ARTiculAction Art Review - Special Issuue Aug. 2016 | Page 114
ICUL CTION
C o n t e m p o r a r y
A r t
meets
R e v i e w
Mark Franz
An interview by Josh Ryder, curator
and Barbara Scott, curator
[email protected]
Multidisciplinary artist Mark Franz's work
explores a wide variety of features that
marks out our media-driven lives: his
works could be considered as visual
biographies of the ubiquitous
consequences of contemporary
technosphere and find a point of
convergence between Literature and
Design. In his recent Zelda Deforested
that we'll be discussing in the following
pages, he draws the viewers into a
dystopian world to discuss the conflictual
relationship between technology and the
natural world. One of the most convincing
aspects of Franz's approach is the way it
urges the viewers to evolve from the
condition of mere spectatorship to reflect
on the various roles of technology in our
unstable contemporary age: we are really
pleased to introduce our readers to his
stimulating artistic production.
Hello Mark and welcome to
ARTiculAction: to start this interview,
would you like to tell us something about
your background? You have a solid formal
training and after having earned your MA
of Electronic Art and Animation, you
attended the prestigious School of the Art
Institute of Chicago, from which you
degreed with an MFA of Art and
Technology: how do these experiences
influence your evolution as an artist? In
particular how does your cultural
substratum due to your previous studies
in Literature inform the way you relate
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yourself to art making and to the
aesthetic problem in general?
I had some encouragement from educators
and peers regarding my poetry and I
thought studying Literature would help
develop formal skills related to creative
writing. To my surprise, it didn’t work that
way. A degree in Literature helped to
foster the critical and theoretical skills
necessary for academic writing, but did
little to encourage writing poetry and
fiction. After producing scores of pages on
Neal Cassady’s influence on American
counter culture, writing creatively seemed
like a chore. As a result, visual
communication really became the primary
means of expressing my ideas, especially
as an interpretation of the poetic
abstraction, symbolism, and structure I
had set out to convey.
Studying with John Fillwalk, a student of
Hans Breder, during my M.A. really gave
me the vocabulary for what I was doing.
The Fluxus legacy of Intermedia describes
the space between media, and both
Fillwalk and Breder are squarely within that
tradition. I was interested in the space
between poetry and visual communication,
as well as literature and design. As a third
generation Intermedia practitioner I finally
had a vocabulary to describe my work and
a community for critical feedback.
Producing video poetry, motion design,
sound experiments, and typographic
studies became a permanent substitute for
traditional forms of poetry at this point.