approachable, and what gives the strongest tentacles for access and understanding for readers and viewers. What’s mundane is also most intimate. Only my lover knows the way I squeeze my toothpaste out of its tube. I love technology, too, and I like making it just another mundane material of my everyday life. I don’t believe that technology should be fetishized or put on a pedestal, just like I don’t believe that it should be lamented or catastrophize. I do believe it should be approached, engaged with, and toyed with, as if it were just another potato chip in a big bowl of Utz.
What is your relationship with videorecording devices? I tend to use the cheapest and simplest means possible to make videos. Switch was shot entirely with a Kodak Zi8 Pocket camera, which is sort of like a Flip cam. Sometimes I even shoot footage with the built-in iSight camera on my Mac. I tend to care more about getting lots of ideas germinated, prototyped, shot, and distributed out into the world than I care about superior quality of footage. As I work more and more with video, this is beginning to change for me -- but mostly because my cheap cameras keep breaking.
Your work focuses on the border that between the "digital" and the "analog". Could you explain what these terms exactly represent for you? I use the word “digital” to refer to things that are technological, that are plugged-in, and that are in the realm of new media, and the word “analog” to refer to things that are
non-technological, unplugged, and more old-school. I know this isn’t the standard definition of the words, but it’s their gist. It used to be the case that these worlds were really separate: either a TV was on or off; either you were online or you weren’t; either you were out to dinner with your friend or you were talking to your mom on the telephone, but now both. Increasingly I see that the divisions between these world have begun to erode. Today our identities reside both in our physical selves as well as on our Facebook walls; QR codes frequently lead us from physical objects such as bus stops and museum exhibits to sites online; and children mistakenly use the multitouch gestures of iPhones in attempts to zoom pictures in physical photo albums. As these boundaries erode, they leave behind fascinating and cultural residues, or imprints, of their former divisions. This is what I like to explore with my work. I often find myself making video work and installations that aim to cast a spotlight on this cultural residue in an effort to form a critical understanding of contemporary culture as both saturated by and resisting new media technologies, and increasingly, as unable to tell the difference between this saturation and resistance. In his essay "Beyond the pleasure principle" Freud depicted for the first time the biological instinct directed toward the organism's return to the inorganic state. Do you think that today technology can offer us a reassuring instinct de mort?
I don’t really think so. I think more than anything technology tends to offer us a reassuring feeling that things can live forever, that everything can be remembered, and that we can be immortalized. Computer memory seems cheap and infinite. Our Facebook walls live on after we die -- even if no one checks them. We freeze moments with photographs, videos, animated gifs, and so on. I think technology wants to always be new: we want a new iPhone, we want newer updates on Twitter, we newer maps and we work hard to keep our devices looking new by covering them with cases, screen protectors, and other prophylactic sheaths as if they were fancy sofas in our grandmother’s houses. This is why I love broken devices, because they shatter these illusions.
What are your next projects? I’m working on a few different projects right now. I’m making a new video series called My iPhone is Everything, where iPhones and iPads are recast as objects that they could never really be. In one video, a woman rubs a block of cheddar cheese on the surface of her iPad as if it were a cheese grater, and in another a man in spandex lifts two iPhones as if they were heavy dumbbells. As these devices become our technological Swiss army knives, My iPhone is Everything questions whether technology can really do everything. I’m also working on a set of videos where I use the Apple multi-touch gestures to zoom my own image on video. And I’m working on another project where I shoot footage from the built-in cameras on the devices in Apple stores -- its laptops, desktops, tablets, and phones. I don’t know how I became so Mac-centric, it just happened one day. I think it happened because I like looking at how technology has become increasingly totemic -- and fetishized, as you say -- and the ultimate totem or fetish is the shiny chrome Apple product on a white background with a halo of lights around it, as if it were delivered to us from some sort of digital heaven.
Frames from "Switch"