JL2

Noah: Thank you very much for joining me today. To start out with, could you please describe your work formally and a little bit of what it may be about?

Jack: It's a roughly four minutes single channel video collage. I just jotted down a couple of some keywords that have inspired the piece: sports, cults, video games, nostalgia, digital artifacting, faith, the early internet, cyberpunk, and this game from 1995 called the story of Kamikuishiki village. This is like the wildest connection of things.

Noah: In a collage sense, it sort of came together conceptually to you. Was there a link in your mind between these different themes?

Jack: I was reading a lot of, this is kind of embarrassing, but I was reading about the crypto punks. They were like an early internet data group in the early to mid nineties when the internet was finally opening up to everybody. They foresaw a lot of government surveillance happening on the internet. They were advocates for Cryptography and stuff. There's just this climate where we'd created this new, unknowable kind of flow or avalanche. Relating it to where the internet is now, where it's slowly becoming this hegemonic controlled thing. I was trying not to lament that, because I think nostalgia's tacky, but I just wanted to recognise that.

Noah: Between this work and in a lot of your other work as well, there's sort of this play of rejecting that and just fully going into, I don't want to say nonsense because there's a large amount of thought out reasons for everything in your work. I think aesthetically, you, you play into the idea of the unintelligible.

Jack: Exactly. Yeah.

Noah: You take like both this combination of themes, found footage ,and early internet and all of these sort of things. Which becomes its own form of encryption in your own sense where you make it almost impossible to tell what is going on.

Jack: Yeah. That's I think that's actually a good way to put it. I've always been interested in encryption. Earlier last year I kind of got very interested in the culture around computer viruses. I made a small zine about found poetry. I just compiled a bunch of the messages that viruses would display once they had done what they were going to do.

Noah: Can you tell us a little bit about your practice. You have a wide range where you do a lot of digital collage, but also this wide range of printed matter and sculptural work and all sorts of other stuff.

Noah: Could you talk about your editing process at all.

Jack: I usually work from-- I'll find some sort of image that really captivates me. In this case, it's the very first image. It's this footage of a crash in NASCAR with a car sliding upside down across the track. And I found that, and I just toss that into my video editing software and played around with it when looking for other assets and yeah, just kind of built up this stream of consciousness or improvisational editing. I go in, work on a chunk of it, leave, come back, rearrange it, or make a new chunk entirely and just keep on remixing those and fusing them. Until I got something that was hopefully elaborate.

Jack: I'd say this piece definitely falls in line, pretty snugly, with a lot of the stuff I've been doing up until now. When I first started at NSCAD , I was like, " I'm going to be a video artist", but now I've just kind of decided to--

Noah: Do the NSCAD thing, which is go wildly off the rails in second year?

Jack: Right now I'm making reproduction medieval
wooden herald farming tools. So that's how that went.

Noah: Perfect.

Jack: So that's my reason to go to school.

Noah: The impetus of the assignment that this work was put towards was working with the theme of weight/ wait, both gravity and durational. Is there a connection between that and this work, or did you reject that altogether?

Jack: I'd say there's a connection. I was kind of trying to convey some kind of suffocating rock slide of all these different images coming at you and. Kind of that feeling of being weighed down by the relentless scroll or flow. It was like Pandora's box opened up.

Noah: I think the work really plays with that so well. You get into mixing the sound with the images. Where it sort of leaves no gaps for rest.

Jack: It's just one thing after another. But near the end of it, there's the sequence that-- so I found this really great footage of the Aum Shinrikyo cult, which was a cult in the late nineties. They were responsible for the 1995, Tokyo subway Sarin attack. They were a yoga class, turned doomsday cult from Japan and they perpetrated this attack, it was a big story. Ultimately their compound got raided. I kind of looked at that as this kind of weird, and that's what the game I mentioned earlier, a story of Kamikuishiki village is about. It's a satirical game about that whole situation in Japan shortly after the attacks happened. It spoke to this kind of weird drying up of optimism.

Noah: There's this absurd rejection of optimism in the work. Souring is a great way of putting it.
You already mentioned all your sort of inspiration, at least the key words. Is there anything with the work that you want mentioned?

Jack: One thing I always like to say is, whenever I look at my work, sometimes it can be pretty goofy. So feel free to laugh. I think that's a good thing to live by just feel free to laugh.