INTERVIEW WITH MARTIN WATTENBURG BY PETER OLIVETTI
Spring, 2001

Peter Olivetti: How would you describe Apartment in one to two sentences?

Martin Wattenburg: Apartment is a virtual city of memory palaces, an online experiment in do-it-yourself concrete poetry.

PO: How long have you been working in Internet base mediums?

MW: Since 1995, but I've only called what I do art since 1999.

PO: How do you feel Apartment relates to the idea of us having a Cyboratic persona, esp. when engaged in a work such as this?

MW: The apartments people have built are intimate--far more so than I ever anticipated. I think people feel especially safe typing secrets into Apartment since their words appear in a partially cloaked and reordered form.

PO: How do you think we change identity wise when we "log on," i.e. we use identity altering devices like usernames, chat rooms, and so on?

MW: I think we become freer, more flippant, and more experimental... until our new persona becomes part of a community, at which point all the strictures of traditional discourse return.