Series curator Kathy High conducted this telephone interview with Muriel Magenta in May, 1997.

TOKEN CITY really sweeps you along in a way that's sort of overwhelming at points, visually. And I'm just wondering if that was also related to your sense as a kid or your sense as an adult?

Okay, that comes from a different source. It comes from my use of the computer animation medium. I wanted to do a piece that involved that medium in dealing with both the past, the present and the future aspects of the subway, and also bring out the medium itself. So I decided that because I was working in a medium that dealt with the future, shall we say, I wanted to express that along with the old mosaics, the old rivets, and all those things that I put in as visual details. So I said that I was going to work with the computer camera that's built in to the animation program in a way that was different than a video camera. In other words, why does this piece exist if it's not in video, if I can't do something different with it through the 3D animation process? So, I purposely animated from angles and speeds that a video camera couldn't possibly do. That's why you shoot through a train and you're going from aerial views that are totally impossible for any other kind of camera to negotiate.

And I also felt that that aspect of it would talk to the future and sort of suggest that this system, the subway, involved the past. I thought the people that I put in, in my mind anyway, were the present. And also, using the silver trains and some of the things that we use now involved the "here." And then I wanted to get into the cyber-world. And part of getting into the cyber-world was the velocity of it.

It's interesting that you're working with the 3D animation and that medium, but using as your subject matter the train which is such an old form of transportation that's been around since the beginning of the century. So it's an interesting sort of vehicle to go from past and present to future, I think. At the end, you go back to real time, real life imagery. You said that that was a reference to the present, but it also has an interesting effect in terms of slowing down everything.

Well, I felt like I had to come to a way to make myself and the piece and the viewer comfortable, you know. You just can't go at the velocity and work without balance of that tension.

So do you want to speak a little bit more about some of the technical aspects of how in this piece was created?

Oh, yes. Well, first of all, it was done on a Silicon Graphics system. And I used Alias Wavefront software. And the piece was really built from scratch. All of the architectural forms of the subway -- the columns, the rails, the staircase, and so forth were actually built geometrically. And what I did was I took hundreds and hundreds of photographs of the subway, of every detail. And there was picture after picture, and I just laid them out in front of me. So I had my staircase series. I had my rail series. I had just about the ceiling, the girders, everything. And I just took a little from this and a little from that, of course, with a lot of artistic license. Because I wasn't just building a particular station or platform, I was going from my concept of one as an artist.

And so first the geometric part was built. And then we use what we call wire frames and I let some of those show through in the finished product. So, all the wire frames were made and then I texture-mapped on all of the surfaces and I created a lot of those in the STI, but there was some that I made in Photoshop, like the mosaics and some of the more detailed things. And I fetched over to the Silicon Graphics system as TIFF files and added them in that way.

And then came the animation process and there you have lighting; you have your camera that you can fly around; you have your sort of stage set, your movement. I worked with each scene and I thought about how I wanted to make it move. I also felt that I wanted to have real people. I did not want to have animated people. And so I called ABC News archive and WWOR TV -- they provide, you can buy, archival news footage which is copyright free. So I got archival news footage from them and then through editing, video editing, I took the different sections of the animation and the video footage and merged them together the way you would edit a video piece. That's exactly what I did. The animation, when it was completed and rendered -- you know, after you animate you render -- that is the beauty of the Silicon Graphics System and I had two of them going by the way, cooking that thing full time. My output was to laser disc. So I had really nice clean footage. And I had people on Beta. So I then just went into an editing suite and edited in the normal way that you would expect video editing to take place. My animation was in chunks; it wasn't in a straight line. I just did each scene and chunked it, because I knew I was going to want to edit, because that's how I like to edit animation. I think I can get a lot more out of it then making a snap decision when I create the thing as to what it's going to be. It allows me a lot more thinking time and a lot more time to push the footage where I want it to go.

You said that you and Michael were meeting throughout and talking about decisions that you were both making about the images and then about the sound composition. How did that finally come together, and at what point did you hand him the piece to work with?

The piece -- this is very important -- the piece was created at the Institute for Studies in the Arts at Arizona State University, which is a very special creative research location where artists from all over the world come to work. And some people are resident artists. I am a resident artist there. But artists from all of the arts write proposals to come and work there. And he was one of the people that wrote a proposal in the sound area. So we got together that way and through his grant he came to the Institute and that's how we spoke initially. And then he was thinking about it and through telephone conversations, he developed some ideas, some sound ideas, and he came back to the Institute. We worked together for a week and I listened to his pieces, his initial pieces, his drafts, and he looked at the visuals that I had initially developed. We spoke and critiqued each other and began to sort out what we thought would work in terms of his concept of the piece and my concept of the piece.

And then he came back another time and made a really full presentation to all the artists that happened to have been at the Institute for Studies in the Arts at that moment in time. But he had lots of music and sounds and just everything that you could imagine built around this idea because it really inspired him. So from that we picked out what we really wanted to use because that was pretty close to the time we were going to edit. And so he was able to select also with me from my work what we thought could work with what he had done. Anyway, that's how that evolved.

And then the final thing was for the two of us to edit the piece together. He actually brought a lot of equipment with him and he set up right in the editing bay. And we edited together. He did digital editing using a sound program. It was actually over the Christmas break, the winter holiday, that we did it. We did it in very early January. This is a rather new piece. That's the story really, and how it came about in terms of the collaboration.

So has [Michael Udow] been to New York a lot and seen the subways here as well?

Oh, yeah. He has traveled all over the world with his concerts and so forth, and so he's seen that. And we talked a lot. Yes, as a matter of fact, he recorded some of the sounds in the subway.

I thought they sounded pretty authentic.

Oh, yeah. Those sounds were recorded with a DAT tape recorder in the subway.

Can you think of anything that you would like to add about the process or the piece itself?

Well, I really want to say one thing and that is that I created this piece in the way I would create any piece from my point of view. It was just going from my personal experience, which is where I usually find my sources. The added excitement, I think, was the medium of 3D computer animation, because I could use all of my skills as a sculptor, a painter, a videographer, and a person that is very interested in theater, sets, costumes, and so forth in this one box. And I find a lot of excitement in that, and I expect to continue for a while exploring this area.