ROXANNE BOGUCKA: Talking with Anthony Mauzy of Teleportdoor. What is and who is Teleportdoor?

Anthony Mauzy: Teleportdoor is just me and my friend Alex, Alexander Meyer. And what we’re doing is basically just making an arts collective for fun. We have no social agenda. We made up what we thought are some silly, almost like Dogme 95 type rules that we haven’t really nailed down, but I guess one of which is that any art that you make that you want to show with the group has to be shown with a current, like an electrical current. Or a circuit. That’s pretty much the only thing we could agree on at this point, but yeah it’s just meant to be just an excuse to do something. I think more so, I just graduated from grad school, and I’m interested in doing something with the masters. And in the process I think that—no one’s hiring right now, obviously because the economy sucks, and it’s March and we still haven’t gone to war yet, so sometimes if you just say that you’re working on something, that is an in, you know? You’ve got something to invite people to, that’s kind of an in. When you’re interested in mass communication and public relations and things like that, so…

RB: And Teleportdoor will further mass communication efforts how?

AM: Well I mean it’s just a way of showing off some of the work that you’ve done. Some of your own personal interests, that are communication-oriented or visual. I think that we’ll have more showcases, probably one every two months, just for fun. We so didn’t plan on this being anything at all. We were just hoping that a couple of our friends would show up, and that was about it. So we put our noses to the computer screens and started working on little Flash movies and things like that. And I spin IDM for fun in my closet, and I’ve only done maybe two parties. Just going to friends’ houses at a party, and they’ll let me hook up my laptop, so, you know. That’s that. In a nutshell.

RB: So it’s for fun and it’s sort of showcase what you can do. And I don’t want to like piss you off, but how is it not, you know, like so many personal web pages or personal blogs are sort of… if we were back in the print paradigm we would call this a vanity press?

AM: Exactly. Exactly. I mean, you know, we’re not rappers or whatever, or we’re not arrogant musicians by any means. It’s just that, for what we’re interested in, because Alex is a photographer and he’s also a Flash guy, our interests… we’re having a hard time finding gigs that let us jump into our interests. So we just decided we’d make an excuse to have our friends hang out with us and we’ll make our own interests.

RB: So it’s sort of the old Mickey Rooney-Judy Garland, “We’ll put on our own show! We’ll use my father’s barn!”

AM: Right. Exactly. I mean the thought process went no further than that, other than us sitting around scratching our heads, going “Man! It’s really tough to get a photography gig here in Austin.” And I’d go, “Man, yeah! It’s really tough to get hired by a PR firm here in Austin, to get a freelance gig here in Austin.” So let’s just put on a showcase and maybe someone will come. And we’ll just invite people and go from there.

RB: And have you had previous showcases and if you have, have you met people who were simpatico and said, “Hey I want to do this type of work too.”

AM: Yeah I mean when I was an undergrad… I put on two concert series my first two years in college. When I was at North Texas I put on some plays… I put on one at UT when I was an undergrad and I transferred my junior year. So I’ve been doing stuff, like organizing stuff. And I’ve talked to other people that are really jazzed. Either they’re not going to be in town this weekend or they can’t make it because they may have to work or whatever but they’re jazzed about the idea of helping out on the next one. So it’s okay for this first go-round to just have fun and see who shows up. We’re having this for our friends. We made some Flash movies and I made a playlist and I’ll be spinning just for our friends.

RB: So you envision maybe in the future something like a series of… in the folk community here they have house concerts?

AM: Like shows at houses?

RB: Yeah.

AM: No, no we’ll probably stick to Le Privilege because they’re, we know the guys that own the place and they’re really cool. What we’re not meant to be is an alternative to AMODA, the Austin Digital Museum of Arts, something like that. They’re having a showcase tomorrow. They have one once a month. They bring in a lot of artists from out of town. There are lots of IDM artists that I love that I can’t afford to go see, to travel to see. But they’re bringing in a good percentage of them monthly at these AMODA showcases. They do try to mix that with local artists, that do digital art or interactive music, things like that. But it tends to be people being brought in. So it’s fun, because it’s kind of like a carnival that you can show up periodically, once a month, and you can see. So my interest wasn’t to mine all the old AMODA people but to grab people who have heard of AMODA but just haven’t gone, but they’re still making music, and they’re still… IDM isn’t something that, specifically for IDM, it’s not something that sells big here. But is a little bit more known in Europe. So I’ve got a friend of mine that couldn’t make it to this one but is going to make it to the next one, he lives in San Marcos. You wouldn’t know that he’s in demand in France. But he is and he’s like all of 24 or something like that, you know? And he’s licensing his music for commercials in France. So AMODA hasn’t banged on his door, in fact AMODA’s oblivious to him, but he’s just kind of a guy who’s making music for fun and that’s that. And it’s not by any means to be counter to AMODA. If anything we’re always at AMODA and we have all these AMODA stickers everywhere, our cars and stuff like that. We love it. It’s just something else to do, one more venue. There’s no saturation for digital art or IDM music in Austin, and nothing close. There’s one venue, once a month. Sometimes they don’t do it for three months at a time.

RB: That venue being?

AM: Texture, it’ll be tomorrow at Texture. It’s on Tuesdays at Texture, usually the first Tuesday of every month. But they only do about 8 shows a year, 6 to 8 shows a year.

And later…

RB: Okay, I just saw your set, it was interesting. Talk to me a little bit about art that invites the audience to participate and art that invites the audience to ponder and what you think is going on here.

AM: I think a little of both. Definitely a game, a participatory game. That was almost a stroke of luck, out of just knowing the right people who have a game that’s in beta stage, and knowing that I can also, at the same place be able to squeeze people over a time that would not be in the way of the other artists. But as far as participation compared to pondering, I would say that, well I don’t know. I’m not too, I don’t think that I have a social agenda. I just think that I kind of object to the idea of us going to war again. To us going to war again. And I think that the Flash movie, if this is pertaining to the Flash movie, it’s more so meant to just be, I mean it’s not just me. There are other people writing these very interesting captions to go with the ready.gov captions that are already there. The images and the captions. And they are very overt and very, well subversive. Ack! It’s hard to say exactly what it is other than, it’s not sitting back doing nothing. It’s an active thing. I don’t think that marching in front of the Capitol is my thing. I think that just making a funny Flash movie is my thing. I think it serves the same purpose. You’ve seen Fight Club and you’ve seen… there’s a bit of commentary about the idea of having these airplane cards that tell you to put your head between your knees or hop down the banana slide. There’s nothing normal about that or fun about that. The slide looks so passive, you know, like just going down a slide isn’t a big deal. It’s a tremendous deal when you’re over the Atlantic and it’s freezing or whatever. And going to war, I think it’s being sold to us as, it’s not that big a deal, it’s just something that we kind of have to do. Specifically going to war with Iraq again. And I don’t think of it in those terms. I think of it as, it’s terrifying. Because we’re all of a sudden a target here, against an enemy that may gladly attack the U.S. Maybe here. Maybe Austin. Who knows? So I hope that kind of gives an answer.

RB: Sorta kinda. Thanks.