NY Arts Magazine: Please tell us something about your work that often gets overlooked by the unfamiliar or untrained eye.
Damon Zucconi: It’s hard to answer this because I feel like, by definition, I shouldn’t know the answer. But something that’s become apparent, only recently to me, as I live with the things I make, is the amount of time I have to devote to the maintenance of certain pieces—usually work that is primarily viewed in a web browser. Rendering engines change, APIs change, support for certain technologies wane (notably, Flash). Maybe now I have to make something work in a context that’s mobile. How does the work change knowing that it gains some mobility?
So, some work accumulates subtle differences with each iteration, each fix. Sometimes these are significant. And this process is maybe not so transparent. I mean, it’s part of the public record as much as I can make it be. But there’s a specific kind of technical audience to whom that information is privy.
Something that’s fun to imagine is how this slow creep of incremental change leads to something completely novel and disassociated from the original intent. I’m left to wonder how the next iteration of the Google Maps API will force my hand. What other forms of art are subject to deprecation?
There’s also this Ship of Theseus-like paradox—are these things singular works? How does the work maintain it’s identity over time—is it the same work? Is it done now? Was it done before? How do I know when to stop? These are the kinds of questions one imagines only painters deal with. Really great questions. And a nice side effect of all this is that in restating something’s original logic, you revisit the decisions that led to its existence in the first place.
