Kyle McDonald

Do you think about the life-span of your own works? If you do, please elaborate on your thoughts.
My work started outside of any gallery or museum context. This meant that most people experienced my work through online documentation. If the documentation can survive, then that makes me happy. If a few people can have an in-person experience that gives them a story to share, that's even better. I feel the most long-term effects of art emerge through a few individuals who care deeply about the work. This doesn't necessarily require an artifact or some well-functioning piece of technology that lasts into a distant future. Artifacts can also be misleading, and distract us from deeper lessons that only come from examining the context of the artwork.
Assuming you can time travel, in what way would you like to re-encounter your works 100 years from now?
I would like to see all my work deteriorate in time and transform into heavily exaggerated mythologies. I would like to find a small book containing a description of my work: the core ideas and any cultural impact. It would be available in a couple translations, and indicate both who I was influenced by and who I influenced.
As there exist various definitions of “death” in the case of a human being, how exactly would you define the state of “death” of an artwork?
Art lives in people, and an artwork is dead when people stop caring about it. This could mean that they stop talking about it, or that people don't think about it anymore, or it no longer has an influence on anyone. This definition also means that if there is a record somewhere, there is always the possibility for the artwork to come back to life.
Is there any particular work of your own you would like us to include in the “Mausoleum of Media Art”(*) at YCAM? In that case, what kind of work is that, and in what form do you think it should be “buried” here?
I would be happy to send my "Blind Self Portrait" machine from this video https://vimeo.com/44489751 It might be best to show it with one of the sides off, making it clear that there is nothing obviously wrong with it. But unfortunately there is a bug in the hardware that causes it to draw everything 2x taller than wide, and this is so difficult to fix that it might be cheaper to create a new device completely from scratch.
If you have other comments or requests, please feel free to share them.