This is a multimedia interview with elit artist Diana Slattery, the author of The Glide Project and The Maze Game, during April 2003 in Switzerland. The interviewer and Slattery had just completed a session in Zurich with CAiiA-STAR (now the Planetary Collegium), and to wind down after a very intense 10 days of work, they had arranged to travel around the country together for a week. After visiting Bern, they headed to Grindelwald, a mountain hamlet located in the Jungfrau. The interview begins on the trip to this tourist mecca located atop the mountain range, and it continued through the train ride to Lucerne on Easter Sunday. Once back in the U.S., they extended the conversation via email. Readers will come to realize through the interview that Slattery's work is a reflection of a very fascinating and highly innovative mind.
The interview was published in the Iowa Review Web in 2004. Due to the numerous videos involved in it, the journal requested the interviewer to retain the files on an independent server.
Discussion
Extending the entry
The interview's kinetic backdrop lends itself well to Slattery's work, which explores the possibilities of movement in language and new ways to put text and symbolic meaning into motion. The interview addresses these topics and Slattery's work on Glide specifically through a transcript and videos of the conversation on a noisy train. Grigar asks Slattery whether she sees an epistemological shift in this move to visual language, to which Slattery replies: "I think the most obvious one to me is the form of knowing, 'the epistemology of interaction,' like what you learn by getting into an interactive playspace or a game or an interactive world—something that you can actually have agency in it, change, and some kind of dialogue with it, in it, evoke knowing from it, make changes in it, create things in it." Grigar's site offers various metanarratives about the interview process as well as links to the Glide project and a short critical bibliography.