Post-Real Panoramas

Nick Hooker Interview with Reality Sandwich Creative Director, Michael Robinson:

1. What's your personal mantra?


Just get out of bed and start. That’s actually a serious mantra because once I’m working I’m doing something that I don’t fully understand. I think a mantra is a tool to help with something. I just need help with starting! Then I’m fine.



2. What does the role of the artist mean to you? 

I admire artists who are primarily uncovering and elaborating some truth about them selves. The effect of lots and lots of people doing this in the culture at large is hugely beneficial. Some artists do it on a grand, mass scale; others do it in esoteric and indecipherable ways, it doesn’t matter, it’s the sum total of all this creativity and the vast energy it represents that is important. It is the greatest force for progress that mankind possesses, that and humor. So the role of the artist is simply to make the art with as much integrity as possible.



3. What is the driving force behind your creativity?


Truthfully, it’s to stay on the light side of things and confirm to my self that I am indeed conscious and that this consciousness is endlessly fascinating and wondrous and worth engaging with and exploring. The less creative I am the less aware of being conscious I am and I risk slipping into a state of non-consciousness and ignorance which I have done from time to time, it’s not fun!



4. What transformative experiences have influenced your life and how was that manifested in your work? 


Probably the most important thing that happened to me was getting badly injured playing Rugby when I was about fifteen. I went to boarding schools in England when I was eight years old and wasn’t able to draw or make art which I had loved doing when I was very young. I used to copy all the Greek gods out of D’Aulaire’s book of Greek gods, endless pictures of Zeus and Hercules. These English schools snuffed that out and replaced it with sport; it was excelling at sport that earned you status and respect. Anyway, I suddenly couldn’t play rugby and so I went down to the art department where I met a great teacher who had just come off an oil rig, I have no idea how he wound up at this very proper English boarding school, but there he was. The head of the department wanted me to do watercolors of the school chapel but instead I started raiding the pigment cupboard where there was thousands of pounds worth of untouched and unused pigment. I took all this pigment and with this mad teacher’s encouragement I started doing these huge canvasses. It was the first time I had experienced real joy after about eight years of this oppressive English educational system. The next time I played rugby I just faked an injury and walked off to go the studio. In a sense that experience is manifested in everything I do but it also triggered a love of really vibrant color that I still have. Raw pigment is intense stuff. I love all that Yves Klein work, it’s completely alive, literally, it’s vibrating and transmitting something.



5.  How long does it take you on average to complete a piece of work, and do you ever do several pieces simultaneously? 


It can take years or days. A lot of the material I work with is originally from video footage I shot in Berlin when the Berlin Wall came down. I still use that stuff because, even though it’s just ones and zeros, its imbued with an essence that I understand and have an intuitive feel for. So it’s hard to really define how long it takes me to make stuff, I work in sessions with material that goes back twenty years.



6.  Why should people check out your work?   

For different reasons, some shallow, some deep. On a superficial level they might just get an aesthetic rush but occasionally that might just be a detonator for something deeper. But revulsion is fine too!



7.  How does your work affect consciousness, and what are your views on the evolution of consciousness? 


It affects my consciousness by illuminating myself to myself, which is helpful. My views on the evolution of consciousness is that it will become ever more aware of itself on a collective level which will be an ever wonderful thing for some and completely terrifying for others. I’m not sure if technology is that important. I know people who think that AI will eventually be essentially conscious but I think we’ll need to call that something else. We’ll need an  entirely new body of ethical, legal and philosophical insights to handle that, especially when we start inserting that highly complex AI into similarly complex machines.