The collaborative studio Jana+Koos are known for a variety of projects with unpredictable art execution that ranges from work on small passion projects to global brands. The list goes on and on but I believe the ones they are best known for include Simon + Mary, MESH and Nike ZA. Koos jubilantly reflects on the studio’s work with Simon + Mary as their baby that is now “a healthy young kid in school”. In my interview with Koos we talk about the start of their studio as well as their new project ‘The Free Art Project’ and the concept and ideas surrounding free art
Jana Hamman and Koos Groenewald walked into what would become their collaborative journey when they first met as graphic design students in Pretoria. After having worked in advertising for a couple of years the duo started their own studio, Jana+Koos. “We’ve always been keen to work on many different kinds of projects, in different capacities and art has always been our way of exploring, trying out new things and making the jokes we can’t in commercial projects.” Koos tells me that this is a vital aspect of the partnership that he shares with Jana. To Koos failed art pieces are the first emphasis and tests for ideas that have the possibility of informing big projects in the future.
‘The Free Art Project’ got its name due to the fact that Jana+Koos viewed it as both sensational and dubious, Koos tells me that it didn’t start off as that however. “It actually started a couple of years back when we saw a link that the British Library had released a flicker account with 20 000 high res scanned images from it’s archives.” Stating that the studio has always kept true to creating distinctive, original imagery for every project they take on, this release of imagery from the British Library was a gem they could not leave unfound as the image quality from the archives were not only suitable for commercial use but also free of charge. The duo had planned to use these images from the archives on smaller and personal projects where photography or illustrating it themselves was not required.
“So we kind of kept a look-out for similar news – and when we saw the Met Museum’s link about their public domain – and the vast amount of classic art one had access to it had us trembling with excitement. I mean there are actual Cezanne, and Manet photos of art big enough to make a building wrap out of.” Printing images for themselves from these archives for their studio and house walls was the next step the project took on before it became an official exploration.
The Free Art Project took shape when Jana+Koos collaborated with their friend Gareth Steele. Gareth had shown them a glitching site called MOSH where images can be uploaded and you have the ability to ‘glitch yo’self’ and download the artwork afterwards for whatever use you deem fit. “Just messing around we fed some close up imagery of romantic painted boobs through the glitch machine and got some weird (but cool) imagery back, and loved this so much we used it as backgrounds on our iPads and phones etc. But it felt wasted on just our own personal wallpapers.”
After having taken this imagery into MOSH, the studio realized that remarkable art works could come from this idea, not only from artists but also from anyone and everyone and they thought about the possibilities that existed for programming techies. Viewing ‘The Free Art Project’ as an experiment, Jana+Koos forged some rules to abide by while working on it, namely that no design and photo shop software that they had purchased may be used to make their new art works (free to download apps only) from the archival imagery. The idea is to choose their best art works and release them publicly as downloadable high-res images in the same way that they were able to download images from the Met and the British Library archives.
In this week Jana+Koos are planning on releasing the project officially on Instagram and Facebook and see where the project develops naturally. “Everything we do isn’t for press or commerce. Sometimes you just have something that needs to get out. Free imagery and free software or even generative design/programming isn’t new, it’s more a case of wanting to show the potential of putting the two together.” Similar in vision to the ‘con artist’ project Jana+Koos ran a few years ago, they invite people who do not consider themselves to be artists to partake in ‘The Free Art Project’. “We often grapple with the question of what constitutes an artist or not. Creativity really is everywhere, for everyone, and potentially by everyone too.”
When I asked Koos what some of the challenges were using open source software he had the following to say, “The main part that was hard without our design software was the lack of control in exporting to final sizes and formats. It’s surprising though how much you can do with the free and open source software. And it’s actually been a great exercise, forcing you to try out new ways to get to results, making us realize how stuck we have become in some of our ways of doing things.”
Koos tells me that at this time there is not an over all theme for the project but that it is about the subjectivity of art, what constitutes what art is and who is in fact an artist and whether painful labour is essential to creating art.
Koos’ opinion on the idea of free art is expressed as, “Giving away Free art is obviously not viable only as one needs to make money to survive but is a cool project. But seen from the perspective of Free-ing the art and making it accessible to more people it becomes viable and lives on beyond us in terms of helping to build on a culture of art creation and appreciation. It feels cool for us that perhaps someone whose barrier to starting an art collection is money, could own a nice big piece that they love. Even if it is their first piece that starts a collection – that would make us very happy. We’re also happy to share our preferred printers and framers with anyone who needs help on that side. Mail us anytime.”
Initially I was dubious about the concept of free art, I mean surely giving away an art piece that someone slaved over is not ok? After I had spoken to Koos, I must admittedly say that my view has shifted and I agree with him that making art more accessible to the public will in tern foster a more dynamic society with an appreciation of art.