Drive Studio to challenge traditional experiences of public art, and to increase access to fine art through AR. She was named one of ARTnews’ The Deciders who will shape the Art World in 2021.

For her latest project, Contract Killers, Nancy has collaborated with art lawyer Sarah Conley Odenkirk and the Contemporary Art Museum of Houston’s Director, Hesse McGraw, to create a site-specific AR experience that challenges our understanding of smart contracts, and encourages us to consider the broken social contracts in our communities. Each AR handshake was minted as an NFT on the Tezos blockchain NFT platform Snark.art and immediately sold out on 18th May 2021.

Tell us about your practice. You’ve become known for your AR work, but you work across mediums, including what you have described as “analog” work.

Drawing is my first language, and analog drawing on paper is where all of my ideas begin and often end. That said, I have always had a foot in video and immersive installation, and drawing in VR sprang out of dovetailing conceptual and formal needs. I began using AR in early 2018 for reasons of accessibility. My VR drawings were only available to a small number of people who either had a headset or could physically come to my studio. Creating the 4th Wall app as a platform dedicated to creative inclusion allowed me not only to share the VR works as translated into AR with a broad, unknown audience (and invite them to “locate” the works in the setting/context of their choosing), but also to collaborate with other artists and share the platform for curated, geolocated and often politically charged AR exhibitions. In addition, I have begun to experiment with projection mapping and continue to generate sculptures made of my graphite drawings, which I have been mutating after the fact with AI and 3D software.  


What drew you towards AR as a medium, and how does it differ to working with Virtual Reality (VR)?

AR appealed to me given its essential accessibility and availability through smartphones and tablets. Conceptually I love that it engages the shared immersive space of the “real world,” where it can literally add a digital layer or layers of meaning in situ, unbound by a white cube or brick and mortar institution. AR also occupies an ineffable memory space in our consciousness, particularly when the artwork is thematically rigorous in nature. Because its manifestation relies on the visual prosthesis of the phone or tablet camera, it exists in a there-not-there space, which allows it to be both subversive (in the case of many of my collaborations and work), ephemeral and poetic. All of these qualities are conceptually aligned with my interest in examining power systems, selfhood and embodied consciousness. Working with VR is an unadulterated joy- but there is a higher barrier to entry for people to experience it in its full immersive glory as they need the hardware to do so. Both of these mediums take time and ample resources to produce as well. 


You’re are a seasoned public speaker. You’ve spoken about how technology can be used as a political tool, such as facial recognition and data mining for example, and at other times, on how technology can be used to subvert the status quo. What is it about public speaking that adds to your practice?

I consider it a form of advocacy, community engagement, and an ongoing means of philosophical exploration. Connecting with others around the ideas that I feel are urgent or inspiring allows me to expand the conversation and hear different perspectives. Public speaking also allows me to get more granular about the work and to engage with audiences from a variety of contexts and backgrounds.


Last year you launched an augmented reality public art project titled Liberty Bell, using the augmented reality app which you founded, 4th Wall. That work incorporated a number of site-specific locations, an element that you have since built upon in the more recent Contract Killers project. Can you expand on this reference to site-specificity in an augmented or virtual context?

Pairing an artwork to a specific site with its own history (erased or known) and its own immersive context gives the artwork an entirely different weight and impact. It allows artists to reclaim space, reveal untold stories and identify poetics in the pairings. I prefer to use the language of “idea activation” versus “site activation,” because the shared cultural thought space of ideas eludes the unwanted intervention/monetization of private interests and influences related to property. 

Detail from Nancy Baker Cahill's Contract Killers (Judicial), animated AR artwork, 2021. Project collaborators include art lawyer Sarah Conley Odenkirk, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston Director Hesse McGraw, the Snarkart platform and Tezos.

Tell us more about the Contract Killers project and the AR renderings of the dissolving handshake. In the art industry, many relationships are built on handshake agreements and verbal exchanges that are conceptually speaking, ‘sealed’ with a handshake. Did you have these kinds of relationships in mind when creating the dissolving handshake?

I did. For years I have had to chase down remuneration to which I was entitled for my creative labor. This is why I hired (art lawyer) Sarah Odenkirk (among other compelling reasons, like her early and abiding interest in blockchain). Artists have no union, no guild. We have no built-in protections or accountability systems, so the dissolving handshake felt apt as a metaphor for what so many of us experience project to project. I also felt it was germaine to any consideration of broken or neglected social contracts, which is why I situated the AR works in front of City Hall, The Hall of Justice, and over a pile of fiat cash. 


Contract killing is a form of illegal agreement – a court won’t recognise a contract killing because it’s purpose is illegal. Its quite an intriguing name for an art project.

Clearly this is a double entendre- in this case we are using contract as a noun, not an adjective. It’s an appropriate title for an unregulated landscape, and one that appears to have little built-in consequences for any type of malfeasance. 


You will donate a portion of those resale royalties you receive from the resale of the Contract Killers assets to an artist fund maintained by the Contemporary Art Museum of Houston. Why did you want to bring a ‘brick and mortar’ museum into the fold – what role, if any, should museums play in the NFT space?

Hesse is an incredibly thoughtful museum Director, and a true advocate for artists, evinced in his museum's credo, “Trust Artists.” I wouldn't want to dictate what role museums should play, but there’s an opportunity for institutions, as CAMH has, to lock arms with artists and support them in generating sustainable incomes. After all, it is artists’ creative labor that undergirds art museums’ entire raison d’etre. 


You worked with art lawyer Sarah Conley Odenkirk to create an additional contract layer on top of the smart contracts relating to the minted NFTs. Why did you want to work with an art lawyer in this way? What did you learn from the experience?

Sarah and I have been in conversation about blockchain technologies and art since 2016. It was a natural outgrowth of our conversation and of her proven record as a fierce advocate for artists and artists’ rights. Once we rolled up our sleeves to collaborate on this project, I was in awe of just how few protections existed in the “smart contract” on any given blockchain. The idealistic promises of empowerment and agency for artists were scarce. Sarah took a much deeper dive into the minutiae of contractual obligations in this space and now knows more than anyone I know on the subject, from provenance to accountability to the nuances between DPoS, PoS, and PoW blockchains. I also knew she agreed with and supported my requirement that the artwork involves a PoS blockchain like Tezos.  I have learned volumes from working with her and from actively participating as an artist in her formulation and vision for a “smarter contract.”

Free augmented reality public art is now available for you to explore on the 4th Wall app. Visit 4th Wall here.