Interview with Tony Domenico
Creator of Petscop, 3D Workers Island, Tapers, and other wonderful projects.
I have been around the internet spaces for a long time. No work has hit me in the same exact vein as Petscop and Tapers. That being my motivation in art, I reached out directly to the creator, who was beyond kind and answered my questions! Here they are for all of you.
”Hello.
I have been an avid adorant of your work for a very long time. It inspired me, and more than that, it lit a fire under me to create works of my own. I am a writer, a multimedia artist, sometime noise musician, and a person with more than my share of painful experiences.
Your work, particularly your use of language, has always resonated with me in ways that are hard to quantify. I seek out that same chord, of being able to evoke emotion without understanding.
I am writing up a think-piece analysis about memory, narratives, abuse, and trauma healing through the lens of 3D Workers Island. While I understand you to be a very reticent individual in regards to your art, I have questions which I cannot help but seek answers to. None of them relate, in any meaningful way, to "the story" or "figuring out" Petscop, 3D Workers Island, Tapers, or Goodsky. It is more about the emotional truth at the heart of your work.
I recognize that I have very little accolade or standing as a new-coming artist, but I greatly hope you will at the very least consider correspondence with me. I feel that you and I have similar passions, and I am eager to hear any and all response you would be willing to share with me.”
Here are my answers:
"You have a very particular use of language, and i'm interested to know where that came from. I was struck by it in Good Sky, but some of that seems to be in Petscop as well."
With Good Sky I wrote in a way that was artificially strange -- there wasn't any real depth to that, I just wanted it to sound unfamiliar.
With Petscop I wasn't writing like that anymore. Mostly I think I was writing in my own plain style. But maybe I'm just not self-aware enough to notice my own idiosyncrasies.
"Your writing seems to focus first on emotional truth rather than being narrative driven. More on the feelings, very Lynchian, dreamlike. What helps you to write in that style, or does it come naturally?"
The more concrete narrative and details and connective tissue that I add, the less interesting it all becomes. So I just remove a bunch of that stuff. And whenever I remove stuff, I do it in a way that leaves behind a ghost. You can still feel its presence but it's like a strange or haunting presence, and it's mostly made of vague ideas and feelings. So my process has been largely about building up something concrete and specific, then blurring it into a vague, amorphous ghost, eventually disregarding the details that originally led to it and just dealing with the ghost itself. To me that ghost is always more interesting.
"With 3D Worker's Island, there seems to be an narrative of the viewer bringing their own trauma to the story. That we see through the windows our own childhood reflected back, our own experience. Would you consider this to be a lens you intended with the story?"
Don't worry about what I intended. :)
"Who are John Sorroway and Sam Ferraro, and what do you want the viewers to make of that comment? I see some people attempting to connect it to larger, real world stories. I doubt that is what you meant."
There's a lot of stuff I left out of the final project, but I purposefully kept some references to it, like the Jonnsorroway link. I've thought about taking the leftover stuff and making something else out of that. But it works as-is.
"Amber is mentioned both in Petscop and in 3Dwi.scr. Is this somehow meant to be read in any light?"
I have my own inscrutable reasons for reusing names, but other people can interpret it how they want.
"(Also, is the lamp Holland takes out of the house connected to the lamp in Tapers, in some emotional metaphor?)"
I guess I just have some kind of fixation on lamps.
"What drives you to create your work, and, as a fellow creative, how does it make you feel when your works are interpreted in ways you did not mean?"
I have no idea what drives me. Most of the time I have no motivation at all. Some part of me recognizes that it's all kind of pointless. But then something comes over me and I get really excited about a project. I don't know why.
I don't care about people understanding my work the same way I do. Actually, I kinda prefer to be misunderstood.
"What is something you wish viewers would have understood about your art?"
"What is something you wish to clarify about Petscop, so many years later, or do you feel it stands on its own?"
See above answer.
"What is in the future for you as a creative, if anything?"
I'm still trying to figure that out. Haven't found the right thing yet.
"As a creative, art rarely matches (at least for me) the image one has in their head. Which of your works did you feel came closest to that?"
Some of Petscop was like that. A good amount of the underground area was pretty close to what I imagined. Still, the best ideas in Petscop came as I was working on it.
I have a lot of ideas that I daydream about, but those are rarely the things I actually end up making. Ideas straight out of my head usually turn out to be pretty mediocre when I directly translate them. I think you have to view the work itself as an extension of your imagination, because the imagination in your head alone is pretty limited.
"Are you comfortable with references to your art in other projects? I fear some images struck something in me, and I would be remiss not to mention that I have used the term cutilacunae in unpublished work of my own personal poetry."
Yeah I've got no issue with that.
"Are you comfortable with me using your responses in my essay-thing that I'm doing, or sharing them with the community at large? If not, I understand."
Yeah go ahead.
"Would you like me to share the final project with you as well?"
Sure.
"And of course, who's your favorite worker in 3dwi.scr? (Amber, no question.)"
Rebecca.
Please check out Petscop, Tapers, and all of his works! A brilliant mind who deserves all the love.
Very interesting to read!