Interview with JEREMY HIGHT
Interview with JEREMY HIGHT
What is your background ?
I was born in Los Angeles. I lived in San Francisco for a few years then came back for graduate school. I am still here 8 years later. My family is Italian, French, Irish, Dutch and a tiny bit native american (cherokee and choctaw).
> When do you create ?
I work at all hours when I have time. I teach Multimedia and English Composition at a college which gives me flexible hours. I used to work mostly at night as a teen and in college. I sometimes get my best ideas and concepts while walking or just before falling asleep. Studies of the brain many years ago found that the most creative brain wave activity is just on the edge of sleep, which makes sense. I once had an 8 page epiphany about semiotics while in a theater watching a dumb action film
with friends and had to keep cycling it in my mind to remember until I could get home to write it down!
> who inspires your work ?
My Answer may have to be in a few sections. At 17 I was hugely influenced by Dali,Escher,Magritte and Ambrose Bierce, At 22 it was dada,the futurists,the punctuation of faulkner and little odd experiments I found in galleries and in journals that seemed really new and fresh with
image and text. At 30 it was new media pioneers, experimental books like Pavic's "The Dictionary of the Khazars" ( a "novel" constructed as an encyclopedia of an imaginary lost civilization) and the fun in finding the propaganda in a smoker's magazine made by phillip morris that I would read at my
parents house when visiting. Now it is simply the composite of countless influences over the years and mostly the ability to just try something new that strikes me without fear of it failing or not living up to some standard set by a work that was an influence on how to compose text and
image or music over the years.
> What is art ?
There are so many variations in how this question can be answered. Art can be personal expression,communication,dialogue,raising awareness,community...
To me personally it is communication. The best works speak in a hushed voice of something subtle yet deeply resonant, sometimes even of a personal and universal, of something you had not thought of in quite that way until this wondrous encounter.
> Have you ever exposed in Italy ?
My mother's family is from a town 20 miles north of Naples. My great Uncle Pasquale Napolitano came with them from naples at the turn of the last century and had some of his paintings and sculptures in museums in the 1920's to 1940's. I have not been able to come visit yet but plan
to. My work has been reviewed in several Italian new media journals (Noema a few times, Neural-It a few times,Random Magazine and in Radio Italia.
>How do you image your work in a city_space ?
Wow. Where to start on that....
I have written several papers on this and created the first spatial narrative in a city space and worked on the first locative narrative that triggered with gps in a city. I have lectured about this at MIT and at the international symposium on technology and writing at the University
of Nottingham. An essay about my career to this point in locative media and my ideas for reading the landscape will be coming out soon in Leonardo out of MIT. I just wrote a paper for the International Conference on Cultural Utilization of Space Exploration on how to read cities from above with spatial art and my project I have developed for the international space station that will partially work with gps and cities (triggering art and history in city spaces and miles above). It will soon be published in the new media journal HZ in Sweden. My paper "Narrative Archaeology"
(www.xcp.bfn.org/hight.html) lays out how I developed the way to have narratives of history,architecture, ethnography,events and people form an art,critical theory and creative writing fusion that "reads" cities in city spaces as one moves about.
> tell me more about your work-
I originally loved math and etymology as a little boy then studied Meteorology on my own for many years and planned to get a phd and do experimental field research with hurricanes,tornadoes and graphic models of hypothetical weather events. I then began publishing poems,short
stories and essays but also began playing music and developing conceptual art ideas.
In the last 6 years my work has found ways to fuse all of these things and push ahead in what is art and science and what is art and technology as well as how to read cities in locative media as well as how to work with sound art as metaphorical or spatial music. I carry a torch for
science as an art and art as a science.
some more links
"Espace Sonorite" an ongoing exhibition of sound art/experimental composition out of cologne , Germany ( I have 2 works in it)
www.lichtensteiger.de/music_room.html
A great article about "carrizo parkfield" and semi-interview in Noema
www.noemalab.org/sections/gallery/carrizo_parkfield_diaries/diaries_2.html –
my second of 8 academic papers so far in the last 3 years
web.mit.edu/comm-forum/mit4/subs/mit4_abstracts.html#hight
Jeremy Hight also joined gallery2006
