Fokky: Your work is very experimental and flamboyant – artist Olia
Lialina has called it "baroque". You use Shockwave very often, and your
interface design is consistently extremely innovative. But what's behind
it? I am interested in art with some critical content, and some
reflections on the political and technological sides of the medium too.
Do you want to be critical? Can you afford it, being a commercial
designer?

Michael: I was trained a graphic designer. The difference between art
and design for me is that design should serve a certain function. But
since my school days I have never ceased finding new functions for
design. A chair is not just meant to be sat upon. So the border between
my art and my design is getting more and more blurred. The only
practical distinction I currently make is that I get paid to do design.

As an artist I have always found my education as a designer to be a
benefit. I don't have an artist's fetshisms–like being in love with the
smell of oil paint–and I don't feel any pressure to pretend my work has
very deep philosophical meanings, or the urge to express my inner self.
Also I happen to be very interested in everything modern like fashion
and pop music. Technically, being a designer helps to use that kind of
imagery.

My art is research. I don't want to be "critical" as such. I want to
analyze things and present my results. Those results should help the
viewer to deal with contemporary society better.

A lot of my work is about this strange coexistence of natural and the
media worlds, which you can probably extend to the "real" and the
"fantasy" world. Both seem very real to me and influence each other.
With my work I try to help Alice survive in Wonderland. So it's not the
medium per se I find interesting but the mediatization.

Maybe I'm not critical in the way that revolutionaries are critical.
It's probably a typically Belgian attitude to find shortcuts instead of
trying to solve the problem. Problems are like facts to me, not
questions that need answering. I try to face the facts.

In my design, on the other hand, I am probably much more critical. Maybe
because criticism is a lot easier to communicate than what I tried to
describe above. All my design is critical of its subject matter, always
full of jokes and puns.

A form of criticism that I do practice is meta-criticism, criticism of
the criticism. I am very critical of criticism. I always suspect the
critics to have other reasons for their criticism than righteous ones.
Maybe they are only critical because it's so sexy to be critical. Since
the Benetton/Toscani ad campaign, criticism has been very fashionable,
and as such suspect.

During the CDA period, when every website made its homepage black as a
protest against censorship, I made the homepage of FFF black too with
the text "This page is black as a result of aesthetic considerations."

Fokky: You play with the interesting but dangerous relationship between
art, design and commerce. Are you aware of your manipulative power as a
designer, and do you use it deliberately in your art projects?

Michael: Yes. I want to manipulate those who use my work. I have not, by
a longshot, reached my goal! I won't be satisfied until I can get into
their skulls and push their hormonal activities over the limit of human
tolerance. And they will love it. But I will never do it without letting
the users know that they are being manipulated. Of course, they have to
be smart enough.

The only reason why advertising might be more manipulative than art is
because the people who made those ads are more talented than the
artists.

I love to be manipulated. Especially when I know that I am being
manipulated. It's a bit like sex, isn't it?

See Michael Samyn's work at Zuper! at