The Interview Project

This book is a work-in-progress, launched in the summer of 2016. It gathers transcripts of interviews, talks and conferences that I have recorded, conducted, or otherwise taken part in.

It was inspired, among others, by Hans-Ulrich Obrist’s Interview Project¹, and by a couple of outstanding interview collections, such as: Playtime by Fucking Good Art; Conversations² by Constant and Christoph Haag; East Coast Europe by Markus Miessen³...

Process:

This is the process for building this book:

1. Conduct interviews, ideally one per week
2. Transcribe them (or use online transcription services)
3. Publish (update the book, approximately once per month)
4. Repeat!

Background:

Some notes on my interviewing practice.

During the 1990s : taped interviews conducted for music fanzines (Crépuscule, Transit), with numerous electronic music acts: Kid606, Velvet Acid Christ, Das Ich, Olivier Moreau, Stelarc, Mother Destruction, Zbigniew Karkowski...

August 16th 2001: "the absolute interview / 10 small questions about music" is sent out to a number of musicians and sound artists.
On sept 13 2001, a website is created with the recieved answers, featuring Alec Empire, Blectum From Blechdom, cdatakill, Disinformation, Hanin Elias, Multipara, scanner, s.e.t.i., Silk Saw, Third Eye Foundation, Ultra Milkmaids, Ultra-red.

October 2001 : minidisk recordings, dream transcripts done in Georgia with members of the General Document collective.

Summer of 2002: I perform the 24 Hour Project. Over the span of 24 hours, I produce a continuous 24-hour audio recording, using two minidisk devices.

More recently, I conducted web-based interviews with Libre Graphics Magazine (conducted over IRC in 2011), with the Open Source Publishing collective (conducted over Etherpad during the production of the Aether9 book, 2012), and with free type advocate Dave Crossland (conducted over VOIP in 2014).

Manuel Schmalstieg,
September 2016

About the author

Manuel Schmalstieg is an artist, designer and educator, operating in the area between free software communities and hacker culture. Studies in Geneva (ESBA / atelier zero1) and Krakow (Academy of Fine arts / animated film department). Founder of publishing house Greyscale Press in 2008. Currently teaching webdesign at Eracom (Lausanne) and powering the InfoLab at HEAD (Geneva).

Footnotes

1. "An oral history of contemporary art", running since 1996 with nearly 2000 hours of interviews. See Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans-Ulrich_Obrist#The_Interview_project ↩

2. Conversations, Constant Verlag, Brussels, 2015, conversations.tools ↩

3. Markus Miessen (Ed.), East Coast Europe, Sternberg Press, Berlin, 2008, sternberg-press.com/index.php?pageId=1222 ↩