National parks, zoos, protected areas, polluted seas - using the whole world as a readymade, I thought about it as a stage set. To activate a stage set you need a drama, an actor to offset it.

In 1989 I came to New York to go to the School of Visual Arts. Then, after two years, I switched over to the New School for Social Research and did cultural anthropology in the graduate school there.

Of course I can have a simple reaction of sympathy and sorrow to destruction. But you also know that you can't have new things if you don't occasionally destroy the old. That's something you're really not allowed to say because things are often destroyed according to particular power relations so it means taking a stand in those cases, which I am not really interested in doing either. I think I am simply interested in looking.

I try to make that tension almost stupidly overt in my projects, almost ridiculously so. I keep coming back to the same obvious points again and again.

You pick people, and they pick you sometimes. It's especially great to connect with people you think you have nothing in common with.

My purpose isn't to be confrontational. My purpose is to find out about the world and play myself against it to the extent that it is even conceivable.

The space program caused so much future-thinking in culture. People who couldn't go to the Moon were building space-fantasy chairs and corsets and hairdos and anything that they could put their hands on.