Mimi Bow On Transcending The Algorithm, Working With Chloë Sevigny And Mesmerising Us All
To say Mimi Bow’s Instagram feed is mesmerising is an understatement.
A couple of seconds into one of her ethereal clips and you’re scrolling through everything she has ever produced. It’s whacky, captivating, weird, beautiful, nostalgic and new. It’s no wonder why her work has caught the attention of forever ‘it girls’ Chloë Sevigny and Kim Gordon. We stumbled across Mimi’s feed and instantly had to find out who was the person behind it. Of course, she’s as interesting as you would expect, full of wisdom and that kind of tenacity that sets people apart from the crowd. Mimi Bow is well and truly in a league of her own. We’re pleased to introduce you.
Mimi, hey. How are you?
Mimi Bowman: I'm good. How are you doing?
Yeah, I'm good. Thanks again for chatting tonight, I know it’s always difficult with the opposite time zones.
No worries, happy to chat.
Alright my first question is, how did you get into what you do?
It's sort of a difficult question to answer. It is really hard to explain and because of what I do academically I kind of can’t.
Okay wow, I am so intrigued. (At this point we had to go off record).
Without going into detail, the videos I make now are the reason why I had a complete career shift, why I left my partner, and why I moved to London. I used to own a bookstore and a gallery, which was the best job but I knew I had to shift, which has led me to what I do now.
And what do you do now?
Now I'm at UCL in London. I'm getting my masters in archaeology, but I want to work in qanat rehabilitation. They're like these ancient underground wells in Iraq. When you rehabilitate them, they can provide fresh water to rural communities that are otherwise having to truck in all of their water. So that's my life path goal now.
Okay wow. I’m trying to think of a way to talk about these videos without bringing up the personal thing. Can I ask where you find these videos from?
I really remember the wild west or the golden age of the internet where when you search for something in a search engine there was a purity to that search. When you were on YouTube there was no algorithm to get around. So you were really seeing a lot of mundane things happening, like girls wandering around an apartment complex together, just talking, not even necessarily doing anything. So all of that it's still on the internet, it’s everywhere you just have to find a way to get around that algorithm and break that algorithm.
Right.
And so that's essentially what the videos are. They don't really belong to me, right? Because I'm just finding things from all over the internet. It’s just a reconfiguration of things that are already there existing, and I'm just mashing them together. And there's also this ubiquity of videos that have 300 million views and videos that have three views. So, I really like that kind of disparity and putting all of those things together.
Can you talk me through the process of how you make a clip?
Honestly; I can’t really explain it, I just have this feeling that this clip has to go with this one. Sometimes it'll be obvious, like the colours match or the movements are similar but other times it just goes together because it does.
Kind of like why some people pick up a magazine based on a certain cover and not others. It is interesting that you say you have to get behind the algorithm. How do you actually do that?
There's no such thing as an unfiltered version when you're on something like TikTok or Instagram because whatever the proprietary technology of social media is, is just constantly learning from you. You have to really move against your own impulses. I’m like everyone else in the sense that I want to look at hot girls, but if you linger on the hot girl then that’s what teaches the algorithm that that is what you like, so you just have to swipe past really quickly and you teach it what to show you. Social media also learns from your friends as well, pulling in their habits into your feed and explore page. So, you have to figure out how to go incognito. There's a bunch of different things you can do. I really didn't want to become this person who was angry at social media because we all know the way it is manipulating us, ruining our lives and making us violent, anorexic and totalitarian. I knew there had to be a way to find each other through it.
Would you define your videos as art?
For a long time I wouldn't show them in galleries. I was really resistant to it because I felt like because they lived in a phone they weren’t art, because they're made from the phone, they’re edited in the phone and they belong in the phone. Everything happens just on the phone. I also felt weird because it's all stolen videos. I shouldn't attach my name to it. But as I started to show people, they were like the point is to share this stuff. I think they are compilations but not necessarily art.
I mean, I see where you are coming from, but I also have never really seen anything like them before. Like they’ve got the Mimi Bow style. And the music?
Yeah now I'm learning really how to make the clips work with music, where as before I would just slap a track on that I loved. Now the track dictates the clips which is a recent shift and has also made them take a lot longer. I’ve realised I listen to so much sample based music which is essentially the same idea as the clips where you're just taking pieces of something that already exists and putting it together to make some kind of narrative. Which is also the most amazing thing about the internet too, that you can just use the detritus of something complete and make something completely new out of it.
This is so interesting. I saw Kim Gordon's comment on your latest campaign with Régime des Fleurs with Chloë Sevigny - that is so cool - can you tell me more about that?
I mean, that was crazy for me because I saw Gummo when I was 12 and the way I saw it was crazy, too. I was at the video store. Someone on the spine of a VHS tape had written in a spray paint pen, ‘This movie sucks plus you suck.’ I still have a photo of it. and when I pulled it down, I was like, ‘What is that?’ When I pulled it down from the top shelf, it was Gummo, so I had to watch it right. And in that film, I saw how they took everything in my life that I'm ashamed of, scared of, and made something funny and beautiful, and turned it into art. And that was really the beginning of an obsession with film and art. Got totally obsessed with Harmony and Herzog and Chloe and that whole universe at that age. Anyway I became Instagram friends with Haley Wollens who runs Myth Mag at some point. I've been a fan of hers for a long time and she just got in touch with me and was like, ‘Do you want to make a video for this perfume that Chloë Sevigny did?’
Yes, yes I do. Wow.
Absolutely. So that was definitely a full circle moment for me. I've peaked.
Yeah that’s the top for sure. Did you get to talk to Chloë?
I'm sure I could have but I was shy about it. I felt like I was trying my best to communicate through the video.
For sure. That’s amazing. Do you kind of see yourself doing more of that commercial art stuff?
I do commercial work fairly regularly now. Last year a thing called the Director's Library posted one of the videos. I need to actually get in touch with him again and just say thank you because that has been really life-changing. I don't usually connect my name to commercial work but that one I did and it led me to where I am now.
What’s a dream project?
I love what I call brand archaeology where it's like getting to go through the archives of a brand's video content and make something new out of that. It would be so fascinating to get ahold of fashion archives. .
That would be so cool! I can already picture it. Old runways and campaigns. Wow. Do you think there is a reason why you are more drawn to film than say photography or drawing as an art form?
I'd say I'm pretty obsessed with it all. If I was really talented I would be a painter. In my opinion it is the highest art form. But I am not a painter. I tried but I found out I was better at curating painters than I was at being ever one. But yeah I am full on obsessed with literature, painting, music, everything. I'm an eternal groupie of the arts. I can't get away from music makers. That’s who I always fall in love with. You know what I mean?
I do know what you mean. Alright I’ve got a side question because I can’t stop thinking about the fact you owned a bookstore and a gallery and you’re so young. How?
So, we were lucky because the place was a bookshop in a gallery that I worked at and it was funded by someone wealthy. He decided he didn't want to do it anymore, that's when myself and another employee took it over. We did a Kickstarter so there was a ton of community support to keep it going behind us and I'm sure we wouldn't have been able to do it without that. So it was kind of a unique situation. I mean everyone was like this is going to be a disaster. I was also a baby. I think I was 22 when we opened. That was so crazy. I had no idea what I was doing. But at the same time people really got behind us. People buy books. People will come if you're good at curating a really banging selection. You have your specialty, you have good taste and you stand behind it. People will always resonate with that.
This conversation is restoring my life.
I remember the first year going to the New York art book fair and there was the last copy of something at a table and there was this girl who's just decked out. Like so hot, head to toe in the most amazing outfit. There’s celebrities everywhere. It’s New York, like it’s always a fashion event and anyway this girl grabbed the book out of my hand because it was the last copy of something and ran to the other side of the table and bought it. And I just remember crying because I was like, This is so amazing that some hot young girl is stealing a book out of my hand because she's just got to have it. I'm so happy that there's a place where people respond to books like this.
Holy shit, I would cry too. Also we gotta get you into the MC archives and get a Mimi special.
Yes please. It's my favourite thing to do. I'm always on the hunt for the next video archive and a new database is just so special.