You came to Utrecht to make a new video and to finish two others. Does working in another city change the way you work?

“It has effects, surely. Just working in a different room will have effect. And for one of the videos I'm making, I'm going to translate a poem by the Dutch poet Gerard van Eckeren, who lived in Utrecht. I didn't know I was going to do that until two days ago, because I had never heard of him, and then I found a book of his while browsing through a bookshop here in Utrecht.”

That's funny, because your work gives the impression that it's all very autobiographical and quickly made. One can very well imagine you walking through a city like Utrecht, finding a book and then coming home and quickly make a video about it.

“Yeah, that's because most of the videos have a narrator that gives you the feeling that he's just randomly talking, off the cough. It seems like it's all improvised and it's all autobiographical, but it's not like that. The texts are all written down. I put a lot of effort in them, but I want the videos to look effortless. It does sometimes come from just walking on the street and getting an idea from seeing or hearing something, but it's not necessarily autobiographical and not so quickly made.”

You'll be working on 3 different projects at the same time in Utrecht, and you often work like that, several projects at once. Why is that?

“It's a way of working that suits me. Sometimes, the only way of getting things done is by avoiding working on other things. Sometimes it's hard to tell when something is finished, so I just let it go for some time, work on something else, come back and then suddenly I know what to do with it. And the works influence each other through this way of working. Often videos end up in larger works, like the 3 videos that I'll be working on in Utrecht that will all be part of the Final Thoughts series. And in the end, all my works are part of the same thing. I guess in the end, all my work is one big work. It's all connected to each other.”

Does that mean that you would like the audience to view all of your work instead of just one piece?

“Yeah, though I think a lot of my videos can perfectly stand on their own, I would prefer if people would go and see my other works too.”

A lot of your videos have some shocking, or controversial element in them. Has that ever caused trouble for you?

“No, not really, because even though a lot of my works have a sort of transgressive element, the tone is always playful. It's more comical than a straight assault. And even when there are things that might be offensive to some people, they usually don't bother to complain, because then it's obvious that it's meant to be controversial. They only bother to complain when they think you didn't mean to offend people.”

You often work with found footage. Where do you find the footage?

“Nowadays, I find most of the material on the internet, now that the quality of the material on there is good enough to work with. Before that, like 10 years ago, I would buy a lot of stuff cheaply from schools, when they were getting rid of all their films because they were switching to video.”

So are you currently busy plundering the Impakt archive for material to work with?

“No, I'm not plundering the Impakt archive, because I rarely use work from other artists. I usually only use historical footage.”

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Steve Reinke, the Canadian video artist, is currently staying as artist-in-residence at Impakt. He will give a workshop on 26th , 27th and 30 July 2010. For mor infomation on the workshop, go here. More information on Steve Reinke, and a lot of his works, can be found on his website.