>Do you have enough time?


Always and never. I discovered that I have too may ideas anyway and at
the same time that I can almost always make "temporal" room for things
that I want to do.



>How do you use free time?


As I am a father of two kids I rarely have any free time left.
Specially since I made my passion my job. But 'relwaxation' means to
watch a Star Trek episode with my wife in the late evening - from
tape, of course.
Other activities in my 'free time' are outings with the kids, to a
park, a shopping mall, stuff like that.


>How does your free time (should you have it) affect your (artistic) work?


Well, in a way I am always "working". I have my 'office', constisting
of a mobile and a hand held computer always with me and if I need to
make notes about ideas or take a call, I can also do that in the park
or at the mall.


>Marcel Duchamp, perhaps the greatest avant-garde artist of the last
>century stoppend working as an artist in 1912. This fact had an enormous
>influence on modern art. On 11 November 1964 Joseph Beuys actually
>dedicated a complete art-action called “The silence of Marcel Duchamp is
>overrated” to this refuse to work.
>How do you explain this enormous effect Duchamp´s ´not-work´ had? And
>what do you think about it?


I just recently had the idea that terms like 'work' and 'free time'
and 'retirement' do not and will mot have any meaning for me. They are
terms of a punch-card-view on work and productivity. They only have
meaning in an industrial context. And as I do not work in such a
context, they have no meaning for me. So maybe Duchamps 'strike' just
was an anticipation of this fact. In a way I am on strike too: I work
- on my art projects - so little, that you could almost call it that.
But then this 'little' is only if you look at the time aspect. You
culd also say, that I never stop working on them, that I only take
very little time to actually 'produce' something.


>In an recent essay Lev Manovich states that since the end of 1960s,
>modern art has far more become a conceptual activity and less a question
>of “medium” or “techniques” (thus, for example he assigns software-art
>to craft).
>That means art could easily be considered as part of the “vita
>contemplativa” - the contemplative life - and could be referred to as
>(perhaps last) counterdraft to the “active” spectacle of the global
>capitalism. What do you think about that?


I was once asked after a redaing, what my views on politics were. I
answered: I have views on philosophy and they imply political
consequences. The same could be said on my way to reate to art: I have
views on what makes humans human, and I have topics I think and wonder
about, and sometimes a work of art (or maybe craft) is a way to
express my thoughts. So the essential part of art is not the 'doing'
but the 'thinking'. In this way your thesis sounds like a good
description of what I do.


>There is a coincidence between art and free software. As a rule, except
>appreciation both do not gain much money and are commercially exploited.
>For free software this is allowed and desired but not for art. What do
>you think: Will the free-software-model increasingly become valid for
>art too (that means we will have complete cross-subsidizing and
>self-exploiting).


In a book on viral marketing I read the idea, that authors will
probably make more money from speaking about their books and reading
them in puiblic, than from actually selling the copies. And when I
talk to authors they often confirm that this is already the case.
Something similar might become the case for artists - and I think for
some artists it is already true.


>Only a few artists make a good living - despite supposed highest
>appreciation. Doesn’t society owe them at least paid leave?


Another anecdote: A Swiss artist told me, that he makes quite a bit of
money sitting in the meetings of high ranking comapanies acting as
'Querdenker'. 
Those businessmen have understood, what artists do: They look at
systems and point to the place where something is 'queer', weird, out
of place. I think society owes artists a share of their attention. And
of course a way of honoring your contribution is paying you. This does
not mean, taht you put your art to the service of business. But if you
have no comment to make that would be interesting to anyone, you might
as well shut up and go to work.