Matthew Weinstein
This interview, previously unpublished, took place in Matthew Weinstein’s studio in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, where he walked me through his new work Ana Kavan: The Living End — his first experiment with interactive digital animation — and several paintings in progress.
SEAN CAPONE: This is my first interview for this series, so thanks for welcoming me. Just to set the stage, my goal is to create a conversation about the practice of animation, of animation as ‘art’. Historically animation has incorporated a huge spectrum of techniques and materials: painting, drawing cartooning, as we know, but also film & photography, puppetry, and now CGI & digital production. The history of animation is, you could say, one that parallels the development of technology itself. Technology seems to be an intrinsic characteristic of the medium, yet old techniques are not discarded in favor of the new. What was your particular point of entry into animation: as a painter, a filmmaker, a technologist, or what?
MATTHEW WEINSTEIN: I was doing screenwriting in LA, and I became interested in animation because I kept pitching Disney, and I thought it was maybe a sign. I realized I didn’t want to go into commercial animation, and I thought about different art gestures that have taken techniques and media from non-art sources. Warhol, an obvious example, the Pictures Generation, graphic design, commercial photography. And I thought that simple readymade translation from one field to another becomes really profound. So, with computer animation, to transplant that into the art world was like an experiment. The way my work was different was I was using this pseudo-narrative, Pixar level of animation where there was music, talking, singing, a talking animal. So for me it was really like “how non-art could you get?” and then infuse it with conceptual, philosophical ideas. It was modeled on the Pictures Generation strategy.
SC: The idea of the monologue, the recitation, that is so prevalent in your work also seems to come from a theatrical tradition. More so than a cinematic structure of dialogue, characters, and plot. Were you working in theater?
MW: Yeah I’ve worked in theater, and acted. The reason I work with actors well is because I’ve been directed, I know what you can ask an actor to do. I think I understand how to get a performance out of an actor and not offend them. I really admire the craft of acting, I don’t look down on it, I don’t look down on entertainment. And that’s why this medium also excited me — I thought what better way to express my contempt for the high/low idea about art than to take a medium which most people find, frankly, obnoxious.
SC: Then why construct these works as films as opposed to live performance works? Because if you’re talking about finding an entry point into the art world, as opposed to the entertainment world, the art world seems more accepting of performance art, theater, of the kind of performative propositions you’re making.
MW: I feel like what I’m giving you is theater as a ‘quality’. There is this story, a monologue, they don’t usually make sense, but they’re there. And so, you have a sense of this character, this being, trying to relay information to you. My pieces are often written in the way that you think before you fall asleep — non-sequential thoughts, desperately trying to explain ideas that get mangled. So I’m saying: here is this theater reference but it this isn’t theater, here is this children’s animated movie but it’s not that. It gets close enough to all these things that people tend to not like in their art, and then doesn’t totally deliver them.
SC: What was the process when you first started making films?
MW: The thing that inspired my first animated film, a fish floating in space ... she was a telemarketer with her little flip-phone, making calls into the void trying to sell people things which she didn’t know what they were. She thinks the way you think a fish would think — every 30 seconds starting over, or starting a new narrative. What inspired this was that B-movie The Brain That Wouldn’t Die — the woman’s detached head in the lab — not only is she just this bodiless being, but she’s a pain in the ass, and also, she becomes psychic. I thought, what a perfect image of the ‘artist’.
SC: That’s such an old sci-fi idea. Once the mind is liberated from the flesh, then it attains a kind of supernatural consciousness with special powers.
MW: It’s very Platonic, very subject/object, body/mind. That head is a perfect symbol of an ‘artist’, just this limbless mind in a basement trying to communicate with the people upstairs...
SC: So the severed head became a fish?
MW: Yeah, I was going to actually do a version with a head and a monologue coming out of it, but that felt like camp, and I’m not really interested in camp. A fish looks just like a floating head, and I was in Tokyo looking at these carp, and when you go like that <claps hands together> the carp come, and I thought it’s so strange that fish know us, they see us, and you don’t think that beings in different environments acknowledge us. Japanese carp really feel like dogs — and I thought, there’s this history of talking animals in animation. The staple of animation is probably talking animals. So why not try and engage with animal consciousness as all consciousness, and work through ideas I’ve had that we share consciousness with all beings. So I created this fish that is trying in impossible ways to reach something outside of her environment.
SC: A telemarketer in a cubicle, reaching out through technology... no idea if she’s talking to someone. Like a pirate radio station.
MW: Yeah. Or old cable access TV shows. So it became a very melancholy piece which undercut everything you expect computer animation to be. Which is what my work has been for years now.
still from É Lobro (2015), 3D animated film.
SC: I want to ask you about your subject matter. This library of forms you draw upon. You said you weren’t attracted to camp, but I do feel like you have an attraction to kitsch. The cocktail umbrellas, the lens flares, the Asian decoration, the fish and pig that look like little gift shop figurines, and so on.
MW: I’d say I’m not attracted to kitsch, I’d say I just have terrible taste. <laughter> I genuinely love these things, I’m so much more excited by things like that than a lot of art I look at.
SC: At first, I couldn’t figure out where you were coming from. It was actually the lens flares throughout your work that crystallized it for me. I was already thinking about lens flares as a kind of kitschy effect that serves as a stand-in for some preconceived feeling, as a way to sneak ‘craft’ into an art conversation. Introducing fake aberrations that we feel are more ‘authentic’.
MW: <laughs> Like artificially aged denim. It’s all fake — in digital film there’s programs that make these lens flares. Like artificially aged jeans, we are attracted to them because they represent some kind of lived experience. It’s a con.
SC: It’s one that you’ve taken to a whole other level here. What you’ve done in The Living End, all these chromatic aberrations and overdone lens-flare effects, you’re pushing the technology to its own breaking point. The oversaturated light forms that it produces becomes a kind of psychic architecture overlaid on the character.
MW: That’s a good point. In the sense that the lens flares, now that I’m working with a gaming engine, they are based on actual aberration, they are almost more real or as real as classic film lens flares. They’re actually occurring.
SC: But they don’t have to be there. They’re meant to simulate real world optics.
MW: But the fact that they fragment into these geometric patterns because the gaming engine can’t keep up with the demands of constantly making them, means there is a genuine artifact. Whereas a lens flare in a digital film is completely artificial — it’s actually highly intentional. The flares in my new film are not intentional, they’re actual fuck-ups, so they have some integrity within the language of the game engine.
SC: The game engine creates its own ‘authenticity’. I find it interesting how all these cinematographers and opticians spent years trying to eliminate these very artifacts from filmmaking technology, which we now turn to, to express authenticity.
MW: And you have sci-fi, and you have the lens flares taken to insane billion-dollar extremes. And that’s why I’ve been also painted images of sci-fi lens flares for about six years now, for me it’s the perfect image for sublime artificiality.
SC: I’m looking at this lens flare painting across from us now, and I’m thinking of Romanticism, the Romantic Sublime, or those ‘Assumption of the Virgin’ ceiling paintings, where the lens flare forms a kind of spiritual radial vortex...
MW: Well there’s nothing more sci-fi than the Baroque.
SC: In a way, sci-fi never really moved past most of the ideas laid out in that period.
MW: Which is another thing I really love about computer animation. There’s this idea from Postmodernism that all contemporary art is necessarily routed through Modernism. Which I’ve always found incredibly assumptive. Why? With computer animation, it goes from the Baroque to now, it jumps over absolutely everything else. When contemporary art became a discourse around ‘flatness’ or ‘conceptualism’, no one ever thought about space, or perspective, or Z-space (except artists who were referred to as retrograde or traditional, not contemporary). So, I was so excited, because this is a medium where no one can talk about my work at all in terms of Modernism. It’s a statement saying, that’s just not my reference. I’m not against it, I’m not for it ... it’s just not my reference. Nor is my reference the Baroque. It’s saying the reference has to come from something a lot more heterogeneous than re-routing Modernist tropes. This medium never existed, as I use it, in High Modernism.
SC: Computer animation as your choice of using it, as opposed to sitting down and hand-drawing traditional animation...
MW: Right. I’ve eliminated drawing so in a sense, it really does go from Baroque atmospheric deep space, and all of a sudden, there’s computer animation as if nothing else happened.
still from Anna Kavan: The Living End (2017).
SC: Your earlier films referenced the idea of being ‘self generated’... having no reference within the physical world. Now with the gaming engine you’ve been able to manifest that almost completely. Not 100% but you’ve gotten closer to eliminating those referents. There’s still a human figure, a specific body there.
MW: Well, I have a person talking. The reason I love animation is because I always want general concepts, not specific, and I try to avoid empathy. I did that piece The Childhood of Bertolt Brecht, interested in the idea of theater without empathy. In this new piece The Living End, she’s speaking, but I asked the actress, Hope Davis, to tell her story as if she’s reading a story about someone else. The gestures she’s making are all Japanese tea ceremony, which is a way of saying — she can’t act, really, because her gestures aren’t connected to her voice — it’s so the narrative doesn’t announce its own importance, it’s just sort of there for whoever wants to follow it. But I don’t care if someone comes in at the middle or the beginning.
SC: The point of audience entry into the work — something I’ve noticed is this obsession with the idea of ‘storytelling’. I’m putting that in scare-quotes. In popular culture, film culture, the media seems enamored with the concept of people telling stories. What about animation as a way to defy that ... to create an abstraction, an atmosphere, a non-sequential effect? You’re not working narratively per se, but there are bodies, there are characters telling stories, with actions and expectations that things will progress and things will ‘happen’ if you continue to watch.
MW: We’re told on and on that motion pictures are narrative ... with very few exceptions, and even then we apply narrative because they begin and they end. You know, I was watching Blade Runner 2 — whatever, terrible — and there’s a huge hole in the plot. The thing doesn’t make sense. In fact, every time I see a big expensive movie the plot is completely fucked up. But we close the ends ourselves. They made a huge movie with a terrible script, in the original Blade Runner they had to add a narration to it because it made absolutely no sense...
SC: I hate movies with voiceover exposition. Famously, perhaps apocryphally, it’s said that Harrison Ford deliberately did the voiceover in a flat, terrible monotone as a way of dissuading the producers from including it.
MW: Yeah... but in a sense, we crave the version without the narrative. The director’s cut. We accept so much non-narrative in popular culture. A movie like Mulholland Drive or Twin Peaks is the extreme example where people kept speculating about what really happened...but nothing happened.
SC: In the context of animation and cartoons, one of my early touchstones was [Peter Chung’s series] Aeon Flux. If you remember Aeon, she would die at the end of every episode — she would flub her mission, always some pointlessly violent and abstract mission; she would fail at it, and the episode would end.
MW: It’s like “who killed Kenny”. I love things like that. We’re trained to accept so much incongruity. Which is why one could make an easy step from there to our President. We’re basically beings that do understand non-narrative. We accept it, and we create a psychology, a fake narrative about yourself to replace the fucked-up narrative about yourself.
SC: Well, in a larger sense. At least me, I’m always thinking about the idea of audience expectation. I think about how the piece functions in a space, the viewership and what people might expect. The investment of time which is much higher in a moving image piece, the time people are asked to give ... and the disappointment, much more profound... <laughs>
MW: There’s something really really sad about a gallery with a video playing to nobody, more so than a gallery with a bunch of paintings that no one is looking at. You sense “I’ve asked too much of people. I’ve failed because I wanted them to come in and look at my piece for 17 minutes, and no one has 17 minutes and what was I thinking?”
SC: Shouldn’t it be all about the work and the artist shouldn’t worry about the audience? Some artists, the idea of the audience is not important to them.
MW: I just want an audience. My job is to communicate, without that I don’t know what the meaning of art is. It would just be a series of luxury objects with no social function. Because I have a political view of life and art, I don’t understand art outside of social and political life. So yes, I create these things and they have a certain familiarity because of the technique I use, and they don’t announce their own seriousness... they don’t say “you’re going to be bored by this because it’s video art”...
“I just want an audience. My job is to communicate, without that I don’t know what the meaning of art is. It would just be a series of luxury objects with no social function. Because I have a political view of life and art, I don’t understand art outside of social and political life.”
SC: Do you think of your work as video art, or does it operate in some other sphere?
MW: I’ll always be a painter, and I have a very painterly idea about what these things are and what they’re supposed to do. The way painting seduces with materiality, beauty, light, these qualities... that is primarily what I think about with these pieces once the narrative has been internalized. It’s really about making something that has the complexity and seduction of a really good painting. Even though I hate the ‘moving painting’ form of animation. I’m not talking about that at all.
SC: Ha. Wait, what do you mean — like, Bill Viola kind of work?
MW: Not just that, it’s more like ‘a watercolor that grows’, an image that constructs itself... really hokey. I’m talking about the way one experiences painting with their body. I make pieces that have a certain tactility — they’re haptic, without being able to be touched. Which is what I loved about Toy Story, you wanted to grab these things and pull them off the screen.
SC: Well, what’s your view on animated artwork that is just a pure exploration of form? In the way that a painter would really get off just on the sensuousness of the material, on seeing what a particular technology can do visually?
MW: That’s the kind of ‘moving painting’ thing that I don’t find interesting. Nothing is intrinsically bad. What I find interesting in animation is its base, its backstory, is in narrative.
SC: I’ve never seen you go off and just purely explore an environment in an abstract way, even though digital animation gives you that — it’s pretty low stakes in terms of time wasted, experimenting. The process of traditional animation is less free form.
MW: I’m trying to use animation that functions in the legacy of the medium. I think it could be interesting to do animation that doesn’t involve the baseline condition of narrative, but it’s not a rupture that excites me. Because, you can’t make it into ‘art’ too much. You have to keep the bad taste in there.
SC: You said in a previous interview, you wanted your work to “pass.” I know what you meant was you wanted it to work within the bounds of professional entertainment as well as art, but I think there’s a code in there somewhere about “passing in the straight world”.
MW: Yes, that’s what I meant. Like gender illusionists, they only pass in the right lighting. That’s what my work is like. No one’s going to look at it and say “Whoa, that’s like Pixar.” If you showed my work in a movie theater filled with children, they would think it’s boring and badly done. In an art context, it is interesting, because it does pass in that way, like [dumb jock voice] “whoa, that’s a dude!?”
Celestial Sea, Giant, Starring Elizabeth Taylor (2013), acrylic on canvas
SC: <laughter> Well, where I was going with that — there’s an inescapable question of entertainment and spectacle that gets attached to work with high production values. Seamless production values vs. showing the ragged edges. By adopting that strategy, it’s like you’re trying to say the production values are part of the material or the very idea.
MW: Yeah, I refer to that because I’m using the medium in a way that comes out of its own history. If you gave me a hundred million dollars to make my work, I would make many many pieces that look exactly like my work. I wouldn’t take the opportunity to make Pixar, I don’t think that adds meaning. I think I’m doing the independent-film version of computer animation. To make it look more ‘amazing’ might please people, but...
SC: But now we’re at a point, culturally, where lots of people are out there making independent animated films using these high-end production tools. That world does exist. They’re getting Oscar nominations. So why have you eschewed the festival and screening world?
MW: That’s not my world, my work only makes sense to me in art galleries and museums. I don’t do screenings, I don’t want to be in festivals. I don’t get what I get out of it. To me it seems like a kind of exploitation of content.
SC: But, just to challenge you, isn’t that also part of the very baseline nature of film and animation? It’s presented in this cinematic context. It’s a movie.
MW: Like every artist, you choose the parts of the medium you want and throw out the rest. For me, the system of film distribution isn’t interesting — those are questions answered by other artists. The transplantation of the medium from “movies designed to indoctrinate children” into the art world is the experiment I’m interested in. The familiarity for me is the art audience, or the audience that wanders into the gallery, and is surprised to see something that looks familiar to them. Also I don’t want these things out there in a mass way, I don’t think they’re appropriate. They don’t give what a mass distributed film would give. They’re made for people who are pre-acquainted with art ideas.
SC: So do artists working with film & video, more generally, do they want to enter into the screening & distribution form of circulation, or do they want to enter into the art world form of ‘artificial scarcity’ with limited editions and prints. You made it clear you want to maintain control where your work ends up. With digital, now, works can circulate and reproduce easily, versus the old days of videotape and DVDs which were themselves a kind of object. Can we talk about the actual ‘objecthood’ of The Living End and how you’re selling this piece as an art object?
MW: Yeah. It’s sold, in an edition of 3. In this case it’s a gaming computer with the piece installed on it, a Kinect camera, two thermal sensors, in a custom case; a booklet on how to put it together and a digital print of the character’s face, and an instruction manual that’s signed that serves as a Certificate Of Authenticity. There’s also the actual game, the piece which is an .exe file on a thumb drive, if they want to replace the computer. The code is open source so that can also be upgraded. You’re not stuck with this equipment, there’s an interpretive potential. I’ve no problem with the technology being upgraded in the future. In fact I’m upgrading it for the next museum show. There’s a mutability to it, ownership is very different.
SC: What are your concerns with preservation? A future curator unpacking the work after you’re dead?
MW: Any computer kid can put it together in 15 minutes, the content is all together and however it can be viewed is authentic. I’m very loose with this sort of stuff — all I want is for my work to keep looking better as time goes by. You’re not saddled with this... Epson projector from 1997 for the rest of time. I am doing a single channel version of this, which is just the 3D animated character on a black background, telling the narrative — I want there to be a record of the performance, almost like an actress’ rehearsal of the piece.
SC: Well, that loops back to the idea of theater. Or, speaking of dance and choreography, some choreographers are content with the idea — like Merce Cunningham if I’m not mistaken? — that when they’re gone, so’s the work. And it’s up to whatever generation of people studying directly with the artist to keep the work alive. This is, in a sense, like the genre of instruction-based conceptual art and how it connects to now, with generative digital art.
MW: The point is, I’m really not that interested in technology <laughs>. Look, I got this call from the Denver Museum the other day, and they were like “what do we own? We’re trying to figure this out.” They own all these Nam June Paik pieces that use T.V. frequencies ... and now we don’t have T.V. frequencies. Nam June Paik was very, like, do whatever you need to do, he wasn’t proprietary, you don’t have to throw the piece out. We don’t have static anymore, so they have simulated static. Which to some artists would be unconscionable. I’m more on his side, just get the piece working to deliver the experience it’s designed to deliver.
Installation view of The Living End, Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University.
SC: So, with The Living End, you’ve created a piece where it seems to make sense for it to intrinsically be an ‘original object’. In order to understand it, it has to be viewed over time, with different people, to understand the subtleties of the biometric sensor readings that change over time...
MW: There’s also proprietary programming. The programming links the Kinect and thermal sensors to the piece. Without the inputs, the piece doesn’t run. Which I didn’t do because of ‘artificial scarcity’ reasons, I did it because I wanted the piece to seem like a living being. That without us... “if the tree falls in the forest if we’re not there, does it exist?”, and my answer to that was “no.”
SC: So, tell us about The Living End, what the piece is and what it’s about.
MW: The Living End came with my discovery of a British writer, Ana Kaven, who died in the ‘60s. I found one of her books in a used bookstore... she wrote sort of at the same time as shows like The Avengers and The Prisoner — British new wave Kafka-esque sci-fi fantasy, except she doesn’t include humor. Her work is very grim, highly imaginative. I got very influenced by her voice and the environments she set up. So I read all of her books many times, then I wrote a monologue as if I was her. Not using any of her narratives ... just in her voice. Then I thought “who’s saying this?” and I invented this woman who’s in many ways based on Ana Kaven’s biography...
SC: An avatar.
MW: Yes, and obviously, also, of me on some level. She was writing under a different name, and she had a nervous breakdown. Her early books were very normal, British novels. After her breakdown she came back as “Ana Kaven” writing these very strange, fantasy-driven Kafka-influenced novels. She also changed her appearance, she came back very thin with platinum blonde hair. Her vision of herself was very glamorous. So I created a character which was, I thought, her avatar of herself.
And then, I was thinking about Ana Kaven’s themes which were often about entrapment. There was a behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner from the 50s and 60s, he wrote a book called Walden 2, which describes a perfect behaviorist society, a utopic community like the one described in my piece. The town ’trains’ you, the town always give you a system of reward and ... not exactly punishment, but shunning. To improve your behavior and how you relate to society.
SC: So this is where the biometric feedback element of your video comes into play?
MW: Yes, and the story of the town, how she gets there. No one asks her any questions about herself, but she feels when she does things right, people warm to her. So I layered these two authors over each other, one scientist and one non-narrative fiction writer — they’re both saying very similar things. One who I admire, Ana Kaven, and one who I don’t admire, Skinner, and coming up with a monologue that expresses that commonality, then coming up with a system of interactivity which expresses it.
I was given this opportunity by Cornell University to work with interactivity. They gave me two computer programmers to add an interactive element to the piece. I kept saying, I really don’t like interactivity, I don’t like art that looks at you, or talks to you, or waves at you — can’t stand it. I think it’s everything I don’t like: the subject/object divide, the idea that we’re mental and that’s physical, it instantly makes art terrible. So what’s the opposite of that? What’s the phenomenological version of interactivity? One that’s non-mental, it’s more descriptive of what it is to ‘perceive’ and ‘be’. So I said “let’s design a system of anti-interactivity” and we had many discussions about what that is. We got medical thermal sensors and a Kinect [motion capture infrared camera] as a way of capturing heartbeat, body temperature, optical flow, the amount of people in the room — all these parameters.
So we had all these parameters but still, people could consciously fuck with them. They could jump up and down, get sweaty, etc. So then I thought, let’s route this information through these five, pseudo-random personality traits. Everything you do gets routed through the computer’s decision of how it wants to output it. We kept asking, how do you keep removing the viewer further and further away? To the point where it’s like a person that sees you but simply doesn’t care.
“I really don’t like interactivity, I don’t like art that looks at you, or talks to you, or waves at you — can’t stand it. It’s everything I don’t like: the subject/object divide, the idea that we’re mental and that’s physical, it instantly makes art terrible. So what’s the opposite of that? What’s the phenomenological version of interactivity? ”
SC: You showed me the video with the biometric overlay first. My reaction was that I wanted to get up and trigger the action somehow. I want to abuse the system in some way, like kids do when they go to an interactive exhibit in a museum. Overload it or get it to notice me somehow.
MW: I’ve had eight people in the room, and the piece was really mellow. Then I had this one person in the room and the piece was giving her all this magenta and red. It wasn’t based on her, something deep in the piece was deciding that it liked her. It does things that surprise me like it’s literal, but they’re not literal.
SC: The shifts in visual mood are imperceptible to the viewer — maybe noticeable over long periods of time. Which leads me to this thought. Another thing that seems intrinsic to animation is slowness. The production process, regardless of technique, is unavoidably tedious — so I’ve been thinking about the potential virtues of entering into this process of ‘thick time’. What does it mean to work slowly, even unenergetically, in the studio? Is the tedium just something you learn to deal with or does it create a space of meditativeness, deliberation?
MW: I think it does both. Another one of the reasons I think my pieces wouldn’t fly, won’t “go viral”, is that they’re kinda boring! They’re not exciting. You’re just listening to this... thing ... talk. I don’t give the audience a lot to entertain them. The camera work is floaty, hypnotic. The slowness of animation is good, it makes sense to me, but I also draw and paint. I couldn’t just make animation, I have to make things. I love doing watercolors because I can make something in a day. And honestly, I don’t animate — I have people I’ve been working with for 15 years, because I’m not good enough to do what I want to be done.
SC: I know animators who do work on that focused level of detailed world building. But you’re outsourcing, working remotely with your team.
MW: Remotely, but intimately. I don’t have to tell them what I want to their face. We all have this style that I’ve directed and that they’ve agreed is interesting. They know what the camera’s supposed to do — be a gentle, almost invisible camera — and the kind of rich lighting I tend to like.
SC: But working with programmers is so different. Were they presenting you with new technological ideas that opened up new avenues of visual exploration? Did you have an expectation of what this piece was going to look like?
MW: I had no idea what they were doing. For the first few months it was very conceptual. And then generally making connections, like the light changes colors when it reads my heartbeat. Then we became more artful and complicated with it, to where the input is miles away from the output. But they kept saying “this is just programming — we can either do this or we can’t do this.” So their attitude, which made me very calm, is they could say yes we can or no we can’t. Whereas with animation I’m used to “well maybe we can make this more like...”
SC: There’s more intuition involved.
MW: And also a lot more dreaming. It’s just language at the end of the day — very different from working on an art project. The programmers were actually solving ‘real’ problems, rather than the problems I create which are illusory, fantasy-based problems... <laughter>
SC: So, the marketing text for this piece would probably call it an “interactive VR animated experience”...
MW: ...that will disappoint you! I’ve been describing it as “disappointing interactivity”. Because it is! That’s the point, it’s a piss-take on interactivity, it’s a piss-take on AI. Because AI is just nonsense. The piece has this sort of mock-intelligence.
SC: Well, I don’t mean to insult the piece, but maybe this is a good place to bring this up. With the floating background, the minimal grid behind her, what I thought of was Max Headroom. But Max Headroom is a point of reference for me for all things. You have this pseudo-A.I. being performed deliberately in a comic, science fiction role.
MW: Yeah, Max Headroom is deeply important to the work we both do. Very influential to me, creating that fake-A.I. look.
SC: But I’m embarrassed in my Max Headroom references, I was literally just making floating heads. Whereas you were clever enough to turn the floating head into a fish.
MW: Haha, right. Most of the ideas that guided my work are phenomenological, which I like. It’s a more literary kind of philosophy, Explaining how we exist in the world, it’s a very nontechnical kind of philosophy. I think it was the phenomenologist Hubert Dreyfuss at M.I.T., he was called upon to talk to the people working in artificial intelligence. In a way, he trumped science, he said you can’t have a consciousness that isn’t embedded. Or an intelligence that isn’t embedded, because intelligence is linked to consciousness.
SC: Does that connect to what you were saying earlier about how the Living End character has become “worlded”?
MW: Yeah. In a sense, she has no beginning and no end. The story has a sequence, but ... like, you can say “okay, this is my story, I was born, and then I lived and then I died”. But the problem with that story is that you’re not conscious of when you were born, and you’ll never know exactly when you died. So in a sense that’s a fake narrative.
SC: Hmm. So we’re either just ‘being’ or we’re ‘nothing’?
MW: Yeah! Being and nothingness. I mean, it’s been said. It’s been written about!
Still from Cruising 1980 (2010), digital animation.