INTERVIEW: Rand Sevilla

*Editor’s note: This article was originally published on Mostmodernist.com on 10/28/09 and is reprinted with permission.

Rand Sevilla is a graphic artist and also a graphic musician. I don’t know how many bands he has (a dozen, perhaps) but one of them is this outfit called Club Sashay. Recently Rand was pimping a web snatch of his own design to Vicemag via Twitter. It’s called YYAAHHOOOO.COM. It won a prize. It’s an Internet nasty website mashup. Go there to see what it’s all about and then come back and read an interview I had with Rand about the Internet.

Johnny: What are you up to with yyaahhoooo?
Rand: YYAAHHOOOO.COM is an extention of a earlier efforts in experimental HTML called “Maury Povich” available here: randsevilla.com/povich [Whoa!]. I like manipulating language to create irrational experiences. We took a bunch of mushrooms in the desert at this music festival (Manimal) and got on this dialogue about bands like Wavves and Lovvers and Miike Snow. So Peter from Beast Cop and I decided we should start a band called Tom Pettery Presents YYaahhoooo.com. I don’t know if the band will ever happen but the opportunity to take YYAAHHOOOO.com as a domain named seemed great so I grabbed it.

The act of typing in a URL is coordinated by the sequence of the letters: your fingers touching the buttons is the space where your meat makes zeros and ones. Typing in YYAAHHOOOO.COM has this interesting double rhythm that is appealing, too. Its like datdat datdat datdat datdatdatdat dat dat dat.(sic)

J: Is everything in there shit you found, or is some of it your own, like the faces?
R: The gestures are mine but the content cannot really be claimed. The faces are from a blog that lasted for about 2 days called LOLBROS. The profile photo of the authority figure is already funny, but when you make the faces completely and shoddily shitty I crack up. The other stuff is all copy paste copy paste code collages and media arrangement, not dissimilar to the sculptural stuff I used to do when I had room to do it. I really believe that proximity creates identity and that you can create a lot of questions just by putting two signifiers next to each other. I like Haim Steinbach’s work a lot; and what he was trying to do with the banal in a hyper consumer environment, I’m trying to do with the banal in infornographic environment.

J: I know you have a penchant for the grotesque Internet. What do you think about the insane shit one can find in/out there?
R: As having been a person diagnosed with mental illness I don’t know if Insane is an appropriate characterization. I know that will seem a contradiction when you see my next post that says “THIS IS INSANE!!!!!!!”, but that’s just Internet hype. The Internet is the human brain melting into one giant pulsating mass, an überhuman blob. I sometimes feel like the Internet is the pink slime from Ghostbusters II that boils under NYC, and other times I think the internet is the logical extension of the collective unconsciousness and will move us from being messy piles of DNA. The Internet as a whole is grotesque. Its the pinnacle of technology that can be used to appeal to the basest level of human experience.

J: What about the creators of extreme, grotesque content. What kind of people are they? Why do you think they do it?
R: Its always been about sharing. Content creators want an audience. I know I do. We extend our interests and desires in the internet in the hope we will make contact with someone who understands, or at least “gets” what you are about. Would furries, pedophiles or Christians access the Internet if there wasn’t a relevant and related body of content and community available? Unlikely. Internet is augmented consciousness where we aren’t limited to sharing by conventional media. I don’t have to describe a picture or movie I made, I can show you. We all want to have a legacy and the easiest way to do that is insert our code in the pile. The dark and sticky pile.

J: Do you consider yourself apart from the grotesque, or a part of it? Just visiting?
R: Totally part of it, you can’t just visit. I think a lot of people don’t realize is when you are on the Internet your computer is spewing information on other computers and other computers are doing the same. Its a good thing human STDs haven’t figure out a way to travel through the network.

J: Do you have some ideas about what it all means, culturally speaking? To me it’s a scream. I think Internet has been a big long healthy scream so far. Or a “movement” (“shit”)(with a scream). Like culture is exorcising decades of not being able to govern its own entertainment, information and interactivity. Internet as steam chamber.
R: I know I just gave you a bunch of rhetoric about what it means but, when I take a step back, the Internet is still in its infancy. No broadcast medium has really hit the hundred year mark. That’s only two generations in people time. I’ll consider the Internet grown-up when it effectively merges the Newtonian world with the quantum world, that is to say [when] all information, including time and spatial perception (memory, emotion) exists everywhere and nowhere simultaneously. The analogy you gave of the Internet being a shit scream already points to how language, our organic lexicon, is merging with the technical lexicon. The ideas precede the reality–be it flight, 9/11, or Singularity. The ramification of this is that we will not be human anymore and so shit like google, Huffington, and even YYAAHHOOOO.COM will be a remnant of an ancient civilization primitively carved from binary processes, rendered in 2 dimensions.

The Internet is a Monolith.

J: Are you now or have you ever been a member of the somethingawful.com forums? 4chan?
R: I lurk 4chan and Encyclopedia dramatica because it feels like hanging out in the back of the bus with all the bad kids.

I can’t really say to much else otherwise I’ll be breaking the rules of the Internet**.

Randsevilla.com

club sashay deep pentagon internet rand sevilla thatrandguy video Posted under Interviews by Johnny