Kristopher Keith Helton is 24 years old and has been in and out of it for years.

MOSSLESS: Where the hell is photography going? This internet thing has turned it into some kind of weird chaos.
KRISTOPHER K. HELTON: It’s going anywhere. Everywhere. There is no another medium that has this much tension applied to its identity. It seems that the pulls exerted—those by the games of marketing, journalism, party/event archiving, self-digitization, life cataloging and more—put huge tears into the format, with the significance and act of photography as an artistic practice being rather irrelevant in the big picture (no pun intended). I think I fail sometimes to remember how new and myopic the process of photography is, let alone its staked claim as Art. It seems to be hardly acknowledged.

Fortunately, the format has been shown to have a lot of give in it.  With the ubiquity of cameras you’re going to find many people willing to suck from any and every straw that leads back to them. Just think about the raw pervasion of imagery in our everyday lives: we’re getting virtually bombarded everyday with toxic multitudes of imagery. Every minute we’re in a living, breathing coil of prepared sound and vision. Functional, cognitive packages of aesthetic, presentation, subject and essentially everything that exists and doesn’t, and it all comes with a photographic sub-identity. The only limitation in this is whether something is relevant enough to someone, somewhere to be photographed.

Thanks to the Internet, anybody can have an audience if they win the digital territory (by whatever means necessary). It furnishes artists—and everyone else—with the boundless resource found in abstraction. You know, the internet is real, but it isn’t Real, its dimensions have no materiality. This means that a lot of the restrictions upon the real-life model of Art are dissolved, with people arriving at an infinite potentiality every day, in all things. 

I think the significance in this is that a lot of the applications of the camera that were once ‘non-artistic’ in nature can be found in the ‘collective mind,’ soaking right through, and becoming relevant and artful in the hands of ever-weirder and more visionary youngsters. This effect, whatever it is, gets amplified by the ‘infinite potentiality’ of the Internet. I think chaos is an apt description. Maybe the limitless variation will even out into a visual substrate that is homogenously individual. Every mote of dust is different and unique. Weird Chaos. In other words, this question is impossible.

ML: Interesting. I’ve noticed that image aggregators like Tumblr and fffffound somehow make us look at images with such a rapid speed that it’s almost blinding. Scroll, scroll, scroll. As a result, art is sucked of all context. Do you think it’s possible that the entire art world will have to focus on creating art to feed this instantaneity as this generation slowly takes over? 
KKH: I think it’s a possibility that a majority of the art world may cater to the ephemeral fluxing of Internet-dictated fads. People are already hunched over that corpse of a future, with their chips stacked on the table. There’s even a certain new language, new MLA-style format that people need to see work presented in before they can get behind it. I think it’s kind of bolstered by a bunch of shill artists who have only legitimized it to themselves. Obviously, Pop Art prophesied something to this effect, maybe not as rapid and grotesque, maybe not so soon.

I still keep up hope in the redemption of Art, whatever it is. I kind of dreamily long for the new crusaders of authenticity, an uncompromising Art of sentiment and individuality with an elephantine heart. If things ever heated into a sanguinary dialog of the sides, I’d like to be with them. But who wouldn’t want to be a crusader for some death-drenched rebirth? But, in any regard, today’s transactions between Artists seem really lukewarm, lost in the academic labyrinth—lost in the self and the meta-self, ad nauseum. I don’t think the bloodshed is going to come from that.

ML: Do you prefer to make work that caters to online sphere?
KKH: I don’t know. The online sphere has vitality; it is too boundless to not be exploited. I’m hoping for a polygamous union of spheres that are material and immaterial, unique and reproduced. The new mind, if it were geometric, is of an impossible dimensionality at this point. I have no idea how many layers there are to what is happening at any moment, how many walls or rooms. I think, if nothing else, new work should strive for that dimensionality—to be manipulable, open and multiform, to feed back on itself. Something.

ML: What were the last five images you found and liked online?
KKH: Image of an asian pear, found on Japanese Wikipedia. 

Image taken in 1972 of MIT students throwing a piano off the roof, found on an MIT website.

Image of painting of Sisyphus by Franz Von Stuck, found on Harpers.

Image of Shoko Asahara, found on Cult News.

Image of Trembling Strain’s “Four Pictures” album cover, found on Holy Warbles.