PEOPLE LIKE US concert
Event: Noche Blanca
Date: Saturday, October 6th 2018
Venue: Teatro Filarmónica, Calle Mendizábal, 3, 33003
City: Oviedo, Spain
url: www.nocheblanca.es facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nocheblancaovd/ instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nocheblancaovd/
This audiovisual concert commemorates the 25th (well, at least!!) year of People Like Us publishing work, featuring highlighted excerpts from the previous four a/v performances of People Like Us.

Translation: 

You were so young, only sixteen, when you got interested in “collage”. ¿What pushed you to get into that first experimentation?

I have always been inspired by music and moving image rather than non-time-based media.  The only education that I completed was a pre-degree art and design foundation course and I immediately was most interested in photography rather than drawing or sculpture, etc.  I was lucky enough to have a tutor there to lent me his books on performance art, conceptual art and photo collage, and through that I started working with footage and pictures as “found” objects rather than trying to capture something through a lens alone.

Are you aware that you get into cut&paste in a time and being part of a generation that wasn’t digital? In which ways could that circumstance have influenced your work?

What I do is folk art in the age of digital reproduction.  When I started it was in the age of analogue reproduction.  I couldn’t predict how fast things would develop around 2000 with the age of faster cheaper computing and broadband internet.  When I started it was still possible to do quite a lot with a cassette four track, hifi-based electronics and a scalpel and glue.  I couldn’t go back to that way of working now and I don’t romanticise it at all.  I always had a vision of what I am doing now but had to wait, and in some ways I’m still waiting.  For the past two years I’ve been making a 360 surround immerse audiovisual work called Gone, Gone Beyond.  This is only possible to do with the fast computer that I now have, but I still am looking ahead and forward, or rather my visions of what I could do next are. 

Do you think that for digital natives, collage, or the fragmentation of things, is something more natural, or there is no difference?

No, I think computers and also analogue copying (cassette, photocopier, printing press) are modelled around the human mind’s way of working.  We learn and improve ourselves by copying and improvising, by cutting and pasting in our own lives.  That is all that we have taught machines to do for us. 

Another fact that is related to your job, is that digital media caused an over documentation. Nowadays everything is filmed, photographed and saved. What implies for an artist that works with found footage?

That is true, but most of what is documented is pretty trivial, and the analogue version of that might be taking photos and leaving them in the wallet that you were given them in when they came back from the photo developers.  I think once again it’s to do with the way that we are, we like to document as a “witness” to us having been somewhere or done something.  This is why people used to like to photograph a landmark, or themselves in a landmark, it isn’t necessarily because they are going to ever look at that again but they want to take the snap shot to some how validate that they were there, possibly with the intention that they would share it in the future with someone, or just with themselves.  Although a lot of the time they never will.k

There are some authors that think that this over documentation cancel out, in some way, the “oblivion” and get us into “loop dynamics”, blocking progress or experimentation, especially in artistic languages. Do you agree with that? What do you think about it?

I agree that we all are in danger of repeating ourselves over and over again rather than being on a variable cycle of gradual/sudden change.  Although the latter happens naturally if we try and do the same thing over and over anyway.   

How much importance do you give to movements like Collaborative Art and DIY? Nowadays what role plays the authorship in contemporary art and what it means to be an artist?

I would rather that there were not “movements”, since they imply that something is in or out, or good and bad.  I understand the need to categorise in order to communicate faster but at the same time it can trivialise the subject matter then toss it onto the scrapheap once it’s been summed up.  DIY is very important, to learn through repetition is how we finally come up with something that makes sense to us, something that is more than the sum of the parts.  Authorship is limited once something is published.  You cannot put something out into the public and still have 100% control of it.

What could we see in Oviedo on this trip trough 25 years of “People Like Us”?

I’ve been publishing work since 1991 (so it’s more than 25 years now, in fact!) and decided to make an audiovisual concert compiled from a number of different works.  So it’s a whirlwind rollercoaster ride!