I would define [my tasks as an artist] … as one: manage to having the least amount of sleep possible without dying. I have so many things to do. So many things I want to see.

Art has a great value. It is a free expression. Of nothing specific, but free.
Artists explore themselves, society, technology, the environment. Art innovates, creates idols and fears.
They have a very big potential power. But i think that art is strongest when it doesn’t intentionally use it.
Artists that act with activism in mind, with politics, with education and culture are admirable, but the fact that we “need” to identify them with someone “with culture” makes us loose focus. As an example, Picasso was an incredible communicator and a really sensible person: his value is not in his political expressions (such as Guernica), but in the incredible way in which he explored so many art forms, estblishing landmarks on each one of them, evolving concepts and creating totally new ones. Artists should feel free and compelled to explore and suggest.

SI:
Artists explore. In a way. Artists leverage, on the other.
They act as a magnifier for “rising” concepts in society, for forming memes.
At the same time, they stimulate the creation of new ones.
This is a full time profession, that can only be done for vocation.

AR:
Would you please describe more closely what you mean by using the term “vocation”?

SI:
Vocation: in a sense that is really close to “sensibility”.

Art is not standalone, it lives in a context that actually is an ecosystem. It grabs things and puts back some other things. It allows for artists to express (and, possibly, make a living out of it) and it gives back beauty, happiness, fears, objects, new uses for technology, opportunities for investments, culture, knowledge, new views on the world. Lots of stuff, sometimes including the series of orgasms that make up the addiction-inducing effects that art is starting to share with consumism in these contemporary times. Value is bi-directional and goes back and forth between all of these components.

AR:
How would you define the chances and needs of art in the social society you live in?

SI:
Artists are beginning to melt into the figures of “experts”: engineers, communicators, critics and curators (did you notice? in the contemporary era they seem to be artists more than the artists themselves)…. Artists are becoming scientists. In the past artists often were alchemists (and this is a hint on the total disappearance of mysticism from our society). Human beings need a mystical dimension, a transcendency. In the past they had mysticism, and art was an illuminated view on it (think of the ecstasy of making art, or the work/study/research on materials and minerals). Nowadays we’re superficial and lost, so we think an engineer (or any other form of scientist or technician) can bring us to illumination and ecstasy. This is perfectly fit for our contemporary life models, where illumination has changed meaning and has become a fact of the contingent life, associated to consumism and the like, and is now a series of short-lasting orgasms derived from achievement and/or ownership. Art, as expression of the mystical (in a broad sense) domain in which it lives, produces. Call it entertainment, call it generator of value, call it need for expression: artists have a view on society that is privileged. They can invent and express. They are actually the only ones that can.

AR:
In which field of art production are you active?

SI:
I do the only thing that anyone can do nowadays: process art.

AR:
What is important to you in your art production? What are you aspiring to/striving for in/with your art production?

SI:
I don’t aspire to anything. I need to express.

AR:
Are you an individual artist or member of an art producing collective/initiative/organisation?

SI:
Both.
I know this question was meant to be simple and straightforward, but it does not make any sense if we are talking about contemporary art. Contemporary art is about communication and, as everything in our field-of-view, is about meshup, crossover, contamination and perception. You are just not able to work on something that hasn’t already been fed by someone else, in terms of technology, content, communicative impact, perceptive conceptualisation. Painters, sculptors etctera don’t exist in the contemporary era.
“Contemporary” painters/sculptors/… are called “contemporary” just because specific aesthetics are handled by specific operators, but they do not make any sense, since they are classical.