An interview with
Bob Paris How did you come up with the idea for O Leonardo? The initial notion for O Leonardo came on my birthday a few years back. I somehow had the idea to start writing a poem on Leonardo da Vinci as a war criminal. It was a joke. I’m pretty sure I was drinking. O Leonardo, what a tornado — relishing the bad poetry, you know — What verve, vision and bravado. You were the greatest primate that ever graced this glorious earth. It turns out that as I kept writing, ideas emerged that interested me, a thread arose that I followed, and even an occasional line of good poetry spilled out here and there.
Bob Paris
Such an experience certainly would not have happened if I hadn’t been working on The Cluster Project by this time. I had started The Cluster Project after I was struck by how few contemporary artists consider our age of global conflict and war machines, even when the human experiment hangs in the balance. So I began conceiving ideas for an ongoing collaborative website featuring multimedia works about weapons, war, and civilian casualties (it launched in the summer of 2013 and can be found at theclusterproject.com).
And so Leonardo. Our greatest all-star of the enlightenment, the celebrated artist supreme, the genius who mastered architecture, botany, and dozens of other fields. He’s depicted as almost a divine creature in human form. So what does this give us? How does the artist who made the most delicate and transcendent beauty coexist with the man who needed to create inexpressible horror in the form of weapons and mass destruction? In this way, I have Leonardo serve as the poster boy for this historical dialectic — one which attracts surprisingly little contemporary discussion and interest.
One of my preoccupations has been the paradox between our pretension to reason and our dark, deep-seated irrational drives. How is it that the human gift for creation and innovation is frequently surpassed by our penchant to destroy? The enlightenment may have come, but the old brain still rules. Brilliant scientists, master engineers, virtuoso designers are the creators of our revolving technology of death, just as much as any general, businessman, or head of state. A good look at the intricacies of any munition reveals an incredible blend of form and function, an exquisite sense of technical insight and inspired imagination. Many of these creative geniuses are driven by an amoral ethic that seems to leave them utterly untroubled by the applications and implications of their achievements. They simply solve problems. They are “neutral.” They have jobs. They are good fathers. And so on. And so forth.
So I wrote this poem of sorts. This O Leonardo. And then it was put away somewhere. A year or two later, I came across it, read it aloud and thought, Maybe there’s a video here. I started digging through footage and cutting it together with my voice. When I finally stumbled upon using short looping samples from Prokofiev as background music, the work somehow came together. O Leonardo contains old film samples, like "Things to come", from the 30s, and more recent movies like Japan under siege (2005). How did you select the film fragments? Have you used a specific criteria? I just looked online for material that might resonate with the underlying ideas of the text. And I knew I wanted to collapse that line between fact
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