BH> As you have excelled in multiform arts, have made the act of publishing its own art, what is the importance of hybridity to your aesthetic, do you recommend particular reinventions or combinations of text and art, photography or collage? How (or) does science influence your art?

DW> Well thank you, I don't know if I have excelled at too much besides exile. I'm sure science influences me in ways I'm not even aware of, it forms the core of my belief system. Then again, half the fun of "art" is it allows you to throw science out the window. Hybrid works I aspire to/am inspired by lately would be Tom Phillips' A Humument or Codex Seraphinianus or the works of Stanley Donwood, Joseph Cornell, Edward Tufte, Mirtha Dermisache & Mira Schendel.

BH> Do you think your having worked as a field geologist has come through in your art at all?

DW> The sections of the book I'm working on now (Ark Codex) are based on my experiences working as a field geologist up near the Arctic circle, so I guess yes, I'm sure these topographical & exploratory ideas obtained while doing field work have been baked in at this point.

BH> What do you dream lately?

DW> I don't dream nearly as much as I used to, or at least I don't remember as much. The other night I dreamt I was chasing a scorpion that had stung some girl on a cruise ship. The scorpion dug itself into a yam, and I kept trying to get a glimpse of it and take a photo, amidst all the flying debris and strange noises the scorpion was making, and when I saw it the scorpion was holding up a cut-out image of Fela Kuti wielding a firehose, in front of his (the scorpion's) face so I couldn't see his true identity. I had managed to take a photo of this, but part of the deal with the cruise ship was that any "art" you made on the ship became their property, so I couldn't "expose" it until I got to shore. So there you go, the Copehagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics infiltrating my dreams.

BH> Do you have any impression that your travels may have had an impact on your texts, the sense of place, of being a foreigner?

DW>  I'm sure they do. I'd like to think good things come out of being a fish out of water, from confusion, of not "understanding" a language or its culture. When you feel "at home" in a place you tend to take a lot for granted, and often aren't able to express the interesting nuances beneath the surface.

BH> What films, maybe hard to find, speak to you – films you’ve seen on other continents than the US?

DW> Lately we've been watching a lot of Italian films to try to learn the language, revisiting all the Fellini Films (some ones often overlooked are the ones with his wife Giulietta—La Strada & Nights of Cabiria), Rome Open City, Il Sorpasso, The Bicycle Thief, etc. Black Cat, White Cat is a great Serbian movie that I'd never heard of in the states but everybody talks about here. More contemporary films to keep your eye out for include Into Paradiso (co-written by Chiara Barzini, who is on deck for Calamari) & Le Quattro Volte.

BH> Who would you pick to direct Marsupial the movie?

DW> The obvious choice would be David Lynch, or Jonze/Kaufmann, but I'm not sure how Marsupial would work as a movie. In many ways it's an anti-movie, or at least an underlying intention is that it could never be made into a movie, just like now I "write" things that I'd like to think can't be translated into another language.

BH> At what point (if there was one revelation or many) did your experience working as a stand in in France lead to the revelation of Marsupial and perhaps then to the presence of Stu? To what extent is there a kind of non-existence involved with the more menial aspects of film work?

DW> A few years after coming back from France I was working as a land-surveyor in Savannah, Georgia. On one particular job (on Parris Island, SC) all I had to do was sit near this swamp in the sweltering summer heat and monitor a GPS point, and that's when I first remember putting pen to paper. So Stu is semi-autobiographical. Menial jobs like being a stand-in (or sitting on a GPS point) allow for observation & reflection. In the case of a movie, they allow you not to get absorbed in the immediate drama (both of the movie & on the set) but to see things objectively. I mean, really, how weird is it that we are these biological organisms that evolved to do such things as mobilize to make a film? 

BH> Would you consider character and plot fleeting in accordance to the text itself or rather in full service to its quality, or both or neither?

DW> These are things I'm grappling with that I'm not sure I have answers to. On one hand I see the necessity of plot & character & have a hard time "reading" things that don't have them, but on the other hand plots bore me, and characters (like most people) typically disappoint me. The only solution I've come up with thus far is to redefine what we mean by "reading," to make language abstract so as not tell the reader a story, but to let their own interpretation surface from it. 

BH> Have you seen / would you care to discuss Antonioni’s The Passenger?

DW> Yeah, it's been a while though & i have a terrible memory, though i remember liking it, and the mood it evoked, like Chinatown meets Sheltering Sky (if I had to pitch it to Hollywood)? Come to think of it, it seems the premise of Mad Men took a page from The Passenger. Or was The Passenger the first movie where someone steals the identity of a dead person?

BH> What’s one good and bad experience you’ve had working in Africa?

DW> It's hard to quantify good and bad, & I didn't "work" much in Africa, unless you count working on my tan! I have fond memories of travelling through Tanzania by train. And it's hard to go wrong in Ethiopia. I don't have such fond memories of the day-to-day living in Nairobi though. And having to be in a car anywhere in Africa is a scary-bad experience.

BH> Who is your favorite African writer?

DW> Amos Tutuola. He is perhaps my favorite writer period.

BH> Is there an avant guard art and writing scene in Rome?

DW> Yes, of course, or I'm sure, there is, though as far as writing goes my Italian is not so good to comment on the nature of how they use their own language or whether it's avant-garde. But there are plenty of good-looking books being published (though they have different ideas of what a "small press" is), and there are lots of galleries and museums, etc.

BH> Where is the weirdest place you’ve gone swimming?

DW> It seems I have been swimming in some strange places but i can't remember off hand. The first thing that popped into my head was when I was spelunking in New Zealand and we got to the edge of a subterranean cliff near a waterfall, in pitch blackness except for the glo-worms on the ceiling, and my tour guide told me to jump, and I did, into the darkness, and landed in a pool of water. But I don't know if that's "swimming". When I was working in the middle of Nevada we use to swim in this natural hot spring that just bubbled up in the middle of a vast plain. It was warm clear water percolating from the deeps, rimmed by muddy banks. I'm not even sure if the place had a name, it was truly in the middle of nowhere. Oh, one time I was crewing on a yacht in the middle of the South Pacific between Fiji and the Cook Islands and the wind died down to a stand still so we took a swim. The idea of that, swimming in the middle of the Pacific I guess felt weird to say the least.

BH> Do you find any connect between writing and music making?

DW> I'd like to say yeah, but I'm not sure. The process is different, music you don't have to think about it too much, you just do it. Writing requires a lot of thinking. Or maybe I'm just going about it all wrong. There's a magic to music that I don't think is replicable in any other medium.

BH> In what ways is your art a tearing apart or blanking of incriminating documents?

DW> Not sure I understand your question, but yes, it seems I've deconstructed documents in my writing, though I'm not sure about incriminating. Maybe fabricated incriminating documents. Or if you look carefully in some of my recent frottage/collages you could probably figure out my credit card number or social security number and steal my identity, which is the whole point.

BH> What percentage of earth is void?

DW> 0% . Sure, the vast spaces between electrons and protons is "void," & maybe void exists in theory (depending on its definition), but as for my perception of it, I don't see or otherwise sense any void. Except perhaps in that instant I was jumping off a cliff in the above mentioned pitch black cave, in that instant of not knowing, before I hit the water. But as Cage has taught us, you can strive for silence (in sound, or any other sense)  but inevitably you will hear or sense your own body, your own sense organs, functioning. 

BH> In art, is anything made a shadow of where one lives?

DW> Art is a shadow of life, it makes itself thus.