Buffalo Zine/Interview

Interview
Photoshoot
===Interviewhttps://view.publitas.com/buffalo-zine/buffalo-earth-ss20/page/66-67===
IN A PARALLEL UNIVERSE, far enough from present reality as to seem theatrical, but not totally impossible, GRIMES has spent 32 years playing computer games in a Vancouver basement. She's a poindexter at heart, fused so cosmically with global gaming parlance that it has drawn out fundamental existential questions from her-some prompted here by her friend, HANS ULRICH OBRIST.
Words by JACK STUART MILLS
THE FIRST video game she picked up at age 12 was the Ocarina of Time, maybe Nintendo's most acclaimed first-player, and the fifth installment of The Legend of Zelda saga. In Ocarina, Grimes would have led protagonist Link through the volcanic terrain of Hyrule in order to find and destroy the bastard king Ganon. For the game, Grimes learned to play notes on the ocarina itself, an ancient ceramic flute with the power to unlock new levels in Hyrule.
After Zelda, Grimes' taste for fantasy brought her to books like Frank Herbert's Dune and the slow-moving frontiers of Tarkovsky. In the sci-fi pop she has made in studios and on major stages, the Canadian artist has spenttwo decades thinking
speculatively about space travel, fantasy realities and human singularity.
More recently, though, Grimes has started using sci-fi to come to terms with life on earth. Miss Anthropocene, the hero of her fifth and latest album, is the goddess of climate change. In order to discuss the apocalypse on a human, universal level, Grimes hypothesised, why not give it a face? It was an idea that hasn't always sat well among the commenting class-especially when early billboards for the album declared that "Climate Change is Good". But Grimes has often used sci-fi to explore where we could go, rather than where we are.
SONICALLY, Miss Anthropocene reflects Grimes's bassier, heavier, earthier moodshift.The bitcrushed synths on songs like "Darkseid" and "My Name Is Dark" sound like human cells dissolving under duress. It's perhaps no coincidence that Grimes feels this way. Sometime after she became pregnant by her partner Elon Musk in 2019, she began thinking of ways to permanently distance herself from the Machiavellian powers of social media. How can you detach from your digital presence, but keep yourself out there?
WarNymph is Grimes's computer-generated avatar, the digital embodiment of her online persona, and an incremental move away from the grid. For the songwriter, creating an alternate personality for yourself online is adjacent to stepping into the body of a computer game character, and this duality can be dangerous.
Giving birth to your digital avatar the same year as your first child might sound like the headfuck of the century, but it's ideal territory for someone like Hans Ulrich Obrist, who frequently discusses the virtues of reality-hopping as Artistic Director of the Serpentine Gallery. The friends talk forever about the possibilities and probabilities of WarNymph to define a new relationship with the world around us, and yet somehow, by the end, it feels like they've just gotten started.
HANS ULRICH: I thought we could begin with your new album, because we talked about it a little bit when we met last time in LA, and you said then that a big reference is the anthropocene. I wanted to ask you about that because, of course, the previous epoch-the holocene-was the 12,000 years of a stable climate since the Ice Age. And this acceleration from the mid-20th century onwards of carbon dioxide emissions has led to the current climate disaster. What prompted you to come up with that play on words as a title for Miss Anthropocene?
GRIMES: For me, the biggest thing when I was coming up with this title and making this album is that I just couldn't stop thinking, why is it so hard to get people to care about climate change? And I think lately people are caring a lot more, but it is really painful. It's such a new concept for us, so there isn't a lot of art about it yet, I guess. And mostly when you engage with the climate crisis. visually, it's like, a photo of a polar bear on a melting glacier, so I wanted to make something that was more digestible. I thought, what would the goddess of climate change be like? How do I turn this into a sort of comic book character? Because I can read Lord of the Rings and understand Sauron, or I can read Batman and understand the Joker, or I can read Harry Potter and understand Voldemort. But then when it comes to real-life things like climate change, it's much more existentially painful. And I thought, you know, all of those villains are metaphors for painful things, so maybe there should be something like that for climate change too. Maybe it's easier to look at or understand as a kind of cartoon. I don't know.
HANS ULRICH: It's interesting also because it has to do with time, this goddess of the climate crisis you're creating or addressing. What is the kind of time horizon you're thinking about?
GRIMES: I mean, I think most people out of necessity are thinking about five, ten, 20, 100 years. But I think it's also very important to be thinking 500, 1000, 10,000 years into the future. That's actually a big thing for me. I just started reading this book, Foundation by Isaac Asimov. I don't know if you've read it, but it's about planning for a dark ages, and planning an exit from a technological dark age that's going to happen 10,000 years after the people who are entering the dark age are dead. So there is no guarantee that humanity will live for those 10,000 years, or even 500 years, you know. I think that there will still be, probably for a while, humans on earth. But if we're not careful, we really could enter a technological dark age. A lot of the things that we're capable of doing now, and the progress we've made, we could lose. Just look at space travel. People are like, why do you care about getting to Mars? Why do you care about this stuff when people are starving? But I think it's important, because we're in this tiny snippet of time right now where we actually can get to another planet, and it's never been this way before. And if we're not careful, it might never be this way again. And so I really believe these opportunities should be taken now. general intelligence, which I think we just need to be prepared for 10,000 years in the future, we need to be prepared for these greater existential things that could happen. 
HANS ULRICH: I totally agree. It's similar to what the French historian Fernand Braudel called longue durée, or long duration. Which of course brings us also to sci-fi, because that's what science fiction often does. And you've been interested in science fiction from a very young age. So I was wondering if you. can tell me a little bit about what kind of science fiction-I mean, you've already mentioned Azimov-helped shape your worldview, and the sci-fi more recently that you've been drawn to. How has that interest in sci-fi evolved over time?
GRIMES: Well, the first science fiction book I read was Dune, which I actually read when I was six or seven years old, so it's a really formative book for me. I love how Dune is about a post-Al world. One of the core concepts in that book is that Al existed, but it almost destroyed every living thing in the universe and created a sort of permanent fascist state. And Al was just barely overcome, but now they live in a computer-less society, like 100,000 years or however long from now. So it's way, way, way in the future, when you're not allowed to have what they call thinking machines at all, which is something that could really happen to us. And that's another example of a technological dark age. If there isn't proper oversight of Al, we could end up in a future where we actually have less computer technology that we have now. In the way bots and stuff are being used to shape elections, I guess Al is already being used in dangerous and manipulative ways that a lot of people aren't even fully aware of. So yeah, I think Dune was probably the most formative book in my childhood. And with regards to what I'm reading now, the Foundation series is really blowing my mind. It's highlighting for me that the people who make technology are the most powerful people in society. And I think that's also something we really didn't prepare for. Now we have Facebook and Twitter, but there was no oversight at the time that these things were developing power. So we've got this weird kind of technological oligarchy, with Mark Zuckerberg controlling all the news and all the information, which should be a much more pressing issue, and I think that's something that's really foreshadowed in Foundation.
HANS ULRICH: And also when we met you mentioned Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor. Can you take time to talk about that? What inspires you about that book?
GRIMES: Have you read it yet?
HANS ULRICH: Yeah, you encouraged me to read it, and it's amazing.
GRIMES: It's phenomenal. I think it's one of the most original books I've ever read, it's so untethered from anything I've ever experienced. It's just so unique. And I feel like it's that exact middle ground between fantasy and science fiction, I really can't say what genre it is. It's kind of future fantasy, I guess. I love how it's sort of about a villain, it's about a girl who's technically a demon but she just doesn't want to be. There's something beautiful about that.
HANS ULRICH: And of course one of the themes of the album, particularly when it comes to ecology and nature goddesses, is spirituality, and this idea of god- designing. You said in an interview that, if you think about god-making or god- designing, it just seems so fun. Can you talk to me a little bit more about that?
GRIMES: I feel like what's really interesting right now is that humans are working on building artificial general intelligence, which is fascinating, because if we can actually create a sentient being, I mean, that's an extremely godly act. That is the act of creating life in a way, which would in theory make us like gods. But at the same time, the thing we've created would be, compared to us, a god in terms of how powerful it is. So I think it leads to this interesting paradox where by creating Al we are gods, but we're also making gods that could so easily destroy us, and I find that a very poetic concept. It's intelligent design, quite literally. It's interesting that something so logical, like writing code, which seems so antithetical to the concept of intelligent ﻿design in religion, is in and of itself intelligent design. I think that's a beautiful contradiction.
HANS ULRICH: I remember you saying to me also that you not only wrote all the songs on the album, but that you also produced all of them. It's actually something I discussed a lot with Arca when we chatted the other day, it's quite rare a musician would both write and produce everything themselves.
GRIMES: I think, honestly, it's just my passion. I can make more unique things if nobody else is in the room when I'm doing it. I love collaborating with other people too, but there is something special just think the human psyche in just being alone, I feel a lot more adventurous if there isn't anyone else there. I think this is the last record where I'm gonna do it this way, because it just takes so long, it's not an efficient use of time. Collaborating is so much faster. I just love creating the whole soundscape, you can really own the work if you produce it. It's a good exercise in world- building, you know, you can make the whole world that each song lives in. And it's really beautiful to do that.
HANS ULRICH: The other thing which I wanted to talk about is the idea of coming up with an avatar. It's a way of avoiding all the travelling involved in promoting a record. And of course, there are many more dimensions to an avatar-we're actually working with Ben Vickers on my avatar right now, which is called HUO 9000. You told me that you're very advanced in the creation of your own avatar, and we have even discussed that our two avatars could at some point do a conversation together in public or perform together. Where does that stand for you right now? Because it's obviously going to change the way concerts are happening, it's going to change the way so much is happening. Can you talk more about that? And how you came up with the name for your avatar?
GRIMES: So my avatar is called WarNymph, and our avatars should definitely do something together! I'm really excited to see yours when you're ready. But yeah, touring is something that stresses me out so much in terms of the environmental impact, you know. So many times after a show the room empties and you look out, there are just thousands of plastic bottles and drinks all over the floor, and I'm like, man. And then you get on a plane, you're flying 12 people all over the world with tons of equipment and lighting and all this heavy stuff. The carbon footprint of touring is huge, it's really bad. So yeah, we've created the avatar, but we're still far away from body mapping and motion capture, that kind of thing, which we would need to do if we wanted to start doing virtual shows. I've also been thinking about the nature of the concert. Like, why does the concert have to just be showing up and hearing songs? We're working on a gallery exhibit right now where it's not going to travel, it's just going to be in LA, and people can come to it.. And WarNymph will guide them on Al meditations, and there'll be music from the album, and then there'll also be a bunch of different images of the avatar. It will be this immersive experience that isn't really a concert, it's like an audiovisual, musical, conceptual art experience, I guess. And if that goes well, I'd be curious to start trying to do that in other cities. It's less temporal, people can come all day, and you can go at any time. It's a bit more insular. If you go at two in the afternoon, maybe there are only a few people in the gallery. With the avatar, I think there are alternative ways to consume the performative musical experience, and I'm curious to be trying them out. I think what we're currently pursuing might be a cool idea.
HANS ULRICH: Also, you mentioned this idea of doing things across these different worlds: not only in the music world, but also the art world, and you were mentioning your practice of making drawings. I remember we spoke about H.R. Giger's drawings once. Can you tell me a little bit about the visual art aspect of what you do, because your drawings are not so well known?
GRIMES: I mean, drawing has always been a passion of mine and lately I've been collaborating a lot with my brother on CG, and the avatar stuff, but I always think my first creative expression was illustration. I grew up on a lot of manga and anime and comic books, and people like Giger, who did the concept art for Alien obviously. There's a lot of sci-fi that I love, and Heavy Metal magazine, all of that kind of stuff. So I guess from an illustration perspective, I'm probably working within that legacy, comic book art and sci-fi art. I think in particular the Heavy Metal-adjacent artists and people like Moebius, it's sort of an underrated field of illustration at the moment. And I feel like it's probably sort of overdue a rediscovery. But the visual art is where I first got into a lot of the weird shit I loved when I was a kid.
HANS ULRICH: I used to know Moebius in Paris. I recorded long interviews with him.
GRIMES: Are you serious?
HANS ULRICH: Yeah, I can send you the interview.
GRIMES: Wow, that's sick. He's like, one of my favourite illustrators ever.
HANS ULRICH: Who are your other favourite illustrators?
GRIMES: I love Katsuhiro Otomo who did the Akira stuff, for sure. I also really love Gustave Doré, a lot of that Romantic art from the 1800s. Do you know Clamp? I love them too. They're this all-female manga collective. They did Magic Knight Rayearth which is this sort of weird environmentalist manga from I think like the 90s, but you should check them out because they have a really incredible style.
HANS ULRICH: Another thing we discussed when we met was your idea to basically go beyond Grimes-you even mentioned the conversation that you planned in the future to kill Grimes. And that actually made me think of Marina Abramovic, because she did The Life and Death of Marina Abramovic for the Manchester International Festival where she kind of jumps back in time and then tells the story of her life. There are these multiple identities, and all of a sudden there are these different bodies and no one knows anymore which one is real. There seem to be some parallels to that with you, because you've also died on stage like Marina, and you've also talked about constructing these different identities. Can you talk a little bit about that?
GRIMES: Man, I really need to get into Marina Abramovic more because she seems really fucking cool. I just feel like everyone thinks that they have such a strong identity. And, you know, people get mad at me a lot for changing my identity, but I feel like identity is extremely fluid, your identity is just all your experiences, and every time you have a new experience, you become a slightly different person. I think people get too fixated on what they think they are and it actually prevents them from moving forward in life, or making new friends. I feel like so many of our issues in society right now are caused by people being too militant about their identity. Like, oh, I'm religious, so I hate gay people, or whatever. Can't you move past that? I think it's really important to consider your identity, especially with the internet, where everyone seems to have two identities now. Your online persona is actually a huge part of your life for most people, but it's not a true reflection of what you're actually like, or your day-to-day life. And so it becomes ﻿this alternative identity that you have. It's not just social media. It's very clear in gaming, for example. There have been video games where I've spent, you know, 200 hours in a game as another person. And you get really attached to that character and when you go into the game, you forget about your real life and you just sort of exist in this whole other world. I think we're all engaging with multiple identities more than we think we are. And that might be one of the big problems of the current age, that we're not adjusting psychologically to this. We're not accepting that we're all living multiple lives in multiple universes, via things like gaming and social media. And so we're struggling with the psychological toll of these conflicting personalities. I definitely keep getting into this kind of psychological trauma where my digital self and my real self aren't the same thing. And they end up fighting each other and I'm like, what the fuck is going on? [laughs]
HANS ULRICH: In art history, many artists used a pseudonym. I remember I wanted to talk with the Situationist Raoul Vaneigem, and he had like seven, eight, nine, ten different names. And you of course go under many different names - there is Claire, but there is also Grimes, there's c, then there is the name of your avatar. I'm sure there must be more names. Can you talk a little bit about these different names? And also, I was curious how you came up with the name Grimes?
GRIMES: Well, speaking of that, I actually had like ten different fake bands at the beginning. I had like ten different MySpaces with all these different fake artists and they all had separate music. And funnily enough, the Grimes one was just the one that people started caring about, this one MySpace started going kind of viral, and so I stuck with it because it was the most popular identity. Which is interesting, because I probably would not have chosen the name Grimes, it was just a funny afterthought that ended up becoming a meme of sorts. I don't know, I wasn't expecting anyone to ever listen to that music or care about it. So it was kind of a happy accident. But, yeah, I hate my name Claire. Like, I just despise it. I can't stand it, I've always hated it. And I've always been trying to have other names, because I think names are really, really important. And I think names sort of make you who you are. So I use a bunch of different names. I also go by Dark, and I have a bunch of finstas and stuff that are under Dark and my PS4 name is Dark C. And a lot of my friends call me c. And then WarNymph I think just sums up my aesthetic personality.
HANS ULRICH: So there are many! You said almost ten?
GRIMES: Yeah. There's probably more than that even, there's a ton. I don't know, I've just always had a bunch of different names that I go by. It seems sad to only have one name. I feel like I'm 20 different people and I like to reflect that. Names are like poetry. I like to aestheticise everything in my orbit. Plus, my name is one of the things I have to engage with the most, so I like fucking around with it.
HANS ULRICH: You told me you had to remove yourself from your public self because there was no way to remain invested in yourself that has anything to do with the culture while surviving mentally.
GRIMES: Exactly. I feel like when you're in the public eye, there are these stories and scandals that can be really embarrassing and intense and everyone's mad at you, or like, laughing at you. And you do go through this kind of ego death when that's happening. You're like, man, everything I thought I cared about, it has to die, because if I stay attached to it, I'm just suffering. I'm watching it be destroyed, I'm watching everyone hate it. So maybe I need to just kill that part of myself, or let that thing die and just be something new. And I think that's actually a really healthy thing to go through, I think a lot of people confront that kind of thing in their life where you just have to let the person you thought you were die and grow unattached to it. Still, it's weird to just move on, or to just like, build a new personality. Or to not care about what everyone thinks about you. It's funny how hard it is to not care. But once. you stop caring, you're quite free.
HANS ULRICH: I'm also interested in what you're saying about branching out into the world of gaming. I know you presented your new song "4ÆM" at the 2020 Game Awards, and it connected to the Cyberpunk 2077 game, it's kind of the soundtrack to that. Can you talk a little bit about how you bridge into the world of games? I think it's interesting in terms of sci-fi, but also in terms of the production of reality, because when we think about how sci-fi can produce reality, it's almost that positive games could produce a more positive future, maybe.
GRIMES: I think games are a distillation of the best parts of life. I started playing video games when I was around, maybe, six years old? It's everything good, without any of the boring stuff. It's living but there's no mundane shit. Well, unless you're playing a farming game or something. [laughs] But I think humans are primed to be in games, actually. It's part of our existence, everything is gamified. Even look at Instagram, it's the game of beauty, or who can be the most beautiful. It's not formally presented as a game, but it's still a game. Or look at the stock market, or business, it's this weird game of who can acquire the most money or who can acquire the most shit. Uber and Lyft are trapped in a game with each other of who's going to be the ride sharing app. It feels like people are more successful in gamified scenarios, people achieve more when things are gamified. And so now, almost everything we do has become gamified. Even when I'm reading a book, I'm like, ooh, how far have I gotten along? Am I halfway yet? Am I three-quarters yet? There's a positive feedback loop in your brain as you achieve things and unlock things and reach higher levels. I just think the human psyche seems oddly developed for gaming, and gaming is like the peak human state because it's just sort of like sheer, distilled life, in a way.
HANS ULRICH: And then there is science and technology, which is another world you bridge. I believe we can only address the big topics and themes and issues of the 21st century if we go beyond the fear of pooling knowledge. You connect all these worlds with the new album. We talked a lot about James Lovelock, and I actually went to interview him on Chesil Beach recently. He's the inventor of the Gaia hypothesis, but he's also written a new book called Novacene, which really connects to Al. He says the experience of watching your garden grow gives you some idea of how future Al systems will feel when observing human life. And in this book, it's actually quite optimistic, because he talks about the evolution of intelligence and says that maybe Al will be better at solving climate change. because we humans are doing such an appalling job. He talks about the future of cities where he says, you know, it's about abandoning land and creating these human retreats. But you've also been inspired by the work of Nick Bostrom, and his simulation theory of 2003. He of course proposes this dilemma where basically a technologically mature post-human civilization would have enormous computing power, and if even a tiny percentage of them were to run ancestor simulations, the total number of simulated ancestors, or sims, in the universe will greatly exceed the total number of actual ancestors. I once met Nick Bostrom, and he has a dark vision of the future of Al, whereas Lovelock is more optimistic. So I'm very curious about how you connect to technology and science, and the inspiration from Lovelock and Bostrom, and how Al appears in the new album.
GRIMES: Well, I actually just got the Lovelock book. I love the idea of a novacene. I was so pissed as, right when
I handed in the album, I found that book, ﻿and I was like, oh man, I actually love this idea. It's so positive, and even just the first bit of it that I read really got my mind going. But Bostrom makes very good points too. I think there's a lot of potential danger for Al, but if it's managed properly, Al could really be the thing that truly insulates us from extinction, or at least I think Al can insulate intelligence from extinction. I want humanity to exist, but I think more important than humanity is consciousness. We haven't ever found anything out in the universe, and we might be the only thing that there ever was, or ever will be. Like, I don't know if that's true, but it might be true. And I think Al offers potential for consciousness without a body that needs to die, and that's a very beautiful potential, As scary as it is. A consciousness that could colonise the universe and beyond. I think we should go full-on into making AGI, but I think it should be heavily regulated and monitored. I don't know if you've read Life 3.0 by Max Tegmark.
HANS ULRICH: It's an amazing book.
GRIMES: Yeah, I just feel like we need people like that overseeing things. I love the opening story about the Omega team, where they're making an Al but they're keeping it offline and being extremely careful with it. I think that's probably the way to go, just to proceed with extreme caution. And if we do that, we can potentially solve abundance and solve physics, and find the answers to the universe, and create a world where everyone has equal opportunity and access to all the food and resources that they need. Well, potentially at least. That's obviously very utopian, but I don't think it's out of the question, and I think it's worth striving for.
HANS ULRICH: You also said we are always looking for our maker, our god. What's interesting with Al is that we are their god, so it will be the first intelligent being that knows its creator.
GRIMES: Yeah, no, that's right. To me, that seems so beautiful too. Also when everyone's so worried about Al destroying us, it's like, why would Al want to destroy us? We're working really hard to bring it to life. I like to think that hopefully it would appreciate that. But then again, it might not, who knows? All of those social things like appreciation and thankfulness, those things might not exist at all, so I don't know. I guess everything about Al is speculative at the moment. But I still think that's so beautiful either way, to have a consciousness that knows its creator. It's sort of like manifesting all religions ever -it's a truth-is-stranger-than-fiction kind of situation.
HANS ULRICH: I remember you also saying that words like fantasy and psychedelia have been missing from the kinds of texts we've been discussing. I wanted to ask you about the importance of psychedelics and if you practice any somatic rituals, because I just met C. A. Conrad, and they talked about this idea of somatic rituals.
GRIMES: Wait, what is a somatic ritual?
HANS ULRICH: C. A. Conrad is a poet doing these somatic poetry exercises and it's a very fascinating ritual. Tarkovsky said that rituals may be missing in our time, in our world, and rituals are somehow symbolic acts, they create a community without communication. And while today we have so much communication without community, with all our tech devices, I think what C. A. Conrad is getting at is finding a way of reconnecting to our community that goes beyond communication. Saint- Exupéry, who wrote Le Petit Prince, said that rituals are in life what things are in space. And then Hannah Arendt also said that rituals can also create something which is independent of the existence of our life, you know, the existence of our lives is relatively short, but rituals can kind of continue. I find all these different thoughts on rituals interesting.
GRIMES: You know, I've actually been thinking a lot about this lately, because I think a lot of the fractures in our society are due to rituals breaking down and people losing a sense of community and stuff like that. I think there are many beautiful things about modernity, but also, as religion becomes less common, there's a lack of rituals. to bind people together. And you often see among atheist or agnostic people I know, people are getting really into like the Zodiac, or horoscopes, that kind of thing, which is in itself a type of ritual. I think it's really interesting that it's so prevalent among people my age. They don't follow a religion or anything, but one of the first things they ask is, what's your sign? And that's a sort of ritual behaviour. It's obvious that there's something very human and necessary in that kind of thing. I think what you said is true, it's to build community, and without necessarily needing to have super explicit communication. It's a fundamental behaviour that allows people to agree on something, or all participate in something together, and they don't necessarily have to know each other, which is pretty beautiful. I wonder, I do think we are maybe about to enter an age where there is more of that. I think that maybe the 2000s and 2010s were the least spiritual time in human history in a sense. There was an intense movement. towards atheism, and there's been such fracturing in society. Especially if you look at rural America, with factories closing, and so many communities are being torn apart, and the rise of the internet. A sense of community has been significantly reduced but, you know, people have been discovering and forming communities online, which is cool. I think we're in this stage of restructuring, which is causing a lot of chaos, but it's also interesting. I think people are finding new footings.
HANS ULRICH: It makes me think about something which I was fascinated by, because it's also a ritual, which is your semi-fictitious, futuristic workout regimen, which you announced at the moment of the Stella McCartney collection. It was a collaboration with Adidas that was fully sustainable. And on your Instagram, you actually talk not only about the campaign, but about sword fighting and screaming.
GRIMES: [Laughs] I think it was an exercise in what maybe I would call social media science fiction, but my brother Mac-who's actually right here. beside me...
MAC BOUCHER: Hello, Hans Ulrich!
HANS ULRICH: Good to meet you again.
MAC: It's so comforting to hear your voice. We're very excited to show you what we're working on, we're making some crazy stuff.
GRIMES: But yeah, the science fiction workout routine. It's not actually real. I will admit that I don't actually do most of the things in the workout routine. But Adidas kept asking us to submit a workout routine and it just seems so boring and basic to send through a normal workout routine. So I was just like, why can't we just make this interview a fictional experience? It was sort of like corporate performance art, or something. [laughs]
HANS ULRICH: There was biohacking, there was the sensory deprivation tank. Can you tell me more about these fictitious rituals?
GRIMES: Yeah, I mean, I actually am really interested in biohacking. I'm pregnant right now, so I can't really do any biohacking because I don't know if it's actually dangerous or not. But there's ﻿a lot of stuff I was doing before I got pregnant that's quite experimental, but hasn't been tested enough to know if it's safe, so I'm not doing it currently. But I am very interested in the idea of extending the healthy periods of my life. You know, there are certain things like NAD+ or nicotinamide riboside which might really improve your mitochondria and help you live longer, or at least help you live in a healthy, useful, painless way for a longer period of time. These are things I'm super interested in. I haven't done the sensory deprivation tank, but Mac I think has done a lot of the sensory deprivation stuff and you find that really healthy right, Mac?
MAC: I have like, literally time travelled in deprivation tanks.
GRIMES: I think it's interesting. these things that mimic psychedelic experiences without drugs, whether it's deprivation tanks and extreme meditation, there's a lot of interesting stuff to pursue there. Because there the implication is that the psychedelic experience is a natural one.
HANS ULRICH: The other thing which is exciting is this new way of launching the album, because it's basically no longer this idea that it's sort of launched all in one go, but it's a kind of evolution. where you drop different elements. There have been game-related things, there's been the most recent video very recently for "IDORU". You explained on Instagram that it was a camera test that ended up being a really emotional performance. Can you talk a little bit about this? And also this way of releasing an album which seems to be so different from how people did it ten years ago?
GRIMES: I think it's partly that the Grimes team is really small. I've made most of the albums by myself, and then the visuals are mostly just me and Mac and sometimes a few other people. But, you know, I think we've always kind of been in this indie zone and it's really encouraged us to take everything on ourselves. And sometimes that's been a hindrance, but I also think it's sort of cool, because one of the things we like doing is working in public. As in, instead of working behind closed doors, and making the perfect product, and then just putting it out at the end, I think it's great that we have the ability to show our process, and to show our mistakes, and have this DIY thing happening, almost in real time where people can like see what we're working on and how we're making it. Because when we're making these videos, for me it's like an awesome discovery period. I'm learning new techniques and new ways to do things, and experimenting with different programs and technologies. Like when we were doing the "Delete Forever" video, that was amazing, Mac and Neil (Hansen] built everything in Blender, it's a whole simulation that you can walk around in. It was really trippy watching him make it, because it just makes me feel like we're in a simulation. It's like, okay, the wind is going to be at like this speed, and the clouds are gonna move at this speed, and we're going to move the sun over here. That in itself seems like art to me, to watch somebody literally just moving the sun, it was so poetic and beautiful. I feel like that aspect of CGI isn't at the forefront enough, the actual act of making computer graphics is like playing god. It's so incredible to watch.
HANS ULRICH: And it's not one god, it's many gods. I read this conversation you had with Lana Del Rey, and you say that you're really obsessed by no single religion, but by polytheism. How actually the ancient Greeks or the ancient Egyptians lived in a kind of anime world where there were many gods.
GRIMES: I guess if you look at gaming, if you consider people who are building this stage of restructuring,
simulations to be god, then it's like, is Nintendo this realm of god? Is Kojima Productions another realm of god? It's interesting that there are all these people building these separate simulations, and each simulated world is kinda like its own religion, and each has these communities that enter into them and engage in the rituals of that simulation. Wow, I'm kind of tripping out on this conversation. [laughs]
HANS ULRICH: Well, we spoke earlier about sci-fi, and you even went as far to say that religion is like the best sci-fi.
GRIMES: Yeah, I think so. I mean, this idea that God is in space, on the first day doing this, and on the second day doing that. As if God is up there just playing The Sims. When you actually step back and extract yourself from it, it's literally incredibly trippy science fiction. I feel like people think of religion as something so close to the aesthetics and semiotics of the medieval era, or the ancient world, that we forget that it's actually just crazy world-building in space. That's literally what it is.
HANS ULRICH: I also wanted to ask you about your unrealised projects because we know a lot about architects' unrealised projects, for example, they are published all the time. But we know very little about visual artists, musicians, composers, designers, even scientists, unrealised projects-projects which couldn't happen within the currents of structures of the art or music world, projects that have been too big to be realised, like utopias for different societies, but also projects which have been censored because there is of course censorship in many parts of the world still. And then as Doris Lessing told me, there is also the idea of self- censorship, things we haven't yet dared to do. So it's a huge topic, and I want to ask you, what are your unrealised projects? I'm sure there must be many.
GRIMES: Wow. There's a ton. I mean, I don't want to say too many of them, because a lot of them I definitely do still want to do, so I don't want to leak them. [laughs] Mac, what are some of our unrealised projects right now?
MAC: There's a lot of film projects.
GRIMES: Yeah. Our biggest restrictions have been primarily economic.
MAC: And time. Both of us think in such filmic and cinematic ways, but to really explore those themes in their fullest version is a very long, arduous and expensive process, and neither you or I are at that stage yet, but we're dying to get there.
GRIMES: We really want to get into film. One of the things Mac was just talking about was a project called Portraits of Future Tyrants. I guess it literally is all there in the title. Tyrants have shaped our world, whether it's Napoleon or Genghis Khan or Alexander the Great.
MAC: It tends to be deeply insecure people who are full of fear and projecting it outwardly. We're building out a kind of techno-universe essentially, exploring a lot of what you guys were talking about. The expression of mythology and religion but in a fictional setting.
GRIMES: And how they link with capitalism and business and all these other things, too.
MAC: Which are also religious systems in a way. The idea of future tyrants ﻿is more or less an aesthetic world- building exercise with narrative connotations.
GRIMES: It's a sort of future history. I mean, I guess that's just what science fiction is, but we're just very intrigued by tyrants. I mean like all the best characters are tyrants. Baron Harkonnen [from Dune] is like the best character ever.
HANS ULRICH: And any kind of projects outside the worlds of culture or music or art? I always wanted to curate a city, for example. Do you have any?
GRIMES: Yeah. I mean, we haven't thought about it seriously. But I've been thinking a lot about how, when I want to do crazy shit with my house, I have to get all of these permits. I wanted to paint my house black, but you can't actually just paint your house black, you have to get the city to approve and all this crazy stuff. I hate how cities can be so controlling of their aesthetics. I don't know if you've ever been to Burning Man, but there's something so incredible to be in a space where everything is aestheticised and everything is beautiful, and every structure is a piece of art in and of itself. There are no audio limitations and there are no light limitations, and you can just wander through like it's a beautiful piece of science fiction, or a chaotic future. I do think it'd be really cool. I know there are people like Kanye talking about building new cities, but I think it'd be really cool in the next hundred years if people start building new cities that aren't bound by these rules of what you can do with sound and light and structure. Cities are actually weirdly subdued, like, there are so many rules, there are so many ways in which you're not allowed to live. I mean, it's nice to be in a city with a very specific aesthetic, the world that you're in really does inform your state of mind. I've been really loving brutalism recently, I love those severe, harsh environments too. I like super simple large scale things, like Soviet monuments, these extreme, hyper-modern but super minimalist giant objects. It's so emotional, but so futuristic at the same time. 
HANS ULRICH: I have a few final questions. I heard that you have an obsession with bulldogs, and when you see one you know it's going to be at good show. I used to have one myself, so I was wondering if that was true.
GRIMES: I guess it is true. I mean, now my heart is with pitbulls. I love bulldogs, but they're kind of like fancy breeder dogs, and I adopted a pitbull a few years ago. And I realised that people really don't like pitbulls. If you go to the pound there are so many of them, and I can understand why, I guess, because they're huge and they look a bit scary. But they are the most amazing, sweetest dogs, and they're a little like giant bulldogs in a way. So now my crusade is for pitbulls, and I consider them very good luck.
HANS ULRICH: Beautiful. And then. before when we spoke about religion, I wanted to ask you about one thing I found interesting, which actually goes back to your beginnings. I found an old interview when you talked about the kind of vision which led to your first album, Visions, and you said after nine days of no sleeping or eating you have no stimulation, so your subconscious. started filling in the blanks. You said you started to feel like you were channelling spirits, that you were convinced the music was a gift from God. Do you remember that? In 2012?
GRIMES: Yeah, I mean, I still really like doing that. I really like doing hardcore work sessions where I lock myself in a small space with not a lot of daylight. I actually still mostly black out the windows of my work environment, I think there is actually truly something to that. I think the less stimulation you. have visually, the more I get into a really weird zone where I can start crazy things and it helps me be creative. It's not super healthy, but I find that's my favourite way to work actually.
HANS ULRICH: And then, as my very last question, when you talk about the vision which led to Visions, it's fascinating to see now at the beginning of 2020, a lot of your songs and albums were actually in the top five, top ten, of the most important music produced in the last decade, and Art Angels in particular was mentioned a lot. And I always think it's interesting, the moment at which epiphanies happen. Do you remember the epiphany that led to Art Angels, or what it was that triggered that?
GRIMES: Art Angels was sort of a slower process, but I do remember the day I thought of the name. I would always have these things-I would nickname them art fairies or something where, if I would do things that weren't true to myself, they would punish me and not give me inspiration. And every time I would do something. that wasn't artistically true, I would literally have these sort of creative punishment periods. And so I started feeling like I was in this weird dialogue with these spirits and I had to like, please them, or I wouldn't be able to make good art. This sounds insane. [laughs] But yeah, no, I remember rolling words around my mouth and I thought of Art Angels, and I thought that summed up what they were quite nicely. These beings that I have to kind. of feed with good creative content, or they will punish me with writer's block. I remember I was listening to this Lana Del Rey song when I got the idea, it's unreleased or leaked I think, but it's one of my favourites, called "Angels Forever". I wish she would release an official version so bad.
HANS ULRICH: That's fascinating. I just read the conversation with you and Lana-do you and her talk a lot?
GRIMES: We don't talk that much, but I think she might be possibly my favourite artist. She's definitely in my lifelong top ten. I think she might be one of the greatest living musicians working today.
HANS ULRICH: I really want to read her poetry, because she announced that she's going to be doing a poetry project?
GRIMES: I mean, if you read her lyrics sometimes it's just incredible magical poetry. It's actually shocking that someone can get words like that into songs that are actually listenable and enjoyable, because most lyrics don't actually look that good when you write them down on a page. I feel like Lana is an incredible poet.
HANS ULRICH: This has been the most amazing interview and I'm so grateful.
GRIMES: I have to say, I think this is like the best interview I've ever done. Thank you for doing so much research. This was super awesome.Category:InterviewCategory:2020