Secretary Interview I

Ryan Griffis from Furtherfield recently interviewed me for the on-line new media journal.

For the next few entries, I will post excerpts from the interview.

RG: I'm curious about the initial formation of the US Department of Art and Technology. What was the process that led to it, and who was involved in the beginning?

RP: Four years ago, I moved to Washington, DC. After some exploration of the "nation's capital," with its monuments, the US Capitol, the White House, etc., I found myself in the midst of the greatest of all spectacles, the most ostentatious of all theatrical sets, the backdrop for America. I wanted to insert myself as a performance and multimedia artist into this space. I wanted to incorporate it through appropriation and transform it into an alteration of what it was originally intended to articulate as a proposal that repositions the role of the artist on the world stage. This was the germinal idea of the US Department of Art & Technology. US DAT became a site-specific performance work emulating systems of government in order to re-engineer those systems through the prism of the artistic lens.

(Go to Furtherfield for the full text.)