“WV: I’ve incorporated vast amount of military equipment into this piece. If you read the label on this table it’s called: ‘Case and Rack Assembly Bomb Navigational Control.’ It’s crazy that these things come to my house so I took this and incorporated it into my targeting system because this is what it really is. It was designed to navigate bombs so I’m using it to navigate my pictorial corridors which are basically trajectories of invisible projectiles.

DD: So that’s an overt connection to this idea of Brotherhood and the machinery of war.

WV: I don’t hesitate to speak about it because while I have always been intellectually opposed to it, in fact I’ve surrounded myself with these war machines and have adopted them. In fact, the RPT robotic head in The Theater of Hybrid Automata is made from a celestial navigation unit that navigated the bombers for the Strategic Air Command …

WV: … [T]he same purpose, to amplify the mind of its creator: the male idea of the machine’s destructive power. This thing, a vestigial bombing rack, carries the inspiration with it. When I saw it for the first time, I knew exactly that this was a piece of that soul. I didn’t even know what it was until I read it later, but I understood it intuitively. When I opened the box, there was a table with four legs and these racks which I later read were part of these bombing computers. I envisioned these guys sitting in the jungle just before they went to Cambodia, programming these computers. They were probably dressed in fatigues, drinking beer, punching the code into computers mounted on these racks. So I’m trying to replicate exactly the spirit contained within this piece of metal. It is probably subconscious but very authentic: these were the machines for automatic bombing so that no one had to have the consciousness or responsibility of inflicting death. These codes are hidden to the general art strategies unless one descends to this level of intimacy where you recognize by strange instinct the role of these objects. I think it transfers subconsciously to the mind of the observer. It is this third level of involvement that really interests me rather than the obvious one.”