Dave Greber's The Fool, The Hierophant, The Devil and the Wheel
There's a rather distinct cadence to the way that people communicate in your pieces with characters often having their dialogue cut up, displaced and de-contextualized. It seems to simultaneously give them a stilted, artificial quality but also seems very true to how we're coming to communicate with text messages and the forced brevity of Twitter. Do you think that we're learning to speak from commercials?
Commercials, in their contemporary form, have their own built-in morality and sanity which are influencing the world in ways we don't fully understand yet. Is it possible to say anything "true" in the form of a commercial? Or, is the form, itself, inherently corrupt? A big-picture goal of my work is to fully harness the effectiveness of capitalist messages, for communication of real value, without satirizing them. I think we are all going through this struggle as we learn to re-communicate, every few years or so, with each new advent social media.
It seems that the majority of your videos are presented (even online) as loops - why do you think that you are drawn to the loop as a formal and narrative device?
Much of my work, exists in a sort of purgatory, where beginnings and endings aren't as apparent as in most forms of cinema. In my experience, exhibiting my work in the form of a linear-narrative leaves audiences baffled and uncomfortable. But a loop is a much more natural shape for my work. A loop gives the viewer an opportunity to linger with it if they are intrigued, or leave it behind if they want to. When I started giving the audience that power, my work became much more effective. There's a real elegant formal ...
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Michael Connor