Interviewed by i.j.oog

It is nine below zero and three o'clock in the afternoon in the little big city of Amsterdam. I have arranged to interview Dan Zero returning from Europe to the Australian outback, for the ANAT newsletter. In little more 24 hours he will be sitting on his verandah of his remote farmhouse watching the sun go down. I am more than a little envious of this minor multimedia artist from Wagga Wagga with the unfashionable trousers.

oog: So Dan how was the First European MacroMedia conference?

Zero: Well you could say it was three days of hi-tech bliss hanging out with some of the heaviest dudes in the multimedia industry. There were a few surprises. First it was the mountains of little cakes and little biscuity things with little dollops of cream and the constant stream of waiters with trays of glasses of quite a cheeky little red wine... then a really rad presentation by a couple of Beastie Boys fans cum multimedia geeks of about 18 from LA who got the job of doing the new Beastie Boys CDROM because they sent some of their stuff to their manager... which hordes of people walked out of...

oog: What about new products...?

Zero: Yeah... QuickTime 3.0 movies will be able to be any shape you want... no more rectangular boxes... you will have sprites which are clickable like in Director... in fact when you dump a Director piece to QuickTime with the right plug-in it can retain a lot of its interactivity... and combined with the new version of QuickDraw 3D you will be able to have fully scalable rendered 3D vector objects in your QuickTimes... all this with 5 channels of CD quality sound... 2 rear and 3 front plus a centre channel...and MPEG2 is supported so you can have 30fps full frame 32bit colour visuals...

oog: The big question is... will it run on my Mac Plus?

Zero:(nearly falls off his chair laughing) Yes well they were a bit cagey about the amount of RAM and processor speed necessary to do this all this stuff and I don't think it is any coincidence that Apple are in the computer manufacturing business as well...

oog: Did you see any work which impressed you?

Zero: The people at Real World Peter Gabriel's interactive multimedia company are working on an interactive CDROM called Ceremony of Innocence which is based on a book you might have seen called... I think... Griffin and Sabrine.. it consist of a series of postcards and letters exchanged between two artists who have never met... it develops into an odd sort of long distance love affair - and what I saw of the work was very intricate... quite whimsical and beautiful... mind you the resources they have at their disposal are unbelievable... They can have a large team of very talented people work for 18 months on a project and still not be finished... and if they want to spend 2 weeks in a studio in New York with Isabella Rosselini for the voice -overs they can...!

oog: Did you learn any good tricks or cool shortcuts...?

Zero: There was a great workshop by Terry Schlusser who up until recently managed the Lingo side of Director... which was completely packed out of course...the guy is a powerhouse... he condensed a two day workshop into two hours... but I have to admit that I kept drifting off daydreaming about having enough money to just hand him the prototype of my new work and say: Terry spend a couple of days on this thing fixing the code... Damned jetlag...

oog: So how does the future look Dan...?

Zero: Well of course there is a whole wave of enhanced CDs and hybrid CDROMs which access the internet for the up to date low bandwidth stuff but the sound and graphics come from the CDROM... all seamless... and a whole range of plug-ins that are available or coming real soon now which allow you to do things like import fully layered and anti-aliased Photoshop files straight into Director with all the transparency and ink effects intact... you can even switch layers on and off through Lingo... also a Shockwave plug-in for FreeHand which allows very precise and sophisticated placement of text and graphics on web sites...we also had a nice presentation from your favourite people at NetScape and of course version 4 is much improved with all the Shockwave plug-ins standardised and included in the software suite but again... when someone asked will it run in less than 64 Megs of RAM there was much general hilarity but no serious response from the podium...

oog: Did you see any interesting exhibitions whilst you were in the Netherlands?

Zero: I went to Tilburg for a major Christian Boltanski show (Passie/Passion)... it just goes to show that you don't need masses of hi-tech equipment... just 23,000 rusting biscuit tins, a few old coats, some white sheets, 1293 close up photographs of people's faces and 523 light globes... but joking aside it was a moving experience... full of humour and wit alongside the melancholy and his preoccupation with death...Whilst he probably seems a bit morbid in Australia but in this context the particular European nature of his work is much more apparent...and with the mass genocide in central Europa so fresh in the memories of the people his themes of power and innocence are as relevant to contemporary events as to history...

oog: What about new artists...? Did you see that show in Eindhoven called ID...?

Zero: Right yeah... with all the so-called up and coming young stars of the so-called revitalised English art scene... Well call me an old cynic but it reminded me a bit of a first year art school exercises... I mean imagine having the theme of 'identity'. There was a lot of video there. So much for the death of video art and not a computer in sight... Most of it was very bad... though I loved Eija-Liisa Athila stuff from Finland... she records adult women talking about their first sexual experiences and transcribes the tapes and these texts are then spoken by very young sexually immature girl actors...and she edits the footage to look like a TV documentary...really trippy...

oog: What did you think of Douglas Gordon's piece...?

Zero: Well I'd give anything to have his memory... Apparently he can remember the names of all the people he has met in the last five years and he letrasetted all two and a half thousand of them all over the gallery walls... I like some of his other stuff a lot like 24 Hour Psycho which was shown in Sydney but he's lost me on this one... Actually a funny thing happened when I was looking at Georgina Starr's work because I was wondering why a really bad sound recording needed a digital walkman and always the pragmatist I was honestly just checking how the thing was secured to the wall... but a bevy of attendants already suspicious of me because of my unfashionable trousers were soon on hand to prevent me finding out whether it really was only tethered there by a small piece of velcro!

But, shit my flight is boarding... have to go... see ya...

oog: Thanks Dan... and I am sure you would like to say thanks to ANAT for partly funding your sojourn under the quick response fund.

The little bloke from Wagga Wagga with the unfashionable trousers and the Shocking Your World T-shirt is already on the moving walkway and gives a little wave. "Yeah of course...", he yells, "...Thanks ANAT..!"

i.j.oog
january 1997
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