My work never really had specific content until I began making pieces for the web. And the first piece that I did—which is "Realms"—was never intended to be a storytelling piece and just kind of ended up that way through a series of accidents. I initially was going to make an image-based piece, where images changed and reflected a kind of abstract narrative of architecture. But when I started writing html and looking at Netscape 1.1, it struck me that it was really a text medium. That you could have pictures but it really was about text. And it was such a different way of working that in order to structure the piece I started writing. I initially thought of having a friend write the narratives, and then I would do the images and put them together. But as I started writing I got very involved. And the narrative began to evolve around the difference between different kinds of urban spaces.

It was somewhat inspired by a couple of visits that I'd made to Houston and Dallas, where I was walking around taking photographs. And there was like no one out in the street. I was literally the only person. It was very surreal. In Dallas, actually—there was one space where they had classical music piped out around the building, but there was no one there. And it was like a place that had been hit by a neutron bomb and the people had somehow magically disappeared without any damage occurring. I never quite figured it out, whether the office buildings were really empty. I think to some extent people arrive in underground garages by their cars and they get their lunch in these underground courtyards, and they leave the same way, and you just never see any people. Except for some poor people downtown.

And Houston was the same.

So, when I came back—I'd been there a week or a week and a half—it just kind of hit me how different this was, that it was really a different culture, that not only was the space different, but the dynamic was different. That it was really inhabited in a way that made the space very alive. And also realizing that that was very unusual. A friend of mine who grew up in the South—I described this to him, and he said well, now you've also seen Atlanta. And he reeled off all these cities. And they all have these characteristics of a kind of diminished public space. Its a kind of fortress-like quality.

And I started reading about urban space and gated communities. And the thing that kept coming up was that a lot of people talk about not wanting to have any experiences that are not predictable, about wanting to live in a community where nothing ever happens that is of an unexpected nature. And that's essentially about control, being able to completely control your environment down to the most trivial experience. And I think people who live HERE don't want that control or don't care about it or like not being in control or like the aspects of spontaneity and unexpectedness. There's a kind of richness of experience that doesn't happen in those other places.

So, the first piece was about that. And it was very linear. There was a pairing of image and text that was sometimes literal and sometimes anti-literal, a kind of opposition of image and text.

And the nice thing about that piece is that people responded to it—it was on the web—and I got lots of letters. Very personal correspondence, not an art audience response. So, it got me thinking about the power of narrative. Also about the power of the web as a communications medium.

And then in the second piece, Pedestrian, I started working with much more complex narratives, and also images that move as well as narratives that move. The piece uses scrolling text to simulate a walking movement. And then the images are primarily GIF animations, but some of them, the more fluid ones, have a film-like movement to them. And both elements loop. So sometimes, the looping of image and the looping of text intersects in different places and different meanings emerge. And I think that was maybe my first sense of a more dynamic kind of narrative, where you could watch the same narrative overtly, but it would end up being a different kind of narrative, because the text and the image would intersect at different places. It came together in different ways at different times like a living collage.

That piece had one sound at the beginning (laughs), which now in retrospect seems very strange like why that one sound? And that sound was a siren, which kind of gets your attention and is a very urban sound. I really don't know why I didn't use more sound in that piece except I think I wasn't very open to sound at that point.

In between Pedestrian and Sampling Broadway—I did a video, where I woke up to the importance of sound. And that piece was about death. It was about two different experiences of death. One in a kind of magical environment. These two friends Glen Santiago and John Hoge turn their apartment into a shrine once a year for the Day of the Dead, and the entire surface of the apartment is covered with art work and objects from Mexico and mementos of friends who died. And they throw open their apartment for 24 or 48 hours, and people come and bring food, and they play music. And it's this wonderful way of remembering the enormous number of friends who died of AIDS, primarily, but also other people who they know who have died during the year.

The first time I went I happened to have my video camera. I did some filming there. I was kind of amazed by this environment. It was a very warm and kind of cozy way of looking at death. It made death seem like a very familiar and not very frightening thing. And then walking home, we came across a scene of a murder, where someone had been killed. Probably less than an hour before. And the police were still there. And I couldn't shoot it. I just couldn't take the camera out of the bag. But it made a tremendous impression on me. And then later talking to a friend, I discovered this friend had actually been there when this happened, so...somehow these two things came together. And I decided to do a piece which ended up being a short digital video that was based on the contrast between these two experiences of death in one evening.

This piece was a real expansion of my understanding of narrative, my ideas about where narrative could go. It's divided into two sections: the first section is very slow, very lyrical, a very warm kind of reconstruction of Glen and John's apartment. And there's a lot of gold and light, and it's all sort of red and gold. It just very slowly pans through different images in their loft, but in an impressionistic way. A lot of the images have been manipulated. And there is a text on the screen. I taped Glen talking about why he does this and how they put everything together. Then I listened to the tape and pulled things out, and then wrote a narrative from that interview. Then he came back and recorded the text that I put together. And then I went and shot additional footage, around where the murder had taken place. And put that together...in a very different tempo. And recorded my friend Colin who had been there when the murder took place. I did the same thing: took his narrative...took phrases and put them together in a slightly different way. And then re-recorded his section and put all three parts together.

So, there is a narrative text. The text actually moves and the topography expands and contracts and, well, animates on the screen. Then there is Glen's voice-over in the first half and Collin's voice-over in the second half. All put together with titles and then music and street noise underneath. And I think that piece was the piece where it all came together for me in terms of making a narrative out of reading, hearing and seeing, and having these multiple strands woven together at the same time. It was also the piece where I realized how important sound was in terms of creating an evocative sense of place and atmosphere.

Glen gave me some old Mexican folk music on tape. And John Neilson put it together with street noise and recorded voices...And when I first heard everything put together, I found it a little hard to take it all in. But after listening to it enough times, I really like the layering of all of these pieces, and I really like the idea of...you kind of see different parts at different moments, and the narrative shifts...It's a little operatic, I guess. But it's also like multi-tasking. You're reading but you have music on, and someone is talking to you. I think in the past, if someone was going to listen to a piece of serious music, they would sit on their couch and listen to the music and not be doing anything else while they were listening. I don't think people do that today. Actually it sort of interests me—not as a way of living, but as a way of thinking about multiple kinds of information.

I think people, especially young people, are much more comfortable with that kind of mixing of information...My next piece is still a little vague, but it's going to focus on how our perception of landscape, or in this case more specifically certain urban spaces, has been altered by film. So, that's one aspect of it. And the second aspect of it is—this is an emerging aspect that I didn't think of at the beginning, but kind of a sense of loss over...about the irretrievable past. When things are gone, they're gone. And the tension between nostalgia for a past that maybe is ridiculous, because maybe that past is just imagined, but how landscape is like a time line in a sense. I feel this intense nostalgia for what I see in photographs of the city in the past. I mean it's a past as filtered through photography and art work and film and reading, and so it's maybe a non-existent past, an imaginary past. But when I started walking around and doing some preliminary shooting and realized how much was really gone and couldn't really be re-created—it has a sort of poignancy.

One of the things that I'm thinking about doing in this piece, and it's once again pretty vague at this point—is inter-cutting not only between the different kinds of narratives like reading or the narrative of images, which is also a narrative, and audio narratives, but also between very different—I don't know how to say this—contextual narratives. I'm planning to tape a friend who is a film buff—he's giving me a lot of references about the city and film. And I thought it would be really interesting to just tape him about the city in film and then to intercut that with other fictional narratives, storytelling narratives—and other kinds of information. There'd be different kinds of narratives, in terms of conveying information. Almost like a data base narrative of just facts being repeated, a narrative of this particular place as it appears on film, a storytelling narrative, maybe somehow cut between those things. I'm also looking into, and I don't know how to do this technically yet...the technology of streaming video and having links in the streaming video that would branch to different narratives.

And I just have to find out more about it. But it may be possible just in QuickTime form. Or, you may have to use this proprietary software. But I think it is possible. And assuming that the streaming happens smoothly and quickly enough, it does have some possibilities (laughs).

You know, one thing that I did learn after both working on that video and then also on these audio things: You listen to the same thing over and over again. Until you get to hate it! And then you kind of get away for several months and the feeling goes away. But that feeling of being so sick of listening to the same thing over and over again. I don't know how people do it. You loose all your objectivity. It's like listening to someone practicing the piano, or scales or something. Because it requires time and attention. You can scan images and it's really a fast forward thing. But you can't scan audio that way. And it really did drive me crazy. I have a new respect for the kind of attention that it takes to really listen through and be able to hear it with any kind of objectivity after the thrill wears off. It's really...it's kind of awesome.