Nico Wheadon: FREEZE FRAME presents video still prints by thirty international artists representing fourteen countries and ten languages. I have asserted that—in spite of an original cultural context—the video still forges a unique paradigm within the tradition of visual storytelling in which communication transcends language and culture and returns to nuanced expression and gesture. Would you agree?

Tony Cokes: The still, or the series and sequence thereof, does create a new heterogeneous context for viewing. This context produces the possibility of reading across languages and cultures and can enact a virtual collapse of spaces and times, a collage, or implied montage of images and references. This may result in a false impression, or simply a set of new, unexpected relations. That impression can be nuanced and telling, or completely decontextualized except in the coded, visual sense. So even a single image can be complicated in relation to its others in a flow of time. Images are remarkably flexible with regard to meaning depending on context, captioning, and specific juxtaposition. I suppose this is inevitably a beauty and a danger.

NW: And as someone who straddles both critical theory and creative production, how does your knowledge of these emergent viewing paradigms operate within your own visual and theoretical approaches?

TC: In my practice I often use excerpts from very specific texts in juxtaposition with sounds or other texts to have an effect of collapsing differences or staging new perspectives on the familiar and everyday. Possible meanings are found and released by a process. The possibility of rearranging things to illuminate their potential political implications animates my work. Once a narrative or argument has been circulated widely, I tend to think it can and should be edited for emphasis, magnified, remixed, etc. My operating assumptions tend not to be Modernist in that regard. Fragments are sometimes better than "coherent" wholes. For me, especially when discussing narrative tropes, I prefer the condensation and suggestiveness of the cinema trailer or an opening title sequence to the full convention-laden plot and fiction. Often the explication of a narrative doesn't really shift the form in any way that I care about. I can watch it to consume time, but I always already know that it's a relatively empty function; so seeing more merely becomes redundant, like filling in every possible absence when you've read and understood the overall pattern long ago. I can understand that this may be pleasurable or reassuring for others, but I have absolutely no interest in making works that way, or to produce that effect.

NW: So in working on the periphery of a universal meaning or understanding, how important is it to the comprehension and coding of these extractable referents to present a narrative in its entirety or in accordance with a durational structure? I ask this as a subtext of the greater question, is it possible—or even worthwhile—to hold on to linear narrative in the face of a LIVE! media culture that privileges the prompt dissemination of information over the complete history?

TC: If there is anything worthwhile about being able to detach an image from one context and reinscribe it in another, it is the chance that it allows us to question and explore how meaning is constructed and to think about what authorizes and sustains the notion that certain discourses are seen as more true, beautiful, powerful etc. than others. As far as non-fiction modes of representation are concerned, its been interesting to watch as the ubiquitous means of (re)production turns "liveness" often into a shell or shadow of its former self. It seems the more zones into which media technology penetrates, the more weird eruptions of narrative tropes in the midst of "reality." I tend to like durational structures where either one becomes aware of the apparatus and one's desire and spectatorship, or fragmented works where I have to structure an experience out of limited material.

NW: So what then becomes of authorship and is there a remaining dividing line between genres? What were once termed experimental approaches now share innate characteristics with our everyday mediated visuals that shape our own autobiographical understandings and portrayals. What are the dangers in hybridizing genres and does my reading place too much emphasis on new media forms as sites for cultural magnification and critique? Must it always be an act of defiance or can new forms actually rise from within convention without being considered counter or queer?

TC: Multiple approaches tend to stimulate my practice anyway so I don't have much attachment to a singular genre or a hierarchy among genres. While my practice is hybrid and experimental, I often think that having work shown in contexts where other approaches and durations are obtained actually enhances readings of my work. Unfortunately though, all approaches—including those I privilege—can be boring to another subject, or fantastic depending on how the structures, elements, and tools are deployed. There are no absolute guarantees or rules when it comes to cultural practice and the production of knowledge and pleasure. I tend to work from the premises that works are incomplete without the viewer’s perspective, and that readers are potential collaborators and authors, even if they are resistant ones. Yet I'm never sure about autobiography. I often observe a productive tension between the allegedly narcissistic and the cultural/ political. A potential problem with media images of the self is that they are just as much about mediated codes and expectations around "individualism" as they actually express anything true or concrete about any self. Some artists use images of themselves to question such conventions, as a way to confront atomized, prescriptive ideas about identity, for instance. Taking themselves more as convenient, perhaps flawed, examples of the cultural conventions around them, rather than as anything special, unique, or anyone to be emulated positively. This strategy could describe another address to representations of the artist's body. Personally, I tend to exclude my body from my work, but often bring attention to artifacts, sounds, or images I collect. This is not because my tastes or interests themselves have any inherent importance, except to illustrate how such things can be used as materials. They permit ways of engaging critically with daily life, and our social fictions about life and ourselves.