Craig, Mock Up on Mu is the latest in a series of collage-style
films you've created. Can you tell us where this film came from - what
inspired you to create it?

Increasingly I have become interested in "remediating" the representations of history through a collage style, to break the totalized issues down into articulated components whose complexity begins to resemble the kind of analysis that historical literature could offer...
in fact, more like the complexity, contingency, and possibility of real historical experience. This approach does not simplify the historical forces, but instead acknowledges the contradictions and disjunctions in social action--or thought for that matter! When I chanced upon the Feral House book "Sex and Rockets" while touring with my LAST film,
I immediately knew I had in my hands a matrix of human figures, technologies, and convoluted belief systems that would provide fertile ground indeed for this kind of "dialectical elaboration".

Besides, as it turns out, my own father worked for Aerojet, the rocket firm founded by the book's protagonist! So in fact, I realized it was, in a way, my own "pre-history", as a California child of both the aerospace and New Age sub-cultures.

How does it represent an intersection of your creative interests?

As an artist, I am interested in giving VISUAL form to intellectual topics -- in this case, say, the uses of technology--that too often are just left to the history writers. Being a story about rocketships and exotic cults, there I saw loads of great visual opportunities, because the imagery is so exciting -- lurid even.

What's it like having access to your incredible collection of government and educational films?

As to my own personal archive of "orphan" films, as they are sometimes called, after 30 years I guess I am used to living with it -- or IN it might be more accurate. But I really shouldn't take it for granted, and I could hardly imagine a future without it; combing through that treasure-trove has really become more of a lifestyle than a part of professional process.

How long did Mock Up on Mu take to make?

Let's say 7 years, but, see, in the 'lifestyle' mode I'm proposing,
one works on a project part-time in the midst of many other activities, like Simon Rodia with his Watts Towers in Los Angeles.

What are you hoping audiences will take away from the film? What are
some of the things you'd like viewers to feel, experience, think about?

On the so-called content level, I want them to "grok" the richness of California's distinctive post-war history, to gain at least a little familiarity with some of the players and forces at work. But as I've suggested, viewers could get a better grasp of all the abstract motivations and intentions and logic of that through literary means (in the course of making my Mu-vie, 2 or 3 more books came out on this particular historical nexus). The larger "felt' impression they'll hopefully take away from the theater is the resonance of this "experimental" method of historical narration.

Looked at from a distance, one can easily understand the arc of the allegory, but within every one of the 13 chapters there are countless semantic declensions between any 2 adjacent images (and audio cues and graphics and text), and this constitutes a celebration of the plasticity of cinematic language itself, an invitation to play with the relations between pictures and their received meanings. Now, that might sound like a tall order, especially at the brisk rate of the cutting, but this 'construction of meaning' is a cardinal lesson, especially in today's media-saturated environment.

I don't want to preach about it, but my film represents a sort of 'extreme case' that hopefully points to new spaces of visual literacy, visual poetry.

You've famously been inspired by the Situationists, leading to some
of your more outrageous and provocative actions, culture jamming
films, etc. Can you tell us how this film relates to Situationist ideas?

Well in fact my next film is literally about the Situationists, by the way! (‘F*cking brilliant' - DZ)

As to "Mu", of course there's the concept of "detournement'", of "kidnapping" and "detouring/detourning" material from the film industry to use it for contrarian ends. And there's the implicit awareness that these film gestures -- from Hollywood blockbusters through low-budget genre artifacts to didactic educational demonstrations -- are all part of the unified Spectacle that the Situationists theorize...and this is my humble effort to deconstruct that alienating pseudo-totality and reclaim that dead culture as raw material for my own argument about the world.

You're also associated with the ongoing Beat sensibility in San Francisco. Can you tell us how this might manifest in the film?

The Beat sub-culture is one of the major strands that is braided with the aerospace and the New Age religions in the diegesis.

Jack Parsons and Marjorie Cameron could certainly be called bohemian or proto-beatnik, and Cameron's activities inspired a hundred Wallace Bermans and Bruce Conners. Because their art exhibition was busted by the LA Police (it was a drawing of Cameron's that was deemed "obscene"), many in that LA scene came north to San Francisco, at least for a while, and their energy was part of the birth of many cultural movements and institutions here -- like Assemblage sculpture, found footage film, and the San Francisco Art Institute where I now work!

I see myself as the inheritor of that Outsider sensibility.

In the film itself, well, this can be felt in montages akin to jazz riffing, and taste for speed.

What other projects have you got on the agenda? What else would you
like to get around to and do you have anything creative that you're working on right now?

As I said at the top, I am currently writing a, uh, scenario for a speculative history set in Paris' Left Bank in the late 50s. Both William Burroughs and Guy Debord, our famous Situationst here, were living mere blocks apart, and at that time they were both working out many
of the ideas that have so influenced me, and all of contemporary literature and cinema, namely, appropriation (detournement), and the 'cut-up' and 'fold-in'. So my movie will bring these two seminal forces into a kind of dialogue (whether or not they ever actually sat down together) as an "embodied" way to mount these very same terrifically exciting ideas about retrieving and redeeming our cultural legacies.

Interview by Danni Zuvela