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 18 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.