I think ‘technology’ is a key word in your works. What do you think about the ‘Internet’. Does it play an important role for modern art? Is there any specific advantage or disadvantage?

I would say “technology” is probably not the key thing. It has just happened to be something accessible to everybody, and accessible to me. And I enjoy it as it extends my abilities to do things. Technology is just a sort of background it should not be a message. For many artists, however, the use of technology stands in the foreground and becomes a central part of the message. That’s something I am having nothing to do with. I don’t want to use the internet just in order to have made use of the internet.

Let’s say I use the Internet – so, does that make me an internet artist? I was considered a video artist many years ago when it was fashionable but keep in mind – when the video technology dies, you die with it. Don’t marry yourself a specific media technology. Technology is always defined by its abilities and also its inadequacies. When artists use technology, it is often used in an inappropriate way, non-conventional way. So, we are deconstructing technology. It is a different kind of use. We are exploiting inabilities, glitches, mistakes in the system.

The aesthetic qualities of video have been exploited by artists not because video delivers such a crisp image but because video has certain texture. Like when you’re moving the camera quickly, it gets blurred etc… the colors shift … That is actually the shortcoming of the system that is being exploited. It’s the difference between the media and the reality. The more difference, the worse for the media, and thus aesthetically more interesting.

Do you think the internet has an important role?

It’s difficult to say… It actually destroys many existing art economies. They invented a new technology. For an artist, a new media, you know, that’s exciting. But no new economic model came with the introduction of the Internet… not for artists and not for anybody else. It allows new expressions but you don’t know who the audience is yet. We don’t really know how to sell Internet or network based art yet.

Worldprocessor Installation. Tokyo, 1989.

Your great ‘world processor‘project, in which you visualized data from many surveys and made various globes. During that processor after you made the globes, have you ever been shocked by the data itself and the art work you made? Actually I got strong impacts from your globes, for example ‘Nuclear Explosions’.

Every time! There were 2000 nuclear explosions! I had no idea. I thought, you know, OK, there was Japan first then you have some testing in the United States and in Russia. I totally forgot that England has nuclear weapons as well. But where do they do their testing? Of course in Australia. They rented space in central Australia. Then the French, where do they do it? The Mururoa Atoll. Before that in the Sahara Desert in Algeria when it was their colony. It was totally shocking to me to see the globe littered with nuclear testing sites. That only happens to become clear once you map the statistics out visually.

So this is what it is about because when you read something in so much detail you never quite get the global context. My works are supposed to be background information or reference for the actual story … context and dimensions are important. I missed this aspect in most newspapers, magazine or in TV news stories. I always cover topics that somehow surprise me.

Is there anything which you bear in mind when you visualize the data?

Yes, of course, I try to bear in mind that it can be understood as easily, clearly as possible in a way it becomes obvious without too much explanation. I need some captions sometimes but I try to use that as little as possible.

You asked me ‘what’s the definition of art’ in your first question, I think, if art gets very complicated, it may or may not be art. – But I happen to think that it should be as simple as possible. It should say a lot with very little. Maybe that’s the source of the nature of art. In that sense art has something to do with economics. Economics of communication. One word saying everything. To me, that’s art. One bit of information at the right point… very elegantly.