Your early works were known for a lo-fi approach, but your use of media has since evolved. Are you reacting to new technologies?
Slater Bradley: I was making single-channel “amateur” videos 15 years ago, when nobody had seen it before in art galleries. In the late 90s, everybody was making over-produced, Hollywood-style film installations. Then YouTube came out and I had to adapt to the fact that this amateur aesthetic that I was kind of playing off of was totally blown out. Back then, people couldn’t see a video on their phone, because they didn’t have one, and now they can. So you’re making a video that you hope looks good on an iPhone and in a gallery. I never thought like that before. There’s been this huge paradigm shift in media, and it just happened so quickly. It was like an artisan being trained in developing some woodworking skill and then it being made obsolete by some machine technology. But that’s what a lot of my work is about—things become obsolete and forgotten, but they can can be resurrected.
