Mediums
- Kubick, Walsh, Raymond, Stevens -
The following discussion between artists Chris Kubick and Anne Walsh (who collaborate as Double Archive) and Leslie Raymond and Jason Jay Stevens (who collaborate as Potter-Belmar Labs) took place via e-mail during the latter part of 2007 and the first weeks of 2008. Kubick and Walsh live and work in Oakland, California; Raymond and Stevens live and work in San Antonio, Texas.
Anne Walsh >> I think this conversation might be a good place to share some thoughts about the use and value of the term “new media,” what is implied by the term and its ubiquity. From an academic point of view, it seems to me that new media is the gateway for the technology industry to enter the Humanities—finally and triumphantly—under the guise of supporting the arts.
Leslie Raymond >> Hmm...I guess I’ve been insulated from that so far.
AW >> What troubles me the most is that the champions—and funders—of new media programs still seem more interested in innovative interfaces and gadgetry than in aesthetics, concept and ethics. So when new media enters the academy, it can carry a sort of imprimatur—a stamp of legitimacy that comes from, essentially, corporate sponsorship. It concerns me that this de facto legitimacy also shields art produced under the auspices of new media. It seems to offer a waiver from expectations of conceptual sophistication or subversive content or intent, or from examining the terms and conditions of its own existence. I should be clear here: I’m speaking as an observer and sometime participant in the evolution of new media art in the academy.
LR >> The University of Michigan School of Art and Design, under the deanship of Bryan Rogers, recently revamped their curriculum to reflect this kind of evolution—an evolution of the dialogue beyond the apparatus. Medium-specific specialization was abandoned in favor of a pluralistic approach to tools, materials and process balanced with idea-heavy coursework. The reality is that contemporary art is a specialization, just as biotechnology or cultural anthropology or even the classics are specialized fields. And though art may actually be more accessible—and in my opinion should be—we happen to live in a cultural climate that is not necessarily receptive to contemporary art in general. Obviously, there are places such as New York and enclaves on the West Coast that have a subculture concentrated around this field, but from where I’m sitting, mere video is still considered a new artmaking tool.
AW >> Looking at the new media works that I tend to see in exhibition spaces—in science and art museums, galleries, etc.—my fear is that “interactivity” is so often foregrounded and spoken of as offering the viewer some creative agency, some kind of power. But what is that power, really? What kind of power is it? At times, I worry that the anti-intellectualism at the heart of conservative politics in this country is having its revenge in the form of this art-as-toy-for-amusing-the-masses, or museum-as-entertainment center. Of course, there’s also the simple fact that digital tools have “empowered” everyone who has access to them to make things they could never make before. Are we assuming that our audiences have to feel like they made the work themselves? Why? If the goal is to promote the ethics of collective agency, and perhaps to downplay the artist-as-solitary-font-of-feeling-and-wisdom model, I fear that “interactivity,” as we know it today, is not achieving that.
Jason Jay Stevens >> There’s no excuse for interactivity for interactivity’s sake, and there’s no excuse for art-for-art’s-sake. And that’s a problem as much in social aesthetics as it is in new media.
So much of the stuff that passes as conceptual art seems to have been created under the premise that art is about wondering what art is. Yawn. To me, the end result of eighty years of navel gazing is that art in general can’t promise to be anything more than creative energy made manifest and, in particular, if the maker wants it to go anywhere other than the studio, they have to accept that art is, in fact, a way for some people to spend the hours they’re not on the assembly line, or spend the money they’re not spending on a new boat. Some folks come home after a long day and read Derrida; others go to art galleries. Some buy HDTVs, others buy combat boots supposedly fashioned from ground-up vinyl records.
Of course, I’m not talking at all about my personal motivation to make. I’m talking about the broad picture. On that note, new media art isn’t about what software the artist uses, either. And, incidentally, Leslie and I inevitably field the “What gear do you use?” question from our audiences. Talk about lazy and not getting to know the work...nothing else turns me so sour. And nothing about my work is a bigger drag than “keeping up” with the technology.
Double Archive, Room Tone, 2007; installation detail, Artists Space, New York
AW >> I would like to think that the conceptual revolution in art practice, not to mention social practices being treated and handled as art practices, should have advanced the dialogue about art far enough that we could begin to classify new media in terms far more complex than by the tools used to make it.
JJS >> Poetry is old as mud, and that’s at the heart of my process more than anything.
LR >> As I see it, integrating contemporary tools in artmaking practice enables a level of participation in culture not accessible via “old media.” People have a relationship to computers and television, so using those media to reflect upon our world through art enables different kinds of entry points. And while using present-day media to generate art in the present moment is not a new phenomenon, we are experiencing a different and more complex iteration of an ongoing story (photography, film, video) in which the playing field between different media is leveled. You no longer need a slide projector to look at slides; a cassette player, 8-track, turntable, CD player or a reel-to-reel to listen to recorded sound; a mechanical projector to watch a film; a VCR or DVD player or laserdisc player for consumer video. Even the television is becoming obsolete. The whole HDTV thing is going to be really interesting alongside Web-based video, especially since it’s now possible to use your computer through a monitor. And how about the good old days when your phone was a massive beast chained to the wall? This is both a utopian and demented thing to say, but you can glimpse the future of media in the iPhone. Having said all of that, antiquated technology still gives me a boner.
JJS >> You’re just saying that to get back at me for the time you caught me making out with an iPhone, aren’t you?
LS >> There is a speed issue, too. I remember when Chris got his first computer for sound composition…1994, was it? At the time, he had been playing violin, and all I could think was, finally, a tool that will be able to keep up with his brain—he is a triple Gemini after all! And it proved to be true. The speed at which an idea can move from conception to actualization is amazing. I experienced this when I shifted from optically printing 16mm film to manipulating digital video.
JJS >> Let’s talk about the work we all do in particular. I know that Double Archive sometimes works through mediums, but is there really a specific “medium” we all work with?
Chris Kubick >> I guess I see you guys being more interested in immersive, experiential communication—in art as an experience that sort of defies language—whereas our work has always been very much about the interaction between language and experience.
AW >> I think of Potter-Belmar as engaged with invention and with the imagining of possible worlds. I think of our work as being a practice of framing what is already present rather than inventing new forms—framing the world we are in more than generating imaginary or portraying personal worlds. I have always thought of what we do as a kind of extraction, editing and re-presenting. When I think of your work, I think of building, layer by layer. When I think of our work, I think about peeling off layers to reveal more layers.
JJS >> That’s a nice way of putting it. I like to think of the art of Double Archive as playful acts of analysis—as collecting linguistic phenomena from the outlands and subjecting them to bizarre situations and experiments. There’s a good deal of deconstruction in PBL’s work as well—of isolating various constituents of the story form, shuffling them, using them as the frame upon which to build big, potentially messy abstract narratives. Our single-channel collections, Settings and Characters both of which screened at the 43rd Ann Arbor Film Festival, are obvious examples of this. But that sort of thing—like our schemes for audience participation—are experiments that ultimately support the invention of new experience. We are quite deliberate in our goal to put a deep curve in the space-time continuum, and to establish psychic bypasses for human-to-human connections. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. We pulled it off beautifully in the installation/performance Improvised Cinema this past September, accessing many thousands of Midtown passersby.3 We invited people to submit singular descriptions of action or snippets of dialogue and used them to inspire a collective über-narrative.
Anne and Chris, I loved your Thousand Years of Sound Effects performance in San Antonio. There was a really elegant beauty—an atomic simplicity to it—with the pure indescribability of sound at its center and a cloud of language’s uncertainty orbiting around it.
AW >> I think the subject of all of the work Chris and I make together, as well as most of what I’ve done on my own, as being concerned with translation—with how meaning changes depending on the manner in which it is delivered and/or transformed by that manner. I am obsessed, perhaps to an unhealthy degree, with how different forms of expression acquire meaning. The very idea of naming a sound, for instance, is still phenomenally amazing to me. I think what all of our work has in common is much less its final form than the fact that we all work with databases—in our case, sound and text, and in yours, sound and image.
LR >> On the subject of the database, I find myself in a very peculiar position, having made the jump from an analog to a digital performance tool (from a Videonics mx-1 analog mixer with four DVD players to Arkaos VJ software with Numark’s NuVj midi-type controller) almost a year ago. I think in images when I am performing, and performing with the moving image is, for me, a largely improvisational enterprise. It is also significant to note that I am generally turned off by visual art that incorporates written text because it snaps me from an experiential, right-brain mode into the more rational left-brain mode, disrupting the pure visual experience of the work. (Although I thought Thousand Years of Sound Effects transcended this through the poetry generated between action, sound and word—I’m thinking specifically of the piece being controlled by the action of clapping.)
With my old analog rig, I had a book of my images that I could refer to. Each page was a DVD menu, with 20–30 thumbnails of video loops. Lately, while performing, a particular image comes to mind that I want to put up on the screen, but I can’t locate it within the general categories of my database. Originally, I thought going digital was going to simplify my process, but what happened was unexpected. I now have to remember the name of a video file, to search via text for it…and there is nothing more frustrating to me than having the experiential process of creating work interrupted by a language-based intrusion.
AW >> That’s fascinating to hear that new VJ software forces you back to verbal language in order to locate an image. I know it’s one of the frontiers of software and hardware design—to get beyond the word as the search device—to create visual keyframes that can become the basic units of a new taxonomy.
JJS >> We are, all four of us, sample artists, aren’t we? Is that our medium? Is that a better label than “new media” artists?
Double Archive, Thousand Years of Sound Effects, 2007; live performance, University of Texas at San Antonio
CK >> I think that while we both are engaging in appropriation, we’re doing it in very different ways and with very different results. With your work, you often alter the source material so much that you can’t really tell what it originally was; I don’t usually get the feeling that that’s important to you. In fact, maybe it’s important to obliterate the original reference. I think it’s very liberating for you, for the audience, for the material. Anne and I come from the other direction; where something comes from—what it is—is usually pretty important to us. We usually like to make that present in some way and then work with and against that genealogy.
JJS >> Ethereal continuities are the stock and trade of a PBL performance. Leslie and I are like tarot readers; associations and juxtapositions are opportunities to hug or choke the audience…I almost said chug or hoke.
LR >> We will soon be premiering Fortune at the Sheldon Art Center in Des Moines, a piece in which we will interpret the “moment” through a series of audience-drawn cards. Though the political is not the primary motivator for me, there is something decidedly political about allowing the audience to affect the outcome and development of the piece. There is also something decidedly political about appropriating material from the mass media. Given that like five companies control all the major news outlets worldwide and Hollywood dominates the film business worldwide, deconstructing mainstream media to make it reflect your own personal voice and/or opinions is powerful.
CK >> Anne and I tend not to manipulate our cut-up sounds or images but instead tend more to reposition them. We listen to a sound and then think of various ways to describe it. Hopefully, these ways of describing sounds resonate with the viewer and generate meaning as they bounce around between memory and desire. The mainstream of experimental music is very much against this kind of thing. Following John Cage, music theorists see words as constraining the freedom of sounds to just BE. I actually see the situation a little differently. I think that by adding a LOT of words to a sound, you liberate it even more than you do by leaving words out of the equation altogether, because now, the sound means not one thing to one person but three, five, seven or a hundred things. So I guess we’re kind of writing a soft little critique of Cage and his mushrooms.
JJS >> I might put you in the category of artmaking I call “the clever idea, well-executed.”
CK >> Lately I’ve been really enjoying thinking about what La Monte Young called the “Theatre of a Singular Event.” This idea of his, which was a certain type of conceptual practice, was to narrow down the field of performance to focus on a very specific act. For instance, in Composition #2, Young asks a performer to build a fire but further specifies that it must be made of wood, not involve a cigarette lighter and that the performer let the audience see the act. Beyond that, he says the performer and audience can do whatever they like, adding that if the performance is for radio broadcast, they can mic the fire if they want. This stands in contrast to someone like Cage, who doesn’t ever want to define what will be the focus of a particular experience; he just said, stay there and see what happens. Focus on what you want to focus on. His work is much more extravagant and chaotic than Young’s.
I definitely think that the work that Anne and I are doing has more to do with Young than with Cage. I think that our most successful work has been confined like that—like Composition #2—to a singularly focused experience like Room Tone. Room tones really are very simple—silent, at least in principle—but in reality, they are complicated, messy and not so silent after all. There’s something very pleasing for me in taking a single thing and allowing everything beautiful and confusing to emerge from that specific thing. There’s a kind of cohesion and a tension between that cohesion and the tendency of any idea or thing to pick up extraneous, fatty lint—to grow, get complicated and tangled. I love complications, problems, messes, tangled wires. It’s just that I particularly like the messes when I can find some kind of surprising simplicity and clarity lurking somewhere in those messes.
Potter-Belmar Labs, Characters, 2005; live cinema performance, 43rd Ann Arbor Film Festival; photo by Stephen Graham
LR >> I see vestiges of Polly Serialism here!
JJS >> Can you tell us a bit more about Room Tone?
CK >> It’s a piece about a certain kind of silence—the silence that envelops any media production. Room tone is like the baseline sound level of any room or situation, and it’s usually recorded before or after an interview or film shoot. The recordist asks everyone to be completely quiet and stand in place while they record a minute or so of tone. And it’s very important that the people present during the actual shoot be there, because bodies completely change the character of sound recording by absorbing a certain amount of the sound, or the silence. All room tones have very different sonic characteristics, owing to factors like the architecture of the space, the number of bodies in the space and, of course, what kind of other technology is also present, for instance air-handling systems and lights, which generate electrical hums.
Room Tone was a four-channel sound installation run by a generative computer program that takes about a thousand room tones and layers them, cuts them up and combines them to create a new, very dynamic and visceral room tone for a particular space. The computer program makes a variety of choices in making this new room tone, including volume—sometimes it’s almost deafening—but the idea of silence remains. It remains as an element of tension, sometimes heightened by the very loud sounds and the descriptive names we gave each room tone. On the wall, we had a kind of loose or hypothetical map of various names for room tones—a kind of architecture of the air drawn on paper. Those names are in some ways the key to the piece, because those names signify the place where sound becomes complicated by language, and that is exactly what we set out to do: reclaiming Silence for language’s sake, for politics, for thinking and for all the bodies that linger silently in the recordings we reconstitute.
AW >> In the space, the piece was more physical than in our studio at home. Being in the room at Artists Space was a surprisingly relaxing experience, even though the sound was sometimes really loud and percussive. Sound is movement, and in that situation movement was like a gentle, calming downward pressure against your skin and bones.
LR >> That’s so good to hear—about a calming impact. A garden recently grew out of my video loop database into a six-channel video installation called In The Garden. It was a place to sit, relax and open into a meditative state. You guys did it physically, through the sound waves pressing against the eardrums.
JJS >> Ah! I think I’ve figured it out: a replacement for the label “new media artist,” at least as far as the four of us are concerned. Since we all work with databases and we are all concerned with creating experience, perhaps we are “experiential data-bassists!”