Dirty Projectors

do you hate it when people ask you questions like that, because you have this feeling of like, ‘uhhhh, hopefully the work articulates the thing in a way that words cannot — that’s why it’s an animation and not a piece of prose; why are you asking me to bastardize & diminish what i’m doing??’ or do you feel like words / discourse provide a different and useful lens?

Haha! both I guess, most things that I make feel like they come from a place in my mind that doesn’t understand or speak a verbal language, and others are created in harmony with a more intellectually stimulated region of the mind, something with a narrative, a reference to some historical thing, for example. Words themselves can have power that goes beyond the literal meaning and melts into something more emotional. But I do often feel that contemporary art can be overly wordy and rationalised; when you explain or justify what you’ve created with a lengthy text, the piece looses elasticity and ossifies into a concrete message, or as Susan Sontag says “a sensibility is ineffable… a sensibility which can be crammed into the mold of a system.. has hardened into an idea.” I like this way of thinking about art as sensibility.

Also, when a piece of art or music has a precise explanation, it sort of becomes redundant, it’s just an illustration to accompany that other thing you’re saying. In art, I think, if words are used at all it should be to infuse the work with another layer of poetry, mystery and psychic life.

in this video, did you think much abt correlating image & sound — ie having the visual gestures harmonize with the movements of the music? (i think they go together super well…)

Yes, I wanted the images to resonate with and respond to the sound. On a macro scale, I wanted them to inhabit the same world, to belong together, so the look and feel of the images is enhanced by the sound of the song and vice versa. On a micro scale, the cuts are based on the rhythm of the song, and there are different moments in the story and particular characters and happenings that also relate to the specific moments or moods in the song.

when you’re working in this way, you’re the writer, director, artist and editor.  does it feel natural and seamless to be in all these different roles, or do the imperatives of one role sometimes come into conflict with another ?  like, does the draftsperson in you occasionally want to take things in a direction that the director simply can’t allow?  if so, how do you resolve these conflicts?

That’s an interesting way of looking at it and very true; yes, I definitely had multiple voices in my mind whispering different things throughout the whole process - as an artist you are constantly engaged in an internal dialogue with many different elements of yourself and even with a fictional “other” that pretends to be an outside audience, so it’s challenging work. But this way of working does feel natural to me, I like being in control of as many aspects of my work as possible, so it doesn’t feel like a conflict that needs to be resolved, rather a conversation that’s had.

do you think there’s something special abt using old-school labor/time-intensive practices, even when there are readily available software/digital shortcuts ?  like, maybe you value the specific unique feel to the finished work, or maybe you just get something you get from the process itself (eg meditative zen state that comes out of doing the rote repetition by hand?)  

Yes, there is definitely something special about labour intensive work and, in this case, using analog rather than digital methods. On one hand, repetition as you say, let’s the mind wander into a meditative state which in a hyper stimulated world feels healthy and grounding. On the other, when you’re working purely in a digital realm you feel a sort of underlying existentialist horror as you are essentially one dimension removed from your work, or else you get a sense of plastic claustrophobia and you just need to run outside and roll around in some prickly grass or something! after a while of being on the computer you desperately need to feel the real material world around you, to feel phenomenologically “in” your body - to embody your reality. I think there is such a thing as a digital malaise akin to cabin fever. So I really enjoyed getting back to paper and pencil.

why roman / greek statuary?  in general, where does your imagery come from?  has it changed much over time, or from project to project, or do you find that there are leitmotifs and vibes that you return to consistently?  

That was mainly based on the imagery that came to mind from the lyrics; words about an empire, a senator, a decaying civilization, violence, power, greed etc. Also when the song talks about a monster eating its children, I thought of Cronus the Greek God. I associate these things with the ancient classical world, and the marble skeleton of it that we have inherited. Also, surrealist works of art, for example by De Chirico, often feature statues and in particular greek/roman ones; there is evidently something about them that resonates with the subconscious mind, they are a meaningful symbol to us, they have a dreamlike and strange quality to them. This video was conjured up mainly by a stream of consciousness, which is a surrealist method for creating images. To the second question I would say both, each project is different as I am a pretty eclectic person and the world is full of new inspirations, but there is a river bed under the passing currents that doesn’t change much, a soil made up of a certain composition of minerals which, in my particular case, has surrealist foundations and an interest in myth, symbolism and the occult, and drawing eyes, people in trances, odd faces and strange places.

w the greek/roman statuary, do you feel like there’s some parallel you’re drawing to an idea of the vast, broken, vanishing empire — and the West today ?   or maybe in general do u feel like that’s part of the operative fascination that vaporwave has with that imagery?  

I definitely think that a broken statue is a clear visual metaphor for a vanishing empire, which might be why it populates the allegorical world of surrealism and vapourware as its digital extension- maybe for the last hundred years we’ve all felt on some subconscious plane a pending apocalypse, the world that we’ve created on the brink of an extinction level event. It makes sense, after the world wars, the cold war, the atomic/nuclear threats, climate threats, financial threats, etc. everything has seemed to be in a constant state of mortal danger for the past century! even our food is supposedly poisoning us, our clothes, bodies, water, air itself, everything is menacing and threatening and hostile, so it’s little wonder our art would express this sense of doom.  

one of the things im kinda thinking out loud abt in the song is this question of, ‘in our insanely interconnected world, is it actually possible to draw our actions into congruence with our beliefs?  what would that mean?  and what does it mean if/when we can’t?’   sometimes it feels like the chains of production, ownership, causality etc are so deeply enmeshed that it’s impossible to chase down the global implications of our choices as consumers & citizens with any kind of confidence or accuracy … and that makes us feel powerless in the face of hideous injustices … like we’re all frogs in a pot of water slowly rising to a boil.  so in the song, even though i don’t have a resolution or conveniently optimistic way of thinking about it, i hope there’s a value in articulating the feeling anyway.  my question is, do you feel like art has a responsibility to be political?  or do you feel like art is inherently political — and there might be something more human / empathetic / mysterious when art is fluid enough to evade the reduction into easy sloganeering ?  for me it’s a question right now, because i’ve often landed in the latter camp, but this song woke up like this .. .

Yeah, it’s a tricky subject, politics and art. I guess that, in my opinion, your only responsibility as an artist is to give your audience your best and most genuine work, whatever that may be. The content of the work will vary hugely from artist to artist. There are many important things in the world, important parts of the experience of being, that don’t include politics at all, and perhaps are even antagonistic to it, so I don’t think that art has to be political. Sometimes it feels gratuitous and disingenuous when an artist injects some politics into their work or their discourse just because it’s in vogue. Lots of artists don’t have a clue about politics, they inhabit a parallel world of emotions, fairytales and daydreams! They might be an outsider, a rebel, or a romantic for example. Others are very passionate about being the voice of their own society, and are deeply entrenched in their cultural surroundings and make of their political ideas their body of work, in the hopes that their message might challenge certain prejudices or else that the audience will identify with the ideas and find expression for their own political thoughts. I don’t think one approach is more valid or moral than the other, as long as it’s genuine. However, on the other hand, anybody that has a visible social platform and access to a certain level of impact could be a useful tool to raise awareness for a number of social causes, but that’s something different.    

how long did this video take you ?

Nearly a month! In fact I’d like to take the opportunity to thank Max Mannone who helped me sooooo much to make it in such a short time! he took all the photographs and digitised most of it, as well as giving me creative input. It’s super important to bounce off of someone you respect when you are working alone, because it’s such a self centred process that you can lose all perspective and start to drown in yourself!

do you like to revise a lot, or is it a first-thought-best-thought headspace ?

With a stream of consciousness type method definitely first-thought-best-thought although as I said above, bouncing off somebody else throughout the process is also good.

what kind of music do u like to listen to when you draw?

Well, for this video I listened to a lot of Dirty Projectors :-) I love this song, and instead of growing tired of it which can happen with repetition I grew to like it more and more! it’s definitely alive. I also have lots of synth stuff on my playlist like New Wave songs and Italo disco music. Probably because I came into the world during the eighties so it kind of feels like home. I actually listen to a lot of podcasts when I draw & animate, I like finding undiscovered youtube channels about weird topics particularly about magic, myths and the fascinating shadowy world of the occult which are all sources of inspiration.  

thanks so much for this, kitty!!  i love the animation a lot, and best of luck with future projects!