Miranda July, artists who use crowdsourcing.

Portrait of the Artist in the age of connectedness

Leah DeVun interviews Miranda July via telephone, May 14, 2007

Miranda July is a writer, filmmaker, and performing artist whose works have been featured in a number of prestigious venues, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, and the 2002 and 2004 Whitney Biennials. Her first feature film, Me and You and Everyone We Know, received a special jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival and the Camera d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, among other honors. A collection of her short stories, No One Belongs Here More than You, was published this month by Scribner. Along with artist Harrell Fletcher, July founded the Web-based collaborative art project “Learning to Love You More,” which invites the general public to submit creative “reports” in response to assignments posted on the Web. July talked to Assignment Zero about her current projects, crowdsourcing, and the cruelty of YouTube.

Leah DeVun: Has your relationship with your contributors gone beyond just putting together the compilation of videos or the Web site?

Miranda July: With Big Miss Moviola, I felt very thankful for the network itself. I would tour the country in the early days and count on staying at the houses of people who would send me letters and provide the material for the shows. And it seems as if every one of those people ended up doing something amazing and becoming an artist that I admire now.

Q: Not only do you use crowdsourcing as a tool, but community and belonging are prominent themes in your artwork and writing in general. What got you thinking about how people form communities?

A: I was raised in a very do-it-yourself, create-your-own-audience world. My parents ran a small publishing company out of our house and I watched them build their audience, which is what we lived off of. So I grew up thinking that this is what you do as an adult. As an artist, performer, and moviemaker, I assumed I’d have to create an audience not just for my work, but for things like my work. The most immediate result of this was to support movies made by young women, so I started Big Miss Moviola. This was a video chain letter/quasi-distribution-network for women making short movies, and the hope was to create a movement. I have trouble doing anything that’s not on a grand scale in my head so the intentions were completely grandiose – we were interested in sweeping the world! And it just happened that technology changed, and the world went in that direction anyway. Not necessarily in a feminist sense, but definitely in terms of everyone making their own work, and making it in order to show to each other. I started doing this before everyone was online, so it changed at that point as the Internet became more accessible.

Q: How so?

A: There was a certain kind of intimacy before it was all online. Every part of mailing out a tape takes a certain amount of effort: you have to put the tape together and address it – and maybe decorate the letter. So there were fewer people involved, but they put more care into each thing. From my point of view, I took each letter and each submission I got very seriously, and I considered the project to be more about the individual than the crowd in a way. But at the same time, the people I was joining forces with wanted it to be about more than just their individual work.

Q: What kind of people submit to the “Learning to Love You More” site?

A: The project is big enough now that I can’t really make any generalizations. There are the pockets of high school students, and for them it’s probably connected to YouTube and Kara Hearn, did the “Learning to Love You More” assignment [Assignment #47] to recreate a movie that made someone else cry. But then she kept going and recreated a whole bunch of movies and scenes from movies, and it became her senior thesis show. She showed it to the public and what started out as our assignment became her work, and then her career. There have definitely been a lot of spin-offs – there are other stories like that.

Q: What was the impetus for starting the “Learning to Love You More” project?

A: Harrell [Fletcher] and I started it because we confided to each other that we secretly liked it when people told us what to do. I still work that way now. I just ask somebody: what should I do? Sometimes I get paralyzed and have a hard time getting started on the next thing, but if someone gives me a push in a direction then I get going. And I figured if that works for me, then why not for everyone?

Q: Several artists who work in crowdsourcing have said that assignments given to participants have to be somewhat narrow in order for them to be successful. Is that true of the “Learning to Love You More” project?

A: It’s definitely an art form that we’ve gotten better at. We’ll start to look at the submissions coming in, and then we adjust the assignment and decide that a certain part has to be more specific. Or sometimes we get work that’s just not good or inspiring, and we take the blame for that. So we end up making some changes to the assignment so it’ll produce better results. We’ve even taken assignments down from time to time.

Q: What were some of the ones that just didn’t work?

A: Oh, I – I’m kind of at a loss. I think it’s better when we just put those out of our mind! Ultimately our job is to make people feel free and to direct them back to themselves, and so it’s not really about crafting specific instructions. We don’t want to tell people how to assemble something that’s going to turn out exactly the same for everyone. It has to have enough holes in it so that it can be totally different each time.

Q: How would you account for the popularity of “Learning to Love You More” or other collaborative art projects on the Web?

A: I think it’s about people finding the next thing that’s on the Web. People will get pulled into whatever’s out there. As you have proliferating forms of media you’re going to get art that moves into those directions, and as the technology becomes more advanced, the forms the participation takes become elaborated. I don’t really spend that much time on “Learning to Love You More” these days, only when I get into a kind of Googling fit and want to find something that’s hopeful on the web.

Q: Do you find things on the Web mostly depressing?

A: No, distracting. I’m a writer, so I’m always trying to stay focused on writing. I mean, it’s the same machine you use whether you’re doing your work or Googling, so there’s always the potential to stop writing and do other things. Sometimes I just have to turn off the Internet.

Q: I’ve heard rumors that there’s a “Learning to Love You More” book in the pipeline.

A: I’m in the middle of working on it right now. It’s going to be coming out in October, and there’ll be an art show for it in Holland, and something in Seattle at [the festival] Bumbershoot. Harrell and I have been sifting through all of the reports in preparation. We’re picking the stuff that’s our favorite work or what goes well together. It isn’t always the best work or the work made by the most talented artists that we’re choosing, but how it fits together as a whole.

Q: Are the reports up on the Web the total of what you’ve received or are there boxes of stuff under someone’s bed that you have to deal with?

A: No, it’s all up on the web, but it’s like 4,000 reports. We just got through reviewing every single one of them. And we’re having a hard time tracking everyone down and contacting them. We need their best versions of the work, and the highest [resolution] possible, so we have to find them and get them to send it to us and get their permission to print it. We haven’t been able to find everyone.

Q: Some people have been trying to make crowdsourced films and novels, like Shu Lea Cheang’s film MobiOpera. Have you thought of doing anything like that?

A: I’m not so much interested in collaborative projects per se. “Learning to Love You More” is really the only work like that I’ve done that’s along those lines. All my first films were made just by me, and the movie and the short stories were written by me. I’m sort of a control freak, and I like to be able to exercise total control over what the output is going to look like. I haven’t been so interested in what I’d call the Exquisite Corpse method of creating art because the product doesn’t always turn out to be so compelling.

Q: But a lot of your live performances involve audience participation, for instance, your series of performances called "How I Learned to Draw." What’s the motive behind getting the audience to participate?

A: When I’m performing, I just think that the audience and I are here together in this space and the most important thing we can do is take stock of who we are and where we are in the present moment. And if we’re not going to do that, then what’s the point? For instance, I got all the men and then women in the audience to talk to each other, or I introduced people to each other that I thought should be friends.

Q: Do you think that a larger audience of contributors is now aware of crowdsourced or collaborative projects, or that these projects are appealing to a more mainstream crowd?

A: I’m not sure that “Learning to Love You More” has gotten attention on a larger scale, or that more people are contributing. Anyways, I hope not. That’s not really the goal of the project. I just think of the things I’ve worked on in the past, and I look at some Internet sites that are along the same lines as my early work or work that I wanted to do, and I’m not overjoyed at the way they’ve developed. I’m really interested in sites like YouTube, where there’s all the potential in the world to put up your videos and have access to this enormous resource, but then it devolves into something that’s really sort of cruel, and I think about the art girls out there who could just be destroyed by a site like that. YouTube also doesn’t have an aesthetic, although I realize that this is contrary to what the Web site is trying to do. One of the things I always wanted to do was to have a film-sharing site along the lines of Big Miss Moviola but on the Internet, a YouTube just for girls, so girls could get together and share their films but be outside of that sort of cruelty.

Q: Your early CDs were released on the record label Kill Rock Stars, which is known mainly for putting out albums by Bikini Kill and other riot grrrl bands. Do you think your involvement in that scene had an impact on the kind of work you do?

A: It definitely seemed like just a natural thing to make Big Miss Moviola in the context of all of that, and to be involved in projects for girls. Riot grrrl is still chugging along out there somewhere, and I’m sure there are still a thousand riot grrrl sites on the Internet. I’d still like to do my YouTube for girls, but I’ve never gotten around to it. It wouldn’t take a lot of effort to construct it, so someone should do it. I have a lot of ideas for projects that I don’t have time carry out because I’m doing 45 million other things.

Q: You ARE doing 45 million things. Do you have any other talents that we don’t know about? What’s next, modern dance?

A: Well, now that you mention it…