Pipilotti at the International Film Festival Rotterdam 2010
Liebling
The wonderful, colorful and slightly bizarre world of influential video artist/filmmaker Pipilotti Rist gets an extension with Cinema Reloaded. For co-producers who are not afraid to dream… of green humans, burning beds and blue houses.
19 Feb 2010
Conversation with Pipilotti
In this latest blog entry, Pipilotti in conversation with journalist Michael Gubbins.
Despite the many international accolades collected by Pipilotti Rist, she retains a very particular interest in audience reaction. “When an installation is put in I pretend to be a visitor and I start to discuss with them about what she did.”
The Swiss artist and film-maker sees real value in such interaction – an opportunity to see what kind of response her work elicits. The audience may bring a challengingly different interpretation of work and that is important, she suggests. Indeed, she encourages it through email correspondence. That same opportunity is not really open to the film-maker, particularly in the traditional theatrical context. “In a cinema, people are concentrated all together in one bubble and then they leave and spread. It is easier with an installation to hear what people think. In art you always get more chance to get a response,” says the artist, whose first full-length feature film Pepperminta was released last year.
Cinema Reloaded then offers a chance to recreate the kind of audience relationship she has come to value. It is an idea that clearly has appeal: “I am extremely interested to have co-producers as a kind of virtual counterpart.” These kind of co-producers have a different kind of commitment than the more conventional financiers, she suggests. “They have no special interest that means they would say ‘change the ending.” They do not intervene in any commercial way to say you have to do it this way or to make it more mainstream.”
What she is hoping for is that backers will be as interested in the project as she is, interested in seeing ideas develop and come to fruition. Rist is convinced that the internet can be an enabling tool that benefits creator and audience. “It is not a threat or an alternative (to cinema) yet,”“What it can be is a liberating tool that puts the audience in the picture, perhaps enabling new creative possibilities,” she suggests. “Maybe art history could have always been like this.”
Pipilotti Rist
Pipilotti Rist likes red beets a lot. Her focus are video/audio installations. She tries to be very friendly but is a somewhat autistic person. She likes machines and children. Her opinion is: Arts task is to contribute to evolution, to encourage the mind, to guarantee a detached view of social changes, to conjure up positive energies, to create sensuousness, to reconcile reason and instinct, to research possibilities and to destroy clichés and prejudices.
2009 she made her feature debut with Pepperminta. Pipilotti lives and works in Zurich and in the Swiss mountains. For further information and up-coming projects/exhibitions of Pipilotti Rist visit her homepage www.pipilottirist.net