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Excerpt:
JH: "...I thought of you recently as I was giving a talk on remix culture. We ended up discussing the Situationist concept of detournement, and it occurred to me that this is a good baseline description of the kind of work Nonchalance does. Is that what you've been doing all these years, detourning the Bay Area (and sundry other places)?
JW: I never thought of it in that way, but the answer is yes, absolutely. I've always been a cut & paste, drag & drop kind of artist, and shamelessly so. I have no qualms about it because I know that what I've produced from these other sources is completely original.
JH: One of the things I like the most about Situationist art is how it's geared toward inspiring the viewer/participant to discover the untapped possibilities of the world around them -- "to expose the appalling contrast between the potential constructions of life and the present poverty of life." What are the potentials you're exposing, and what kinds of poverty -- intellectual, emotional, or even economic -- do your projects work against?
JW: "Potential constructions of life" is a great description for what we've attempted. We're presenting this parallel universe in which we're actively at war with banality and routine. It's a guerrilla street war, too, not some hypothetical plane. The potential is for collective behavior that promotes warmth and trust, communicating something very meaningful through mass media, and generally allowing for variation, color and fun in the civic realm. The poverty exposed is that of spontaneity and creativity in every day life. We don't always recognize how confined or restricted or repressed we are, and I'm speaking generally about "us" as a group or society, rather than us as individuals. Re-imagining and then reconstructing how we operate and function as a culture is our greatest aspiration. We can only do it in these microscopic slivers, though. The slivers exist in tandem with the rest of the world, often overshadowed by it, but they do exist, awaiting discovery by the curious dilettante...."
read the full interview:
http://www.jawbone.tv/articles/item/505-games-of-nonchalance-art-transmedia-a...
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