JONATHAN CHERRY: What has inspired you over the last week and why?

BENJAMIN LOTAN: I just moved into a new office+studio for a residency at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) in San Diego, and getting set up in a fresh space feels truly fantastic. Being here, I’m occupying a node at the intersection of art, academia, and the hi-tech industry. Through the next six months I will be working to understand the way these institutions encroach on each other.

JC: Have you made any new friends recently?

BL: Daniel Rehn has a studio just across the hall from me, we’ve found that our work has a lot of overlapping themes and we are getting along well. He’s the founder of LA GameSpace and is currently starting an art/design practice with his partner Sarah Caluag. We are beginning to collaborate on a new video project called Spchless. The main website is coming soon, but you can see our first video (starring Barack Obama) here.

JC: Would you give some background on the project ‘Recruit’ and how you came up with the idea?

BL: Recruit came out of my frustration with the wars we are fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. It’s not that I am necessarily opposed to the wars, but I feel so distant and it seems impossible for any of us to get a clear picture of what’s actually going on. I continually find that the media coverage is extremely poor, often biased, and difficult to fathom.

As a citizen as well as an artist, I began to think of ways I could engage with the military directly. I seriously considered joining the army as a kind of three year performance piece. Ultimately, the recruiting process itself was very fascinating, and I began to document the relationship I was forming with my recruiter. Though it became clear that joining was not the answer to my frustration, I was able to create and capture some new knowledge, which made the performance a success.

The climax of the project came when, in a private meeting recorded with a hidden microphone, I expressed confusion about my sexual orientation to my recruiter. As I opened up, I become an individual, and he in turn opened up to me. His response exposes the fragile and ethically complex reality recruiters are placed in, as top-down pressures urge them to sign more and more people up for military duty.

JC: Do you think that you will continue to bridge gaps between performance art and photography in the future?

BL: Yes, definitely. What’s compelling about performance is that it provides a framework to transform routine actions into the medium of an art work. For me, the simple act of reframing my experience as performance becomes a point of departure for a deep investigation of my surroundings. I believe that such an approach will become increasingly relevant as the crises of our times continue to develop.

JC: How do you plan to exhibit your new project ‘The Happy Light’?

BL: It really depends what kind of opportunities come my way. Right now I’m working with an editor to pull together a series of fragmented essays based on my experiences in Jerusalem. In Recruit, I mention a single moment that gave meaning to and framed the whole project, but with The Happy Light, there was so much more at play.

I found that one cannot travel to Jerusalem to study religion as a discrete subject. Perhaps there more than anywhere else, religious beliefs and practices are intertwined with social, political, and geographical conflict. In response to this awareness, the scope of the project became infinitely wide. In an exhibition of any kind, I imagine inundating the audience with all kinds of media and doing my best to detonate the fragile discourse that surrounds that region.

I have a lot of material to work with from the project, and what I have up on my website is only a starting point.

JC: What is next in the pipe line for you?

BL: Here at Calit2, I’m organizing an Internet video festival to bring together a diverse cross section of the best video content made specifically for the web. Ideally, we’ll open up a rich dialogue around the growing abundance of fantastic content.

For all the tumblr bloggers reading, I’ve got a project in the works that will allow you to put two photoblogs up against each other for a head-to-head battle. Keep an eye on my screening tumblog for more on that project and others coming real soon.

JC: What are you excited about for the year of 2010?

BL: I’ll be working with Teddy Cruz soon; he’s been one of my heros for some time, so that’s very exciting for me. The way he brings architecture, design, and social programming into an institutionally sanctioned artistic practice is inspiring, to say the least.

This decade I’m looking forward to seeing the art world and the public at large move towards more political and operational understandings of artistic practice. There is a great quote at the end of Holland Cotter’s New York Times piece on the past decade in art:

“In the real world the news of the decade was 9/11, two awful wars, staggering corporate greed and the election of an African-American president. In the art world a big event was Mr. Koons showing his sculptures at Versailles. In short, life passed art by. Maybe in the new decade they’ll meet.”