viDEO savant and Friends w/dancers, New Genres Festival, 2012
Could you better describe the interaction between musicians and videographers in your works?
The musicians are taking a similar approach, they are all reacting to the changing images but they are also responding to each other.
The model might be thought of analogous to the tradition of improvisation in jazz. I have a collection of almost a thousand of small video loops, which I have built up over time, and I always make some new ones for every show.
t is a complex, fluid, dynamic and one that I find very exciting to participate in. Where do you get the ideas for your work? Inspiration comes from many places, other artists’ work, cinema, music, books, and travel all inspire me. The work also drives itself. Most projects are derived from things that happened in creating previous artworks. Discovery leads to investigation, which leads to discovery.
Typically I start by selecting from these to build a palette of images, which I draw on during the show. I choose about 100 for any one performance, many more than I will actually use. This selection might be linked by a theme or a group of themes.
How has your history influenced the way you produce art?
I devise an initial arrangement, a starting sequence of 5 to 10 clips and another sequence for an ending. This is somewhat analogous to the tune or melody that might be the basis for improvisation in music. Once the sequence starts and the musicians begin responding to the images, I can draw from my palette at will. The individual clips are fairly plastic; I can manipulate them in any number of ways. I also layer the images on top of each other and move from one group to the next in a manner that can be either jagged or smooth. All these decisions are made in response to the music and the changes that are happening there.
Some specific incidents in my youth, with light shows and rock and roll, deeply impressed me and led me to the live video work I’m doing today. Residencies at the Experimental TV Center, put me in touch with the video signal as a plastic thing to be manipulated rather than seeing the image as essentially a fixed object produced by a camera. An initial collaboration with a friend, Matt Dibble, led to the formation of my first “video band”.
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