We were excited to see that today's interview was with Alexis Rockman, the artist who created that wild 8' by 24' mural for the Brooklyn Museum's entrance. The mural, Manifest Destiny, shows what Brooklyn would look like in 3000 years, ravaged by global warming. Rockman worked on the mural with the help of Columbia Unversity's Godard Institute for Space, to guess what the climate would be like, and they came up with a Brooklyn (and the rest of the city) flooded under 82 feet of water. Linda Yablonsky's April NY Times article has description of the process of putting the mural together, here's a review from NY magazine, and, naturally, Greenpeace loves the mural. Gothamist could imagine this mural in many a Brooklyn living room - were they big enough. You can see Manifest Destiny at the Brooklyn Museum.
A note about the Interviews: Many people have wondered, been confused by/upset at/shocked by this week's questionless format. Gothamist's decision was to let our guest interviewers find their own interview style and rhythm that they feel comfortable with and feel would suit their subjects. We love K. Thor's questionless style - it's a way of really being inserted into the subject's mind - as much as we love the traditional Q&A style, and we hope you don't miss out on these interviews. That said, we're pretty sure that our cast of guest interviewers lined up through the early fall will be using some sort of Q&A format, but it will not be settled until we announce a new interviewer willing and able to take up the task of producing one new interview each weekday - it's much harder than it looks! Thanks for all of your feedback.
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no one like change- it's human nature- and we've tried to engineer a long period of transition to shake people out of the old interview format. krucoff is going to be doing his format over at his site, or at gawker- so if you like the old questions, you can always read them there!
for my part, i was getting kind of tired of the same old thing. not that krucoff's questions weren't gold- it's just that after 100 people answer the "tell us your favorite taxi story" question, i want to hear about something else.
I ruined everything, and not even on purpose this time. I guess, if you wanted to create a metaphor, Gothamist is like Brooklyn and I'm like millions of gallons of water. I'm only delicious in small doses! Too much of me can wreak havoc! Terrible, questionless havoc.
questionless interview? show me another place that employs this assinine technique. the more people that answer the same question, the easier it is to begin to uncover perspective, the interviewee's perspective. frankly, most of the people interviewed are not That Interesting or have done That Much. So some meandering interview, well, doesn't grab me, cause most of these cats, in many places, don't have that much to say. So their cab stories could be scrolled to.
andrew, are you commenting under aliases again?! show yourself, my pretty.
it goes without saying that the kthor questionless gambit has nearly doubled interview traffic over last week- kt is the master web impresario!
Is it an interview without questions? If the questions were getting tired, change them. The questionless thing is a little risky. But what the hell,it's different.
I actually think the questionless format is pretty interesting - it almost makes the interview seem more like someone speaking. However evocative the Q&A e-mailed questions format is, it is pretty rigid. This actually gives the interviewee more of a voice, and not just an opportunity to be clever. I think an "interview" is a broader concept than one might believe, at first.
Thor is an artist, not a journalist or information architect or literary theorist, and I don't think he deserves all this derision for providing people with free content for no pay. I think that people are being a tad reactionary and the whole situation is degrading into a flame session, which I would have thought beneath the readers of Gothamist (at least outside the forums).
I challenge Thor's critics to email Jen and offer to do a week of interviews. Then they can write the interviews about anyone they like in any way they feel is best.
Jake, I'm right here. No aliases for me. Anyway, my "interview" will resume soon. (I always used that term loosely cause I don't think what I did qualified as one exactly.) Stay tuned...
K-Thor has done an awesome job. I could never go this deep on a daily basis. Too much to do week in and week out so I made something very simple and quick to do. You see, I'm basically a lazy piece of shit. But variety is good and people always resist change at first. Remember, it's just a freakin' interview! Nothing to go apeshit nuts over.
Also, let me just say I never tried to railroad interviewees into answering one way or another and I always told them beforehand that regardless of how I ask a question it was totally up to them to answer any way they wanted to - serious or not. They didn't even have to respond to what I was asking if it was that stupid.
Chris Gage and I enjoyed doing the interview mainly cause we got a kick out of writing absurd questions. It really didnt matter to us what others thought and we're the first to admit it wasn't pretty or intelligent stuff but it amused the hell out of us. That's the primary goal I set for these type of things cause some people are always gonna hate what you do. Not much to do about that but ignore it.
Looking forward to more.
i think this is all a question of expectations. readers are expecting to see an interview (per the title) pretty much like they see in any publication (including most print pubs) via the Q&A format. To just change the format midstream to such an extreme (paragraphs of seemlingly endless sentences) is a bit too much to ask.
further, i personally think some of the 'fun' has been lost recently, which was a key benefit of reading the krucoff format.
that being said, clearly interviews are done in formats other than a Q&A. however, those include anticotal setups by the writers with tons of background. that's just not happening here. we are just thrown into the endless ramble.
just think of it like a sharp kick to the head- it might hurt a little, but in the end, it's very refreshing.
Haters need to step off, especially people that think questionless interviews have never been done before. You obviously haven't been paying much attention to the history of documentary and narrative journalism, not that I really blame you.
Thor set himself a pretty steep challenge -- questionless interviews take a lot longer to edit, require more material, a scalpel-like willingness to shape, and GOOD material that coheres. I'm not really sure he succeeded, but so what? It's an experiment.
Jackson West needs to chill the fuck out. He's a one-man damage control team for this Thensen guy. Save the best man speech for his wedding. These interviews are awful no matter how you slice it. His approach is "different" and "arty" so it must be admired? Okay, how about taking a shit on your mom's face and calling that "art"? In a sense, that's what he has done here. Please don't try to re-invent the simple idea of the interview and decide it functions better as a square. This is just unreadable shit. I'll give him credit though, like a car accident we can't turn away and anxiously await the next corpse to be pulled from the wreckage.
As a minor contributor to Gothamist it is very gratifying to see how much passion our readers have for the site. Personally, I like the questionless interview! It is as if the interviewee is free-associating thoughts about themselves and their work.
good riddance to bad rubbish. i only pray the other readers of similar douchebagness will do the same thing.
Questionlessness itself doesnt bother me; self-important droning, undertaking of massive ontological inquiries, and NO LAUGHS do bother me. the little questions were a point of entry, past vanity, via the trivial, whereas this soliloquizing allows folks to keep up their shitty new york cool facade.
There you, Jake. Dismiss criticsm and dissent with the "people hate change" clche.
Guess what? "people hate bullshit" is another cliche.
There you go, Jake.
Dismiss criticism and dissent with the "people hate change" cliche.
Here's another cliche for ya = "people hate bullshit".
There you go, Jake.
Dismiss criticism and dissent with the "people hate change" cliche.
Here's another cliche for ya = "people hate bullshit".
There you go, Jake.
Dismiss criticism and dissent with the "people hate change" cliche.
Here's another cliche for ya = "people hate bullshit".
There you go, Jake.
Dismiss criticism and dissent with the "people hate change" cliche.
Here's another cliche for ya = "people hate bullshit".
Jo, could you repeat that?
for someone who can't take criticism, i take a hell of a lot. what i can't take are trolls and flamers- get a life, create something substantial of your own, or go away- of better yet, do all three.
i wish there was a turing test for douchebags that i could place on the comment form- to keep them out.
jake, responding to such losers with such anger actually drags you down to their level. something to be said about taking the high road, bra.
Jake, you can be a real twitch at times. But even a broken clock is right twice a day. And reading K.Thor's interviews and the new format is an incredible breath of fresh air from Krucoff's tedious old format.
Seriously, at what point was Krucoff's staid semi-ironic line of questioning going to simply end? I can't tell you how great it is not only not to read that format, but to see K.Thor's take on it is an incredible breath of fresh air. These are seriously good pieces he's writing and they give you a better idea of who the person is than the Q&A format.
Jake, you have some defensive temper issues. But whatever. K.Thor's talent outshines that kind of behavior and makes me read Gothamist again. You did a good thing even if you don't realize it yourself. Change is always tough, but it can often be great.
who cares - it's a week! and like it or not, the interviews this week have generated a lot of discussion. some on topic, some about the format, but discussion nevertheless.
Alexis Rockman is a genius. We need more artists like this guy. Whatever happened to high fidelity art anyway?
There is a great interview with Rockman on Akrylic.com.
www.akrylic.com
Alexis Rockman is a genius. We need more artists like this guy. Whatever happened to high fidelity art anyway?
There is a great interview with Rockman on Akrylic.com.
www.akrylic.com