Megan Elliott: The space in which your work is exhibited often echoes the shapes of the structures and architecture in your films. Is this an important factor you consider when exhibiting your work? Could you talk a bit more about your architectural influences?

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Tamsin Snow: Architecture is my starting point whenever I’m making any kind of work. The films aren’t site specific, but they are about architecture and space, and about modes of representing those things, and so it makes sense to install them in a way that draws attention to the spaces they’re shown in. The Spare Face film was exhibited at Block 336, which is essentially a big, concrete, subterranean room. The room was kept empty, except for the screen and a carpet laid out in front of it. This carpet in itself was an unusual thing, made of a brilliant white wool that was very noticeably plush, so thick you could lie down and make drawings in it. Certainly not a carpet meant for a public space. The gallery had to keep raking it every morning to keep it pristine, but apart from the aesthetic there were practical reasons for it being there. The carpet damped the sound in the room, which allowed the video sound to be turned up very high, and it also indicated the viewpoint from which the film would be best heard. People took this in different ways. Some just stood at the back of the room to watch the film, and then others ran and immediately jumped down on the thing, spreading themselves out. People love to lounge, I suppose. 

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ME: Who have you collaborated with as part of your practice – could you tell me more about this process?

TS: Every project I do involves collaboration in some form. At Block 336 it was with a CGI design company, and in the past I’ve worked with architects, structural engineers and so on. I’ve collaborated with artist Sarah Tynan on several large-scale projects over the last four years. When I’m working on my own, it’s usually in the preliminary stage of a project, when I’m thinking a work through as an idea. But even in my studio, my practice often involves a lot of planning with other people. The space itself is basically empty, less like an art studio than an office. Or possibly a panic room. Right now, all I have in there are bottles of Evian, a computer and a printer.

ME: The text in your films isn’t written, it’s a montage of found text. Where do you take this from and do you think it’s important?

TS: I wouldn’t say it’s particularly important. It’s just the kind of work I relate to. In the Spare Face video, the text is taken from online forums like Reddit, so the source material is all very accessible and recent. This was firstly because that film is about cryonics, and for obvious reasons that isn’t an area where I can have direct access to either the institutions or the technologies involved. Second, it mirrors the fact that most of the CGI models used in the video are also publicly accessible, so everything in the work is a kind of montage. The source materials are all out there in the public domain already, and my work just appropriates and juxtaposes them in a certain way. Also, in the installations and sculptures, everything I make works more or less on the basis of montage.

ME: Your works often seem to explore ‘in-between’ spaces, only meant to be passed through, or for temporary occupation; could you talk about what you have noticed about the architecture of these types of spaces, such as an autopsy room, and how this informs your imagined CGI spaces?

TS: Aspects of modern practices such as autopsy parallel the spaces that are designed for them. Le Corbusier wanted to make radically functional buildings and technologies, what he called machines for living, where every aspect of a design served a practical purpose, which in the end was always to serve the inhabitant. The autopsy room is as bluntly functional as a space can be, which is something I’m drawn to. The reason I like working with CGI is that it allows you to design new spaces and conflate them with these existing architectures, so for example to design a new kind of autopsy room, or a cryonics laboratory. In the Spare Face video, I made a recreation of the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, using CGI models with sequences of new interiors where I designed a cryonics facility. A cryonics lab is also an explicitly functional space which deals with the body after death. The difference from an autopsy room is that in the context of cryonics, people aren’t really talking about death at all. They see cryopreservation as a suspension of consciousness, which only lasts a certain time before the body is resuscitated. So, death is actually defined as an extension of life.

ME: Could you talk about the virtual autopsy process and how this feeds into your work?

TS: A totally virtual autopsy would be one that involves scanning and analysing the body remotely, without having to touch it, and the technologies you would need are being developed. It’s definitely not an option yet as a replacement for regular, physical autopsies, but there is a growing trend towards making the autopsy process a service performed by machines. What interests me are the motivations behind this and what the possible consequences might be. Unlike in the past, public autopsies and dissections almost never happen now, and medical students are attending autopsies less than they used to. I’m not sure what that means. It seems possible, likely perhaps, that if we do away with any physical contact with corpses certain kinds of knowledge could be lost.