Changing Spaces: Galinsky and the Virtual Furnace: an interview
- Changing SpacesGalinsky and the Virtual Furnace
Before the end of the 1996/97 season, Franklin Furnace announced it was going virtual. The organization sold its premises at 112 Franklin Street in downtown Manhattan and with that ceased using any physical space to present its art and performance programs. For the first two seasons following the decision, a number of works were presented on the Internet in conjunction with Pseudo Programs Inc. Through Pseudo.com, Franklin Furnace started making the works and ideas of the artists on its program available to a broader audience on the web.
The main producer working with Franklin Furnace at Pseudo was Robert Galinsky; an artist in his own right known only as Galinsky. Born in New Haven, Connecticut, Galinsky moved to New York in the early 1990s to develop his career as a writer. In 1995 he cofounded Pseudo Programs. He left the company in 2000 and briefly worked with Arts International as Director of New Technology and Media. I interviewed Galinsky at my apartment in Jackson Heights, NY, on Wednesday 9 August 2001. Galinsky is no longer professionally involved with Internet technology. He continues to write poetry, perform, teach, and produce performance on screen. His website is available at <http://www.galinskyplace.com>.
The Internet became available to communities outside academia and the government in 1994. By the end of that year, the World Wide Web really started getting major public attention through Netscape Navigator 1.0, the first commercial browser release. What were you doing in 1994, the year before Pseudo.com appeared?
In 1994, and for a few years before that, I was teaching. I was also producing, mostly spoken word shows. I was doing the occasional theatrical audition, but I was mainly teaching conflict resolution and drug prevention—using theatre, film, and poetry—to special education kids in all five boroughs.
Were you teaching in the New York City public school system?
Yes, but I was working for a private company called L.E.A.P.—Learning through an Expanded Arts Program.
How did you meet Pseudo's founder, Josh Harris?
I met Josh in mid-1994. I was teaching and producing what I called Live Axe! and Galinsky's Full-Frontal Theatre, which were multigenre shows. Instead [End Page 86] of getting seven of the same type of artists, I got seven different types of multigenre artists and did an evening where the audience saw seven different things. On the producer's side of it this was great because we had seven different groups promoting the show, and seven different types of audiences were showing up: a poetry audience sitting next to the singer-guitar audience, sitting next to the live fashion show audience. It made for a great evening because you have drag queens sitting next to completely intellectual, book-minded poets in the audience. This was at La MaMa Galleria and later at a place called Play Quest Theater on 28th Street.
Did you meet Josh at one of these shows?
I had seen him at the shows but I never met him. Then Josh was doing a pilot for TV and Spyro Poulos, one of the original Pseudo founders, invited me to perform there at the pilot party, and then we met and talked. He liked what I was producing so when it was time for him to do his radio show he said, you know, you want to produce this show about the Internet? I didn't own a computer in 1994. I didn't have email and I didn't know about the Internet either. I didn't care. I thought it was interesting. I was into the raw live experience.
Was this how you started working on Pseudo?
Josh called what he was doing Jupiter Interactive but it was too close to Jupiter Communications, the company he had just sold and so he had to change it, and he came up with Pseudo.
I know you got involved with Prodigy at the time? Was this part of your deal with Josh?
No. Josh told me...
