Bettina Funcke: In the last ten years, film and video have become popular tools and references in contemporary art. However, there are still facets of these mediums that are poorly understood and often badly translated in exhibition contexts: how they are shown, how they relate to other artworks in the space, and how the audience is guided to see these works.

Until recently you showed your work in the context of film- and video festivals like the New York Video Festival, the Rotterdam Film Festival, and the Biennial de l�Image en Mouvement in Geneva. But you have begun to situate your work in the realm of visual arts. Why does the context of the art world-its museums, galleries, exhibitions, and projects&-interest you more than that of film festivals?

Seth Price: In festivals, there's a lack of -- well, you drop your work in a black hole. Sometimes the art world may provide more of context, and flexibility, and ambiguity. Last year, Barbara London asked me to do a screening at MoMA, and I made a piece (New York Woman, 2001) which was at right angles to the video medium, you could say... I was looking at music production techniques, and, in a way, examining cultural production in general, the way that production technologies dictate the passing style, as it fades, from future tense to past... The versions-- well, it was more like shadows-- I made these versions of old dance singles, all dating from different periods... I had the idea that the structures could be recreated, the structures alone, like, the bones of the songs are the production... Well, at MoMA I gave a talk about it, the methods, the history of the music, a lecture, and I distributed free compact discs with the songs. I did show some videos, but it was only as supplementary information. 'Visuals'. Later, I showed the same piece in a film festival, and that audience didn't know what to make of it, or the expectations were totally different, all the attention focused on the video, really, which doesn't make sense as a discrete work.

BF: What about linearity and the loop as two different forms of time-based work?

SP: Yes. The scheduled "screening"--it's a--this is not just in film festivals, but anywhere--it's a kind of control. And the idea of the loop is more of a kind of 'total flow', the faucet just got left on... For most of film history, movie theaters were okay with people just drifting in during the screening, sitting on through the end, through the beginning, and back to where they came in... And this is the time when you'd lean over and say "this is where we came in". That was a popular expression once. The swing era. It defeats the schedule, you don't have to arrange your day around the ticket line. Yes. That would only happen in a gallery today. It would be interesting to see commercial movies presented as loops... inevitably it would have to be framed as some kind of "project"...

BF: Your work Painting Sites (2000) uses the loop, which is one reason for it to be shown in an art context. It consists of two narrative elements: a kind of a manipulated slide show of paintings and a fairy tale that you have written and are reading yourself. These two elements break with linear narrative and, by turns, affirm and contradict one another. At times the images seem to illustrate the story, and at times they make no sense together at all. Can you tell me about your ideas for that piece, and how you conceived of it?

SP: That piece came out of opposition, out of contradictory impulses. Dan Graham wrote something about placing the work at the edge between two things, so they contradict each other. I wanted to make a video, but without a video camera. To remove my hand, or at least put it behind glass. And to work with the two major strands in "video art", the narrative and the performative, and then to negate them, to make them work against themselves.

So, I wanted a kind of seduction, also, I wanted to appeal through simplicity, an extreme simplicity of structure. So that the elements, at least at first, could seem like known quantities. The images are presented like a slide show, which is familiar from any art history class, and the story is essentially a fairy tale, which is told in professional tones, like a voice actor. Getting that authoritative voice was the performative element. To give the idea that if you're having a problem following, it's your fault for not paying attention. I dropped the most basic video effects I could on top of the paintings. I was thinking about graffiti... It seemed like adding insult to injury--I mean the injury of leveling out all the paintings, whether they were masterpieces or trash.

BF: How did you choose to combine these visuals with the German Romantic fairy tale?

SP: Some bodies of -- some cultural areas are basically monoliths... Under scrutiny they unfold, or maybe they point somewhere else entirely. Nineteenth-century 'Marchen' are couched in the language of fairy tales, but they aren't for children, they're for adults, they are labyrinthine, and morally ambiguous. I decided I would analyze the stories, and mine the formal tropes and stock phrases, and then I wrote one. It's a story that never resolves, it's a stack of tics and cliches, it goes in a circle. It's like the New York Woman pop songs. It's a kind of a production skeleton. Around then I was asking AltaVista to give me results for the term 'painting', really just out of curiosity. I wanted to see what people were nominating for such a universal category. I saved all the images to disk in the order they were given to me by the search, and I added the narration, and that was the video. It's a fact, a fact... The organizational function of the web only seems to mobilize when it's asked to produce results; the rest of the time it's nothing, it doesn't exist at all in the usual sense, it has to reconstitute itself a million times a second for all these different users. It has to make itself up to look like architecture for you. In this case, it was being asked to assemble a body of knowledge which has already been mapped ad nauseum according to specific ideological and historica tendencies. This is its levelling effect, it doesn't care about anything in particular... Like, this year Richard Posner published a book, ("Public Intellectuals. A Study of Decline", 2001) listing the top 100 public intellectuals, and the ranking was determined by Internet searches. The same strategy was what determined my video, except that it was self-conscious: you take a snap-shot of a database in flux, you hold it up to the light, with minimal framing, and you endow it with the resonance of a fixed system. That's what art does all the time, or fashion.

BF: It seems to me that you are developing a kind of advanced technique of appropriation. You get into a certain genre---for example, electronic pop from the 80s or the German Romantic fairy tale---until you are familiar enough to create a pseudo-product of the same genre, following the rules of that cultural genus.

SP: Maybe... in one context a work could be legible as a network of signs, or maybe a proposition about how signs work, but at the same time it might stand alone, as a functioning cultural artifact in such a way that it would be impossible to prove to a skeptic that it's actually "art"... Media, or mass media, which means ideas packaged as entertainment, like a book or a CD... so, a contribution to the general cultural conversation and the popular archive, something that lives or dies by the rules of the general market, as opposed to that of the art world.

Well, I put out a record last year. It was early video game sound tracks, they were downloaded as files from these Internet fan clubs and file-sharing networks, which I then turned into music tracks, and put onto an album. This was going to be a product, so it was important to work with a trend, I mean with a fetishized area of the culture. One reason it had to originate in what you call an art context is that it's not legal to pirate these songs, although they're already stolen, anyway. But that's a failing in the culture: given this obvious demand, why can't someone buy old video game soundtracks at the record store? It seemed perverse, in a good way, to shift this 'content' from this newer system of distribution, the Internet, to the older model, of products in stores. It was fans who were the ones who hacked the songs out of the original arcade games, but it took the Web to give it a distribution medium. The album's cover comes from this website "cdcovers.cc", which is a database of music packaging, all the inserts, the booklets, the covers, for people who are already getting the content from some downloading service. I was reading about this Warner Brothers lawyer who was saying he wasn't concerned by all that, by this practice of downloading the packaging... One must stop and say to oneself: it's amazing, surely he has no imagination whatsoever... You know. It's clear that packaging is the last card that the industry has; it represents the last vestige of the old model of distribution.

BF: You are giving me only half an answer here. You said that you had to make the CD within the context of art because of copyright issues, but, really, you could have addressed those issues and then made a real, profitable, product, but you didn't. Are you torn at the moment between wanting to be an artist and wanting to be a music producer, or do you want to work with the tools of a music producer from the position of an artist?

SP: I wouldn't mind being a music producer. Well, I am. You're right, the challenge to copyright law is inherent in the album, but I think that even if you wanted to do it legally, the difficulty of tracking down all of the rights-holders would make the project practically impossible. To start with, some of the tracks, as you get them off the Net, have almost no information whatsoever attached to them, sometimes not even the name of the game, certainly not the composer... When you download them, the names might just be strings of numbers and letters. But I like the anonymity. When it's recontextualized as a "product", that lack of identification stands out, it's suggestive, and aggressive. I'd have no clue if one of these old soundtracks was a complete fabrication. Which is a unique quality of the web, as a kind of archive... it's not like the public library, which has to go by federal regulations... the Web has no use for provenance, or identification, or truth value. It's kind of like public access cable.

BF: The web manifests extreme pluralism, though. One finds not only websites reminiscent of the obscurity of public access TV, but traditional archive structures, such as the Library of Congress home page, or the New York Public Library website, the MoMA library catalogue, and so on. The host signifies the kind of archive you are dealing with. But I do agree: for your kinds of keyword searches, the internet produces ambiguous and nonlinear results that are based on a specific pluralism of the net that obliterates all traditional understanding of the hierarchy of information.

I'm still curious about genre appropriation. Let's talk about that a bit more. You are currently researching Christian apocalyptic novels, a quite particular literary genre that you are planning to take on. As I understand it, you are planning to write such a novel yourself. How does that relate to your earlier work, and your ways of making work?

SP: Well, an attempt to find a way to make it, make the, keep art-making interesting. I'm not always so comfortable with objects. I was looking at the idea of genre, and it seemed that genre constructs itself by demanding immersion in a rule system. So, I had the idea I could get rid of taste, by basically taking the vernacular on its own terms, without any kind of distance. I started trying to understand musical or literary genres which I thought I didn't like... Then there's a natural temptation to create works within these media, and the content becomes an expression of the formal parameters.

He mused for a moment, his brow furrowed, a wisp of smoke emerging from his briar-cob. The kind of appropriation you were talking about, at least as a strategy, it's common in the mass market. So, an art-making practice that abandons craft, plasticity, and singularity in favor of information, distribution, and circulation, has to really catch up with consumer media, with mass production. When he started out, (author) Robin Cook wasn't getting the sales he wanted, so he got a bunch of best-sellers, analyzed them, and then went and wrote his breakthrough, "Coma" (1977). I was reading that the musician Moby listens to hit songs over and over, for similar reasons... Well, those are obviously two extremely "successful" examples. This isn't strictly about selling, which depends just as much on factors like promotion. The aim is to identify formal characteristics that give something a kind of widespread appeal at a specific moment. For example, you could resuscitate older designs and techniques that shed light on a past moment and on the present, like in New York Woman. The point is that minimal legibility as a pop artifact depends on a strict adherence to rules. Otherwise, the work is instantly relegated to the realm of the experimental on formal grounds alone.

BF: Jorge Pardo said that in order to be an interesting artist you really had to understand your relation to other sorts of production. Elsewhere he continued that thought: 'What does it take for a relationship to be worth something in a work of art? It's a question that runs through my work. What's the minimum expectation in juxtaposition between one thing and another?' He sounds like the generation after Dan Graham, following a similar goal with his work: to situate a thing on the edge between two things so that they contradict each other. Do you believe that this edge will be found for your generation in technology and media as forms of communication or as forms of public space, rather than in architecture or design?

SP: With media, unlike, say, architecture, you have something generally reproducible and not localized in space. There's work that has rubbed mass-media against art: Dan Graham or Robert Smithson's magazine pieces, Chris Burden's TV ad, or maybe Stan Douglas' TV spots, but I haven't seen them---these are precedents for a practice that inserts itself into communications and popular media. Digital technologies of the last ten years or so have reshaped the terrain so much... there are entirely new problems. Like Linux, an 'open-source' operating system: the code is freely available and manipulable, an on-going project to which anyone with the know-how can contribute, which means the authors probably number in the thousands by now. It's decentralized and impossible to co-opt, but it provides power and utility to the degree that large companies have to reckon with it. At the same time, and inherently, it challenges ideas of ownership and authenticity. It doesn't matter that this was not conceived as art; it is a great example for art.