Interview

Interview is composed entirely of screencaps of subtitles—gathered via copy + paste—from a pirated DVD of a movie of the same title, directed by Steve Buscemi. The copy was purchased from 1 of thousands of underground stores—underground in the sense that they are illegal, despite being openly nested in public marketplaces—vending pirated DVDs in the Philippines. This work foregrounds a feature that is typical of pirated DVDs: erroneous subtitles. Normally considered a type of visual noise that intrudes into the appreciation of the filmic object & therefore usually switched off, erroneous subtitles exhibit a double displacement—a lack of correspondence between what it says & what is heard, & consequently a lack of correspondence between what it says & what is seen—slippages that evoke Magritte’s door, wind, bird, valise.