Janet Biggs

This is the first substantive career interview with installation artist Janet Biggs. Biggs discusses her motivation for making installations, rather than theatrical films, and the different ways in which moviegoers and visitors to installations experience moving image art. Biggs describes her experiences traveling to the ends of the earth to record compelling imagery in the Arctic, at a sulfur-mining operation inside a volcano in Indonesia, and in the Afar triangle region of Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Djibouti, Her many wide-ranging conceptual videos explore various forms of physical labor and athletic endeavor from football to water ballet and synchronized swimming to NASCAR, as well as the mysteries of Alzheimer’s disease and attempts to break the on-land speed record.