Generally I have a PowerBook tucked
under my armpit and some music around. It seems difficult
to loose these two, but mpeg has at least enabled them to
both live in the same bag.
My studio is my practice, it is an exercise in the application
of ideas. So I am perhaps a surgeon of language, a sculptor
of visual rhetoric.
At some point I would like to see my studio being in a ship
(at sea or in the air), and be able to spend more time on
location. It’s incredibly important to be able to engage
with this sense of the place on projects. I am developing
an idea to have a mobile research unit, to work with local
people and culture, while examining the way we have a unique
approach that appears in different cultures throughout the
world.
As for my background, I am part linguistic Hoover and part
picture maker. I very much enjoy the dialogue and see it as
an essential part to the whole process.
So far I have been commissioned to
create a broad portfolio of work, ranging from directing film,
creating titles for feature films, to developing next generation
technology. I have also been fortunate in I that I have been
able to work with really inspiring people.
I am very happy about having been able to travel and work
around the world like this. It has brought an incredible insight
into my sense of direction, just as it has helped shaped my
own sense of visual understanding.
How do you begin coming up
with concepts and filtering ideas when you have a big project
such as an identity piece or titles to a film?
There are a series of different approaches
you can take. A piece of work will generally suggest its own
pace—it will tell you where it wants to go. A project
is borne out of an ecology of movement, and brings with it
its very own sense of truth and ideas. You know if it is workable,
what sense it displays and if you are willing to go on this
journey.
This initial period is very crucial
to the way a concept will develop. So, this is the first stage
at which ideas begin to coagulate. It is a moment when you
begin to realize the umbrella under which the concept will
settle.
Facing this is an approach, a kind
of frame of mind, with which you begin to map a first outline
of the concept. For ‘Watershed’ this came out
of the story itself, as well as out of my interpretation of
the perception of such a story. For ‘Walking Time’
the concept developed out of my film work.
A concept is then determined by a
set of thoughts, ideas and projects that are currently in
my lab.
At the moment, for example, I am
inspired by the idea of the coexistence of parallel events:
coincidence.
Following this, in phase three, I generally have a set of
questions, an oblique strategy, a first outline that will
become a key to originating artwork or developing a plot or strategy. This helps me bring the
project to the drawing board.
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