Tag Archives: interview

History is what the Present is made of

November 16, 2011


Middletown, Connecticut, 2011

I joined the Social Text Editorial Collective this Spring, and one of the first visible results is this interview with Matthew Frye Jacobson. Tavia Nyong’o and I interviewed Matthew about his interdisciplinary Historian’s Eye project.

Jacobson: And then I’ve been traveling around–I’ve been to something like 28 or 30 different states at this point– shooting pictures that I think capture something important about what’s going on. So now it’s a project not just about Obama, but it’s about the backlash against Obama, it’s about the Tea Party, it’s about the economic collapse, it’s about the oil spill, the wars, the anti-Muslim agitation. It still feels like a unique moment to me, historically speaking. It feels like a moment in which the country is about to deliver–at any second we could deliver up our very best or our very worst. It feels like that kind of tense moment of hope and danger. The archive is meant to build materials that capture that aspect of this moment. But then it’s also meant to be a pedagogical tool, to help teachers help their students to think historically about the present, really. To think about history as what the present is made of. To think about the present as having a deep history of its own, but also being history in the making.

The full interview is online at Social Text.

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A CRUMB Interview on Open Source and Collaboration

January 18, 2010

CRUMB interview

As I get ready to take part in the Transmediale/FLOSSmanuals book sprint for the “Collaborative Futures” book, I thought it was relevant to drop this blog post about an older interview about FLOSS and art.

A bit ago Dominic Smith of CRUMB interviewed me about my practice in relationship to Open Source and Free Culture. This interview is going to be included in a forthcoming 10 year anniversary book about CRUMB’s activities. Posting this slipped through the cracks, but you can find it here (along with a snippet below):

So there is ‘Open Source’ the Noun, and then there are 2 different versions of the verb ‘Open Source’, ‘to Open Source’. So you’re working on a project and you release it Open Source, that’s to Open Source a project. But the other version of to Open Source is a certain kind of reverse engineering, it’s kind of hostile or confrontational, and it’s to Open Source somebody else. I was open sourcing Sherrie Levine in a sense. So I think that a lot of my work comes from that appropriation and that’s a starting point.

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Burning the New York Times

December 16, 2009

A short interview video with Michael Mandiberg shot and Edited by Dan Eckstein (daneckstein.com) in March 2009, with Music from Au Revoir Simone at Eyebeam and Postmasters Gallery NYC.

From the dialog:

I’m Michael Mandiberg. I am an artist, designer, and educator, and I am a Senior Fellow at Eyebeam, which is an Art and Technology Center in Chelsea, Manhattan.

As an artist I am pretty omnivorous. I have a background in photography, so it is pretty image based, but I was also a really really good bad high school poet. So I am particularly interested in words and their meaning, and their nuances and their poetic value. So I am always looking at the world around us visually, informationally, and culturally, and politically for inspiration

Some of my more recent work involves the laser cutter, cutting paper and books, making sculptures and drawings. The laser cutter takes the information from the computer file, and it uses a laser to cut that shape out of the material being cut, which in this case is a newspaper.

A few of my recent works are at The Future Is Not What It Used To Be, which is a show at Postmasters Gallery. One is called Old News, which is a stack of New York Times into which I am cutting daily the phrase “Old News” into it. The other is DATA BASE, which is an Oxford English Dictionary with the phrase “DATA BASE” cut into it.

The show itself is about the promise and the failed promise of technology, and its potential to connect people or not connect people.

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Graham Parker interviews me after studio visit

October 8, 2009

Graham Parker stopped by for a studio visit, and we had a great conversation. The highlight was when he told me to “choose my words less carefully.” In the description he writes:

First in a series of studio and show visits with contemporary artists. I’ve known Michael for some years – probably since a friend directed me to his Shop Mandiberg project. He’s recently been a research fellow at Eyebeam and is having an open studio there soon – mostly showing off work he has been producing with a laser cutter. He invited a few people along to do some studio visits in advance of that and I happened to have my camera with me when I went along. He’d set up a lot of work in one of Eyebeam’s main display spaces, so the effect was much more like a solo show than a regular studio visit.I asked Michael to talk me through a few pieces on camera and he generously agreed to do so – despite having no time to process what we’d just been talking about in our visit. It’s mainly shot under existing lights with a few stills dropped in, so the footage is a little grainy in places, but it should give an idea of what he’s up to.
More on the blog post.  Thanks Graham!
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