Associação Cultural Videobrasil

Your work is connected to the new media scene. How did you begin to work in this field? Were you attracted to the technologies and the creative possibilities that could be set up?

In 1989, it was already cheap to make home videos, but I hated to see what people were doing. It was when I was studying at an American high-school that I first came in contact with HyperCard (to make small databases and interlink information - it was fascinating!), programming, image editing and BBS, but when I came back to Brazil everything vanished because I didn't have a computer at home. In 1991, there were no new media courses at USP (University of São Paulo), but people were already talking about the Internet and hypertext, and something about computer graphics, but not at ECA (Communication and Arts School). In a way it was good, because we had to learn how to think and write. I was never a technology freak, but I always liked to use the “machine”, so I had to do something. Actually, I liked many things like animation and cinema, but I didn't like to work in groups and I thought the process of working with cinema was too bureaucratic; I wanted to make things and to be able to show these things. In 1995, people were already talking about CD-ROM, but just a few knew how to make it, and I was lucky to have friends that could make it, and they were really good. They gave me the Director 3 and a book. I went to the house of a friend who had a 4MB PC and learnt to use the program. Mixing technology with the monster-city and the will to make a fanzine, Guilherme, from Candyland Comics, Mariana Rillo and I produced “Biographies”. Afterwards, my fascination for the “machine” increased…. Then, I learnt to use the Internet to communicate with my family that was in Austria. I learnt HTML in a week, then I worked with some technology freaks who created the first Internet servers in São Paulo, they taught me a lot of things. It was extraordinary to know that people could see what I was doing from anyplace, anytime, but I didn't have time anymore to do my own work. The process was quick: in 1998 the web was almost as unbearable as TV (or even more), and I lost my interest. It was time to go to Germany.

In one of your texts you state that you use the computer as a media because you have a certain illusion that you have more control over time then you would have working with video or cinema. How do you relate time to interactivity in your work?

Interactivity as “pressing a button” doesn't interest me. I began to pay attention to time when I wanted to put written text on video and people told me it wasn't appropriate. In my works, interactivity is used to dissolve animated image's time. I talk about an illusion of control because time as a natural phenomenon is not our invention, and it cannot be controlled by anybody, but media time can be controlled, because it is a human invention. If cinema invented the moving image, interactivity invented the control over this movement, and the control over time. But it is too obvious that the interactive works represent only the space, ignoring the “media” time. That's why I decided to create Mpolis, a video city.

You worked at KHM, in Cologne, and now you are working as an artist at IAMAS. Do these “walks” in different cultural contexts affect your works?

They do not only affect my works, they are also their basis. I couldn't work in Brazil as I work here, because in Brazil there is no money for this kind of work, and the artist or creator must eat, pay their children's school etc. Looking at the complexity of works like Mpolis, A common ancestral stranger or The one made of light stuff, and working almost alone, taking from one to three years to realize a project, I know I couldn't make it in Brazil, and it makes me sad because I only feel at home in the monster-city, and I need it to create. However, it's exciting to live within the context of art and media in countries like Japan and Germany, super-producers of technology, and to see how art and culture are influenced by the industry, and also to know that there are people in these places that are interested in my work. I am not an export product from the Brazilian culture, as music and cinema, which now have official export programmes, and my works are not projected specifically for the European use. And I move to be able to work, and my travels are always affecting my work.

You have created printed and interactive works (CD-ROM, DVD and the Web), as well as interactive audiovisual installations. How do you choose the supports during the creative process? Is there a decisive factor?

Yes, trying to combine an intuition with an original characteristic of these media. I felt oppressed, for instance, by the idea of using images to talk about the imagination of blind people. Another example is the Unstable CD, that could exist only as a CD-ROM, or the work MediaScan, that could exist only as a static image. If a work can exist only as words, it must be a text, like Nó na garganta (Lump in the Throat). Pisando em ovos em Buenos Aires (Treading on Eggs in Buenos Aires) was an attempt to deny everything that I have just said. I cannot think: “I want to make a video” or “web art”, because I don't think this kind of classification is significant. I think that I can work this way because I got rid of the paranoia of having to keep a total control over the techniques I use. I love the technical imperfections of my works.

Some of your works treat the theme of the body. How do you perceive the relations between body and technology in your works?

The body represents the definition of a being - I never talk about the body only as a group of accumulated cells. It is the centre of our perception; in brief, culture and other inventions are its continuations. The “machine” seems to be something difficult to be comprehended by the average man, but it is nothing more than a bad copy of the models that try to define a small part of what we are. To represent the body using a computer is basically a historic result, or maybe an ironic redundancy. I have personal arguments because the body (as identification) and the media are important to me. One of them is the recollection of, when I was a child, not understanding why the women on TV were never Asian-looking.

What is the central theme of The one made of light stuff, the work you are developing right now?

The central theme is an individual's identification with the group. This time, I don't treat the cultural identification as an issue that belongs only to the stranger, the immigrant. I talk about the conscience of being an individual, the imitation and the belonging to a “group” (any group). Obviously, body and time are strong themes in this work, as well as the blindness, the skin and the scars. The theme of the blindness as something exotic has worn me out, so I have decided to approach a new perspective that is much more interesting: the identification, the formation of the personal taste, learning and imitation - all this through the sight. Developing this work in Japan is very important to me, not because the work displays Japanese culture, but because it is a place that is part of my existence, of my looking, a place that defines half of my body, and that, at the same time, is so new for me as any other foreign country.