Jeremy Hight: Who are some of your influences?
Matthijs Vlot: Influence is everywhere. Do not want to pinpoint this too much. Can be in art, entertainment, poetry or whatever. But also just some girl you have a crush on or something.
But my main influence when i started doing this was how hip-hop and dance producers took snippets of soul and funk records to create new works.
Public Enemy's production team "The Bombsquad" for example, they really made an impact by creating new records with sometimes using up to 20 samples in one single song.
What I like so much about sampling, is the fact that it's close to the very fundamentals of creativity.
All ideas are build on other ideas, so in my opinion all creative work can be considered a mash-up.
From that perspective today's copyright and patent laws can be considered very unfruitful for culture to evolve.
JH: Your work is both cut up edit fun, super cuts and brilliant commentary; what terms do you think best describe your work?
MV: For me, I try to strike a balance between all of these. If entertainment is good enough it may also contain commentary or artistic value. And if art is good enough it might also be entertaining.
JH: What most interests you about the archive and working with the growing mass and depth of film clips and data to work with/from?
MV: I always found new technology inspiring and as this big data revolution is taking place, it's just logical for me to get on that train and see where it takes me.
JH: Can you describe a bit of your process?
MV: First I need to have some kind of concept or idea, then usually i will try to find some key clips which give me the confidence to go ahead with this idea.
Then I will try to find as many good clips as possible and then I'm going to the edit stage and try to glue 'em all together, this can sometimes be quite a puzzle. Usually timing is everything, obviously when there is music involved, but also without it. Sometimes just a half a second more or less between two sentences can make or break a joke for example.
JH: What are you working on right now?
MV: A small little clip featuring Marty McFly from Back to the Future 3.
JH: What brought you to your work with editing and re-contextualizing video?
MV: Like i mentioned before, when a started doing this i was very much into soul and funk samples. I started doing art-school, the first year i did graphic design and i leaned a bit of how to think in concepts, the second year I switched to AV. I did some stuff using a camera at first, but I figured out in that in modern media culture we are surrounded by images all day and i thought it would be more relevant (and fun) to use all these images in a new context, rather than keep on adding more images.
JH: Have you seen a progression in your work since your first video edit works?
MV: Definitely yes! My first video, or at least the first one i considered a success, was just a plain minute of Dutch call-tv. I just zoomed in and slowed it down and that was enough for that particular context.
My recent work contains way more cuts and sources, but in the end it doesn't mean that much, since i think the most important thing is just simply having a good idea, some kind of funky twist.
JH: Which of your works do you find has had the biggest response?
MV: Hello! The months after it went viral, I saw something like 5 similar type of video's appearing online and people crediting me as an inspiration. Felt very honoring. Even Jimmy Fallon took notice and Lionel Richie liked it too, he did not even sue me for stealing his song, but instead he was tweeting my film. That was hopefully a glimpse of how a ideal world could look like somewhere in the future.