iDMAa: Looking back at ten years, from the perspective of digital art/media/culture, what kind of things make you go “Oh my gosh! Look at what happened!”?

MC: Well, I think there are a lot of amazing artists that are using the technology in a really interesting way. And I actually thought of four… one was Andrea Polli, do you know her? Oh my God, I want to say Andrea Polli. You should look up this piece on the web called Particle Falls (http://vimeo.com/16336508). So, she is at U.C. Davis. She’s going to be a visiting artist for us this coming year, I think in the spring. She uses technology… she set up this device that measured particulate pollution in a city in California… I can’t remember the city, I want to say Santa Cruz but I might be wrong… and it translated that data into a visual that was projected against a building, so you literally saw the particles falling as light. When the pollution was heavier, the water was stronger; the waterfall was larger… when the pollution was light, the waterfall was very small. She also had a mobile app (http://www. andreapolli.com/studio/particle_falls/partigen_final2. html) that she made for the Droid, so when you go to it, it’s a blue surface and little dots are falling like raindrops, and when the pollution is high, it’s pouring. When the pollution is low, it’s not. She was able to visualize particulate pollution with an art project that was an installation, as well as on a mobile device. That is extraordinary to me!

iDMAa: Is it art or public service?

MC: I think it’s both; and that’s true for the four people I want to mention. Next one is Stephanie Rothenberg, and let me see if I can get the title of her piece… her piece is amazing. They’re all amazing pieces. It’s called Invisible Threads (http://www.emst.gr/commonwealth/?p=96 ). She interfaces a real installation where people can walk in with second life. She has set up a sweatshop factory in the third world to make designer jeans. People go to this boutique in a storefront and they order their designer jeans and then people in second life make them in the second life sweatshop. Then, they digitally send them to a printer and in the storefront boutique they are printed out. Then, they are sewn and the people get to walk away with the jeans. So do you understand how this is extraordinary art? Katrina Cizek has a piece called High Rise that was sponsored by the National Film Board of Canada, and she’s the most related to film. It’s an interactive piece on the web where she went to high rises… High rises have become the place for people to live in most countries in the world, especially in third world cities. So if you think of cities in South America, in India, in Asia… it’s almost like the high rises are like home factories… a way you warehouse people. So she went into these high rises and she shot videos of people who live in the high rises, and it’s just an extraordinary piece. In the past I think she would have made a conventional documentary but this is a piece where you get to click on it and there’s a BRML so you can look around at somebody’s place where they live in the high rise. Then, if you click on little links, then you get these little documentary parts. So there’s just amazing stuff out there that I think people have done with digital that I think of as art. That’s very political.

iDMAa: It seems like there’s a thread there… We think of digital as cold… Digital can be viewed or at least initially viewed as cold…

MC: Oh no, this is very human! It’s the way that they bring the human into the digital, but it’s also quite political. I think Annette is doing that also, in a very different way. She’s doing all this work on monocultures and how it’s an environmental project and how monoculture is destroying the environment. She uses a laser cutter in order to create these almost sculptural works that are quite amazing.

iDMAa: Just as a side thought… as someone who has read science fiction his whole life, it sounds like science fiction; do you know what I mean? This is the period of the beginning how culture was depicted in science fiction… this is what it always sounded like.

MC: Right! If you think of artists as creating culture… I mean, culture is created by multinationals. Disney, Microsoft, whatever… but it’s also created by artists. I think with the internet, with tablets, with smart phones, with laser cutters, all of this digital technology, that artists have figured out a way to create this wonderful art that is trying to change culture… both visual culture which is how we think of art, but also, political culture, whether it be where we live, the environment, the economy. That’s why I talked about these specific people.

iDMAa: How about your own work?

MC: Do I have to answer the questions?

iDMAa: I kind of think you do because, from my perspective, you’re someone whose work I’ve been digesting and loving for 40 years.

MC: So on some level, it’s really pushed my work in a new direction that’s very exciting, and so the digital has allowed me to explore narrative. The digital, which allows for both interactivity and non-linearity, has allowed me to look at those issues as they relate to narrative. At the simplest level, what keeps somebody clicking, right? We know with conventional filmmaking, what keeps the viewer in the seat is that the scene, for instance, always ends with a question. It’s never answered and you stay in your seat to find out: will they sleep together?

iDMAa: Most important question in Hollywood—will they sleep together?

MC: It really is! So the question is, how do you keep them in their seats? How do you keep them in front of the computer? How do you keep them clicking? It’s a question that gamers ask all the time. I’m just trying to ask that from the perspective of somebody who has made films and I have this idea about melodrama, about contradiction, about moments that are provocative… it’s not so much a question’s not answered, but it’s provocative. So melodrama fits into that, sex fits into that, death fits into that.

iDMAa: Life fits into that.

MC: Life fits into that! So it’s really elaborate to create the series of interactive narrative and I’ve made four of them, although the last one is not interactive, but certainly its digital. It’s on this website called queerfeast.com (http:// www.queerfeast.com), which I have been trying to launch for six months, and now we get to the next problem… So, there are these four pieces that were made over a ten year period. The first two were made in Director, the third one was made in Flash. The Director pieces… they can’t play anymore. I have had to spend a year literally remaking these pieces, so that they can play on the web. There’s this real issue of archiving and how do you keep migrating work (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/ 6265976.stm). What happens to work that’s even five years old? The third piece I made, Mixed Greens, which was made in Flash, it’ll play on a computer or laptop, but it won’t play on an iPad.

iDMAa: Do you still think of yourself as a filmmaker at all?

MC: No, I don’t. I think of myself as a media maker, but I love film and all of the pieces (even this last piece that I just finished), that’s going to show at UFEA next week. Leftovers. It started off as an interactive piece that I made in Flash, and at some point I realized it did not work as an interactive piece and I made it into a linear piece. So I made this linear piece in Flash, and now I have to go back and remake the entire piece in After Effects. It’s a linear movie, it’s made in After Effects, and it has a lot of 16 mm film as assets that I’ve shot… so what is that?

iDMAa: I think you summed it up. I think the notion of this distinction… I mean, it’s what we’ve been working with about transmedia. You build a universe and then you see where it rolls.

MC: Right! Exactly! You see where it rolls, and I think that the elements that are used to build it (the assets) are everything. So I have .tif files that were in Photoshop, I had 16 mm movie… not only was it 16 mm, I shot Kodachrome, a film that doesn’t even exist anymore, but it existed when I shot it five years ago, and then transferred it. Then you have all of this coding, and you end up with a work that is created in After Effects, but it’s a linear movie. I made a Blu-Ray version of it.

iDMAa: Can you add to the list of what technologies interest you?

MC: It’s the non-linearity in the interactivity of it. I answered that.

iDMAa: What do you think we’ve lost as a culture in the past ten years, with all this forward movement you described?

MC: Well, I think what we’ve lost is history. And so you have all of these works that are five years old, ten years old, that you literally cannot see anymore. Marsha Kinder, a professor at the Annenberg School at USC, runs the Labyrinth Project there that has made the most extraordinary interactive narrative. She’s got one called Tracing the Decay of Fiction, about the Ambassador Hotel in L.A., she has one called Mysteries And Desires. There’s a whole bunch of them, there’s probably a half dozen of them. They were all made in Director, and some of 22 them have been migrated forward, but there are some that don’t play. I have them, but they don’t play on Snow Leopard, they only play on Classic. It’s so complicated! You’ve got changing operating systems, with both the Mac and the PC. You’ve got changing software. You’ve got large corporations deciding that they will stop supporting certain kinds of software. You’ve got these multiple players and if something is made in digital, and any one player decides to stop supporting a particular digital software or platform, you no longer can view that work. Artists don’t have the money to constantly migrate the work to new platforms, so I think we’ve lost history and important cultural products.

iDMAa: Isn’t it ironic because in many respects the popular cultural meme is the notion of the long tail, and what you’re saying is just the opposite: long tail is a fiction. MC: Yeah, I think it’s a total fiction. I really do. There are movies that you can’t see anymore! iDMAa: And yet, you can probably watch Killer Clowns From Outer Space on Netflix if you so choose. Is there something you wish you had spent more time exploring now with 20/20 hindsight? Are there threads you wish you had pulled…?

MC: I wish I knew more programming. When I was directing films, I would hire a cinematographer. Now, I have to hire a programmer. The difference is that because I taught film, I understood cinematography, even if I wasn’t a cinematographer. My problem now is that I sometimes I enter into a project without always understanding the limitations of the software I’m using. Sometimes, that’s been to my advantage, so when you see Leftovers which was originally made in Flash… when I showed that to the IAM people, they couldn’t believe I had made it in Flash because they had never seen anything made in Flash like this. That’s really fabulous! I actually know some Flash but not that much… only a teeny bit. The limitations were… you have to front load movies in Flash and the movies were too large. That’s why I ultimately went over to After Effects. There are these issues with Flash that if I had been more aware of… So I wish I knew more programming.

iDMAa: Do you think artists… are you implying that future generations… we both know a few artists who are programmers, as well, who have that bent. Is that going to be a more common thread going forward? MC: I don’t think so… not necessarily. I think there are artists who are going to come out of the computer world and really understand programming. I think that the software is becoming so user friendly. Let’s talk about the latest version of Final Cut. It becomes software for dummies… you don’t need to know anything to do it. It also means that the software is controlling so much of your aesthetic choices. I think you do need to be able to get onto the “could” to really use the software to the extent it can be used. People can do point-and-shoots and they upload it and they don’t care.

iDMAa: It’s about breaking stuff sometimes, as well all know.

MC: Yeah, jailbreak stuff. There are people who are into jailbreaking, and people who aren’t.

iDMAa: How will people… So much of what you described in terms of what interested you is how people interact with digital art and digital culture at the moment— that all these interesting things will be done. Can you look forward and make guesses at the future? Are there things you foresee? How will people be interacting?

Tablets are so hot … Columbia College Chicago’s Interdisciplinary Book and Paper Arts program just received a $50,000 grant from NEA for The Future of The Book, project, which intends to make interactive books on iPads. I think a lot of artists are moving there but I don’t know… that just had all these other questions. What software do you use? How about the idea of censorship? No matter what software you use…So you’ve got that issue… what software do you use? But then once that happens, you have the real issue of… on the iPad, there is a Gatekeeper. There is the Apple Gatekeeper who decides whether your work can even be shown on the iPad or not.

iDMAa: In some respects we both know your first love was film. Are people going to be sitting in movie theatres in ten years?

MC: How do I know? I don’t know! I hope so! There’s something about the collective experience, the community experience… experiencing a work of art together in a group. It’s different than experiencing a work alone, in isolation. So that’s one issue. Maybe people will gather around the smartphone, I don’t know. There’s also the issue of artist feedback… the artist being able to communicate more directly with the audience. With film, 23 you can travel around with film, you can go to festivals, you can get feedback from the audience. With the digital, you can certainly track who’s watching it on the web, who’s downloading it… there’s lots of data that you can collect. I suppose you could set up a blog stream or a comment stream, but it’s a whole different way to interact and to get feedback. I think that the idea of community… viewing in groups and also how an artist gets feedback, those two things changed drastically with the digital world. I don’t know… sometimes, I just think I’m a dinosaur… and I lived at a certain moment in history and that moment fit my personality. I am moving in some ways to the future, but I think another generation has to take over at some moment.

iDMAa: I live with that other generation and I can tell you, they’re just different. They are. Social media has had a huge impact on how my kids interact with their world and how they organize their stuff. I used to live to get out of the house, and they don’t because in part, they can live in a virtual world interacting with their friend without leaving their room.

MC: So interesting. I just feel that because of my age I’m of a particular generation and I do see people younger than me being so different that I would never have the hubris to predict the future.

iDMAa: That makes sense, but I think you touched on what’s the most interesting thing which is that in-person communal experience…

MC: …Is going to shift in a big way. I think that’s it, and archiving. Half the time I just want to write a book, you know? I just want to write a book. And you can hold it, and it will be there if it’s on acid free paper.

iDMAa: Actually I had a depressing thought about the other thing. When things happen like they did in Colorado, it makes you question the value of the in-person physical experience. It’s just a bizarre moment…

MC: Here’s what’s really interesting, though; I think the solution is not the digital but some kind of “keeping guns out of the hands of crazy people” and not having assault rifles. I’ve spent half my time in rural America and half my time in Chicago. Let me tell you, rural America is not wired. I cannot get broadband where I live. I can get satellite Internet, which I had for a while, which is certainly faster than telephone dial-up, but not much. Now, what I do is I use the Wi-Fi off of my smart phone, which is better than the satellite, but it’s not broadband. I cannot stream movies, I can get satellite television, but I can’t get on-demand on my satellite television because I have to stream off of a landline. What’s really interesting is that I think that my experience of rural America, which is really farmland… I’m between one town that has 4,000 people and one town that has 1,200 people. People live very far apart from each other because the farms are a couple hundred acres each, but there is much more social interaction than I have in the city. And there’s very little digital world.

iDMAa: Are we really setting up two completely separate universes, is that what you’re saying?

MC: At the moment we are, I think we are. Until the broadband happens… and I live on this country road and there are telephone lines on the road on poles. They strung high speed optical cable literally in front of my house to connect the two towns that my house is between so that the businesses and the hospitals and the medical community could have that high speed cable. I can’t even tap into it… I can touch it, but I can’t even get to it! I even went out to the guys as they were hanging the cable and I said, “Can I just tap into this?” and it’s just like “Uh-uh.”

iDMAa: That’s so funny, you should have slipped him $20.

MC: So it really is two cultures and I just, I don’t think people who live in cities understand that.

iDMAa: Is there anything else that you have a perspective on? You brought up audience and assets that was really good and talking about…

MC: The whole issue of archival vs. accessibility is it, right?

iDMAa: Looking ahead, optimistic or pessimistic?

MC: I am really pessimistic, but it’s not about the digital world; it’s about the environment. I honestly think the only thing that matters is the environment…. What good does it do to have all this technology if the ozone layer is disappearing? If we can’t live on this planet… I’m very pessimistic. It’s not the answer you wanted or expected…