VB: What first occurs to me in response to what you say is that painting and writing are fundamentally solitary occupations. The image of the painter in the studio, like that of the writer at her or his desk, is of an individual before a blank page – canvas or paper – upon which an imaginary world may take the form of a material inscription.  From my beginning as a painter I have taken a detour through photography and video – which obliged me to seek my subject matter in the external world – to return to a sedentary position in front of a screen. The unreal worlds that may be created by science fiction writers – worlds in which the physical laws of our everyday reality no longer apply – may be painted or may be modelled in computer space. This would be the first, most obvious, relation I might make between the spheres of painting, writing and computer modelling. When I think of painting in relation to videogames what first comes to mind, irrationally, is the experience of visiting museums. The passage from one gallery to another suggests the passage between levels in a videogame. One passes from the Medieval collection, to the Renaissance gallery, to Baroque, to Romantic … Each gallery is its own world, where the differences between works is less striking than the similarities, and yet they are all part of the same ‘game’, the same story, which is the history of painting. The Modern collection was once last in line, as the rule of the game is that the levels be historically organised, thereby implying a Greenbergian modernist scenario of progression towards the victory of pictorial art severed from any reference other than to itself – all obstacles surmounted, Game Over! According to one’s perspective, the Contemporary gallery may now be seen as either troubling this progression or as perfectly coherent with it, as the penultimate stage of the triumph of neo-liberal culture at the ‘end of history’ in that ultimate de facto gallery which is the Museum shop! But in the more fundamental terms of my working experience of producing art I am less aware of a relation to videogames as such than of the relation to the software used to produce videogames – the ‘game engine’. My own experience of working with a game engine to produce images, still or moving, is closely similar to a certain experience of painting – in which one moves hesitantly towards the realisation of an imprecise mental image through a process of false starts, corrections, refinements and fortuitous accidents to arrive at an image that could not have been fully foreseen at the outset, something related to what I ‘had in mind’ but not identical to it. To return to science fiction, I would say not all science fiction interests me, only a certain science fiction. Most science fiction – for example, the ‘space western’ – simply projects already familiar narrative themes and tropes into unfamiliar settings. The science fiction I look for is not fundamentally different in purpose from other forms of writing I value. There is a story by Virginia Woolf in which she describes two dots in her narrator’s field of vision as they eventually resolve into two approaching people. A more conventional narrative would have begun with the people. I perfectly understand why Rancière should say he derives a better political grasp of how historical time is experienced from Woolf than from Zola.[7] What I look for in science fiction is that same sense of the strangeness of the phenomenological world before it resolves into preformatted representations, that same ‘making strange’ that Viktor Shklovsky saw as the very purpose of art.

AS: According to Shklovsky, “defamiliarization” as an artistic technique is less a matter of knowledge than of perception.[8] The artwork’s aim is to interrupt the automatism of taking things for granted by complicating or defamiliarizing common beliefs and perceptions. Nicholas Royle relates Shklovsky’s esthetic approach of “making unfamiliar” to Freud’s concept of the uncanny.[9] This entanglement of perceptual and psychical estrangement seems to be the common ground of all your references to science fiction. Let’s take, for example, the scene in Tarkovsy’s Solaris, when the protagonist tries to unfasten his late wife’s dress, who in fact is a projection, and realizes that there are lace-holes but no laces. Or the schizophrenic boy in Philip K. Dick’s novel Martian Time-Slip, whose anomalous perception of time enables him to see the future in ruins before it is built. I have the impression, that your own work is based on similar processes. Actually, the reader of Afterlife constantly is confronted with diverging and sometimes contradicting perceptual and psychical realities without being able to integrate them into a coherent narrative or interpretation. The reader finally is thrown back on herself or himself – her or his own perceptions and associations. Julia Kristeva writes, in Strangers to Ourselves, that “Freud teaches us how to detect foreignness in ourselves”.[10] Would you agree that your work invokes this question of “foreignness in ourselves” by drawing on techniques of defamiliarization both on a perceptual and on a psychical level?

VB: The ‘foreignness in ourselves’ at issue for Kristeva is of course the unconscious, that subject which is radically other to the ego – the amalgam of imaginary identifications we must assemble to occupy a place in society. When you invoke the idea of defamiliarization in both psychical and perceptual registers, you add consideration of the phenomenological real to the real of the unconscious. In Lacanian terms these are versions of the ‘big Other’ – to which I would add the Other of Global capitalism. Any work of art is necessarily constructed within these ‘horizons of Otherness’. When, forty years ago, I put together the collection Thinking Photography I placed Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Author as Producer’ as the inaugural essay. This essay is foundational to all of my thinking about my work; not least, to my criticism of so-called ‘political’ gallery art. Making a point close to that which Brecht expresses in his idea of the ‘apparatus’ Benjamin writes: “Before I ask: what is a work’s position vis-à-vis the production relations of its time, I should like to ask: what is its position within them? This question concerns the function of a work within the literary production relations of its time. In other words, it is directly concerned with literary technique.”[11] When you ask if I draw on techniques of defamiliarization, therefore, I would say that the entire history of my work has involved the close attention to technique for which Benjamin argues – not least, to the attention of the relation of image to text on which he insists elsewhere in ‘The Author as Producer’. For all it may not be immediately apparent, Afterlife is in a direct line of descent from my 1970 work Room. The earlier work was a response to the question of the limits of sculpture, a question that preoccupied many of my generation. It may be seen as a response to a remark Donald Judd made in a seminar while I was a student at Yale, to the effect that “a form that is neither organic nor geometric would be a great discovery.” My work Room came hard on the heels of Photopath – a mise-en-scène of looking at the real through its representation, a perceptual act which inevitably brings with it the experience of looking at something while thinking of something else. Room was an attempt to impose a form, albeit a shifting and fluid form, on that state of being in the world which is looking-at-a-material-object-in-the-setting-of-a-gallery. However, once I took the subjective consciousness of the viewer directly into account, once I stopped treating the viewer as a disembodied eye equipped with a knowledge of art history (once I stopped feeling constrained by the apparatus) I encountered all the complex of emotions and judgements that are the traditional domain of the novel! At this point the question of the quasi-plastic form of a psychical object became coupled to considerations of narrative form – but, precisely, with the invention of non-novelistic forms of narration. Over time I moved away from such conscious attention to technique as, for example, in my détournement of advertising rhetoric in the 1970s. By degrees, my basic formal model became that of the unconscious fantasy. The psychoanalysts Jean Laplanche and Serge Leclaire describe the reiterative fractional chains that form daydreams and unconscious fantasies as “short sequences, most often fragmentary, circular and repetitive”,[12] and characterise the fantasy as a scenario with multiple entry points.[13] The reader/viewer as subject of the signifier is constituted on a möbius band of impressions and associations. Time here is centrifugal and centripetal rather than linear, a time of shifting perceptions and associations around a perpetually displaced moment. This precisely, as you observe, throws the reader back upon their own associative processes, and into multiple and indeterminate narrative possibilities.