Film 4 - Gilbert & George discuss their use of computers to design their pictures

George: So, here we are in Studio 3 where we have our computers for designing the pictures and sending the panels to the printers.

Gilbert: And this is the darkroom as well, because you still see the beginning larger and all the trays for washing and printing.  We are so happy that we moved over even when it took us two years to research it, because nobody actually made such a big image in pictures, some are 10 metres by 5 metres, because we didn’t know how to… the quality was not good enough at that time and even the computers were not powerful enough, so we had our computer especially made, because if not we were not able to turn one negative on the computer because the memory was not powerful enough, but now they are becoming so, and even so, we had to buy… we looked into scanners, we had to scan our small images and that was a big search and we found out how to use the drum scanners that are very powerful – twelve thousand dpi – but they take half an hour to scan a what they call a thirty-five-millimetre negative.

George: It's quite interesting because for many years young people have said to us at openings of our exhibitions, “What computers are you using?”, they assumed that we were using computers already, but luckily we came in just at the right time, it wouldn’t have been possible before.

Gilbert: And then here you see… we are all organised you know, here are what we call the picture frame that we can use. We have different frames.

George: The blank pictures in other words, yes.  Can we call up a blank one? 

Gilbert: You see, calling up a frame and here we have what you call high-res scan and low-res scan, and they are all in years, you see… 1998 low-res in subjects: bird shit.  

George: And see some as well.  Magnified as well. 

Gilbert: We have every image that we have for the last fifteen years.

George: Tens of thousands literally.  

Gilbert: There is bird shit but it looks like a rabbit in fact.

George: They all have their form.  It’s very interesting when you take images of bird shits, like some other subjects, the general public become very angry and aggressive: “What are you doing that for?”,  “What do you want to do that for?”, it’s quite extraordinary.  We used to have to climb all over that big end black wall which has its centre with Blu Tack and drawing pins… extremely laborious.

Gilbert: It feels that you are more near to your brain when you do the art, its unbelievable and even that we can call up all the images that we have now but we need an index if not we would be lost. We have to know what the subjects are that we want to experiment with.

George: Shortly after beginning with this technology we read a wonderful story from E.F. Benson around the turn of the last century when he invited an artist down to stay with him in the country, and the artist liked the view from the garden so he set up his easel and his stool and started to paint a beautiful picture, and a farmer passed by and said, “What are you doing?”, he said, “I am painting a picture”, and he didn’t understand and he came by the next day, “And what will you do with that picture?”, “I will show it in the gallery”, and then the following day “Why would you show it in the gallery?”, “Well, to sell it, of course”, and then the following day, “How much would you sell it for?”, he said, “Fifty pounds or a hundred pounds”, and the farmer shook his head and said, “And you do that all sitting down”, that’s exactly what we do.

Gilbert: It’s very good, it’s much better, we can sit down, we don’t have to go up ladders anymore. It's magic, we really believe it’s the magic box.