An Interview with Michael Daines

[Michael Daines is a 17 year old artist living in Calgary, Canada. But
his precocious mastery of code and underhanded satire has earned him
respect in his own right. His most popular work, "The Body of Michael
Daines," was one of the first auctions on Ebay that crossed the line
into conceptual art. Not often does a kid from Canada get a chance to
have his work in Artforum, no matter how talented he might be. But this
is the utopian vision of the web at its best, the classic story that
always seems theoretically possible but doesn't seem to happen often
enough. If you have the talent, you don't have to do the networking, the
paperwork, and the hob knobbing that have plagued the "real world" art
scenes for years. Do something right, and it catches on- no one has time
to check your resume. This is his first in depth interview.]

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ES: So, for starters, how did you get into Internet art? What appeals to
you about the media?

MD: The best answer is that I just found myself to be "in" Internet art
at some point. It wasn't a well-defined decision that I made, or
anything like that. I think to do that, I would have had to have
considered myself somehow "artistic" beforehand, and I certainly didn't.
I'm still very uncomfortable with the notion of being called an
"artist". I'm also glad there is no overwhelming proliferation of
"net.art" programs for teens. Had I participated in something like that,
I don't know what would have become of me.

ES: Why not call yourself an artist?

MD: I think it has to do with a certain teenage politics, actually.
Because there is this demographic in high school that thinks of itself
as "artistic", the kind of people who take art classes and do things
like psychological self-portraits, that sort of thing. The kind of "art"
that I really wouldn't consider art, because it says nothing to me, is
all clich