Thank you very much. Non parlo Italiano, ma... I'll just start with a poemo — I mean una poesia!
Qui c'è il letto di muschio giapponese. Li c'è la montagna di Harakriri. La giù a destra la casa dal tetto piatto. La neve recopre il davanzale della casa dei genitori di qualcuno. La c'è il lago ghiacciato. E qui il letto di muschio giapponese. ("Here is the bed of Japanese moss. There is the mountain of Harakriri. Down there on the right, the flat-roofed house. The snow covers the xx of the house of somebody's parents. There, there's the frozen lake. And here, the bed of Japanese moss.") (applause)
I'll start my speech by reading to you in English and afterwards, when I begin showing slides and videos, I'll speak a bit more freely. It's really a pity that even though they speak Italian in Ticino we never had to learn it in school.
I was born in 1962 and grew up in a small village on Switzerland's eastern border with Austria. After one semester of theoretical physics I changed to graphic design at the Institute of Applied Arts in Vienna. My aim was to visualise philosophical systems. Influenced by another girl in my class, I began making Super-8 films and also began designing stage sets for my friends' bands. That involved both painting the walls or backdrops and also projecting Super-8 images onto the musicians on the stage. I never wanted to be an artist, and I'm no longer an artist. I'll explain why at the end of my speech.
Anyway, I was doing this work with the music groups and continued doing it when I went back to Switzerland after my studies. In Basel I joined a class of audio-visual design — you can also just call this a video class — because I realised that video brought together everything that interested me, including: painting, drawing, technology, language, music, movement, lousy flowing pictures, poetry, sex, friendliness and the premonition of death. At the same time, ten years ago, I began working as a freelance video technician for the chemical industry, as well as joining a music group. A band had asked me to join as a musician and even though I was a terrible musician I agreed to join, because I wanted to do everything on my own, not just the camera but also sound mixing, cutting, everything.
When I begin a work I always go for my super-personal experience. I believe that if a work is honest, if it's done with blood, sweat and tears, then it's automatically socially relevant. Now I'll show you my first work from 1986.

(Viewing of "I'm not the girl who misses much.")

When I was a teenager I was a big fan of John Lennon and Yoko Ono. It was around 1977, and I collected everything I could find about them from ten years earlier. I was "lightened" by their happenings, which were the special baby of Yoko Ono. So you see, my first experience with the fine arts was through the musical, mass media world. As I told you, I never wanted to become an artist. I always wanted to be a scientist. But I believe the mass media is our collective subconscious.
I would like to show some slides. (Pipilotti begins showing slides of out-of-focus and generally hard-to-read, colourful images).
I really love video with all its disadvantages — for example, the bad resolution. I see video as a painting that moves behind glass. I subject images to all kinds of interference, I play the tape too fast and too slow simultaneously on two different video recorders, then I put the images through a time-base corrector that tries to even out the differences. This is only one of twenty-five or so kinds of disturbances I tried out on the following tape. Asking too much or too little of the machine helps me to find images that are very similar to our subconscious when, for example, we are half-awake or very nervous. It's like if you provoke the machine in a similar way you find the machine's subconscious.
I call these videos "smuttish" videos (like "smut"). I'm not the only person who works with this concept but it's been the subject of my research for a long time. This means that every image should have a pictorial quality and the disturbance of the machine is very similar to the reaction of our bodies when there is too little or too much requested of us. Often this is visible in psycho-somatic problems. This is the content of the next video, it's called "Pipilotti's Mistakes". I'll show you an excerpt of it. It's a didactic piece. The slides you've been seeing are all from this video.

(Viewing of "Pipilotti's Mistakes".)

Generally I'm interested in the inelegant body. I don't mean to say that I don't like elegant women or elegant human beings, on the contrary! But I'm more interested in the weakness of the body and, in this context, the illusion of dimensions. As we know, the way our bodies feel depends on so many things like temperature, touch, etc. If we are touched we feel like our finger becomes ten meters long, or if we have cold feet they become very small. My motivation for the following video was to show such subtle tactile perceptions. As a subject I took a classic kiss scene. Here, I was trying to find the pictures that are right in front of or right behind our eyelids. But I just want to say before it starts that I don't like the first thirty seconds of this video anymore.

(Viewing of "Pickelporno".)

I love machines, they are the extensions of our bodies. On the other hand, I don't have a big respect for techniques. Which is to say that almost everything in that video was made through analogue processes and not digital processes. Machines are generally stupid. When I worked for that chemical industry with all those technicians I knew every machine they had. I had an advantage in that I was a woman so the technicians did not view me as competition. Usually, these guys sit on their machines so proud and so protective, like cocks... galli — I mean roosters. And they like everyone to believe that their knowledge is very deep and their machines are very complicated, but they aren't.
So I would like to talk about the installations. Parallel to my tapes which I've often shown at video and film festivals, I started making video installations in 1988. It's important to me that I can influence the environment in which my video work is received. I like to compensate for the two-dimensionality, the lack of odour, of fresh blood in the atmosphere. I want to strip this dominating box, the television, of its conspicuous shape. I want to reconquer the space that we normally forget when we watch TV.
This installation was called "View to the North, a Peak to the South". People stick their heads inside of these boxes and they watch videos standing up, with their heads in the dark. It was a mixture of cinema and watching TV in a small group. What was really strange to learn watching people use this installation is that when people's bodies aren't shown to one another they talk to each other, strangers, very easily. In another installation I tried to enlarge surrounding circumstances by literally enlarging the furniture of the room where people watched my TV. Normally when we watch TV our reality shrinks, and I tried to do the opposite. At the same time, I wanted the visitor to feel comfortable, that the museum was her own private space, like an enlarged living room. Here in the second slide we see this livingroom installation with another video in the background on the wall. That one's called "Sip my ocean." I'll show you that on tape later.
Now a theoretical statement: I simply use technology that's been invented by mass media as raw ingredients and I try to cook my own meal. So my relation to mass media is not only critical, because I'm very thankful that TV is educating normal people very well. So that means that today ordinary people — if you don't understand this term I mean people who don't get university degrees or learn languages, etc. — can still have a high level of knowledge today.
The videos on monitors and video projections or installations, where you can influence the whole room, are very different from each other. The monitor is like a miracle lamp (? lava lamp?) but projections can dissolve the room, they can dissolve architecture.
This piece, with the video playing in the middle of a baby's crib, is called "The Circle". I did not put the chairs in front of the crib, as you see here. You can be pretty sure if you do a video installation and you leave the room for five minutes somebody will always have put chairs in there. I made another work with the monitor inside of a bathing suit, it becomes a stomach. (Pipilotti says a few words in German, and another translator translates). So now I have English help and German help, but I'm still Swiss.
It's always really heavy to make photos of installations because in reality they're always too dark to photograph properly. Here I made another work where it was my intention to have video function as a lamp — this was for the Venice Aperto in 1993. Under the lamp (a chandelier) social life becomes possible again. I was also interested in how light reflected in the crystals, the colour of this work was always changing a little. I never want to show "reality" because reality is always more beautiful and sharp than anything you can make. But I can try to show our inner worlds with video.
In this slide, the dressing-room table (a vanity) has a small video monitor in the mirror. When you lean forward you are kissed. I'll show you later. Another installation I did involved three handbags and three seashells, and inside of each of these objects was a video monitor. There was also a very slow-moving disco light. It's so hard to show installations in slides so I'll show you another video now, but this is not a video for a video, it's for an installation.

So you see that this tape was quite boring because we were missing the installation. Nevertheless I'd like to show you some extracts from other videos I've made for installations. This is a typical work for a monitor (a girl jumping up and down; after a few minutes the screen goes black and animated bouncing balls traverse it). In the installation the viewer was supposed to move on to the next monitor every time the bouncing balls came onto the screen. The jumping woman was trying to escape the box (the monitor) but she didn't succeed. The next woman did succeed (video of a woman's feet in red shoes constantly slipping away from the camera's view). Here's a clip of one of the videos you would see in the handbag (a video of ocean).
Did you all see my Venice installation this year? If you have I'll go forward. If more than half of you have seen it we'll fast forward... Who wishes that we go forward? Okay. Try to remember that this was a double projection and now I can only show you one projection at a time. There was a girl walking down a street breaking car windows with a flower, and the other video was of the flower in her hand. Saluti Luisa e Alfredo! (video begins). You have to imagine these images together. The girl who's acting for me is Italian. I'll fast-forward now — scusi. Here's another video. That's me. In the installation the monitor was only five centimetres big. I'm shouting up at everyone, I'm tiny.

(Video plays, Pipilotti stares straight "up" at the audience, shouting "Sono un verme! E tu sei un fiore! Avresti fatto tutto meglio! Aiutami! Scusami! Je suis un verme!" ie. "I'm a worm! And you're a flower! You would have done everything better! Help me! Excuse me! I'm a worm!")

And here's another video for an installation called "Beautiful" (the camera "enters" Pipilotti's mouth, travels briefly in the dark, and then "exits" her asshole).
Here's a work from last year. This is a photo of the "baby studio" we made, a kind of miniature Hollywood. I invited ten singers to participate. Before they came I gave each of them a CD of music and they interpreted it themselves. Each of the singers had her own corner where she interpreted the piece, and here you see one studio set-up. The lamps were sponsored by a porno film producer. Here we are in production: this is Pierangela Compagnino from Sicily, one of the singers. Every day another singer came and every night I cut their piece. Here we see a photo of Southit, the woman whose video I'll show you in full. She's showing us Mirielle, where she comes from originally, on the map. She was forced to flee to Istanbul, that's why she sings her piece in Turkish. She had a very simple, cheap studio; you can see here the guy putting the microphone into the singer's hair. In the end we had ten monitors set up in Geneva, each with a different woman. It was for Paolo Colombo's show, and he cooked for us every day. Here you see me watching a tape, I always take a lot of time. If I have five minutes of tape I have to watch it at least thirty times before I cut it!

(Viewing of video.)

So her text, her interpretation of my music was a love poem called "My horse, my dog, my boy, my man, my diva, my swan." The words go "Your saliva is my diving suit in the ocean of pain." Or "Your penis around my neck like a necklace of diamonds." That was the Turkish text.
I would now like to switch over to German. (Pipilotti begins speaking in German).
Now that I've finished showing you all these works, I have to announce that I've decided to stop being an artist, even if, as I said before, I never wanted to be one in the first place. This year in June I received a phone call and was offered an exceptional job, something completely new. It concerns the artistic directorship of an enormous international exposition to be held around the three lakes area in Switzerland in 2001. It's not an art show but a kind of World's Fair exposition involving science, medicine, philosophy, technology — everything all together.
I did not accept this job right away. After I got this telephone call I couldn't sleep for two weeks. I was so confused. I cried every day, I was very angry. Finally, I refused the offer. But to give you an idea of the dimension of the project, it will have a budget of one billion dollars. And one thing I liked very much about this exposition's premises is that it does not want to separate the various disciplines or fields from each other — you know, with science here, art there, technology over there — but everything will be together. Also, there are to be no corporate logos or representations involved. So finally I decided to accept the offer, because I thought about what I'd always wanted when I was a girl: to be against coldness, bluffing and injury.
I realised that as an artist I'd arrived at a point where very rich collectors were buying my work, and that had never been my intentions as an artist, it was never what I wanted. I always wanted to work with others and for others and to participate in the evolution of humanity. So with this exposition I'll be working with scouts, sending them into other countries to find the best of everything, to make a fantastic spectacle, something no-one has every seen before. I'm almost finished my speech now! The main concept of this exposition will be to mix these single professions together and make them work together, and also to eliminate the distance between high and low culture. This doesn't mean we'll work at the lowest level, we'll find a middle level, a middle-high level, the highest level possible.
Thank you very much. I'm very happy to have been able to advertise my next project tonight, my career after my career as an artist.

Q: I didn't really understand exactly what kind of project this will be and I'm very worried when you say that you'll quit being an artist.

A: As I said before, there's no contradiction in this choice. It's a bit Duchampian, I don't believe in the division between high and low culture. This big exposition will show the fundamental problems of today, and the main philosophical questions of our time. It will be information that anyone could access but presented in a totally new way or context. This is not to say that I'll quit being an artist forever, but let's just say that my career as an artist is a bit in jeopardy because for the next four years I'll be focusing only on this. I'll be an artistic director, too, but not of art.