Multi-media artists eteam talk to us about being both removed and immersed in the creation of new work, about the non-existent singular and committing to an expansive sense of “we.”

Collaboration goes deep for eteam.  Not only do you generate projects through your partnership and work with other artists, but you enlist lay people– farmers, barbers, small town residents– to either execute or substantiate the project.  When you collaborate, how do you relate to the idea of control?  Is it difficult to cede control? How do you satisfy your need for an imaginatively and intellectually rigorous project while leaving it open enough to be determined by unvetted participants?  When we work together with other people, especially people whom we have never met before, we control the situation by paying attention or not, shape things rather non-verbally by pointing a recording device towards a situation or not. That’s all. The recording device approves and it energizes. Where nothing has been happening before something is happening as soon as we press the ON button. ON means attention and it implies control, because the situation is automatically framed. Either something fits into the frame or not. Everything outside the frame is irrelevant.  To read the rest of the interview, go here.