Matteo Bittanti: What is your personal relationship to video games? Did you play games growing up at all? Did you specifically decide to incorporate Desert Bus in your piece because generally games are dismissed as "trivial" in the Art World, save for a few exceptions - Cory Arcangel, Miltos Manetas, Jon Rafman come to mind - or did you pick this particular game because of its status as "most boring game ever made?" If so, how did you encounter it?
Dave Ball: I played video games a lot as a child, and then, aged about 15 or 16, I took a sudden and quite conscious decision to stop, and haven't really played them since. I think I was worried that I was wasting away too much time, when I should have been studying or socialising or whatever. Computer games at that time seemed to me to represent something quite unsociable, which I wanted to avoid. I do, however, have some very vivid memories of crowding around an arcade machine at lunch time with a group of school friends, each of us taking turns to play Cloud Master, which was sociable and fun. But in general, no, I don't really have any specific interest in video games; I was simply struck by the absurdity of the Desert Bus game, which seemed to subvert everything you expect about a video game.
Matteo Bittanti: Can you discuss the creative process behind I've Always Wanted to Drive Across America? What came first, the idea (boredom) or the medium (e.g. Desert Bus, the voice over narration etc.)?
Dave Ball: The work was actually developed in response to an exhibition about travel. The premise of that show was about questioning our motivation to travel, given its environmental and social impact. And I'd just been reading about Desert Bus, and thinking about how I could use it (I'd made work before about boredom, and wanted to explore that further). So I started drawing parallels between the subversiveness of the game, and how our lived experience of travel is itself subversive. A lot of my work explores the discrepancies between “proper” experiences (of travel – the enjoyment of new places, the relaxation, the pleasure of companionship), and actual lived experiences (boredom, arguments, tiredness, getting lost). So I suppose I saw the game as a metaphor for an “improper” experience. The narration too, attempts to describe the improper experience of travel. As a child you perhaps haven't yet learnt what proper holiday experience ought to be, so you just fall back on your own experience, which is naturally a mixture of negativity and positivity. The overall effect of the work, therefore, is intended to be one of ambivalence: playing the game and listening to the soundtrack, you recognise that there's something interesting going on, but it has nothing to do with the conventional idea of what's interesting about playing video games, or about travelling. You are, so to speak, playing the game of real-life travel – but it's not exactly clear what the goal of that game is, or even if there is a goal.