аЯрЁБс>ўџ WYўџџџVџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџьЅС5@ №ПЌZbjbjЯ2Я2 d­X­XЌRџџџџџџˆlllllll€ˆˆˆˆ ”€ЇіДДДДДДДД&(((((($RяˆLlДДДДДLllДДaКККДІlДlД&КД&К(КтllтДЈ €gLдёХˆZт$w0Їтwv.wт€€llllwlт ДДКДДДДДLL€€„Є€€„Interview with Richard Wright Feb. 17th 1996 Mats Helm, Konsthogskolan, Stockholm. Q: What advice would you give a young artist in terms of how to survive and how to go about being an artist? A: I don't think there is any general thing anymore because as far as what you call media art is concerned I think the situation is certainly from my point of view qualitatively different from art produced in more traditional disciplines. Because media art is about artists who try to work within and about the system of industrial media both in terms of using similar techniques and production methods and in exploiting the cultural infrastructure that is built around media of various kinds, industrial and commercial. That would seem to imply a different kind of practise from that which is based on gallery exhibition or even one in which artists have their own separate working community like a Marxist collective. Media artists seem to tend to work much more within the system itself which is quite different and that is probably one of the reasons why they are not regarded as artists at all in some areas. In England for example media art doesn't officially exist in the art world because it is seen to be something to do with TV and something to do with game-shows and something you do not want to take seriously. I think that this is particularly common in Britain and not so bad on the continent although the situation in North America is even worse in some ways. What has tended to happen in Britain is that there is a separate clique of media artists who run around having their own circuit of exhibitions and screenings and things and others who are integrated to varying degrees into commercial media, especially younger artists who are doing things like working on pop videos and now on multimedia productions. The situation in new media right now is that no one is quite sure what the 'mainstream' will be or what will be commercial and this makes it easier for people like artists to pop up and say "this is a good product to make and distribute" and no one can be quite sure whether or not they have actually hit on something or whether they are just one of those weird fly-by-night ideas that are best just humoured and quietly forgotten about. Q: If you where in art school how would you pursue a career? A: I think a would probably see myself as taking some kind of interventionist strategy in the sense that I would learn as much as I possibly could about media strategies and technologies and infiltrate or ingratiate myself into the media structure (which I have been so unsuccessful in doing personally but lets not dwell on my failures just yet) and try to exploit it as much as possible from the inside as well as from the outside. My personal experience with gallery based work has been very negative and I have found that first of all it has been very difficult for them to support technology based work because it is so resource intensive, not just in terms of getting machines but the expertise that is required to keep something running. You get these classic situations where you have a gallery installation in a big Museum and some one forgets to turn it on every day so it is just sitting there dead and every one assumes that that's how it is supposed to be but the cleaners have accidentally switched it off - that happens a lot. Also, when you are presented with a gallery based environment where you kill yourself for six months to create an installation which is on for a few weeks and not very many people seem to see it and then it disappears altogether, you feel a sense of anti climax that you have not become a glamorous mega star and you have just had this little show that has come and gone. You haven't become one of these big stars that you have grown up seeing on television. The idea that you can become a great artist and media star at the same time is something that is constantly sitting in the background of most peoples consciousness nowadays. It has a quite positive side to it because you are prepared to venture in to other territories and to try to intervene in the normal mainstream of things and to try to push your subversive ideas into a wider context. I think that this strategy involves a much higher degree of media literacy than you would normally traditionally expect in artists both in terms of knowledge and in terms of how the system of production works. You also need a knowledge of popular culture, knowledge of how to use references to popular iconography and in exploiting peoples responses to advertising techniques. I think of people like Barbara Kreuger who makes the T-shirts with the slogans on. All these new techniques that come from the media industry and popular culture are things which the younger artists have a quite advantageous position in exploiting. The ideal position is that this might enable you to work more effectively that if you where to work in a more gallery based setting. Q: You have been talking about media art from a media point of view I would like to hear more about the art part of it. So what is the art part of being a media artist. A: The art part is a grey area and I don't think that it is something that you can pin down. We can talk about it in general ways such as social and cultural functions that art can take now days. For example, art could be an avant garde project in which you are introducing new ideas which might be aesthetic or they might be about new kinds of perception which could involve different kinds of editing or narrative or something like that. It could be like the idea of the avant garde artist being at the forefront of developing cultural practices which then are dispersed through media in a 'trickle-down' effect. You could also take the view that the artist provides an oppositional stance in relation to mainstream culture so that they could provide an alternative view point or some actual active opposition to the kinds of mainstream practices that are prevalent in dominant culture. The criticism of this philosophically is that oppositional art practices can't work from outside the media system because there is nothing outside the system and you can't oppose the system from within because you are already in the system. But that's really quite an abstract philosophical position because if you are actually within the system you find that systems tend to have inherent contradictions and conflicts and cracks which you can lever open and turn it against themselves. Even quite abstract philosophers like Baudrillard recognise that if you take strategies of simulation to their extreme then you end up with something that is quite problematic for the system so that if you simulate a documentary for example then you end up with something that can be quite alarming for people. The only thing that comes to mind is "War of the Worlds" by Orson Wells but I am sure there are more recent examples that I can't think of - even comedy shows are quite good at doing that now days. Sometimes you are not quite sure whether something is a parody or whether it is the real thing. It is quite disturbing that the real thing sometimes seems more satirical than the comedy programme that has just been satirising it. The other so called 'Cyber positive' view point would be something like –The media system is now so complicated and so diverse and expanded that it is beyond the control of any one group of people and it has a partial autonomy. If someone tries to exploit the media to their own ends it is possible that it might backfire and have some unpredictable effect. The idea is that the artist even though they are a lonesome cowboy may be able to exploit that unpredictability and make an intervention in what otherwise would seem to be a completely dominated situation. The idea of making a small intervention in a large system that may ripple out and have large consequences that any one interest group can't control is a possible strategy which is how one particular art practice may chose to develop. As far as computer media is concerned, that situation is often suggested by the idea that access to dominant culture in terms of the quality of the end product is now almost no longer an issue. The commercial drive towards professional level production facilities is resulting in a levelling off where you can produce professional level stuff that is indistinguishable from that produced by professional companies. This gives you access to the dominant cultural language that hasn't been possible previously. Every computer manufacturer has got to provide you with a professional level desktop publishing and video editing facility. So everyone is using production tools like "Premiere" – it is like everyone is drinking Coca Cola, even the president of the United States drinks Coca Cola and probably uses "Netscape". This levelling is a kind of poststructuralist effect and it has destroyed the standard of quality in so far that now everything is top quality at least from a technical point of view. I think that for a lot of artists that is an unsettling situation if their point of view is that it is the artists role to provide quality - to provide a product which has some kind of extra quality. There are aesthetic issues bound up in this promiscuity of media facilities which for a lot of artists is quite problematic. Possibly not so much for younger artists who probably don't care but more for curators and arts organisers who's job it is to promote certain cultural interests. There is a constant struggle now about policing the boundaries, policing the boundaries between high culture and low culture for instance. In a certain digitalized practise such as computer animation or multimedia there is a constant struggle about when something is high art and when its not. So you get a lot of arbitrary distinctions coming up like "Artists Multimedia" which is obliged to conform to certain criteria which excludes a lot of possibilities which can be quite interesting. The typical thing is that an arts organisation is going to have a call for a multimedia commission and they are trying to decide what would be an artistic theme and they always end up with something like "Gender and Identity". Everybody is like "yeah, lets scan some pictures of our aunts and uncles when their ship first landed and then scan a few pictures of women working in paddy fields and use Photoshop layers to put them together" and then you have some instant issue based media art. Of course it has nothing to do with what's most interesting about what is going on in our culture but in a sense it is trying to recreate an artistic method that is no longer appropriate - trying to recreate a superstructure so that everyone will know their place, so that everyone will be orientated and everyone will have a direction to follow. Sometimes I think that the best thing to tell art students is to forget about art as much as they can and try to pretend that art doesn't exist at all and to try to have as much fun as possible and then worry about what their parents would think later. Q: You where outlining two different art practices earlier - one that had to do with storytelling and narrative and the other one had to do with a more critical intervening strategy. My question regarding these two quite difficult concepts is can and how do you teach this? A: I was going to say that the way that I would try to teach it would be to try to avoid any mention of art. The general conception is that there isn't very much good computer art out there but on the other hand that is the same for art in general - when was the last time that you went to a painting exhibition that you thought was really really good? I don't think that there is very much difference with computer based or technology based art. Although the reasons why it may be good or bad may be completely different. I think that there probably is enough examples of good work that artists have done and of the contributions that artists have made in the history of commercial media and research but this is something which is often quite invisible to the art student mainly because no one really knows what has been happening. Firstly artists have a place in the history of commercial media which is sometimes difficult to tease out. Also, there are important developments in the structure of media which can often be indicated by examining commercial products. The one that I focused on recently was the most derided form of interactive media which was the "Shoot-'em-up" computer game like "Doom" and "Descent". Here you concentrate on a quality of media which is basically that of speed and propulsion or a space simulation which is experienced through speed. These are qualities which are essential and have also been theorised a lot by Paul Virilio for example. Virilio is talking about 'taking aim' and the military logistics of perception, and when you are flying through the "Doom" environment shooting a gun you are extending your aim infinitely through this space, but its not necessarily a militaristic experience. Or the militaristic experience is not necessarily the right way of looking at it, but it is certainly a strong visual sensation which is extremely addictive. This addictiveness suggests that it is not merely a desire to marshal your forces in a militaristic fashion and penetrate the enemies space. There are very important qualities in these kinds of media which get completely overlooked by artists and probably in the future when artists have been put off working with interactive media completely people will look back and say "ten years ago we had really interesting things like "Doom" - I wonder why nothing came out of that?". Q: If you were to build up a teaching environment for this sort of practice how would you do it? What kind of equipment would you use? What kind of facilities would you need? A: It would be a platform which would provide some continuity for the students both after they left the course and possibly before they even joined the course as well. As I said before, nowadays the power of desktop computing has increased to the extent that what you can achieve with those systems is so vast that it is not very much of an excuse to complain that you don't have top of the range high end equipment. There will always be a difference between the most powerful computers and the least powerful computers but what you can do now with the least powerful computers is so vast that there is not very much of an excuse for producing shoddy work with them anymore. I think that I would provide a general environment of low end user equipment like Mac's and PC's. As well as that I would also want to provide some specialised high end pieces of equipment that could be used for tasks that were difficult elsewhere. I think that you could imagine a studio in which there was no actual computing equipment at all and where students simply bought their own computers which they used wherever they wanted. Then the studio of the college would just provide specialised equipment such as scanners, digitizers, video processing equipment, recording equipment, printers and specialised workstations for producing particular effects. The students would plug their own equipment into the system when and where they wanted to transfer data and access these extra facilities. The most important thing is to try and keep the studios as fluid as possible and to keep the flow of data as unimpeded as possible in terms of networking facilities and compatibility and formats. In the same way as we like to think that we are being most creative when our thoughts are flowing freely, we should expect our digital studios to be most creative and productive when the data is flowing most freely between machines and software and processing devices of different kinds. I think that flow is probably the most important thing – people are constantly changing software, changing machines and plugging different things into different sockets. I think it is important to keep the studio as flexible as possible so that no one gets stuck on one machine or in one position and starts to undergo that unpleasant process of vegetating in their swivel chair and being unable to get out. Q: How does your studio look? A: My studio is split now. Unfortunately I have a 486 computer at home which sits in a corner of my bedroom - this I see more as an experimental device which has lots of sound cards and scanner cards and such – this is where I play around with stuff. Then I have got disk-drives that I can easily transport to my other studio which is at the university where I am doing research at the moment. At the university I have a faster and sexier Pentium where I can do more processor intensive things like render and record things. Once again it is very important for me that I am able to easily transfer data between my machines and also that I have different machines that I can set to do different kind of jobs. I deliberately buy storage devices that are as portable as possible, so I am prepared to spend the extra seventy-five pounds on an external drive or a portable disk so that I can take a whole pile of files to another studio or facilities house or something like that. All my formats are as standard as possible. Before I buy a new software package and even before I ask what it can actually do I want to know what I can get into the package and what can I get out from the package. I want to know how that package fits into my studio system. I want to make sure that it doesn't take some odd file formats that I can't really provide or I can't really process further. I want to be able to construct a channel of data flowing through that software package so that it becomes another node in my network of different production strategies. Q: How do support your art work? A: Well I gave up teaching last year because that wasn't supporting anything much really. Now I do anything from odd bits of teaching, art residencies and the research that I am doing at the university to commercial work when I can get it. I also get some regular arts funding when and where that is appropriate. So if I can only get enough data circulating around my studio then my career will circulate more freely, and when my C.V. is circulating freely around the media industry it will hopefully lead to more circulation in my bank account. Q: Have you been able to spend enough time on your art work or has different ways of supporting yourself taken a lot of time for you? A: It has taken a lot of time and I think that in some cases I have gone around things the hard way, perhaps spending too much time doing very very technical things which chew up a lot of time or have not been building up work with more commercial potential. Thinking back about when I finally left teaching last year and devoted myself to film making -shouldn't I had done that 10 years ago? I think at that time I wouldn't had known what to do because ten years ago I really didn't now what kind of films I wanted to make. It has been a slow process to develop my own approach to working with technological media and there is no avoiding the fact that it takes much time. Q: What are you doing right now? A: Right now I am doing this research which I think is quite a good thing for me. I will have a few years to develop different film techniques and different film structures or maybe just some new clever ways of making images. Hopefully this will help to spur on my film making. When I finish my research I will hopefully have some new kinds of techniques or methods or styles which I can exploit more than just purely artistically but perhaps commercially as well. An example might be something I did recently for the Arts Council and Channel 4 which was supposed to be a High Tech scheme for artists to develop wild and wacky new ideas with high technology in partnership with a commercial facilities house. I did something for that which involved a system for 3D montage of live action as a new kind of montaging technique in space rather than in time. That is an interesting thing which as a technique could have all sorts of uses and as far as commercial interests where concerned. It might be something that Channel 4 may or may not want to use in their presentation department for example. That is something that I may be able to continue with. If you are in a position of actually writing software there is always a possibility that something that you produce for a production that you are working on might have some commercial potential. Though it is hard to actually produce a software package because of all that is involved in actually supporting it and distributing it. So there is this research tied up in media arts which is a possible lucrative activity which you may be able to plug into. The artist as a sort of maverick research scientist. Q: Do you have any tips and tricks regarding media art making and how to survive as a media artist? A: Don't tell anyone that wears a suit that you are an artist or they won't pay you. -QТ=У=ЌZіэхнхh €OJQJhІђOJQJhІђ6OJQJhІђ5OJQJ-STUТУдеОno+!т#@%.є/{3|3Ž44[69§9Ю=Я=§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§ЌZўЯ=~>>МGНGлGмGLчLхMцMNNnO*P+PБPВPTSUSvSwSHUёYђYVZWZЌZ§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§А‚. 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