People Kind of Drop Off

Robert Beatty: I do whatever feels natural and just edit it all together in a way that makes some sort of sense.

Forrest Gander: To render the words more quiet, smaller, to surround them with a desert of white space.

Beatty: Yeah, for sure. Of course and McLaren and Larry Jordan both used tons of optical printing in their work and it glows, you know, it has that quality.

Gander: And like the land itself, fractured and dynamic under my feet, I began to experience myself as relational, without a fixed essence.

Beatty: It has such a certain characteristic. (Laughs) It’s like finding a Jack Chick pamphlet in a gas station bathroom.

•••

Gander: Isn’t the past a constant, fluid, upwelling constituent of the present?

Beatty: It’s such an insane thing. And people have a hard time understanding that. People kind of drop off.

Gander: We carry them as talismans that reassure us of the presence of someone else within us.

Beatty: Where is this going to lead, what’s next after this.

Gander: The book begins in the Ozarks of Arkansas and ends in California’s Mojave Desert.

•••

Beatty: People are looking me up, and they’re like “Oh, this guy’s in Kentucky? Not New York or LA?”

Gander: We know that language, perception, and memory are inextricably interdependent.

Beatty: So there’s a selection of stills, and there’s still stuff from those that just doesn’t exist.

Gander: To place yourself in the open, in a place of dramatically altered attention.

Beatty: I kind of just let equipment come to me.