11 beaches, and they became the characters in the work. Although the film looks like one day or a single sunset, I filmed it over hundreds of days during the pandemic and post-pandemic period. Svenja Frank (SF): So the people who appear in Wilderness are not actors you hired, but people you met by chance on the beach? DA: Yes. Everyone in Wilderness is someone who was drifting by, who showed up and I met and spoke to. By making this work, I could collaborate with people and bring them into this fictional landscape and share with them this poem that I was creating, this song cycle about the future. I was fascinated by the idea of taking the chaos of the ordinary, the everyday, and creating a structure within that chaos—taking this random landscape of people disconnected, drifting, and passing by and creating a connective tissue. With Wilderness, there was initially that aspect, and then I started thinking of words and phrases in my mind, and I started writing them down like you would write a poem. I started imagining these like they were electric haikus for the digital era. I began to write song cycles, and I started finding people on the beach or in the streets who could sing the verses I had written. Often, I played the music to them, and, at first, they were saying, “What is this? I’m confused,” but then they would gradually fall into it and become almost hypnotized and seduced by it. That became the core of Wilderness: this idea of a synthetic poem, a digital composition that moves from person to person and creates this surreal connectivity where there normally seems to be none. SF: And that makes it feel unreal. DA: In Wilderness, you have a friction between raw tactile scenes, like people against an old wooden pier or a parking lot filled with broken glass, someone alone, lost and gazing at the bright setting sun, juxtaposed with a digitized artificial intelligence seeping into this world and leaching into our subconscious… What is the real? I had lunch with a friend recently, and he talked about how he’s creating his job proposals through artificial intelligence. I asked him what happens when you get hired, and they are actually hiring the AI and not you. You’ve erased your personality. You haven’t written anything or left any space for little quirks and the mistakes that create our personality; instead, you’re just presented as this perfected and synthetic human. SF: This is very interesting because we have been talking about the rapid development of new technology. What was unimaginable years ago is rapidly being introduced, and new technology is constantly normalized. Do you think VR will become a major theme in art, and to what extent are you integrating the latest technologies into your practice? DA: I think the conversation about our technology is fascinating, but actual technology and innovation have always been part of art, and from the invention of perspective to the Lumière brothers’ early films to sound and film—all of these moments are underscored by shifts in technology. All these chapters at one point have been harnessed by different creators into new phases of human expression. I think the key point for me is that you use the technology—the technology doesn’t use you. Often, you find people who are defined by their medium; as much as oil painters might be defined by their paint and canvas, we also find someone who says, “I’m a VR artist.” I don’t really find that so interesting. You’re a human being, and you live and breathe and have a life and this amazing spectrum of experiences. Why define yourself by a material, a medium, or an occupation? When you talk about art and technology, there are many attempts to create synthetic worlds—alternate worlds—whether it’s virtual or augmented reality. The acceleration of our society pulls us in different directions as individuals. We don’t always want to put on a VR headset; instead, we wish to reconnect with something that’s physical and natural. I find that, in this digital age, we’re now valuing the natural world perhaps more so than we were in the past. Barbara, that goes back to your question earlier, of the diversity of working on pieces in a broader spectrum of media. I always want to remain curious and, while making art, to feed on that curiosity, to be like fuel on the fire, to let it burn hotter and use that energy and merge with the ideas and questions that I’m restless about.
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