Motherboard spent much of 2011 talking to the smartest, coolest, and craziest people in tech, culture, and the web. It made for a mountain of interviews filled with knowledge direct from the source, the best of which we’ve collected here in the first of three lists. Our second list focuses on the scientists and gurus we met, while the third part celebrates the Web folk we chatted with. Peruse the names and quick bios, and click through for the full Q+A with those who pique your interest.
Werner Herzog, Director
Werner Herzog only has half an hour. He’s busy with many projects, including a new art installation, and he receives many requests. But he’s also keenly attentive to the value of each moment, to the brief glimpse into someone else’s mind and soul that each encounter affords. These are the kind of things you think about when making a documentary film, especially when the person you are interviewing only has exactly eight days to live. By Alex Pasternack
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Mark Mothersbaugh, Devo cofounder
The surrealism of Mark Mothersbaugh extends from the circuit-bent synthesizers that helped make Devo famous to the ideas that helped make them important. He is also a prolific composer of film and television scores, many of which are for children, and produced at the iconic Mutato Muzika studio on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, which he owns. By Alex Pasternack
Errol Morris, documentary filmmaker
There are plenty of things that make Tabloid newsworthy – sex, Mormons, kidnapping, cloning – but it was by total chance that Errol Morris’ documentary opened in theaters just as the tabloid-worthy “British hacking scandal” was descending upon a slice of Rupert Murdoch’s tabloid empire. Morris’ stranger-than-fiction movies aren’t just examinations of fascinating people but the strange ways that the facts circulate around them. Ways that, he wants to remind you, are affected by the telling of the story itself, by the medium in which they are told. By Alex Pasternack
Miranda July, filmmaker, performance artist
In the future, Miranda July, who is a filmmaker, performance artist, musician, and writer, Aquarius, webmaster and blogger, would like to be better at not making things. “I’ve been such a like, worker bee since I was 16 that I’m starting to realize that oh, it’s not like this stops at some point, especially if you don’t know how to do anything else, so I’m feeling like that gets to happen soon, or I’m working towards that.” It’s not going to be easy. By Alex Pasternack
Evan Glodell, director of Bellflower
If you’ve seen his car or his flamethrower, you know that Evan Glodell is pretty good at turning hunks of metal into roaring, fire-breathing, machines. The same is true of Bellflower, the apocalyptic mumblecore buddy / desert-romance movie he directed and wrote and stars in, with the help of a bunch of close friends and a few thousand dollars. Sure, it’s a big mess, but that’s what some of the most ambitious do-it-yourself contraptions tend to look like when they’re done, with seams exposed and a few missing pieces. And yet Bellflower tends to look like, well, nothing else you’ve seen. By Alex Pasternack
Jon Rafman, Second Life filmmaker
Montreal artist Jon Rafman is the director of the Rhizome-commissioned short film Small Crowd Gathers, to be filmed entirely in Second Life. I talked to the film’s writer, Tao Lin, about his take on the project, but wanted to learn more from Rafman about the significance and logistics of working and directing entirely in a virtual world. Rafman’s most recent film, Codes of Honor, was also filmed in Second Life and explores the world of professional videogaming — the transient childhood glory particular to a culture of guys in their late-twenties and past their prime. By Kelly Bourdet
Kellam Clark, Artist, designer
Move quickly through the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, down the main thoroughfare Eastern Parkway, past a conflicting intermingling of beautiful terraced homes and marred vacant buildings, and you could easily miss a modern cultural landmark. Hidden in plain sight, packed inside a shuffle of industrial architecture, is the wondrous workshop loft space of Kellam Clark and some half dozen other artists and makers who call his whimsical live-in, work-in reliquary, home. By Sean Yeaton
Tao Lin, Second Life screenwriter
Tao Lin’s experimentation with narrative, medium and self-promotion (his famous novella Shoplifting From American Apparel, a cover story about himself for Seattle’s The Stranger) doesn’t end on paper: he’s also playing around with film, through a new production house he started with his wife and a movie he’s making in the virtual world Second Life. The idea began with the digital artists Jon Rafman and SEECOY, who received a Rhizome commission for it, then asked Lin to write the script. Titled Small Crowd Gathers to Watch Me Cry, the film is based entirely in Second Life, with Tao providing the voice over. By Kelly Bourdet
Jim Guthrie, indie rocker turned game designer
A Juno award-winning indie rock hero who has had a hand in the rising of Canadian artists like Feist, Broken Social Scene and Owen Pallett (née ‘Final Fantasy’), Jim Guthrie isn’t normally a game composer by trade. But for Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP, his alternate take on the videogame soundtrack — which I still hesitate to call a “score” — offers what many examples of game music have been unwilling to dish out: Full-on audiovisual immersion via a collection of arresting interactive soundscapes. By Joshua Kopstein
James Leyland Kirby, Musician
You could say that the primary interest of James Leyland Kirby under his Caretaker guise are the haunted, cobwebbed pathways of your mind. In a sense, the sounds on his just out LP An Empty Bliss Beyond This World — entirely consisting of looped and effected samples of ancient ballroom 78s — are about memory, but something different: ghost memory, or memory that lingers in the brain separated from context like walking into and right back out of a movie, leaving with just a sense and feeling. By Michael Byrne
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By Derek Mead
