John Michael Boling and Javier Alberto Morales have been collaborating for years on various internet, video, and music projects.  Our favorite is 53 o's (www.gooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooogle.com/) and certainly Channel 53.  And while they're moving up to Brooklyn, for now they're still in Athens.

Chief Magazine: Are you both from Athens originally?

Javier Alberto Morales: No, I am from South GA – Jesup, GA.

John Michael Boling: I am from Northwest GA – Rome, GA.

And how did you two meet?

JAM: Art school, time based media class.

And you studied film?  Or fine art?

JMB: It was a class in the digital media program at the art school at the University of Georgia (UGA).

JAM: I was a digital media major for a minute but I switched back to painting to get out of school after six years.

JMB: I graduated as a digital media major.  It took me five and a half  years…

Was it worth it?  Switching back?

JAM: Yeah, I made some paintings that I like and didn’t have to explain myself as much as in the digital media program.

I see… and was it at UGA that you started collaborating?  How did that come about?

JMB: We attempted to make an animation together for the final project in the time based media class, but that particular animation was never completed.  That was the first thing we worked on together.

So… seems like a rocky start?  And since then?  You’re finishing all sorts of projects, but you also work separately too?

JAM: I wouldn’t say rocky. It was for class and wasn’t important.

JMB: We run 53 o’s together.  We each have a personal blog/section, but we also collaborate on projects.  So far the collaborations have been mostly videos.  And we also program Channel 53 together.

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That’s really what impressed me about you two.  The 53 o’s site.  And especially The Church of the Future video.  I love it.  Absolutely love it.  Can you talk about the idea behind the 53 o’s/ Channel 53?  How did that come together?

JAM: John Michael made the website for an Internet class and then asked if I wanted to go halfsies on it with him.

JMB: I registered the domain at the end of 2005.  The first thing that we put up there was Javier’s Christmas album and the video that we did for Sleigh Ride, which we had done earlier in the year for a different class.

And now that you’re out of class and half these venues (the sites), do you feel like you’re more inclined to create work?  It’s a bit of a cliché, but… damn, does the Internet free people!

JMB: I started really working on the site the day after my exit show from art school.  A lot of the YouTube projects in the Misc. column on the front page came from the first week out of art school.  I was just really frustrated with school so the website was a great outlet.

JAM: The Internet is nice – you can blow out ideas very quickly and put them someplace and forget about them for a while.  Also, I realized I don’t necessarily have to create a physical object to make art.

JMB: And it doesn’t cost anything to make it work.

The non-physicality of it all is interesting.  These days it seems like some websites (proper ones like yours and maybe PaperRad) are art in and of themselves, like accidental blue screen.  It seems that web pages are probably the only venue for something like that.  Have you exhibited or screened any of your work elsewhere? Does that work?

JAM: Our videos have been shown a bunch of places and I know John Michael has had his Internet stuff shown.

JMB: Accidental blue screen definitely couldn’t exist off of the computer.  I am still on the fence about net-art in the gallery.  Some projects work better than others.  My YouTube compositions seem to work all right in the gallery setting, but not all of it works in the real world.  And that’s totally okay.  The people that look at the website that are involved with art make up a very small percentage of the traffic and that’s great … the non-art people are a lot more honest and unbiased.

JAM: Like the kids on the Blink 182 message boards.

[Laughing] Meaning the art people take it too seriously?  Look at it through a filtered lens of “fine art”?  Is it fine art?  You said “net-art” a second ago.  What’s the definition for you?

JMB: Not that they take it too seriously.  As much as I would like to distance myself from the “art filter” sometimes, I still take all of that into consideration.  There are just two distinct audiences for the work; neither one is totally right or wrong.  Net-art--for me at least--is just any art that requires the Internet in some phase of its creation/distribution/existence.

JAM: As for me, I like the idea of working in a vacuum and not knowing your audience or worrying about them, but the Internet makes that a little more difficult.  It’s really easy to find out who’s looking at your work and what they think if in fact anyone looks at or thinks about your artwork at all.  And net-art has always been a weird term to me.  It seems some things called net-art are only considered such because they were first seen or gained attention on the Internet which then means to me that anything on the Internet that is “artistic” is net-art.