I found Chris Lineberry’s videos sitting like warm eggs in the great chicken coop that is YouTube after I demanded that my boyfriend look up the video for “Melody Day” by Caribou. We watched the hammers hit a piece of wood to the beat for awhile, and he absentmindedly clicked on one of the videos in the “Related Videos” category, only to be quickly stunned by perfectly timed messes of pulsating colors, rainbows, clouds, dinosaurs, school buses, and apathetic faces that quickly melted into the landscape. It was a video narration of Caribou’s “Zoe” (above) by Lineberry, who after a few clicks I found out was only 17 and had created several visually stunning videos using nothing other than MS Paint.



Is it too late to say the future is here? It might be some kind of indicator that a teenaged North Carolina native who sits with his hand on a his mouse through many winter nights, his eyes full of pulsating colors, can create on crude software the type of animation that 50 years ago might have given Walt Disney a seizure.



Lineberry took time away from his MS Paint window to hop over to a Microsoft Word window and answer a few questions.



SPLICE TODAY: Give me a short paragraph about yourself. If that sounds vague, try including things like childhood ticks, fears, obsessions, teenage hobbies, weird but shareable family predicaments, favorite ways to break the law, etc.



CHRIS LINEBERRY: I was born in Greensboro, NC and, save for an infantile two-year stint out of the state in Vancouver and Cincinnati, I've lived here all my life. When I was four, I thought that beyond my periphery the world might be the inside of a giant spaceship with the most disgusting and globbly aliens running the control panel. I'd turn around quickly to try and catch them but they were always just out of view. I'm obsessed with “Where's Waldo,” mermaids, primary colors, miniatures, planning my dream house, comic books, and museums. In seventh grade, my dad grounded me for having dreadlocks, perhaps rightfully so because they were disgusting. As for my favorite way to break the law, I drive five miles over the speed limit.



ST: Have you had any formal training in art, especially animation?



CL: I've attended a magnet arts high school, Weaver Academy, and will be completing my senior year there this spring. However, even though the school has the resources for animation, they've never given me a chance to do it there. The school has provided me with a technical basis for my work, though.



I've also been involved with the Elsewhere Artist Collaborative since the spring of ‘04 and the conceptual foundation of my work has been heavily influenced by the experience.



The animations sort of arose when I realized that my clunky, obsolete, hand-me-down, McAfee-infected, warrantee-expired Dell could facilitate activities beyond x'ing out the pop-ups that confirm that all of my bullshit virus protection needs to be updated.



ST: How do you choose which songs to narrate?



CL: On top of the song being something I would consider "good music,” most of the time it's the length that I look for. It's an unfortunate case of needing size to matter, but time is a crucial element in the process. If the song isn’t short enough, then I feel bad about gypping it. I guess part of what I do relies on having "a sense" for how things go together, which is probably not the most exciting or substantiated element of my work (even though it's still important).



ST: What is your personal history with music (phases, embarrassments, philosophy if you have one)?



CL: In seventh grade I went from listening to Kittie to Cat Stevens. The transformation happened over winter break, I guess. Then in eighth grade I cut off my long, flowing, Shirley Temple locks and fell in love with the Arcade Fire. I played upright bass for a while and played with a few orchestras (I made it to Carnegie Hall once, even though the audience was composed of parents). I'm obsessed with noise that sounds like something's being played backwards (it's in my animation of Jon Brion’s “Bookstore,” called “Time Travel” [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6X3c7Tq5ia8]), strings/orchestral/symphonic sound, and sounds that define the times. A lot of my music comes from local college radio stations.