Interview Wolfgang Staehle Jordan Crandall

Overview

JC: What moves you?

WS: This is really hard to talk about, but let's say if I go Turrell's crater in Arizona, I think that is an experience that would qualify as an art experience for me. I'm not saying evry artwork has to be so grandiose, I'm just hinting at something here. Something has to resonate within me. Art needs to have an ontological dimension. It has to make me wonder, crash my operating system - so to speak.

JC: I remember one time - during the time when people talking about new authorship forms - when people were wondering whether "The Thing" was your artwork or not. You were deliberately ambiguous about it. You didn't commit either way, kind of played with the idea. But if you were nailed down about it, you would say no.
WS: I would see it more like an experiment... to see how far
you can take this kind of multi user project. I don't think of it as an artwork really.

JC: The question is not really so interesting now.
WS: It's not interesting.

JC: But of course, that experience has changed your approach to art practice per se.
WS: It certainly did. Technology, for better or worse, is my "medium." But in terms of making art, what I like now are very simple ideas. Simple moves, but executed with precision. For some people, especially for those "savvy" media guys, (Empire is just a webcam of the Empire State Building). But then I remember the day after it was installed in Karlsruhe (as a wall projection at ZKM). I walked in there and all I could see were these refractions, all these strange light effects. I thought, has the lens gone? It took me a while to realize that what's happening was the sun was coming up right next to the building. Maybe that's why I talked about Turrell before. In Germany it was 1:00pm and in New York it was 7:00pm in the morning. I never saw that in New York, I'm never up at 7:00pm to watch the sun rise. In a way, this gave me an incredibly visceral experience of synchronicity, of the networking of the whole damn planet. There it was, like a synechdoche, like a dumdum bullet that explodes in your head. This instantaneousness, this compression of space and time. I don't know if I can ever repeat that experience again.

JC: But you remember that one moment.
WS: I remember that one moment.