The Grateful grapefruit Interviews: Evan Roth

Evan Roth is 32 and a bad ass motherfucker. At least that’s what you have to type into Google if you want to find out more about his revolutionary art projects.  In 13 days and 11 hours he made his name (and his site) the top search result for that query. He figured this legitimately entitled him to printing “Bad Ass Motherfucker” on his business card instead of his name. So he did. His future ambitions are to win the gold medal for the searches “badass motherfucker” and just “bad ass”. His other endeavors in life include filling the public domain with free art and cutting-edge open-source software with his F.A.T. crew.

If everything is so cool and open-source, how do you make money? Do you have some way of monetizing the things you do? How do you live? Yeah, that’s another good question. Not from events like this [ha-ha]. Making money in the arts is always what artists end up talking about. I rely on getting artist’s fees from the organizations that approach me. We’re professional artists in that sense. I don’t have a day job, I just rely on arguing with arts organizations as much as I can to get paid when they ask for my work. I’m not putting much away for retirement, but I’ve been able to get by the last few years just by doing this. On the other hand, there’s obvious implications for taking some of the software we’ve been creating and earning money off it. But on the other hand, there also are some support networks in this area, especially in Europe, which is why I’m not in the US anymore – there’s even less support there. There’s some funding here, from various arts organizations and government bodies, but I’m applying for grants just like everybody else.

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I’ll give you keywords and you tell me what pops into your mind first. Twitter? It’s another one of these systems where the content is hosted on Twitter servers… which since April have officially included advertising in the information stream.  We use Twitter like crazy in the group, it’s a quick system for high-speed communication and publication. So the way we get around this, like the Fuck Google idea of hosting your own data, is that we’ve installed Laconica, which is an open-source alternative to Twitter, and we have that running as FuckTwitter on the FAT server, which publishes on the FAT site, which in turn publishes on Twitter. But in general we like Twitter.

Facebook?

Read the whole F.A.T. story and the interview in full length here.