Mark O’Connell director of Strange Ships interviewed by Michael Wilde Tablet: What's Strange Ships about? Mark O'Connell: Anxiety, uncertainty and crowded hallways. Tablet: Can you tell me about your previous films? MO: I don't make films. I'm not a filmmaker. There's no good term for it. If you come up with a good term for it, you win the booby prize. I don't work with film, I don't shoot film, I don't edit film, I work with time based digital media. That sounds like a dry mouthful, but that's what it really is. It's not film. For some of us, it's important to not think of ourselves as filmmakers because film is such a big defined thing. To try to distance yourself from that allows you to be free from that and everything that goes with it. Film is due for a change. I can't even go to the movies anymore because it's just the same thing over and over. Just right now it's just crazy experimentation, there's nothing else you can do. If you have no idea what the real possibilities are, the only way you can unpack them is to experiment furiously. Try all the different combinations, see what clicks and what doesn't. Tablet: Why did you get into that? MO: I spent a great portion of my life in rock ’n’ roll. Playing, recording and doing music. And part of me was really interested in visual art. When I was a kid, I had a movie camera and a darkroom; I was really fascinated by that, too, and this was a good way for me to incorporate the musical and the visual sides. The creative possibilities are so incredible that you'd have to be an idiot not to be intrigued by it. When you think of what you can do, you can sit down and manipulate moving images and sound and make them exactly the way you want them to be, sitting in your own living room or bedroom or wherever you have your computer. Since it's not film and it's not video, and since it's something that is new, it's free from all of the critical baggage and the expectations that go with film and video. You don't have the burden of any of that stuff, you don't have some asshole filmmaker telling you that it's all about the story. You don't have to deal with that. It's whatever you want it to be. We're at a special time where the medium is being defined by the people that are doing it. It's the Wild West, you're helping to stake it out. Tablet: Where do you see yourself going with what you create? MO: Maybe people could buy it. There's stuff at Scarecrow; people rent it. I don't know in terms of mainstream media, because so much of my stuff is flat out illegal because of the sampling that I do. I've done probably 25 pieces in the last six years and there is a progression. I can't tell you where it's going, but I can show you when it gets there. It's moving on a course and that's good.