Selections from my recent interview with Max Capacity appeared in this recent post on Vague Terrain. Here is the full interview (oh, and be sure to check out Max’s very active flickr page).
Me: How do you first develop and explore an idea/concept?
Max Capacity: I’ve always been drawn to the aesthetics of degradation and decay. And I love obsolete media. I went to school for photography, and I used to purposefully degrade my film, my negatives, and my prints through every stage of the process to create random chaos. I recently realized I’m taking a similar approach to video game graphics and pixels, just with different methods and mediums. I find that old video games have a certain nostalgia to them that appeal to people of my generation on an emotional level. I still remember all the NES games I managed to beat as a kid. I’m still proud of those accomplishments, even. Pixels themselves in old video games had to represent something much more epic in scope. Today’s video games don’t need to be symbolic or representative, they look like what they’re supposed to look like. So the video games become a fun medium or subject matter to degrade, as there’s still a certain level of basic recognition after the fact.
Me: What methods, mediums, and tools do you use?
MC: I try to use whichever method I figure is the most appropriate to achieve authentic glitches. Or failing that, whatever methods I have available to me. My NES circuit bending is all hardware, so I actually have to go through the process of testing and bending the circuit to get desirable results. The same with circuit bent cartridges, which have their own issues, since I have to disassemble the cartridge case and work on it while it’s live. I’d like to digitally transfer those images, but since I don’t have equipment for that, I take photographs of a TV screen displaying the glitches. It’s not perfect, but the photos have their own desirable qualities. My plan is to get a DVD-R deck so I can record video output and then rip the DVD. But that’s a little out of my modest budget for now. The rest of the glitches are perpetrated using emulators. Atari cartridges, if not connected properly, will “fry” which causes all sorts of random glitching. The Stella emulator emulates that feature, and allows for easy screenshots to be taken. Similarly, I experiment with loading improper files into emulators, sometimes just by changing file extensions to fool emulators into trying to load up bad files.
Me: What are some of your influences? Where do you find inspiration?
MC: I take influence from everywhere around me, especially media like movies, video games, comic books, novels, whatever. I can’t help but think about Warhol or Lichtenstein when I look at pixels. Pop art and punk art are big influences. I eat up anything by Yves Klein or Jim Phillips. I’m a huge William Gibson fan, and all his books give me tons of inspiration. Science fiction movies, Ray Bradbury, Kurt Vonnegut, Frank Miller, Ghost in the Shell, Akira, lots of anime. Looney Toons, I watch cartoons constantly. Kraftwerk and Atari Teenage Riot. Friends and internet buddies too. Tumblr is a never ending source of inspiration.
Me: Do you see flickr as a community, or simply a platform on which to display your work?
MC: At first Flickr was just a platform to display my work, and for me to refer back to from blogs and such. But I started hooking up with other people who are interested in or doing the same things I am. And holy shit, people actually like my work on there. So the community aspect is absolutely one of the main contributing factors to how much time I spend making stuff. I live for the anonymous praise.
Me: What are the pros and cons of displaying work on flickr?
MC: I haven’t seen too many cons to displaying my work on Flickr, except maybe that I do most of my work late at night or early in the morning and there’s no one online to see it when I post it. The people on Flickr are great though. Some of my friends and fans on there are amazingly talented. Flickr groups are a great way to hook up with niche audiences and find cool people
Me: Besides flickr, where else do you display/exhibit your work?
MC: I post everything from my Flickr account onto my Tumblr blog (maxcapacity.tumblr.com), which is a great way to meet other Flickr users. There’s a lot of crossover between the two sites. I haven’t displayed any work in the material world in public since college, but I’m trying to figure out how to change that.
Me: What display environments and mediums would you like to explore in the future?
MC: I started out with NES and Atari, so I’m branching out now forwards and backwards. I’ve been working with ZX Spectrum images, and started collecting glitched screens and test patterns from arcade emulators. I’m also exploring what I can do with VHS, since it’s rapidly becoming obsolete. And I’d like to start editing together short moving images in gif or video form of my glitches. Also, I’m learning more about electronics so I can do more hardware glitching and get into live visual displays.
