Interview with Bec Stupak by Beth Rosenberg
August 2004

BR: Can you describe the piece that you did at Eyebeam for your 2004 residency?
STUPAK: Ok. The piece that I did was a DVD ’zine called Scissorfriends. I’ve made two pieces for that while I’m here, bringing the total collection up to five.

BR: So now we’re going to backtrack a little bit. Let’s talk about your art background.
STUPAK: I guess my art background has existed my whole life. When I was very young, I did a lot of art and I took art classes from a really young age. When I was in high school, I started making videos that were similar to the things that I’m making now. And in the summers, I would go to the University of the Arts in Philadelphia to work on video and special effects. I went to college at the University of Michigan School of Art for a semester, and then I went to Sarah Lawrence. I studied art there, but it wasn’t an art school.

BR: Did you study with anyone in particular?
STUPAK: I’ve studied with lots of special people at Sarah Lawrence. My main advisor was a printmaker named Kris Philipps. There was a sculpture teacher there named Eve Andre Laramee, who’s a really excellent artist; and Tishan Hsu, as well as a filmmaker named Abby Childs.

BR: You know, Eve Andre Laramee was in Eyebeam’s very first online forum, “Interaction: Artistic Practice in the Network” from 1998. I’ll show you the piece she did for that forum, it was called “Only Questions.”
STUPAK: Awesome.

BR: Ok, so you went to Sarah Lawrence and you were always fascinated with video, from a very young age. And then—I’ve done my research on you—you graduated from Sarah Lawrence, and then you become an art director at Atlantic Records? How did that happen?
STUPAK: Throughout my college experience at Sarah Lawrence, I was working in the Internet. I’d been working in it since 1995 or so. So right out of Sarah Lawrence, I got a job as a designer at a company called Method Five, where my boss was an artist named Ken Goldsmith, who’s really excellent. And he had a show on WFMU radio, so it was like continuing school. He created our art department with people who are now really good friends of mine, who are running different arts organizations and things like that. So that was kind of continuing with school and art. And then from there, in a roundabout sort of way, I became the art director for Atlantic Records New Media department. For about three years, I was working at Atlantic Records with their artists, making their websites as well as making different video things for them.

BR: I read that you did Lil’ Kim’s website.
STUPAK: Actually, I hired a friend of mine to do it. Because I was the art director/coordinator on Lil’ Kim’s website, and then I had a friend of mine do the design work.

BR: Did you work with her?
STUPAK: Yeah, sure. I worked with all of the Atlantic artists.

BR: Do musicians become very involved with their websites?
STUPAK: Yes. Some of the artists become really involved with their websites, some of them don’t. So Little Kim, she wasn’t so interested in it. It really depends what the relationship is with each artist.

BR: And so from there, did you start getting active in Pseudo? Can you talk about Pseudo?
STUPAK: Well, I got involved with Pseudo shortly after I graduated from school, when I was at that company Method Five. I had done my first rave in Ultraworld, and I did visuals for the raves. And it was a huge thing, like three thousand people, and Moby played, and it was really bananas. And there, I met the Pseudo guys, some of the guys that worked there, who later became my partners. And they invited me to come in and do performances on a couple of their shows. And from there, I got to know a lot of the people at Pseudo. There’s an artist named Joshua White (aka Joshua Lite), who was one of the main people at Pseudo; he’s still my mentor. He used to do all of the psychedelic light shows in the sixties for the Fillmore East.

BR: Can you describe, what was Pseudo in the early years?
STUPAK: Pseudo was this really interesting experiment to create a cable channel online. They tried to have twenty-four hour programming. They would create all original content. I think it still exists today; but it doesn’t exist in the form that it did in its heyday. The thing that was special about it was that they hired up an enormous quantity of young talent. They had about four hundred people there, who are now dispersed into the media world of New York, and they’re all doing really interesting work. So it’s kind of— it continues to be an interesting experiment, with the group of people who were there, even though they’re not physically contained in one building working on that project anymore.

BR: So two of the people from Pseudo, you started collaborating with them. Tell us about Honeygun.
STUPAK: The Honeygun project started shortly after I graduated from school. And it was made possible when the G3s came out. And all within like, two months of my graduating—I graduated in December, and it happened in, March or April—the G3s came out, hard drives became super inexpensive; the price dropped enormously. And something else happened. Oh, and then DV kind of became really popularized. So with those three things happening, I started to be able to do video again, outside of the school culture. I started to put together live mixing material. For a long time I performed as my own sort of character, VJ Honeygun. I worked as a VJ and I’d go all over the place. We’d go to Detroit and we’d go to Eastern Europe and all over. And then after a time, I started to sort of team up with other artists, Carl Mok and Fabian Tejada from Pseudo. We changed the name to Honeygun Labs to incorporate everybody and take it away from just being about me personally to being something of a group project.

BR: So you worked as Bec, but you also worked as Honeygun. What’s the origin of Honeygun?
STUPAK: The origin of Honeygun is not very interesting, I’m afraid. It’s a combination of words that are a little bit different in terms of texture and association. It was also available online at the time. So Honeygunlabs.com, or Honeygun.com was available. It was a little bit of coming up with words that I liked, and then fishing around to see if it was available as an internet thing.

BR: If someone wanted to come and hire Honeygun, what do they get?
You do a little bit of web design, there’s visual design, there’s editing. I mean, tell us more about the focus and mission of Honeygun.
STUPAK: I guess the nature of my work and my projects is very chameleon, because there are a lot of different aspects that they take on. Honeygun Labs is hirable as a commercial live studio-mixing thing. So for instance, I do work for Bacardi, where I’ve made material that’s Bacardi specific. And then I have my own material, and then I perform that for them in clubs, and we go on tours all over the country. Another end of it is that I do a lot of work with certain techno DJs, like Derrick May in Detroit. And so they’ll hire me to come out and do work for them and then I also do things like work on projects with assume vivid astro focus, an art collective that showed at the last Whitney Biennial. I also VJ’d within that project, but it was with a very different set of materials. So there are a lot of different kinds of live mixing projects that I do, under the Honeygun umbrella. When I create my own work, like in the DVD and things that goes under a separate name, but is also within the Honeygun realm. It’s all stylistically really different.

BR: Can you talk about your style and also the equipment that you’re using and your materials?
STUPAK: In the past few years, I’ve been creating a lot of work that has a lot of different styles. I recently did a project, which is a remake of Jack Smith’s film Flaming Creatures. I feel that that’s really the first thing that I’ve made recently that accurately depicts my own personal style. The material that I have for live mixing with Honeygun Labs is more about being appropriate for the venue where that’s performed. So it’s a little bit slicker, it’s a little bit more television, and more appropriate for clubs. The material that I make with assume vivid astro focus is very specific for that project. You know, I think the Jack Smith-esque style is very lush very colorful. Although that project’s going to be black and white, but the original is very colorful. And, it has devious undertones; but at the same time, it’s very celebratory and fun.

BR: You’ve talked a little about your aesthetic. I’ve seen things where you say, it’s important to your life to have fun, and that’s a very interesting aesthetic as well. Where does that come from? What are you trying to say with that expression?
STUPAK: I think that when I interact with the world, I try to bring in an element of fun and an element of lightness, just because I think it’s a hard thing to have. Especially when you live in New York and you have the pressures of making money and earning a living; and then on top of that, trying to do something that is creative. I almost feel that it’s an important sort of statement to make-- something that’s almost whimsical, in a lot of ways. The DVD ’zine project that I’ve been working on with Eyebeam is rather whimsical in tone. I feel intensely curious about it in a way too, because I think that it’s something that is hard to remember, that it’s an important part of life—especially when you deal with the pressures of living in a place where everything is so expensive and travel takes forever, and you have things like the Twin Towers falling down, having a counterbalance of energy and light is really important. I want to be able to keep from getting choked in the hysteria that has come up in New York.

BR: Does your expression also come from the VJ music culture?
STUPAK: I don’t think that my tone comes from the rave culture at all, because I was never socially interested in it. I was a part of it as a way of showing my video work, because it was an early venue where that kind of work was appreciated. I could also start making money and traveling very easily with my artwork, in that culture. I was always very skeptical of that culture, because it’s very much based on a false sense of happiness fueled by ecstasy, which is very very suspect. I mean, think of the Ren and Stimpy episode, where he’s playing happy hat, and his eyeballs are bloodshot and he says, “I’m happy, I’m happy,” but he’s really super-pissed. I have to say; the raves seem a little bit like that. At the same time I felt like it was important to bring some of the energy I have into that scene because there were a lot of dark undercurrents in it, so, I felt it was important to counterbalance it a little bit.

BR: In thinking about the two different mediums that you’ve been working with-- the DV film for the Jack Smith project related to the DVD zines that you just worked on at Eyebeam--can you talk about your medium, in terms of what you find exciting?
STUPAK: I’ve always been interested in video. I’ve never seen video as an alternative to film; I always saw it as its own medium. And when I was making videos in high school, I was making them with a VHS camera. I was thinking to myself—and I remember really, really distinctly—thinking that the stuff I was making wasn’t appropriate for watching in a theater, because it was really short and it just didn’t seem like the thing that people would go to a theater to see. At the same time, it wasn’t sculptural either. I always had this feeling that there was going to be some other method of showing videos that would come out of new technology or new circumstances or something. When I started to see people doing live video mixing, I got very excited about that, and I invested a lot of energy and effort into developing techniques that would work with live mixing. I’ve explored a lot of different technologies, from using laptops to create mixing, and then mixing off of, old VHS tapes; that was kind of my first technique. Now I use store-bought equipment that’s made by Edirol, but they make super, super good stuff. It’s basically a hard drive with a touch screen interface, where you can call up your clips to that medium. Then I started to feel that it was a little bit disappointing, that I would make all this material, but I rarely had anything physical to give to people. After working in the web world, where you can work for years and years on something that does not exist and is totally ephemeral, I really wanted to have something that was concrete and that I could hold in my hands, that could represent work that I have done. So I started to explore the DVD. I thought it was an interesting alternative to the paper ’zines; I thought there were a lot of correlations between the media. I wanted to begin to explore that too. But, I didn’t want to toil for years and have nothing to show for it.

BR: On your first DVD, there’s a picture of a Chihuahua, right? Can you explain this more?
STUPAK: My DVD ‘zine project came out of working with the art group assume vivid astro focus on the piece for the Whitney Biennial. We were in L.A., at Javier Perez’s house. He’s our gallery in L.A. I was there for about two weeks to work on the video, but none of the material that I was supposed to be working with was ready yet, and there was nothing I could do about it, and I couldn’t make it happen faster. I was just killing time in L.A. While we were there, we were hanging out with a lot of ’zine makers and people who were really into ’zines and curated ’zine sections for bookstores. We were looking at a lot of ’zines and things like that. I decided that I wanted to make a DVD ’zine because I didn’t see any DVDs; it was all paper technologies. I started to shoot some things that were in the house, and one of them was this little Chihuahua. I think it was Javier’s Chihuahua. Oh, we didn’t have a car, so we were stranded in East L.A. with no car. I was forced to work on it instead of going out and partying or something. I was videotaping things around the house, the little dog, and gathering things from the Internet. I had a lot of pictures from a show we had done at Deitch Projects. I started just to sort of play with that, and I had some music that actually, Paperrad had given me. I brought all these elements together to make the first DVD ’zine, Scissorfriends.

BR: Tell us about the second DVD ‘zine.
STUPAK: The second ’zine is a sound piece, that— is this video love letter to a guitar player from the eighties named Steve Vai, and it’s this weird video that someone found at the end of a tape that they bought in a flea market. I have no idea when it was made or anything. So I subtitled it, because the tape melted, and you can’t hear anything, and you can barely see anything. I wanted to make something that was ripping off the idea of a lot of ’zines with found notes, you know, between people or found photos that are sort of like homemade porn. I thought that would be interesting. I had this tape, which is amazing. But I hadn’t been able to do anything with it, so I thought it would be an appropriate use of it. I also made a little thing to show who Steve Vai is, a little picture of him and stuff like that.

BR: And the next ‘zine?
STUPAK: The third ’zine is a 3-D piece, it’s stereoscopic. It will come packaged with 3D glasses. It’s an homage to a ’zine called Destroy All Monsters, which was made in Detroit, in the seventies, that’s been a big influence and, you know, once I saw it, it sort of started popping up in my life in all these different ways, so that’s kind of what that is about.

BR: And then the fourth?
STUPAK: The fourth is going to be a double DVD set, where it has two different pieces of soundtrack; and then you find two players and you play them simultaneously and the soundtracks match up. Then the video also references this. It’s like a two-channel video. That one’s going to be for an exhibition that Cory Arcangel, a former Eyebeam artist-in-resident, has put together, where it’s all based on infinite fill patterns, the patterns that were used to display creations of black and white, when there wasn’t the ability to have color on a computer screen.

BR: It seems that you take some very low-tech elementary tools and combine them with a very high tech DVD format.
STUPAK: I think my interest in working with video in a low tech way is that for so long, I’ve been in this world where it required me to have a really intense job in order to pay for equipment that was cutting edge and unusual. I realized that I had amassed this collection of equipment, but that I was overlooking things that could be done easily and quickly with the stuff that I had. Like, the focus on cutting is so often high tech; but there’s a lot that can be done with low tech as well. And I liked how, when I was researching ’zines, people would talk about how they made their ’zine because they were able to use a cheap photocopier. I thought that the kind of technology I had, like a duplicator, is very similar to owning your own photocopier. I was interested in exploring that. The content itself is also very low-fi. That’s something that was purposefully elected to be done that way, so that it could almost be like learning how to sketch with video. When you’re not trying to spend months and months and months in order to do a project; the method is--sit down and make something happen very quickly. In such labor-intensive media, you don’t get this idea very often and I wanted try on different styles without committing to them, without taking them too seriously.

BR: I get the sense that there’s a little bit of an “exquisite corpse” in your work? You’re using found objects and lots of different mediums, and also various styles. I mean, has surrealism influenced you? What art today stimulates you?
STUPAK: My influences are really varied. When I was younger, the Internet didn’t exist when I was in high school. It was just beginning to come out. I remember being very thirsty for anything I could get my hands on. Artists like Joel Peter-Witkin influenced me. I watched Fellini’s Satyricon until my copy of it died. They were all sort of sporadic; like, there was a publication called Research that came out that was like a fancy ’zine almost, and it covered all these different underground artists. This was available in my town and that was a really big influence, just because it was one of the few magazines about the underground world that I could get. The rest of the time, I just sat in my room and really, really thought about if I were making Satyricon on no budget, how would I do that, and what would that look like? The interesting thing that I found out, and this is why I’m so fascinated with Jack Smith, is that I didn’t know that he existed then, but everything that I saw and was interested in felt very familiar. I guess I found out about Jack Smith just five or six years ago. What I’m realizing now is that he was a huge influence on people like Joel Peter-Witkin and so forth. So, I was looking at the work of people he had influenced. Jack Smith had no budget, and the people he influenced later on had greater means and were able to expand on his original aesthetic because of that.