Andres Manniste
b.1951, lives and works in Montréal, Québec
Website: http://andresmanniste.rsight.net/
Website: http://andresmanniste.rsight.net/
Screenshot of Penthesilea, 2007
When did you get hooked to the internet?
I probably got hooked to the internet the second that my modem connected. It was simply more exciting than anything I had ever experienced. I remember using Gopher to download an image from a Museum in Greece, something impossible at the time. I had been working with magazine images and suddenly, at my desk, I had a direct source. I had always liked media art, but was too impatient to be locked in a darkened room to present work that could only be appreciated in a darkened space. Exploring internet, I realized that unlike video or film it was not about darkened space, but daylight and like a painting in a museum, you could either walk by it or not. It was your choice. I knew then that the internet was much more than a showcase for art, but literally the only significant art regardless of the material through which it was manifested.
How long have you been making internet work?
I first got involved with art and computers in the early-1990s. By 1999, I was getting more interested with what was happening with my computer, not just at the level of the graphic interface but also with the architecture of the network to which it was connected. In 2000 I began making a version of Phasis on the internet and found that the experience felt similar to what I was doing in the studio except that the materials and scale were abstractions occurring in digital space. My interest in linking to external sites continued and through the rest of the decade as I made increasingly complex networked pieces.
That's amazing!! you started learning it at around the age of 49, It was like learning a new language. Did you meet artists who were also doing digital and internet art during that time? If so, how did you guys communicate?
I was working on adrenaline. People around me were more involved with the graphic interface so they wanted the latest boxes, more ram and gadgets, but I liked the way a computer did not have to imitate a piece of paper. I preferred the interactivity and flux of the internet. HTML could describe space beyond the limits of a monitor with dimensions as numerical abstractions that approach the limits of a processor. I knew that the majority of computers were pretty slow so I felt challenged to make things that were stingy on processing and could be seen on any box in the world.
I became aware of the internet art community through boards like "Nettime" and through browsing and linking. I sent my work out to early websites that were showing network-based art. It was pretty easy before spam. You could simply ftp your stuff to their server. I did show some work in local exhibitions but bringing pieces that were made for the network to a gallery was awkward. I communicated mostly through e-mail until the advent of social media, where I began to have more regular contact with artists and was introduced to net-art generation 2.0. (the Millennials) It was at that point that I began to meet people in person.
Phasis, 2002
We know that Modernism and post-modernism are two different periods. What are the differences between internet art and post-internet art?
It is a very modern perspective to describe post-modern as a historical period. The French Philosopher Jean-François Lyotard used the term "Postmodern Condition" to describe Quebec society in a post-industrial world. He saw it as a paradigm shift very much connected to the changes in technology and specifically, computer communications. In the postmodern condition, knowledge is defined through its use-value and mediated through electronic networks. A modernist practice can continue very comfortably in the postmodern condition, for example, formalism. Calling the postmodern a historical period in art contributes very much to the current polemics about the conflicting opinions of internet-art and white box gallery art. In fact, they coexist.
To me, post-internet art is merging the reality of a networked world through art. My paintings have nothing to do with the19th century. I care very little about the formal or representational qualities in the abundant and disorganized material of internet. I am simply interested in working with availability. I extract my work from the appearance of electronic communications. I reproduce, manipulate, rearrange, exchange media or reassign meaning. It is the reappropriation that is important to me regardless of the container. I make things using the traditional skill set of any artist living in a postmodern condition. I believe that all art will be internet art as people become aware that networks are a real life cultural and ontological experience at which point the terms "new media" or "internet art" will be retired as historical asterisks.
We know that Modernism and post-modernism are two different periods. What are the differences between internet art and post-internet art?
It is a very modern perspective to describe post-modern as a historical period. The French Philosopher Jean-François Lyotard used the term "Postmodern Condition" to describe Quebec society in a post-industrial world. He saw it as a paradigm shift very much connected to the changes in technology and specifically, computer communications. In the postmodern condition, knowledge is defined through its use-value and mediated through electronic networks. A modernist practice can continue very comfortably in the postmodern condition, for example, formalism. Calling the postmodern a historical period in art contributes very much to the current polemics about the conflicting opinions of internet-art and white box gallery art. In fact, they coexist.
To me, post-internet art is merging the reality of a networked world through art. My paintings have nothing to do with the19th century. I care very little about the formal or representational qualities in the abundant and disorganized material of internet. I am simply interested in working with availability. I extract my work from the appearance of electronic communications. I reproduce, manipulate, rearrange, exchange media or reassign meaning. It is the reappropriation that is important to me regardless of the container. I make things using the traditional skill set of any artist living in a postmodern condition. I believe that all art will be internet art as people become aware that networks are a real life cultural and ontological experience at which point the terms "new media" or "internet art" will be retired as historical asterisks.
Rouen Cathedral series, 2013-2016
You also paint, do you prefer making internet art than painting?
I think my most appropriate response is that I work at the same thing all of the time and some of that time is on the internet or on social media and some of it in the studio. I was trained as a painter and printmaker and there remains a conviction for the materials and atmosphere of a studio, however, the concept that I had of a studio practice has been altered by the internet. I no longer feel that I need to respect scale, subject or formal concerns. I also have difficulty making qualitative decisions on images when they are presented in the homogeneous context of a computer monitor. Plausible aesthetic objects are being created daily everywhere. With such a vast selection of art, it is hardly relevant what I do in the studio with a brush. My paintings therefore have become a representation of, "What am I thinking, when I am thinking about these things”
My most recent paintings, Rouen Cathedral (2016) came from an animated gif, Cathedrale (2012) that expressed my interest in Monet revisiting the same subject each summer. Each of the 32 paintings in my series is the size of a television that I bought for an art project and now watch from my couch day after day. Instead of a Cathedral, I paint what I see on the screen in a different atmosphere and light.
With my network pieces freely available on-line and paintings that don't really deal with formal issues of representation, I realize that my work is less about objects than about experience.
Cathedrale, 2012
Your early paintings are connected with religion such as Les Dernieres Paroles du Christ in 1988, seven framed diptychs, and Adam et Eve series that started from 1989 to 1993. Does your interest in religion come from personal experience?
I'm always referencing organized religion and spirituality in my work. My Mother is an avowed atheist who sent us to Sunday School and at 96 years old she's just as adamant. Her most repeated response to any perceived disaster (and she's experienced many real ones) is, "So what? You still have to get up and work in the morning".
I have noticed that art from the Palaeolithic to the Anthropocene has always had something to do with magic and ritual and I refer to it often but I don't necessarily adhere to the plethora of meaning or associations derived from organized religions. My work expresses that life is precious. We invent gods to deal with our fears and fear makes us primitive. Religion, like art, began with someone drawing with a stick in the sand and I want to acknowledge that by saying, “So what!” to my fears and preoccupations.
Les Dernieres Paroles du Christ (The Last Words of Christ) is a series of seven diptychs dedicated to the words of a dying human God. The images on the right are chosen from magazines and found photos and on the left are religious symbols that I invented. The representations on the right are figurative and accessible. The Greek characters can be translated and understood as words. The symbols on the left, however, carry what is in the words and their representation and at the same time, they enclose the spirituality that words and illustration cannot express. Between symbols and representation, there is a conceptual space that a viewer is expected to subjectively define. In multiplying the availability of images, technology trivialized pictorial tradition and reduced visual communication to such a blur that deciphering meaning is reduced to superficial overstatements. What is lost is a sense of wonder. At one point, I considered becoming a writer. The desire is still apparent in the way I combine figurative elements into sentences. In this work I wanted to use a conceptual approach combined with my interest in pigments, lettering and the use of symbols.
I made four triptychs revolving around the theme, "Adam and Eve". The myth was a relatively simple container that I chose to express the complexities of an informational era. The initial inspiration for the work came from a plaque attached to the Pioneer space probe. Despite our perception of having limitless technological resources to communicate anything, a decision had to be made to rely on simple line drawing to express our existence to an unknown future. I reproduced the plaque in base metals of gold, silver, copper and zinc and mounted them on oak, ebony, walnut and Australian lacewood.
Adam and Eve do not represent the first man and first woman of biblical root, but possibly Nietzsche’s last man and last woman. The figures, painted in oil or egg tempera occur throughout a series of works that depict human-made apocalypses.
In the series I compare the luscious primordial environment of early Earth with smokestacks painted literally with toxic pigments or with images of tire burnings in South Africa or sex slavery in India decorating the panels of a church altarpiece. Another piece exploits the obvious phallic imagery of the space program and finally I executed with paint a printout of a large metaphysical representation of the Fibonacci sequence.
These works express the difference between an image from a monitor and one that was transformed into the materials of art and craft. They express my preoccupation at the time with internet-researched subject matter. I have continued with religious themes in several recent pieces such as,
god is here I-V (2014-16) or How do you imagine Heaven? (2016)
Luc 23:34, from Les Dernieres Paroles du Christ series, 1988, oil on masonite, bronze leaf frame, 19.7 x 35.4 in.; 50 x 90 cm
The Adam et Eve series was started a couple years after the 1986 space shuttle challenger disaster, did it influence your original idea?
I can't say that the "Challenger" disaster influenced the Adam et Eve series except, perhaps that shuttle flights had resumed the year I began the series. I was far more preoccupied with painting while dealing with a divorce, a day job and young children and I was into a relatively new relationship and all of that led me into wondering about the world we were living in. I intentionally chose the "Buran" that had just had its maiden flight to express that spacecraft were becoming generic. There is a futurist theme that runs side by side with apocalyptic imagery through all the work in the series. Most of the pictures came from newsmagazines that were illustrating a world in conflict and I suppose I was hoping for better environment for my children and my relationship.
(Top) Helix (Adam et Eve #5), 1994, oil on canvas, 82.7 x 252 in.; 210 x 640 cm
(Bottom) Installation view of Helix
(Bottom) Installation view of Helix
What was it like being an art student in the 60s and 70s?
The end of the 1960s was an exciting time to study art. The world seemed to be in a period of turmoil and political change at the same time that it was adapting to and empowering a large population of young people. The art world as well, appeared to be wide open to change. I began my studies on the prairies at a time when Clement Greenberg's Emma Lake Workshop Modernism ruled the Winnipeg School of Art. The foundation curriculum was very structured with tons of cutting and pasting. Painting and Drawing began traditionally enough but rapidly transposed into painted stripes. Because there were no graduate schools in Canada many of our Professors were American trained, as well, they were only eight to ten years older than us. I remember teasing one Prof about how his paintings imitated the current New York style, to which he responded, "Yeah, but I'm from New York."
Although classes were well organized and disciplined for those who wished to study art, most teachers, who appeared to be more interested in their own careers, let us do whatever we wished without much penalty because that was the sixties thing, so kids spent a lot of time in relationships, socializing, smoking weed, and going to parties
One Professor in second year, a monument in Canadian art, was more disciplined than others. I did not like the way he was teaching so we had a meeting and he suggested that if I were happy with a C+ I would no longer have to deal with him. I accepted the offer and a few years later when we met, I asked him about it. He said that he already knew that I'd be an artist. Another Prof wisely and succinctly pointed out that I had no sense of three-dimensionality. I did pass the course though. Strangely some of my favourite studios were in printmaking where I was allowed to audit without credit. I loved theory courses and my electives because they felt more like University. I'm still in contact with my printmaking and theory Profs. So out of all of this most rebelled against formal modernism and particularly art school. For example, I spent half of my third year drawing classes in the campus pub.
Fourth year was much more serious. We were given dedicated spaces to work and we actually did work. My paintings grew larger and began to look competent. I remember at the graduation cocktail party being asked what my plans were. When I said that I planned to be an artist the response was, "No, seriously what are you going to do?" It was like no one felt that there was a future in an art career.
How did you end up becoming a professor?
I had two young children by the time I had finished graduate school. Grants did not provide sufficient income to support them nor did the occasional sale so I applied for many teaching jobs at all levels but none were available. I finally found a stable job laying out monuments in the far East End of Montreal. I would bike to the factory. The owner of the company was sympathetic enough to let me take Wednesdays off for my art career.
One day I got a phone call from Dawson College asking if I could organize an evening course in silkscreen. I took the job and worked evenings for a couple of years at the same time as I worked days at layout. Eventually I got more work at the College and let go of my day job. I simply kept working until about a decade later I found out that I had tenure.
What is the best experience you've had while teaching at Dawson College?
I have been teaching since the early 1980s so it is difficult to choose one experience. The interaction that I have with my students born and raised in a networked environment influences my thinking. An art school is a rich generator of culture. In our school, Faculty are genuinely supportive of each other's studio practice. There are, however, a couple of memories: When I began teaching there was a semester where we decided to merge the disciplines of a graduating year and teach a dozen students whatever they wanted. We collectively volunteered whatever skills we might have had to help in the projects. Class times were fluid and courses were interchangeable. At the final presentation we had objects and performances that ranged from paintings to furniture to a full-sized hut in the studio. It was never to be repeated because three of the participating Profs moved on to other jobs. I am still in contact with some of the students from that year, several of whom continued in an art practice. On another memorable moment, years later, I received an email from a student finishing graduate school. She wrote about a New Media course that she had attended, "Thank you for trying to teach me complex theories when I was young and stupid". I wrote back, "You were young, not stupid".
What was it like being an art student in the 60s and 70s?
The end of the 1960s was an exciting time to study art. The world seemed to be in a period of turmoil and political change at the same time that it was adapting to and empowering a large population of young people. The art world as well, appeared to be wide open to change. I began my studies on the prairies at a time when Clement Greenberg's Emma Lake Workshop Modernism ruled the Winnipeg School of Art. The foundation curriculum was very structured with tons of cutting and pasting. Painting and Drawing began traditionally enough but rapidly transposed into painted stripes. Because there were no graduate schools in Canada many of our Professors were American trained, as well, they were only eight to ten years older than us. I remember teasing one Prof about how his paintings imitated the current New York style, to which he responded, "Yeah, but I'm from New York."
Although classes were well organized and disciplined for those who wished to study art, most teachers, who appeared to be more interested in their own careers, let us do whatever we wished without much penalty because that was the sixties thing, so kids spent a lot of time in relationships, socializing, smoking weed, and going to parties
One Professor in second year, a monument in Canadian art, was more disciplined than others. I did not like the way he was teaching so we had a meeting and he suggested that if I were happy with a C+ I would no longer have to deal with him. I accepted the offer and a few years later when we met, I asked him about it. He said that he already knew that I'd be an artist. Another Prof wisely and succinctly pointed out that I had no sense of three-dimensionality. I did pass the course though. Strangely some of my favourite studios were in printmaking where I was allowed to audit without credit. I loved theory courses and my electives because they felt more like University. I'm still in contact with my printmaking and theory Profs. So out of all of this most rebelled against formal modernism and particularly art school. For example, I spent half of my third year drawing classes in the campus pub.
Fourth year was much more serious. We were given dedicated spaces to work and we actually did work. My paintings grew larger and began to look competent. I remember at the graduation cocktail party being asked what my plans were. When I said that I planned to be an artist the response was, "No, seriously what are you going to do?" It was like no one felt that there was a future in an art career.
How did you end up becoming a professor?
I had two young children by the time I had finished graduate school. Grants did not provide sufficient income to support them nor did the occasional sale so I applied for many teaching jobs at all levels but none were available. I finally found a stable job laying out monuments in the far East End of Montreal. I would bike to the factory. The owner of the company was sympathetic enough to let me take Wednesdays off for my art career.
One day I got a phone call from Dawson College asking if I could organize an evening course in silkscreen. I took the job and worked evenings for a couple of years at the same time as I worked days at layout. Eventually I got more work at the College and let go of my day job. I simply kept working until about a decade later I found out that I had tenure.
What is the best experience you've had while teaching at Dawson College?
I have been teaching since the early 1980s so it is difficult to choose one experience. The interaction that I have with my students born and raised in a networked environment influences my thinking. An art school is a rich generator of culture. In our school, Faculty are genuinely supportive of each other's studio practice. There are, however, a couple of memories: When I began teaching there was a semester where we decided to merge the disciplines of a graduating year and teach a dozen students whatever they wanted. We collectively volunteered whatever skills we might have had to help in the projects. Class times were fluid and courses were interchangeable. At the final presentation we had objects and performances that ranged from paintings to furniture to a full-sized hut in the studio. It was never to be repeated because three of the participating Profs moved on to other jobs. I am still in contact with some of the students from that year, several of whom continued in an art practice. On another memorable moment, years later, I received an email from a student finishing graduate school. She wrote about a New Media course that she had attended, "Thank you for trying to teach me complex theories when I was young and stupid". I wrote back, "You were young, not stupid".
Recently Canadian art has been stormed by memes ig accounts like Canadianartworldhaterz (the original), canadianartworldhaterzhaterz and c4nadianartworldlovers, do you think these accounts can influence Canadian art world?
On the thought that human culture rather than biology defined our species and that lived experience is merely the agent of technological evolution, biologist Richard Dawkins coined the term "meme" as a unit of human cultural transmission. A meme can emerge as collective thought. There is something happening with what is currently described as a meme but it's happening at the level of metaphor. I have noticed that the more aesthetically interesting an image might be, the less successfully it behaves as a meme. Memes are the ephemeral merging with the superficial thus becoming highly conceptual containers not unlike Duchamp's "Fountain". They can be mockery that comes from a collective felt sense of helplessness living in a world in transition. I was recently made aware by a couple of young artists visiting my studio of certain meme accounts on Facebook where the posts are less important than being a player. For example, subscribing to a hidden meme group will suddenly produce 500 adds to your regular account simply because you are aware of the group. You are conceptually absorbed into the network. This phenomenon should be of interest to any creator.
Because memes are cynical [for example, Trollface or Pepe] they can be construed as a metaphor for the current art world. A meme is a meaningless container for a replaceable comment and for many, it can represent the Canadian art environment, where you choose your container and adapt your talents to that meme. Looking into the ig accounts that you mentioned, I perused followers and everyone that I recognized was younger than their mid-twenties. That is enough of an indication that they are already changing the Canadian art world.
What is a container? Is it temporal?
I used the word container to describe a mundane object such as Marcel Duchamp's urinal that was discarded after Alfred Stieglitz documented it. The urinal had no value except to address complex questions about art in 1917. Similarly a meme can be a container. Recently a soap opera scene depicting a confused-looking Renata Sorrah was combined with mathematical symbols. Neither the soap opera nor the math have any intrinsic or aesthetic significance, however, combined with comments, it became an internationally recognized meme.
Art School students first learn the traditional materials and disciplines that were their preconception of art that first attracted them to study. But art is not an occupation where income depends on manual or mechanical skill. So rather than concentrate on one traditional discipline like sculpture, they very rapidly find it far more useful to learn the current subgroups of art culture that they heard their teachers discuss: studio art, conceptual, performance, mimetic realism, outsider stuff or even more succinctly, art for commercial galleries, art for artist-run spaces, art for lawyers offices, art for curators. They graduate to a practice with parameters defined within their chosen container. The notions from the Professor Doctor container are hardly relevant except to those who choose the same path. From within any container one feels that they are practising art until they become aware of a wider network at which point they either reject it or realize that art is far more complex that they had imagined. This brings me back to my earlier comment where I alluded that all art will be internet art after everyone realizes that civil society, including food distribution, transportation, health care, social organization, everything that defines us, is mediated through electronic networks.
I'm not quite certain of the connotation of "temporal". When I looked it up it means, "worldly rather than spiritual" and in that case, my idea of a container is certainly worldly. In art, it has traditionally been argued that music is temporal whereas painting is not. Nelson Goodman (1968) in, "Languages of Art " made a distinction between allographic art and autographic art. The first requires a two-step process (in Music, notes then interpretation). As long as you have the notes that are eternal, the interpretation is ethereal and intemporal. Autographic art exists in a unique copy that is invariably subject to physical decay (like paintings or photographs) and is therefore temporal. This distinction has become less evident with digital files where a picture for the first time in human history can be allographic by being stored through code. So in this sense, I suppose a container like a meme would be intemporal.
Penthesileia, 2011, acrylic on canvas, 274 x 1386 cm
You've done two versions of Penthsilea, one was an internet project in 2007, while the other one was a large painting in 2011. Are they related?
Yes, they are the same project. When Penthesilea was exhibited, it included Supercolumbine, Penthesilea as a live wiki blog on a networked computer, ten printed copies of the illustrated book version of Penthesilea and the 14 panel painting.
I was at work in my office close to the scene of the Dawson College shooting in September 2006. The whole thing shook me up a great deal and I made Supercolumbine (2007) as a means to deal with it. The work is based on the apology that Danny Ledonne (creator of "Supercolumbine Massacre RPG") posted after the shooting. In the piece I included every single school shooting that I could find before and after the Dawson event but at a certain point I realized that they were endless so that's where the project ended. It is actually the most visited of my on-line things. Essentially I changed the colour of each news report from black on white to white on black and archived a bunch of stuff about the shooters.
My Project Penthesilia came out of this and is a metaphor and a monument to the 14 female victims of the Montreal École Polytechnique massacre.
There is no original myth of Penthesilea since, myths are added to and revised throughout history and my revision is no less or more authentic than anyone else's. I set up an open wiki blog (that has since been destroyed by blackhat scammers) so that people could contribute to my research and the project. I really wanted to understand the mind of a mass shooter and found that Achilles was a perfect example from the classics. I couldn't bring myself to making him the protagonist and the Montreal Massacre was about killing women so I chose Penthesilea Queen of the amazon women. I knew nothing about her so I began my research and from that, retold the Penthesilea story sourcing classical texts and using the actual words of mass shooters. I published a limited edition of ten copies of the book complete with illustrations.
I painted the fourteen panels of Penthesilea as atonement. The Amazon died at the hand of Achilles and in my myth Artemis puts an end to him for I speculate that all who have lived such events fantasize disarming a coward. The painting itself describes a life. Something here might remind you of a loved one. Hands of unborn children are the stars in the sky, snow on the television.
You've done two versions of Penthsilea, one was an internet project in 2007, while the other one was a large painting in 2011. Are they related?
Yes, they are the same project. When Penthesilea was exhibited, it included Supercolumbine, Penthesilea as a live wiki blog on a networked computer, ten printed copies of the illustrated book version of Penthesilea and the 14 panel painting.
I was at work in my office close to the scene of the Dawson College shooting in September 2006. The whole thing shook me up a great deal and I made Supercolumbine (2007) as a means to deal with it. The work is based on the apology that Danny Ledonne (creator of "Supercolumbine Massacre RPG") posted after the shooting. In the piece I included every single school shooting that I could find before and after the Dawson event but at a certain point I realized that they were endless so that's where the project ended. It is actually the most visited of my on-line things. Essentially I changed the colour of each news report from black on white to white on black and archived a bunch of stuff about the shooters.
My Project Penthesilia came out of this and is a metaphor and a monument to the 14 female victims of the Montreal École Polytechnique massacre.
There is no original myth of Penthesilea since, myths are added to and revised throughout history and my revision is no less or more authentic than anyone else's. I set up an open wiki blog (that has since been destroyed by blackhat scammers) so that people could contribute to my research and the project. I really wanted to understand the mind of a mass shooter and found that Achilles was a perfect example from the classics. I couldn't bring myself to making him the protagonist and the Montreal Massacre was about killing women so I chose Penthesilea Queen of the amazon women. I knew nothing about her so I began my research and from that, retold the Penthesilea story sourcing classical texts and using the actual words of mass shooters. I published a limited edition of ten copies of the book complete with illustrations.
I painted the fourteen panels of Penthesilea as atonement. The Amazon died at the hand of Achilles and in my myth Artemis puts an end to him for I speculate that all who have lived such events fantasize disarming a coward. The painting itself describes a life. Something here might remind you of a loved one. Hands of unborn children are the stars in the sky, snow on the television.
Screenshot of Supercolumbine, 2007
Have you played the columbine rpg game?
No, I never played the game itself. I was more interested in the way the images in it have become iconic.
What did you learn from making Supercolumbine?
Supercolumbine is a "spoof" that replicates the images from a role-playing game about a mass shooting. As it evolved I added other school shootings to a black home page until the list dominated the piece. Each referenced link was headed by a “statement” by the creator of the rpg and led to web pages from news and memorial sites.
In May 2006 I began gathering files for a new project that would explore the mind of a mass gunman. It began to take the form of a documentary that gathered words and images through a wiki blog. My initial idea evolved into random images and metaphors. In September the same year, I found myself in the ironic and surreal experience of an actual shooting that remains one of the most unnerving moments in my life. From my initial notes I created Supercolumbine. My original intention was to create a work that would be perpetually updated.
I used the computer and network to share and understand my physical reactions to being frightened. I was also being political but at a certain point the graphics and coding became more interesting and aesthetic to me, while gathering information on what seemed to be an endless string of events was emotionally tiring so I had to finish it.
In the course of the project, I learned a great deal about the "pseudocommando", a mass murderer who kills in public during the daytime and expects to be killed. I chose Supercolumbine because perversely, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold had become popular with young people playing games in their parent's basements. The computer game itself, does somehow try to approach the absurd.
What Supercolumbine taught me was that the electronic world can be confused with real life. I learned that there have been school shootings by the mentally ill, others as the result of criminal acts but the most dangerous ones, like the one I experienced, have been by young people who were otherwise normal to the point of banal. But the pseudocommando cannot carry out his act before dehumanizing his victims. There is a corner in the mind of the shooters that twists things. On a computer monitor everything looks equal. In our time, reality was challenged first by the camera obscura, then film and now through information technologies. As the network evolves, interaction between the imaginary and concrete is common with demarcations becoming ambiguous. Identity, gender and physical appearance are misleading as there is no way to distinguish a true dialogue from a false, a being from a mythical entity or an authentic voice from an impostor. Illusion is perceived as reality. When a pseudocommando confuses illusion with reality there are victims in real life.
I discovered that in a socially conscious art work, the voyeur aspect is, unfortunately, as interesting as the aesthetics.
Eyes, 2015, oil on canvas, 1,11 x ,67 m
What would you do if you had a time travel device?, like the car in "Back to the Future", would you change anything?
I think I would have worked at being more open and less cynical in my thirties. It is a frustrating time for any artist because you are dependent on meaningless jobs to support your art and it always seems that someone else is doing better. I neglected the regular office work required in a serious art career and I inadvertently turned down a lot of opportunities through bitterness or being overly critical of others. I actually did a piece last year on Newhive, My Art Practice So Far that deals exactly with such issues. I realize now that the success of anyone in the creator's community is to be celebrated and encouraged.
What would you do if you had a time travel device?, like the car in "Back to the Future", would you change anything?
I think I would have worked at being more open and less cynical in my thirties. It is a frustrating time for any artist because you are dependent on meaningless jobs to support your art and it always seems that someone else is doing better. I neglected the regular office work required in a serious art career and I inadvertently turned down a lot of opportunities through bitterness or being overly critical of others. I actually did a piece last year on Newhive, My Art Practice So Far that deals exactly with such issues. I realize now that the success of anyone in the creator's community is to be celebrated and encouraged.
