Contributor Confab: Data Vandals
"The book ends with a huge party for Satan and all his friends. It really has everything."
The Data Vandals are the married team of Jason Forrest and Jen Ray, two mind-bogglingly multitalented individuals who have somehow managed to come together as even more than the sum of their already formidable parts. Their Data Vandals project mines publicly available data and transforms it into seriously playful images displayed at live performances, gallery installations, and interactive pop-ups. For slips slips, Jen provided our instantly iconic cover art, and the pair created a wonderful tribute to one of the patron saints of our enterprise, Sister Corita Kent.
ss: Name three writers or artists, and tell us why you named them.
DV: Cocaine-era Stephen King - so much fun, stories you can read again and again. Akira Kurosawa - every movie is amazing, just different levels of amazing-ness. Louise Bourgeois - a builder of everything from giant beautifully realized spiders to elegant small drawings.
ss: Ghost, vampire, werewolf, or zombie? Why?
DV: Vampire of course! Zombies are dumb, Werewolves are angry, ghosts are vapors!
ss: What's the book everyone seeing this should read if they haven't already?
DV: The Master and Margarita: Two men meet Satan in a park and he predicts when and where one of them will lose his head. You meet Jesus and Pontius Pilot on the day before Jesus's cruxifiction. The book ends with a huge party for Satan and all his friends. It really has everything.
ss: What geography has had the biggest impact on your life and work?
DV: The American South, Berlin, and New York City
ss: Rock or hard place?
DV: Aren't we already right in the middle? Would we want it any other way?
See more of Jason and Jen’s work at DataVandals.com.
Learn more about slips slips at slipsslips.net