Michael Robinson

Michael Robinson: Hi, I’m Michael Robinson.

I generally move back and forth between works that I shoot myself and works where everything is appropriated.

Within the six films I’m showing in the program here I guess two of them I shot myself and four of them are purely appropriation-based.

At the core of all my work I’m interested in looking at how we relate to media, and how our expectations of narrative, both within film and television and literature but also within our daily lives is really shaped by our relationships to media.

I mean I don’t think my films—so far they haven’t directly referenced the internet, or, topically they don’t take on the internet as a subject, but I do feel like the last few years I’ve been thinking a whole lot–I mean everyone has—about how much our existence is changing by how much time we spend online and how we’re disseminating and understanding information differently through that. So even if the films often take material from different eras, pre-internet eras, and seem beside the point of talking about online culture, that is there for me.

I’m concentrating more on the sort of emotional and psychological ramifications of the way we spend our time. I mean whether it’s listening to the radio, or tv, or now the internet. I think I’m less interested in replicating media frenzy or a super-anxious state than I am kind of in thinking about that from a more emotional standpoint. I mean I want all of the films to feel a little bit like either nightmares or spells in that there’s a kind of logic to them but it’s coming from someplace that’s maybe illogical.