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July 13th 2006

Short Interview by Eli Milchman appeared on July 13th on Wired.com



1. Why did you create it?

"Average Shoveler" is a 2004-05 Rhizome.org at The New Museum commission winner. More in general my main goal is to create aesthetics forms describing our society and regenerating themselves thanks to a net feedback passing in through them. Oracles fed by real time net content.
So the "Shoveler" is another attempt to describe our society, our daily life, our fight with information and disinformation and many other themes more or less hidden in the "game". Another very important aspect of this project is the collision between the fictional environment in which you are immersed and the real and shocking feeling driven by the online feedback you play with.



2. How did the idea come to you?

It is quite impossible to say how these things come and go, above all because I usually do this job 24/7. Once Chuck Close said: "…inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just get up and go to work". So it is to say that it is more about a long process started years ago than an idea kicked off to feel good with the net mood. So firstly it came "Cookie Portraits", " The Portrait of Sofia Imber", "SkyMan", "Epic Tales", "eBay Landscape", "Altarboy-Oriana" and then the Shoveler.



3. How does it generate the news snippets and photos?

Basically the code is written in Macromedia Flash and relies on PHP scripts to import news and images via the RSS feeds. The main address from which we take texts and images in real time is news.yahoo.com.



4. What do you hope it will do?

Overthrow dead culture