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.
5/17/07
