Interview by Amelia McGarvey
Portrait by Gillian Garcia

AM What do you see and hear when you first walk into the exhibition?

JM You see a very large structure made out of scaffolding, which you enter underneath. There is a cutout in the centre of the scaffolding, through which you see a large widescreen with a video. The scaffold acts as a seating ramp, where visitors can choose to sit, lie down or climb. You also hear four drones that are changing at a very slow speed.

AM How did you source the technology and imagery for the video installation?

JM What you’re seeing on the screen is live footage from Internet Protocol (IP) cameras around the world. They’re related to CCTV cameras, but CCTV is a closed-circuit system whereas IP cameras can be open if you don’t put a password on them, which is how I have access to these cameras. I first learnt about the phenomenon on a YouTube iceberg chart [a popular meme format that ranks topic-specific information in tiers from the mainstream to the arcane] about the strangest things on the internet; there’s a website that compiles all these cameras that people have forgotten to secure. I would visit this website, and then I started to realise that so many of the images are really beautiful. I think the show is about framing that beauty. A lot of the cameras, unfortunately, do infringe on people’s privacy.

AM The scale of the installation is very immersive, but the crudeness of the filmic imagery reminds you that you’re watching through a camera, breaching an otherwise uninhabited scene. How do you think about the anonymity and abstraction of the imagery?

JM I think anonymity and abstraction exist at the same time. It’s disturbing but also beautiful that humans have influenced nature in really radical ways. I think a lot about landscape painting in the late 18th century, and how it was used to reflect on the changing influence of technology and pollution on the planet. I think the show is an updated version of that.

AM Do you want viewers to feel the same emotional response of contemplation and awe as with landscape painting?

JM I hope so. I want the show to be meditative, which maybe I shouldn’t admit publicly. I guess meditation is too heavy a word to use in an art context, which is ultimately a commercial environment. I always wanted to turn Chisenhale into a space of relaxation, in an art world that is otherwise very charged and uncomfortable.

AM You’re using technologies of communication and surveillance, yet the video footage doesn’t show a single person. Is this an ethical or aesthetic choice?

JM Probably both. Humans make up a very small portion of the planet. I mean, there are a lot of us, but what I noticed with the cameras is how most of the time nothing is happening. It breaks the peace if you see a person, because you’re too readily able to identify with that figure. In John Berger’s Ways of Seeing (1972), there’s a section on fields and landscape painting, and the obsessive desire to fill the void with a human figure to assert power and visualise new experiences. I wanted to resist that impulse and focus on what is actually happening before you. The landscape is what’s happening, not the imaginary figure inside the landscape.

AM Do you feel like you own your work?

JM Oh hell no! Andy Warhol already solved the issue of ownership. I don’t think ownership is really relevant. We don’t even have any more land to own. Especially being in the UK, it blew my mind that you can’t really own land here. The idea of the ownership of images is a bit overrated. A lot of the code that the show is running on was developed on Discord, for example.

AM Can you explain the process behind the sound installation?

JM There’s a Finnish composer named Kaija Anneli Saariaho, who was interested in this process where you could manipulate sound by taking images of it. In the gallery there are four computers that take pictures of the signals coming from four radio stations, like a long slideshow, and each slowly transitions into the next picture, and that creates these drones. Sound exists in the time domain. We understand sound because we understand what happened to it ten seconds ago. There’s a process in which you can work it into the frequency domain, which lets you organise sound into bins, as they are called, or pixels, so you’re literally taking a picture of the sound. I chose to use sound from classical radio stations because there are less transients – abrupt “chhh” or “sss” noises you get from drums, or people speaking – which cause a lot of noise in the algorithm I’ve written. There is also a time element. Depending on what time you come to the show, it could sound completely different. For the first eighteen minutes, it takes a photo every two minutes. Between 18 and 35 minutes, a picture is taken every 15 minutes. At 59 minutes, it’s static. Then it starts again. I feel like the visual and auditory aspects work like two shows superimposed on each other, especially in the way the ramp bisects the speakers in the back of the room. They both stretch and distort your sense of time, and deal with transmission over really long distances, too.

AM Nothing in the show is recorded; the only way I could record any of it would be with my phone taking a photo or video. What does that fleeting nature mean to you?

JM I have this fantasy that when we’re not home our appliances come alive. I like to approach that in my work, and I like that I don’t know what’s happening when I’ve left the gallery. I don’t even know if it’s working or not. When I was in school, an artist’s autonomy was seen as the greatest achievement, and I think I’ve reacted pretty strongly against it by building very vulnerable, dependent systems. The cameras could go down or the radio could stop working at any moment.

AM How does that make you feel?

JM I’m excited. It sounds dogmatic, but I think it’s the artist’s responsibility to respond to whatever is happening while they’re alive, and not just fall into traditions like oil painting or film. I feel that if there’s an opportunity to experiment, you should always take that risk. Some viewers won’t realise that the cameras are live. I only have control to a certain extent; anything could happen. .