Interview with Carlos Katastrofsky

Interview with Carlos Katastrofsky


- What is your background ?

i had an education in electronics and studied sculpture at the
university mozarteum salzburg/ austria.


- When do you create ?

hmmm... this is difficult to answer. most of the things i do need quite
a time to become real and the "creating" itself (in means of sitting in
front of the computer) is never the biggest part of it. so, the answer
is maybe "always". creating is an ongoing process that is strongly
connected to everyday life.


- who inspires your work ?

my inspiration isn't linked to somebody, i don't believe in the concept
of a "muse"... inspiration, or, i would prefer to call it "ideas", are
effects of things that happen in my life. most of the time i simply try
to compile everyday experiences into works.

- What is art ?

i believe that art is a concept of past centuries. it doesn't exist
anymore. if we look at the priciple "l'art pour l'art" in means of an
unshared autonomy of art then "art" existed only until the second half
of the 19th century. with the rise of impressionism it was over, because
since then art always referred to something outside of "art", tried to
tell us something about the state of the world or the mind of the
artist.
i'm going here with an austrian arthistorian - hilde zaloscer - who
wrote a fascinating book about this (in german: visuelle beschwörung -
autonomes kunstwerk - ideograph).
sure, everybody uses "art" as a term for describing things like
abstract paintings, experimental videos or [put in here what you think is art].
but to me this is just a name for something what you can't describe with
nowadays vocabulary. a black hole in language. "art" describes
botticelli's "venus" as well as jimpunk's " 4lphA.drawing(s:::::::" or
walter de maria's "lightning field". but is this true?

- Have you ever exposed in Italy ?

no

- How do you image your work in a city_space ?

the works - if installed in a public space - have to be heavily
modified.
thinking of e.g. "russian roulette" this could for example be done via
various bluetooth - downloadstations for cellphones, integrated @ bus -
stops, wastebins or other nodes of traffic. "neighbourhood research"
could
e.g. be a public service where you can meet your cellphone - number -
neighbour (or your id - card number neighbour, etc.).
so the principle is that every work would have to be transformed in a
way.
it wouldn't make any sense to set up some screens in public areas with
the works running.

- tell me more about your work

to me space is one of the main issues in netart. not always as a topic
to work on but throught its absence. thinking about that i started my
first netart - project "neighbourhood research"
( http://homex.subnet.at/carlos/projekte/netart/neighbourhoodresearch )
to put some spatial vocabulary in a net - context."area research"
( http://homex.subnet.at/carlos/projekte/netart/arearesearch ) was a
kind of follow - up altough its starting point were more political questions
like: are there "celebrity - " and "poor - " areas in cyberspace?
regarding the ip - adress are there connections between adresses
residing close to each other?
the issues of space and time were also a question in "entropy"
( http://homex.subnet.at/carlos/projekte/media/entropy/ ) where streams
of webcams in megacities were recorded and processed for a visual
representation of the entropy in these particular places.
a bit more playful in their structure are works like "interactive
readymade" ( http://blog.subnet.at/carlos/stories/1814/ ), "the
original" ( http://homex.subnet.at/carlos/projekte/netart/original/ ), "instant
democratizer" ( http://blog.subnet.at/carlos/stories/2046/ ) or the
"russian roulette" ( http://roulette.cont3xt.net/ ) which deal with -
at first sight - more computer - and gadget driven topics.

blog: http://aqua.subnet.at/carlos
index of works:
http://homex.subnet.at/carlos/homepage/dateien/works.html
reviews: http://homex.subnet.at/carlos/homepage/dateien/press.html
cv: http://homex.subnet.at/carlos/homepage/dateien/cv.html

Carlos is also online on gallery2006