77 Million Paintings: DVD experience

Interviewer: 77 Million Paintings is available on CD, DVD. How do you think this affects the experience?

Nick Robertson: The 77 Million Paintings that’s available on DVD as a bit of ‘buyable’ software is actually not this. It’s a different set of images in there. There is a little bit of crossover. But the project’s developed aesthetically more than it has technologically. So, the choice of the different layered slides and images—I’m calling them slides but in fact they’re not at all, they started life as slides—that’s the main development. I think when we first released 77 Million Paintings, which must have been five, six years ago now, we hadn’t thought of taking it back into a gallery. The decision to release it may have been different had we approached the whole series of events in a different order. But I don’t think it necessarily affects the experience of coming to see these pieces, because a big consideration for these pieces is that they’re experiential and really they film differently than if you’re actually sitting in the room with it. The music’s completely spatial as well. So what an installation should do is make use of the environment in order to create an effect, which we try and do here. That’s something you certainly don’t get if you just put the software into your computer. So, the idea’s stepped on so far from the original release that I think of them as completely separate.