When it comes to the internet and "new media art," either you get it or you don't. Cab Broskoski not only gets it, but he produces brilliant works in a very of formats. He recently showed some work at the New Museum, and he generally gets around town and the web. We spoke to him recently about his art, and how he's trying to incorporate it into the gallery system.

Chief Magazine: So where did you go to college?

Cab: I’m actually still in college. Currently I’m at Parsons, but initially I was at University of Houston doing fine arts. I sort of just decided to leave there and ended up moving to California with my girlfriend. I went to community college in Santa Barbara for a year before moving here.

And what brought you here?

Actually I had been trying to get a friend of mine to move to California, but another friend had moved here so I figured I’d move here and then there’d be two of us in NY and it’d be easier to convince the friend to leave Texas with two people instead of just myself. It worked. He’s my roommate now.

[Laughing] Sneaky. So are you here for fine arts as well?

Well at first I was going to go for that. When I got here Parsons was the only school whose deadline for applications hadn’t passed yet for the upcoming semester so I sent in all my stuff and got accepted. But when I started they had me in foundation and I just didn’t want to go through that. So after about a week I just switched to computer programming.

Were you always making art on your computer? How was that a logical step?

I’d been doing computer stuff since I was 11. You can call it art, but maybe I was more focused on that when I was about 16.

And what started that? What made you choose the computer rather than picking up a pencil or something?

I guess it was sort of a generational thing for me, but also I’m just really lazy (laughing). It feels more efficient to me than to draw on the computer rather than anything else. I do draw. Not so much as I used to though. I guess I’m more naturally drawn to the computer because it’s the easiest thing for me.

---

You have about 65 blogs and websites that you contribute to. Maybe not 65 but there are quite a few. You mentioned that you started doing this when you were about 16. It sounds silly but were you too lazy to go out and do graffiti or something? With all the websites and projects I’ve seen a lot of them seem to be taking this “space”, making nonsense sites, and just re-appropriating stuff. All of that seems focused on putting your mark down and claiming space as your own. Specifically letsturnthisfuckingwebsiteyellow.com really struck me as such.

[Laughing] Is that a question?

I sure hope so.

Well I see what you’re saying. I think the interesting thing about the Internet though is that it’s leveling. Everything’s in the same context. It doesn’t matter if I put up art or a real estate website. They all kind of get the same amount of attention and they’re accessed the same way. And that’s what’s interesting to me. It’s interesting putting art up on the Internet because it doesn’t have that gallery context. It’s just there for people to stumble upon if they’d like and they’re free to think whatever it is that they think of it.

Then do you think it’s limiting for you to have your work in the gallery?

Yeah. That’s still being figured out for me; how that’s going to work out. The right way. The first show I ever had, I showed this piece I did about Myspace. On the Internet every profile is a piece of it. But for the show we got 8 computers to be each profile. So that was kind of ridiculous to have 8 computers when a person could just visit the site, but in the end it actually worked out well. So it’s definitely still something that needs to be figured out, in terms of how exactly to present something like that.