BH: Do you think if you’d been around at the time of the Society of Dilettantes you would have chosen to make that kind of study rather than be an artist?
MD: I think I would have been both, that’s almost part of the point of the Society of Dilettantes... When people ask me ‘are you a scientist or an artist’, my answer is ‘why choose?’ Is it too much to ask to do both? And even though I know I’m not a scientist, I don’t work with scientific method, there are a lot of things I have in my work that scientists don’t. You can’t really speak about ambivalence, you can’t use irony or humour or any of those things that are essential to art, the strength of the personal, those are the things that scientists try to avoid. They’re looking for something objective and art is never going to be that.