AD: Maybe I just feel the need to contest Bill Gates, but I would say that he's rephrasing the Horatio Alger myth, or in other words underestimating factors other than one's ability to focus. If Bill Gates set out to conquer the computing world today, he could not do it with a modest piece of software like MS-DOS (the product that catapulted Microsoft into big business). So he was lucky as well as focused. With regard to "challenging every random thing," I agree that it's important to remain devoted to a manageable range of issues. For an artist to be widely regarded as a success, s/he needs to do or to make something recognizable, and that recognition usually stems from some sort of repeated and perfected behavior, rather than from "any random thing." Of course there are exceptions, artists whose work is rather eclectic or who challenge a lot of things; but they often become known for early work that, like MS-DOS, happens to be popular and lucrative. My own personal success has probably been limited by my impulse to challenge things like the role of the artist and the function of the image. Those sorts of challenges are not random, however. They are essential to an art that aspires to be more than ornamentation or entertainment.
MS: You organize your Space Invaders piece to resemble a video game, with missiles and fancy graphics, but there's no score and consequently no game. Do you find yourself in competition with the entertainment business? Such a financially and socially massive enterprise is bound to come out ahead. The student newspaper at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago recently ran an article comparing Mortal Kombat to the Claude Monet exhibit--the largest and most profitable exhibit the museum has ever mounted--and it shouldn't surprise you that Mortal Kombat grosses a thousand times more than Monet.
AD: Well I guess I deserve this sort of question, because I released Space Invaders Act 1732 too soon. I don't consider it finished, because in its finished form I can imagine it being distributed widely--virally almost. Even though it doesn't adhere to traditional game objectives, it's still fascinating. Whenever I start it up in a public place, people come over to find out what it is. They're not used to seeing trademarks in that sort of context. What I set out to do was not simply to "challenge" corporate power, I wanted to make something that could fit into the game niche--i.e. distributable over the internet, viewable on a personal computer--that poses questions about the symbols and narratives of other games. The "missiles" you mention are in fact the words from the House legislation Act 1732 prohibiting space advertising, so people who play the "game" are armed with legal rhetoric. Judging by what I see in video arcades, and by the figures you cite concerning Mortal Kombat, video games are a tremendously important influence on American minds, particularly those of young people. And yet there are very few serious critiques of their content. That's changing. Nonetheless, the majority of the articles published about video games are in magazines supported by video game advertising. So, even if my game isn't finished, or even fun, I think it's important to begin bouncing alternative narratives around culture space.
MS: How about the calendar? Is it just something you do now because you have for, what, twenty years? Or can you incorporate your calendar into your overall objective? Chain-type bookstores and greeting card stores allot a generous amount of space for really ugly calendars most of which tie in to corporate campaigns for TV shows, movies, sports teams, and novelty books. Speaking for myself, I always feel good to be using an Andy Calendar as an alternative to a FRIENDS or Sports Illustrated calendar.
AD: I'm not sure which overall objective you're referring to. I find that it serves as a cost effective Christmas/Hannukah gift.... Probably you're asking if it's really art or just some weird thing I do, and I think it's a little bit of both. It's "challenging"--I try to make it better every year. It forces me to reveal what I've been doing in my spare time. I don't expect to market it in the near future, though.
MS: How do you like France? Are you ever coming back? Why not Prague or Galway or the Ivory Coast?
AD: Making pictures can be an isolating endeavor, so I enjoy being among a group of people who are developing creative projects. The people at ENSAD (Ecole Nationale Superieure des Arts Decoratifs) have been nice enough to let me use their facilities for the year and they don't ask much in return. The work that I'm doing doesn't demand that I be in France--I'm not occupied with observing the landscape--so in that sense all of the places you mention would do just as well. I'm more concerned with the media landscape these days, which is increasingly familiar whether in Cote d'Ivoire or France. In Africa, the movies are almost entirely imported, and in France 70% of the radio and movies are coming from America. These imbalances of exchange have made me curious about other places. It's not just a nostalgia for cultures that are being swallowed up, its an effort to understand the seductiveness of American media. It's not universal. That African music dominates African radio, for example, suggests to me that affordable production equipment and easy distribution can make cultural imperialism less heinous.
MS: You can work anywhere because you work in a medium that is divorced from geography, and I suppose the proliferation of computers might ultimately have a democratizing effect, with political and medical information being transmitted to the farthest reaches, but I worry about what it means for art. It's more than nostalgia that makes me appreciate a Dubliner's affection for Joyce or even a Californian's feeling for David Hockney. This factor applies to artists from places I've never been: I couldn't appreciate Anselm Kiefer without knowing something about Germany and German history. Now that I realize that I'll probably spend the rest of my life in Chicago, I've been reading all I can about the city and trying to bring some sense of Chicago into my own writing. There's more to a place than its landscape, and when whatever it is is missing from a work of art, that work of art feels unapproachable.
AD: It's true that I'm a bit uprooted these days, but I'm certainly not becoming a French artist. I think that being abroad, like digging at home, helps you to see "where you came from." With regard to the divorce from geography and history, I'm inclined to believe that the computer can be used like paintings and books to represent places and events. As I've argued before (Mall of the Wild) it would be ecologically catastrophic for all of the earth's inhabitants to visit everywhere else. So we are obliged to learn about other places through media. You can dig in books, somebody else can dig through the internet. A lot of people using the network discover that there are others in remote places who share their interests, which can be a very effective means of finding out exactly what you want to know about other places. As I see it, the main problem is that the interested parties that shape mass media don't value the sorts of historical and geographical rootedness that you mention. They only care about name recognition. One reason the World Wide Web has grown so quickly is that people are finally able to contest the hegemony of the major media institutions, meaning that more individuals and groups are diffusing their views. A lot of those "new" perspectives are less stimulating than "Bay Watch", but I've found many projects that reflect a deep commitment to communities, schools, and the environment.
MS: Last time I saw you we talked about copyright issues. Neither one of us knew what to do with intellectual property in the age of the Internet. Have you come up with any solutions since then?
AD: Law in general is rigged in favor of the rich and powerful, so when new phenomena like network distribution and digital reproduction come along and make possible a reversal in the trend toward centralization of power in mass media, I don't want to see new laws, or even the extension of old ones, that will prop up the bloated media tyrants of the present. I recently read a Time magazine article about piracy, and according to them "we" (ie. the software industry) lose $15.2 billion annually because of it. (The only statistics they bother to cite are provided by the Business Software Alliance, which exacerbates the already nearly arbitrary value placed on softare.) But I'm convinced that many people gain from piracy, so I would like very much to see the internet render copyright moot. Shareware, which translates as "pay what you wish, or what you can" is appealing to me. As an artist and programmer, this attitude poses problems concerning how to earn a living, and how to compete with "content providers" that advertise. Still it seems to me that, considering per capita income in the third world, most of the people whining about what they stand to lose have enough money and too little soul. Of course that's just my outlook, you'll have to decide for yourself.
MS: Do you enter a different state of consciousness when writing a computer program? I don't mean to dwell on Bill Gates, but I read an interview where he was describing the initial marathon session of writing what I guess became DOS, during which time he rarely slept, and when he did sleep, he dreamed in code. It reminded me of the way artists sometimes describe the trancelike states they enter when making art.
AD: I dream in C language sometimes. I've actually conceived of algorithms while asleep, and then wake up wanting to get it down before I forget it all. Programming is only a means to an end for me, though, it's not something I use to communicate with people around me. So when I start dreaming like that I usually think, "I've got to stop spending so much time in front of the computer." It can be satisfying to work with that sort of language, though, because it's readily apparent whether the computer understood what you wrote. You don't have the ambiguity of natural language, such as when students nod but don't understand what you're talking about. Students don't crash when you say something outlandish, however.
MS: You close your essay "Mall of the Wild" with a story about a bear and the words, "I'm looking for a better ending," which is more comforting than the last word of your Honors English thesis, which was, I believe, "Huh?". What's your idea of the perfect ending and can you give any examples?
AD: forthcoming