I'm an artist. I started with photography and now work with video and other media. I've collaborated with Ben Neill a musician and recording artist for 10 years. We did multi-media music and video performances, starting with really early VJ technology, some of which we invented ourselves. At one point in the late 90's Ben was asked by VW's ad agency to do his own music for VW commercials. After doing 13 30 sec spots for TV (Drivers Wanted), Ben remixed the loops into full songs, added vocals and produced a CD on the Six Degrees label titled Automotive. We decided to remix the video footage from the commercials to use as the VJ portion of the live performance and tour for the CD. While we were doing all this a friend gave Ben a copy of a novel by Jonathan Dee titled Palladio, about a fictional ad guru in the 90s who starts a radical ad agency/art commune in a mansion. The character's (Mal Osbourne's) idea is to get ad agencies to commission art works with their ad budgets. After doing Automotive we decided to make an actual story with the DJ VJ technology we had been using and Palladio seemed like the right story since it almost paralleled our own experience.
We also wanted to perform it with live music. We premiered the live version at the Arches in Glasgow and then in NY (where we both live) at Symphony Space. Palladio is an art work. Even though it's made from commercials and is about commercials it isn't commercial. It's just our take on what contemporary artists face when working in the real world. We did it for love not money.