Morry Kolman on making things
Morry Kolman’s art makes you laugh. Then it makes you think. He might be best known for Traffic Cam Photobooth, which uses the traffic camera infrastructure at intersections throughout New York City… so that you can take a selfie.
As part of the Making things project (intro here), I caught up with Morry on a video call to talk about humor, his creative process, and how stupidity is underrated.
Bobbie Chen (BC): When anything is possible, how do you decide what to create?
Morry Kolman (MK): The short answer is that I don’t ever really choose.
The longer answer is that I try to maximize free time and big work blocks to myself. I have worked with my brain for a long time, and I know that trying to do one specific thing doesn’t always work out well, so I focus on giving myself time and space. I’ve got an ideas board and a lot of projects about 70% there, but still unfinished.
When I have a nice big chunk of time, I’ll sit at my computer and see what comes out.
BC: How would you describe what comes out?
MK: A lot of my work has humorous themes - “extremely high-effort shitposting” or “Wouldn’t it be funny if…?”
There’s also the unmasking of infrastructure and data - I like to think about all that data around us. First Light is about astronomical data; Traffic Cam Photobooth is closer to home with surveillance data (and once they sent the cease-and-desist, it got funnier); Deface Your Data lets you speak to marketers through their tracking parameters.
BC: To me, it feels like there’s a lot of social commentary in your projects, beyond the funny parts. Is that intentional from the start?
MK: I wouldn’t say that I have a central philosophy, no. Mr. Beast Saying Increasingly Large Amounts of Money started as a bit of a joke, then evolved into more of a critique just by the sheer volume and the context of the numbers. There’s a distinct emotional effect on the viewer; if you make it through the end, you’ve been through quite a lot. The projects evolve along the way.
BC: If someone else can create these, why should you?
MK: To see if I can. That’s always a good motivator.
I’ve written a lot of web scrapers to get interesting data. I’m trying to learn Touch Designer to add it to my arsenal. Sometimes it’s just a pure act of learning.
And often, nobody actually has created it yet. Take Traffic Cam Photobooth - some people had done little things with New York City’s Open Data APIs, but no one had done this specific thing.
There are billions of ideas, and a finite amount of people who can actually make them happen. For example, there used to be a site called Goodbye Warden (archive link), which collected final statements from people on death row. It makes you feel something. A few years ago, the site went away. Recreating it would not take that much effort, but no one has done it.
BC: On the topic of projects that have gone away, how do you feel about Are You The Asshole now?
MK: The original project, with Alex Petros, was a lot of work at the time! It was built on GPT-3, before ChatGPT was released. That matters; it would be nowhere near as impactful today, just because of how easy it would be to do now.
Actually, we only deprecated it because constant API changes made it difficult to maintain. We wanted it to stay up, but it had had its day, and we didn’t want people to have a bad experience.
BC: I noticed you have creative prompts on your website, which is cool - it reminds me of Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies. Do you use these often?
MK: I’ve done lots of these, and I like to keep track of them because they might be useful. But I’m not really actively using them at the moment. Others have reached out and said they’re useful too!
BC: Then, what do you think has most helped you create?
MK: Make the stupidest possible version of it.
I’m serious. People underestimate stupid ideas. I’ve been shitposting forever - high school debate satire blog, photoshopping on a Facebook meme page, competing at Punderdome. Puns are the only form of joke made for the teller, and not the receiver. That’s hilarious.
Stupidity takes off a lot of pressure, which means you won’t procrastinate. If you start drawing and you start with a portrait of your mom, you’re going to have a hard time. Meanwhile, if you’re sketching dog shits on the street, then there’s not a lot of weight on you.
I recently took a class at the Society for Poetic Computation about gift-giving, and I found it really difficult. It’s easy for me to do my usual thing with traditional art forms. But with gifts, the entire thing is about meaning. I made a gift for my dad eventually, but it took eight months because of the pressure even though it was straightforward to make.
If it needs to be something, then you have a reason to say it's not good enough; you’ll leave it unfinished. And if you never finish, then you'll never finish.
BC: Do you have any advice for someone just getting started?
MK: Look at something you find interesting. Look at something you don’t know. Try to combine those two. And keep it stupid.
Morry Kolman is keeping it stupid at wttdotm.com.
Check out the other interviews about making things with Amit Patel, Nolen Royalty, and Seth Larson.