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| Metaphysical Interior With Pixels: Oculart.com's
Geoff Lillemon. Work: Oculart.com, 2001-Present Oculart is a consistently beautiful, hallucinatory site created by Geoff Lillemon. Paradoxically it's also the most neurotic. It twitches, flickers, jumps around, and its music is constantly falling out of tune. Colliding poetry, Georgio de Chirico, and Flash animation (on amphetamines), it's fear and loathing on the internet. It's something that evokes early net.art pioneers like Snarg.net but brings in something that is also entirely its own. At times the Oculart environment feels like the haunted hallway of a seedy brothel from the 1920's -- other times like a Surrealist picnic in a suburban park. ES: What got you into multimedia art? GL: I've always fancied the traditional mediums but the computer gave me chance to experiment with motion which seemed fascinating to add another element of em-ocean to this wave of arts. ES: How does a piece on oculart get started? GL: Well in regards to the process of works, on a non-technical explanation I usually try to derive my shapes for characters and other prominent focal points in a piece from the highlights or shadow forms in a tear or the shape of smeared lipstick zoomed up contains some very sad and humanly forms. ES: What sort of influences do you see in your own work? I see a lot of references to Cherico and the surrealists, but you were saying that you really weren't familiar with his work, so its not so convenient for me. But what do you see in your work, what was it that motivated you to get on the web and create the things that you do? GL: I would have to say I'm very inspired by The Moulin Rouge'ish Paris illustrations and the 1930 brothel house atmospheres. On top of that I just straight draw and dont look at anything to motivate me except my own mind. ES: I remember that for Arcangel Constantini's Ephemera "Battles" you were paired up with Margaret Penny of dream7, who is very drawn to dream imagery and the like, it seemed a really good pairing. Do you consciously look at your own imagery as dream imagery, or do you think it comes from somewhere else? GL: I wouldn't call my work dream imagery as much as interpretive realism, but I love Margaret and her dream7 site so much. Freddy Krueger invades teenage girls minds and Margaret invades mine. ES: What internet artists do you think motivated you to get into what you're doing now, if any? I see some elements of Snarg.net in a lot of what you do; but also some of the more abrasive elements of someone like Redsmoke, with your flash tricks and the like. Where there any sites you saw that really pulled you in to this medium? GL: Well I never really knew those sites when i started...( i know them now and have a lot of appreciation for that approach) but when i came to net art I just looked at fine arts and the such and just learned the flash tricks and animation ideas on my own. ES: Has net.art been everything you thought it would be? GL: I didn't expect for the site to bring up so many bizarre real life situations. Oculart was the sole reason I was having love affairs in Minneapolis, crying in Las Vegas while drinking 75 cent beers and eating foot long hotdogs that made my heart slow down. As well doing cocaine off a prostitutes breast in a shabby beach house while watching the sun rise, exposing my grizzled face. ES: Make up a question, and answer it.
GL: Do you believe in god? Yes. -Eryk Salvaggio
March 2003 |
Cory Arcangel. Geoff Lillemon. Kalx. Michael Mandiberg. Eryk Salvaggio. |
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