Vague Terrain

[EVOL performs in Seoul, November 2010]

Prologue

In my first book Micro Bionic, I briefly attempted to make an outline of the 21st century "computer musician" as social type. In the process, I noticed some defining characteristics common to the most recent generation taking up this "computer musician" mantle (or merely having it conferred upon them by the critical community.) For one, these new musicians and/or sound artists were adept at mixing aspects of 'high' institutional knowledge and 'low' consumer culture, albeit not as stereotypically as presented in any number of "intro-to-postmodernism" course books. They shuttled between clubs and conservatories, or between festivals and lecture halls, with a remarkable agility and with equal respect accorded to both polarities of physical rapture and intellectual advancement suggested by these environments. In this socially amorphous milieu, goals such as securing tenure and maintaining peer group approval seemingly took a back seat to another imperative: cranking up a noise as intense, wild, and highly articulated as possible. With this being the imperative after which all other concerns had to be secondary, practitioners of this new computer music disregarded the differences in age, nationality and sometimes even artistic background among themselves. Rather, expressive skill and persistence of attitude were far more important means of gaining admission to this strange and seductive nano-scene.

Despite the instant decrease in shelf life that came with labeling this phenomenon as "extreme" or "radical," calling it "radical / extreme computer music" was appropriate enough when considering the wired excitement of the new sound itself: it was music with a speed of transformation that either implied or initiated radical change, sometimes going from pointillist pin-pricks of sound to full-on furnace blasting within the space of seconds. And it was "extreme" in that it approached various saturation points - of volume, compositional complexity, etc. - that made it difficult to imagine any louder or more complex successor. It is not a coincidence that this music truly began to bloom in a late 1990s music culture where self-referentiality ruled the roost, and where enforced lassitude could still be passed off as a 'political' pose rather than as a mere dearth of ideas. When seen against this post-everything slacker background, the appeal of "radical" or "extreme" computer music becomes more clearly defined. The attraction to it stemmed not from its status as a Futurist rapture of technological exhibitionism, but from something which had little to do with computers at all: it was rehabilitating recordings and concerts as vehicles for sound first and self-reference second, not the inversion of this order that was prevalent in pop culture of the time.

It seems only logical that the new strain of computer music would be embraced by an audience as heterogeneous as the cultural omnivores creating it. Certainly, the uppermost percentile of computer-literate, mathematically competent individuals could enjoy the music as a sonic illustration of dynamic systems. Meanwhile, a hip, street-smart coterie of designers saw the music's rollercoaster ride of variable tone color, shifting texture, and violent fragmentation as providing - perhaps even more so than electronic dance music - a perfect complement to an inchoate, yet seductive visual world also under construction. Evidence of this can be seen in the 1999 volume DiscStyle, edited by Martin Pesch and Markus Weisbeck, which includes a number of Tina Frank's album designs for the exemplary Mego label in among the album artworks that accompanied more standard 'dance' fare.

One of the more intriguing groups to stalk this arena of sound, the Spanish duo of Roc Jiménez de Cisneros and Stephen Sharp (aka EVOL), embodies many of the tendencies already under discussion here. They have also, throughout their career, manifested a wicked streak of humor that has not been dulled by their immersion in the arcane realm of computer coding. The website of the record label ALKU (coordinated by Roc with partner Anna Ramos) is laden with references to concepts like "jiggery-pokery" that, before they are even comprehended, evince a certain amped-up ludic sensibility (and one that isn't incommensurate with "taking things seriously," either.) In the past, the ALKU site also offered downloadable scripts to its visitors that re-envisioned the 'glitch' aesthetic as a gateway to devious fun: the 'Foo Foo Foo' script, for example, would search a target drive on a computer for all available soundfiles, from which it would then select the opening second or so, recombining these hundreds of snippets into hilarious, sometimes revelatory auto-compositions.

EVOL / ALKU spokesman Roc, as evidenced by the discussion below, knows his way around the language of machines, yet exhibits another curious, ironic feature common to the "radical computer musician": they don't necessarily need to work with computers at all, and are content to fall back on other methods of communication. In an inversion of "expanded technique" -which once meant, among other things, supplementing acoustic instrumentation with electronic novelty - Roc and his cohorts find themselves relying on quotidian odds-and-ends to enhance the high-tech sheen of their computer compositions. Much talk has been made about how electronic music of the 21st century would be a radically hybridized form, and this talk with Roc Jiménez de Cisneros makes clear exactly what kind of hybrids we can expect to see more of. Stochastic processes fused with "rave" sounds are just the tip of this particular iceberg…

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Thomas Bey William Bailey: Maybe I’ll start with the title of your new release [Rave Slime]- what’s your connection to "rave" culture? Is it an active interest (going to raves or participating musically), or have you observed the culture from a distance? I’m also curious how the "rave" scene in Spain developed relative to the scenes in the UK, US and so on- was it pretty much a parallel development or did it develop more slowly / quickly than in these countries?

Roc Jiménez de Cisneros: Both Stephen (co-author of "Rave Slime") and I have been interested in rave culture and house music for a long time. In fact, when I got into electronic music in the early 90s, it was through a weird combination of old computer music on one hand, and dance music on the other. I used to go to a library in Barcelona that had the most amazing collection of 50s avant-garde, and at the same time I went to DJ shops and bought lots of techno white label 12"s. Of course back then I could not have made the connection between both, but it felt natural to me. We are part of a generation of artists who have bridged that gap, approaching abstract electronic music from a perspective that has a lot in common with techno, rave culture and so on. That's why I usually refer to EVOL as "computer music for hooligans".

The rave scene has been huge in Spain since the late 80s, but it's significantly different, both musically and culturally, from other places in Europe. It developed as a very underground subculture heavily influenced by Belgium and the UK, but quickly became a very peculiar thing with its own character. Until the early 90s, the Valencian scene was a very bizarre mixture of acid house, EBM, noise and techno, and it spawned whole culture that was later dubbed "makina" or "bakalao". It's still huge today, but it was never as mainstream and accepted as in the UK, where you had programs like Dance Energy, a cheesy, all-ages celebration of rave culture on national TV (the first time Stephen showed me footage of that I just couldn't believe it).

As regards getting into rave and house music in the early ‘90s, as well as the more academic or avant-garde electronic music, do you feel like you were an ‘exception’ among electronic music fans of the time? Or was this acceptance of different music styles ‘something that was in the air’? Certainly this was around the time I also noticed that "classical electronic" LPs were fetching higher prices in record stores, and were no longer something you could buy 2 for a dollar.

I'm sure it was in the air for a lot of people. Whatever type of art or music you like, it just makes sense to know where things came from. For me it felt quite natural because I had a different background: I was into grindcore, hardcore and all that stuff for years, so noise and bizarre structures were already an integral part of the records I listened to, and when I got into electronic music I quickly became fascinated by the rougher side of avant-garde and academic computer music. In a way it felt like the same thing times a million, only much older, which made it even more exciting.

What kind of changes occurred between that time and the late 90s (societal changes, technological changes, etc.) that led to the formation of EVOL?

I guess techno happened. Just like punk before that, lots of kids with no formal musical education saw it was relatively easy to buy old gear and muck around with it. In 1996 we met Pita [a.k.a. Peter Rehberg], who was at our first ever performance, and through him things unfolded pretty quick. That obviously also has to do with the Internet and how it quickly facilitated the creation of bigger (human) networks/scenes.

Of course, Pita is another one of the figures now associated with bringing computer music to a kind of ‘street’ level. However, I think this refers more to making these sounds easier to appreciate and easier to relate to – not making the composition techniques themselves something that just anyone could handle. I think the attitude of ‘extreme computer music’ certainly differs from that of the academy, but the most radical psycho-acoustic recordings seem to be the ones coming from people who have advanced, specialized knowledge of coding, scripting etc. Any thoughts on this?

Right, this relative popularisation has little to do with ease of use. It's more an attitude towards composition/performance, and one of the byproducts of that attitude is that more people, not just academics, can appreciate this stuff. But that does not mean the learning curve for some of these tools is any less steep. Of course it all depends on the tool – this in turn goes back to the misconception that making electronic music is easy. It can be, because there is no standard way of doing anything. But that doesn't only apply to music…

I’ve noticed, with "Rave Slime", you create sounds with "custom-written generative software" in order to attain the same type of sounds created by the Roland Juno synth series during the heyday of techno. In this case, what’s your motivation for committing to all the "steep learning curve" programming when various "soft synths" and emulators are already available? And maybe this question relates to the entire "hand-coding vs. straight-out-of-the-box recording" argument- why is designing new software to do the job of currently available products important for you? And do you feel that your approach to this issue is pretty much the same one agreed to by the rest of the ‘radical computer music’ community, or - again - are you guys an exception in this regard?

I started introducing old school hardcore style stabs and sounds in EVOL performances in late 2008, and these gradually took over. I suggested Stephen should join in because we're good friends and we're both kind of obsessed with that sound. With "Rave Slime" and similar ravey pieces we're combining old synths and hand-coded variations of them, but the goal with this code is not perfect emulation of the classic machines. If we wanted that, we would have stuck to the actual synths. Writing software for this means you can approach and tweak the sound in ways that the Roland Juno series and other old modules probably can't. It doesn't mean it's better this way, it's just a different approach. That's what made computers exciting in the first place. A lot of the composers who started using computers for sound synthesis in the 1960s created tons of music that was simply not possible without a computer. It's what the Goodiepal refers to as the utopia element of electronic music.

When I think of emulations done in this style, another thing that comes to mind is the P.C. emulators that allow you to play perfect reproductions (or ROMs) of every available coin-operated arcade game from the 80s and early 90s. I notice that fans of both coin-op emulators and music equipment emulators can be divided into purely nostalgic people (people for whom the interface with the emulator is just a gateway to a larger set of pleasant, personal memories), and people who feel that these ‘originals’ can still be manipulated to make radically new creative statements.

So, I’m guessing EVOL fits the profile of the ‘2nd’ type of person mentioned here- but is that correct? Is there also an element of nostalgia in "Rave Slime", or a conjuring of a ‘better’ point in recent history?

Call it nostalgia or respect… In any case, the history of electronic music is full of attempts to reproduce the behaviour of previously existing instruments. Still today, many synths have a keyboard as their main interface, which is totally bizarre for me because that's definitely not how I think about music making, but that is a consequence of this imitative paradigm. For decades, one of the main goals of synthesizer designers and manufacturers has been the emulation of traditional instruments. Most of the times they hit the uncanny valley and failed miserably, but that's usually where it gets interesting. I don’t care for hyper-realism but good things can come from that process of imitation, the TB-303 being the obvious example of this. Another intriguing chapter is the legitimation process of the synth in the late 60s, where Moogs, ARPs and other machines suddenly became massively popular after Wendy Carlos started playing classical tunes on them. Was she conjuring of a ‘better’ point in recent history or making radically new creative statements?

[photo: Dr. Motte]

Well this last example is particularly interesting, because it shows how the public in general becomes more sympathetic to new technologies after these devices are shown as capable of interpreting the ‘old’ repertoire.

And, in this case, that old repertoire is distinguished as being something ‘difficult’ to play, or something that requires real virtuosity to tackle. This is what intrigues me about the revival of the previous generation’s electronic music tools: things like the TB-303 were seen as incredibly user-friendly and capable of being handled by anybody (not only the trained virtuoso); and much of the music made famous by these tools was the antithesis of the baroque or hyper-complex approach to performing and recording music. One TB-303 emulator in particular (the popular Rebirth software introduced in the late ‘90s) paid its respects to this newer ‘tradition’ of accessible / populist electronic music rather than the tradition of virtuosity and ‘transcendence through complexity’… where does your own music, made with emulation tools, fit in here? After all, it sounds quite complex and non-linear despite its also referring to this era of electro-simplicity.

If it sounds complex and non-linear it has more to do with aesthetic choices, than technical ones. A lot of the tools in EVOL are not that crazy – the beauty of chaotic systems is that they can yield very complex structures from pretty simple rules. Just like the TB-303 is indeed a simple system that can produce great results. I'm much more interested in the outcome than the methods, even if these play a huge role in what I do. The thing with old machines like the 303 and similar synths is that although you call them user-friendly, often they were not designed to be used that way, at least not for the very first house producers. It was a bunch of kids trying to do crazy things with machines they barely understood. And it was great. Now, user-friendly has a totally different meaning. In the past few years there has been too much focus on the musician's side of things. We should be more worried about the listener's experience, about challenging musical ideas, and less about touch-sensitive devices, controllers, ease of use and all that. In the end it all boils down to a combination of two factors: first, the industry's obsession with turning listeners into producers. And second, a huge imbalance of interface design over content. Just look at video games: since the Wii came along, all major console manufacturers have spent tons of money in the development of motion-capturing devices and crap like that. It's a race to see who comes up with the most inventive controller, but for the most part games are totally stuck. The vast majority are still very narrow-minded and fit very easily into perfectly defined categories. And the situation in the music scene is not that different. A lot of the students in my programming class are desperate to learn about sensors, motion-capturing systems, touch screens and so on, but many of them don't really know what to do with these tools afterwards. They have been exposed to way too many shows where the main selling point is the how, not so much the result. Then on the other side, the academy seems to be as lost as ever. I recently read a paper on the spring issue of Computer Music Journal called "Artificial Evolution of Expressive Performance of Music: An Imitative Multi-Agent Systems Approach", by Eduardo Reck Miranda, Alexis Kirke, and Qijun Zhang. It's amazing how academia is still trying really hard to make computers play music like human beings. I thought the whole point of using computers to make music was to do things you cannot do without them, not pass musical Turing tests.

Funny you mention CMJ, I have an issue of the journal from 2002 where Sergi Jorda echoes your concerns above, saying "the design of new controllers is often approached from an essentially technical point of view, in which the novel of the sensing novelty deployed overshadows the attainable musical results." So, it seems, fortunately, that academia is not totally obsessed with demonstrating how ‘human’ music technology can be. Although, yes, there are definite camps within academia who do maintain that obsession.

As I’ve been hinting at earlier in our discussion, a common concern of the current world of video games and electronic music interfaces is that of universality. The Wii’s manufacturer, Nintendo, has advertised itself as a great uniter of people since the days of the ‘Famicom’ game system or ‘family computer’, and it seems like the newer Ableton software is also pitching itself as providing an accessible "universal interface" that will unite diverse types of people. Am I just a skeptic, or are these ambitions too grandiose?

There cannot be such a thing as a universal interface, it would make things very boring. Which brings us to Sergi's quote because, funnily enough, Reactable (of which he is pretty much the father) is the epitome of what I was talking about earlier. Jorda and his team replaced what he referred to as the "technical point of view" with that fixation with interactivity, but the "musical results" are missing. What they play at their official demos is this middle of the road dance stuff no one would pay attention to it if it wasn't for the fancy colours. Which once again comes to show that tools are not everything, because their table involves a bunch of powerful general-purpose software tools that can be used to make great stuff. It's a very flashy toy, and they just proved it when they started selling an iPhone version of it. I hope they sell a ton of them, but I don't see it as the paradigm shift they proclaim. And it's a shame, because if you look back fifty years ago, there are many prime examples of composers and computer musicians who devoted their lives to the creation of inventive interfaces, and they did that with extremely limited resources. Maybe that's why I prefer totally stripped-down interfaces to make music and play live. They look dull and you can't jam much with them, but that's the point.

At this point, it might be good to turn our conversation towards the novelty of interfaces, since we’ve already dealt with interfaces that are meant to resurrect a past model of design or aesthetics. I think it was Miller Puckette who said (probably also in an issue of this journal we’ve mentioned!) something to the effect that novelty was fairly pointless unless it "revealed something." I guess he would have seen that as "good" novelty, while there was such a thing as a "bad" novelty that carried with it a sense of surprise but no corresponding information. Would you agree with that, or no?

Yes, that's an interesting point, but it's hard to draw the line between good and bad. The theremin, computer-vision and brain-computer interfacing systems are three good candidates in this debate. There is an extensive literature about affordances and constraints in musical instruments (and more generally in human-made tools) which I won't try to recreate here. What's important is to be aware that any system, however complex, implies many of these properties that shape its capabilities. There is no right or wrong interface: it's up to the user and their understanding of these limitations and perceived action possibilities. I tend to favor general-purpose systems, but in reality they can be as good or bad as we make them. When we started using compressed gas horns in our performances in the late nineties it was merely a conceptual joke, but with time I realised that even in such a simple instrument (which by default produces only one note) there are also many affordances which progressively lead to a totally different approach to the horns and their constraints in the performance context.

This anecdote about the horns brings me to the topic of circuit bending; particularly the warping of electronic toys’ pre-programmed sounds into ones that are more varied and unpredictable (at least in the short term.) Despite its current trendiness, I’m interested in how this practice simultaneously employs nostalgia and futurism… using the electronic relics of one’s childhood to make recordings or performances of sounds that people (presumably) haven’t heard before. Do you feel any kind of kinship with people who build or work with circuit-bent devices?

Not really. Probably because they are usually very lo-fi and I don't find that appealing.

Yet I find people working with these lo-fi devices (a colleague in Chicago calls them "slow electronics," maybe as a nod to the "slow food" movement) often have concerns that overlap with those of certain computer musicians, especially as regards recycling, sustainability and so on. Both the kid ‘bending’ a Speak & Spell, and someone like Mattin using a beaten-up Linux laptop instead of the latest MacBook, seem to be rejecting the planned obsolescence of consumer electronic equipment on different levels. Even though you may not like the sonic output of the people I mentioned earlier, is this a concern you share with them?

A lot of that planned obsolescence you mention has to do with pushing new lines of product in the name of speed and miniaturization, but Moore's law will hit a brick wall at some point because you just can't keep shrinking down indefinitely. Sometime in the next 20 years we may reach that limit and that will seriously mess up the current standard of consumer electronics life cycle. I am looking forward to that. But in any case, even though we have been talking a lot about tools and their role in the creative process, I have always been more concerned with the ideas that precede them. Or at the very least with the possibility of dissociating ideas from systems, if at all possible. Let me go back to the Goodiepal, since he is a great illustration of Sol Lewitt's ‘The idea becomes the machine that makes the art’, which still holds today. When Kristian started playing live again after his exile in the Faroe Islands a few years ago, his shows involved a completely different set of tools which he had developed or fine-tuned during that period, while he had no access to computers or electronics. But the musical essence of the shows was incredibly close to his early electronic stuff, only he was whistling, playing lute or just telling stories. And then the shows/talks he's been giving for the past couple of years are in turn a development from that, where he doesn't even have to play much music, he just talks about it, so he pretty much fulfills Lewitt's quote.

[John Wiese, Jiménez de Cisneros & Senni in Milan, 2009]

Well, the Goodiepal anecdote here is an useful illustration of something that I believe is truly necessary if one is to mature as a creative individual- I seem to often have an obsession with tools, instruments and prostheses, but I do find it much more interesting to study what people do after they’ve gleaned what they can from use of these tools, and then find themselves able to discard them. How would you envision your own work without the assistance of computer processes? The recordings of Barcelona bats that you contributed to my radio show seemed to hint at one possible new direction.

Absolutely. I remember the first time I saw Dave Phillips performing the balloon section of his live set. In the weeks before I had just spent days writing slightly similar sounds on my computer, and the first thing that came to mind was "motherfucker!". Dave's work is a powerful proof that you don't need fancy instruments to produce great music – just a very defined aesthetic goal and the skills to get there, and he's very skilled at using all sorts of acoustic sources to do so. Judy Dunaway, who, funnily enough, also uses balloons as her main instrument, excels at that too. I still find the computer to be an amazing tool but, as I said, what really matters to me is the outcome. In a way that is why the gas horns turned into a big part of EVOL over time, and I'm pretty sure we'll do something like that again in the future. I got into bat calls because they share some interesting dynamics with the kind of algorithms we use in EVOL, somewhat repetitive but really complex and unpredictable patterns. It's not just bats though: nature is full of things like that. A few years ago Joe Gilmore and myself kept contacting marine biology researchers to get high quality recordings of dolphin click trains, which sound like the most brutal synthesis ever, but most of them didn't really get it.

Editor's note: Last year our peers at Artengine approached us about setting up a 'critical blogging residency' to promote arts writing related to the Ottawa-Gatineau area on the web. While we put out a call, received many applicants and selected a candidate for the position but—due to unforeseen circumstances—this individual was unable to complete their writing residency. We are still excited about this idea, and we are going to give it another try. The below text is a slightly edited version of an announcement made by Art Engine director Ryan Stec earlier this week.

In our continuing effort to cultivate new perspectives on the media arts landscape, Vague Terrain (Toronto) and Artengine (Ottawa) open the call for the 2011 Critical Blogging Residency. This residency is for an emerging critic or cultural journalist from the Ottawa-Gatineau area, who will pen a monthly cross-post for the Vague Terrain and Artengine blogs.

Conceived as a creative space for expression and research into culture and technology the content and direction will be developed in partnership with the editors of both publications. The resident will also travel to Montréal for the 2011 Elektra Festival to post reviews and more from one of North America's premiere digital culture events. The resident will also receive critical feedback and professional development through the Articulation series at The Ottawa Art Gallery.

Applicants must be based in the Ottawa-Gatineau area, and are requested to send a resume and letter of introduction. The letter of introduction can describe your interest in the electronic and media arts, what you would bring to the respective online publications or your involvement in previous online projects. Applicants must also submit at least two links to writings published online.

The successful applicant will receive a $1,200.00 stipend; one trip (Ottawa-Montreal) including travel, accomodation and per diem during the festival; and one festival pass to all Elektra events. The resident will also receive workshops from the Ottawa Art Gallery during their 2012 critical writing series Articulation.

Applicants must be available for travel to Montréal for the Elektra Festival in early May, 2011.

Please submit letters and CV in PDF form to operations@artengine.ca. The deadline for submission is Friday March 4th, 2011. The successful applicant will be notified by March 29th, 2011. For questions or further information please contact Ryan Stec at Artengine.

About Artengine

Artengine is non-profit artist-run center that foster democratic and innovative approach to creative expression with technology. Based in Ottawa-Gatineau, Artengine runs a modular media and electronics laboratory, produces the biennial Electric Fields festival and operates an artist-run server providing on-line tools to artists and cultural organizations.

Clothes and computers now seem to live in symbiosis. Artists, designers and engineers are working together and through the usage of electronics are expanding our senses and enhancing our bodies.

The idea of a computer embedded in our clothes brings interesting, new and fresh possibilities. Clothes have started to communicate with the surrounding environment and to feed related interactive processes. As personal electronic devices have become adapted to be worn as jewelry or accessories, the desire to integrate them into fabric and material seems natural. Many authors point that portable electronic devices are being fully integrated into items of clothing, creating a ‘body area network’ (BAN) that can interact with the wearer and the environment1.

The recent miniaturization of electronics and the development of sensor technologies have allowed new forms of interaction such as those discussed above. It is increasingly the case that computers are more integrated in everyday objects such as furniture and clothes. They are improving the capability of communication with humans and the environment and imitating our senses and modes of perception.

Within this emerging field, clothes are useful not only to protect us from the weather or as a cultural expression, they interact with the environment and to the user. Clothes are becoming a key interface for graphic and kinetic expression and conforming to our moods and feelings – they become intelligent.

The selected works presented in this issue of Vague Terrain show how artists, designers and engineers are creating interactivity within clothes and expanded our conception of the body. The debate surrounding smart textiles have generated opinions, questions and more important for us here, wearable prototypes.

Vague Terrain 18: (Re)purposed Clothes focuses on projects that aim to change the original purpose of a wearable piece, adding new functions or even augmenting the existing ones and demonstrate how technology can expand the definition of fashion as wearable art. These works deal with privacy, ecology, communication, emotion and health – reflecting a range of human interests through clothing. Each contribution is accompanied by several quotations culled from dialogue between the designers and myself where they explain their ideas and vision about the present and future of wearable computing. This issue includes work by:

Adam Harvey
Alexander Reeder
Biodevices
DADAgear
Elena Corchero
Francesca Lazavecchia
Joanna Berzowska
Soomi Park

Ricardo O’Nascimento, Rotterdam
January 2011

(1). Chen, M. : Body Area Networks: A Survey, ACM/Springer Mobile Networks and Applications (MONET), 2010, DOI: 10.1007/s11036-010-0260-8 .

[Steve Ounanian / The Unknown (or 20+ Questions to Divine the Future)]

A publication that is quite new on (our) radar here at Vague Terrain is or-bits.com, an "an ongoing curatorial project, a platform [for] displaying contemporary arts and a trigger for the production of new works". It goes without say that this mandate is quite close to our hearts. The project features thematic examinations of topics like 'on-looking', 'simplicity' and 'superposition' and also hosts a relatively active (and eclectic!) blog. The most recent instalment is dedicated to 'acceleration' and features work by Ayo & Oni Oshodi, Benedict Drew Maarten, Vanden Eynde, Rosa Menkman, Steve Ounanian, Maria Domenica Rapicavoli, Damien Roach and Amanda Wasielewski. An excerpt from Marialaura Ghidini's forward for the collection of work:
In the multifarious timescape of the Wink of an Eye, acceleration is a pretext for presenting past, present and future in the form of various, but separate and fixed, speeds. However, in real life, not only do past and future coexist in the present moment, they also merge with it in an unquantifiable system of relations. The impossibility of distinguishing or measuring these relations originates from the fact that the present moment is deeply rooted in our consciousness of time, and thus the 'speed of being'.

Cruise on over and explore what appears to be a very promising platform.

[Performance and Identity: Seminar with artist Martha Wilson and curator Peter Dykhuis / January 20, 2011 / photo: Caroline Boileau, Galerie Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery]

The condition that we live in is an absurd place and there is no way to resolve it so you do have to laugh otherwise you go nuts.

The inestimable Martha Wilson (artist and founder of Franklin Furnace Archive Inc. in New York) visited Montreal recently for two talks in conjunction with her retrospective at the Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery. Staging the Self chronicles Wilson's career as a feminist performance artist - from early work before an audience of one (a Pentax camera) to later appearances satirizing first ladies such as Barbara Bush and Tipper Gore. These complex explorations of identity politics were displayed in the gallery in tandem with Wilson's other accomplishments as the founder and driving administrative force behind the avant-garde activities of Franklin Furnace that opened in 1976. From its inception, this time-based performance space and artists' book archive supported freedom of expression for artists who challenged mainstream cultural values. The desire for “Making the world safe for avant-garde art” took many forms over the years, and in 1997 migrated onto the web. The retrospective held much of interest in terms of shifts across media, from black and white film to magazine pages to video and webcasts. What I'll address here is a narrative arc that formed during the talks, in conversation between the artist, the curator Peter Dykhuis and an audience of a younger generation for whom digital culture is coextensive and the mechanisms of exclusion are less forthright. Wilson's candid reflections acted as cautionary tale: it is often the banality of administrative pressures that threaten spaces of free expression.

The story begins in 1971 during the zenith of Conceptual Art at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. The atmosphere at the time was in Wilson's words: “women don't make it in the art world, what are you making this stuff for? In other words, why are you doing this? This is worthless.” Wilson explored the limits of her expression in videos such as Cauterization in which she immolates an effigy of herself. Works like this found a limited audience at the time, with no critical response and then, as Wilson observed candidly, “sat under the bed.” In 1975, Lucy Lippard published Wilson's work in Ms. Magazine, and this attention helped her to “understand that what I was doing was art and that there were other women around the world who were doing similar stuff.” Lippards' later inclusion of Wilson in the Circa 7500 exhibition introduced her to artists such as Jacki Apple, Rita Myers and Jackie Winsor. She decided to move to New York to talk to them.

When Wilson experienced a familiar dismissive attitude in New York galleries, she took a job at the art book publishers, Harry N. Abrams Inc. where she honed her administrative skills and learned to run a business. The ensuing New York State unemployment funds (and the sweat-equity from half the house she left in Halifax) provided the first year operating budget for the nascent Franklin Furnace. If the mainstream attitude was exclusionary, Wilson wondered, “why not collaborate with your friends and have fun?” And they did, collecting works that combined text and image from the likes of Alison Knowels, Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger and presenting performances or readings alongside - “In the 70s we were allowed to do whatever we damn well pleased and we were even given money from the NEA [National Endowment of the Arts] to do it.”

[Tour of the exhibition with Martha Wilson during the opening reception / January 19th, 2011 / photo: Caroline Boileau, Galerie Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery]

Living and working in the gallery space, Wilson's considered her role as administrator as a creative practice, “since we have to use our wits and come up with new answers everyday and remain flexible and adaptable to the circumstances as they change us which is what you do as an artist.” But by 1981, Wilson “figured out I had to move out of Franklin Furnace or I was going to die.” When Ronald Regan was elected president in 1980, Wilson says, “we didn't quite get it in the beginning, but he, through his henchman the chair of the NEA Frank Hodsoll was intent on dismantling support for the individual artist so that we the individual artist would shut up and not be a cultural influence. First to go was the critics' fellowships right away, but we still didn't know what was going on.” The Culture Wars were impending. Franklin Furnace experienced overt backlash from the Christian Right to programming such as Carnival Knowledge in 1984, featuring Annie Sprinkle, the event asked us to go beyond reactionary attitudes in order to see porn stars as wives, mothers and daughters. But it was in 1990 that dubious tactics, such as closure by the New York City Fire Department and an audit by the IRS following Karen Finlay's 1990 show, A Woman's Life Isn't Worth Much led to an impoverished “exile” and reinvention as an online presence as temporary autonomous zone.

While this move online may seem banal in the era of Web 2.0, Wilson made this choice before Google emerged as the global default search engine. The “dot com bubble” was at its peak, fueled by individual innovation more nimble than multinational business models. At the time, the Internet embodied Donna Haroway's cyborg feminism - a space where the body and machine are hybrid, connecting to others through non-hierarchical distributed networks - as critique of capitalist power structures. In Wilson's words the story continues: “Franklin Furnace went virtual on February 1st 1997 in the wake of the Culture Wars. We felt we wanted to give artists freedom of expression, the same freedom they had had in the loft in the 70s we wanted to give them now in the 1990s… the technology was chunky, not very good, BUT the audience interestingly was way bigger than the people sitting on hard folding chairs in the basement because there were 75 people on the hard folding chairs and there were 700 people on the internet. It's such a ridiculously small number today, but for us at that time we were just thrilled, over the moon, plus you can tell who's in the audience. You can do an analysis of who's watching you and a lot of them were .govs. So the government was still looking. And a lot of them were from way far away - New Zealand and Vietnam and places where you know they could never get their asses into the Franklin Furnace anyway so for as much as we didn't, I mean it is like performing to a black hole… you don't know who's out there but on the other hand of that we thought we're developing a new audience, and we don't have any idea of who they are - this is great we're getting avant-garde art out to the planet. It was a pretty exciting revelation.”

Wilson's journey seems exponential from performing solo for the eye of her Pentax, to gathering together a group of friends, to the black hole of a global audience of early adopters. But the first webcast company they partnered with went bankrupt and today she tempers this early enthusiasm with the caveat, “the internet was the free zone at the time…” At the time. The implication being that despite a continued discourse of freedom of expression and community on the web, Wilson believes something has changed. Perhaps we should question our assumptions of net neutrality as the Internet becomes a platform for mass-media convergence. Internet use is now ubiquitous and private interests, such as Facebook, Twitter and Google seek to monetize, what administrative pressures may loom on the horizon for non-profit, public organizations?

In Canada, the current CRTC hearings on wholesale Usage Based Billing (UBB) come to mind. This proposal ostensibly counteracts network congestion (peer-to-peer file sharing and video streaming are identified as culprits). Michael Geist, Canada Research Chair of Internet and E-commerce Law at the University of Ottawa, alongside other advocacy groups, has argued the UBB proposal benefits Bell Canada, the major telecom provider, at the expense of user access. Possibilities for abuse include overcharging for bandwidth or limiting network access. This means that the economic barriers to entry are higher both for individuals and the organizations whose services provide web-based content. These measures would have an impact upon the operating budgets of public organizations such as most Canadian libraries, museums and archives. Like their American counterpart Franklin Furnace, they shifted their content to the web over the last ten years, through large investments of public money.

[Martha Wilson / Cauterization, Video stills (1974) / Courtesy of: ICI, New York]

I can't help but think again of Wilson's 1974 video, Cauterization. We created doubles of ourselves and for a moment entry points were left open. How insidious and dull that, at this time, the enemy of freedom of expression would be an increase to the monthly telecom bill.

For more information on the CRTC UBB hearings please see this post by Michael Geist and to learn more about the campaign against it you can visit stopthemeter.ca.

The author would like to thank Martha Wilson, David Tomas, Marina Polosa and Caroline Boileau, for their help with this post.

Richard Sumner: Often when we meet people for the first time, some physical characteristic strikes us. Now what is the first thing you notice in a person?

Bunny Watson: Whether the person is male or female.

I followed Watson's debut on Jeopardy about as much as the next guy - the story was unavoidable there for awhile. I read Richard Powers' essay on the pre-paywall version of the New York Times, watched the flashy documentary about Flashy designer Josh Davis, responsible for the avatar seen on screen.

I assumed like others that the AI software was named for Thomas Watson, IBM's founder, or perhaps even for the sidekicks to Alexander Graham Bell or Sherlock Holmes. (Though each of the latter options seemed a mismatch.)

Having finally watched the 1957 film Desk Set, starring Hepburn and Tracy, I think I have found Watson's true origins – in Hepburn's character Bunny Watson.

In the film (adapted from a play), Watson has just returned from a demonstration of the new IBM Electronic Brain (announced by Thomas J. Watson?), to find that her office at a large national television network has been occupied by an IBM "methods engineer" named Richard Sumner (played by Spencer Tracy.) 1

Sumner, who in addition to being a management science expert is an MIT-trained computer engineer, is engaged in a month-long project of studying Watson's office and staff – the Reference Section of the company. Watson and the three women she supervises are the human Google for the company – their phones constantly ring with obscure questions - some of which are so familiar to the women that they can answer without effort, others of which require access to files and books.

Sumner's job, known to us and only suspected and feared by the other main characters, is to design a computer installation for the office. As the company wants some big publicity for this event, Sumner is to keep his mission a secret, leading to greater suspicion on the part of Watson and her team of an impending disaster – would a computer replace their labor?

The film's narrative is anchored by two significant tests. At the beginning, Watson is tested by Sumner, and determined to be a superb computing agent. She is able to count, tabulate, store and recall with uncanny precision, and using counter-rational or supra-rational algorithms. Later, during the story's second big test, the finally installed computer fields some initial queries in its position as reference librarian, and fails.

EMERAC fails because of poor context awareness, something that the mere typist assigned to inputting data doesn't know to compensate for. In the end, EMERAC is only successful - and therefore of value to humanity - when operated by Watson herself, who is able to enter in the right information to makeup for the computer's poor contextual knowledge.

So the conclusion takes us to a happy marriage of computer and operator, in which both are necessary to keeping things running smoothly and efficiently, in the context of a growing world of "big data." (The final problem, and the one we see EMERAC answer correctly, is the question "What is the weight of the Earth?")

EMERAC is thus more like Wolfram Alpha than the contemporary Watson. The new Watson, named for an operator rather than for a computer, is presented to television viewers as an operator of the Jeopardy interface. (The game is, after all, a button-pushing contest.)

In the new Watson, a man - at least in popular understanding - has replaced a woman at the switch. But perhaps a new configuration of labor has emerged anyway. Consider the change from the former, in which Sumner engineers and maintains the machine in real time, while Bunny operates it, to the newer version, in which multiple sites across multiple temporalities are responsible for the resulting computing event.

Alex Trebeck is in the role of the telephone from Desk Set, merely passing along the queries originating from elsewhere. The Watson AI, dressed in Davis' cartoony dataviz rather than Charles LeMaire's fashions, fields the questions and answers them as a sort of merged operator and machine. Behind the scenes and long before the event, a small army of researchers programmed the AI and fed it data. In Desk Set, this latter job is also visible, through the work of Bunny's staff, who help deliver all the content for the machine to digest.

So with the Jeopardy Watson stunt, we see primarily two changes – a person where a phone used to be, and a machine where there used to be a machine-plus-operator. The sum total of laborers has remain unchanged, though we are less one woman, and plus one man. This cybernetic brain needs no operator, but it does need a user – and it certainly needs an audience.

(1) The whole story takes place at Rockefeller Center and bears many stylistic resemblances to the current NBC sitcom 30 Rock – including a page named Kenneth.

This post was originally published on Critical Commons.

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Our eighth VT Audio Edition has been released! Contributed by the Portgual-based Diana Combo (aka Eosin), "Hum" is a live recording of a performance at Sala EL OFF in Barcelona. Diana describes her performance MO:Eosin employs pre-recorded vinyl noises and loops to create time sequences for use in live situations while mixing records with DJ techniques. This gives way to improvisation, choosing the sounds to mix in the moment of the performance and constructing a real-time layer that blends to the one made of prerecorded sounds.

Combo's performance is a spartan creeper that thoroughly explores a minimal sonic palette while elegantly building and diminishing in intensity. Jump through to the release page for more info and a download link.

A quick update: We are busy finalizing the design and layout for our next issue, entitled "The Schematic as Score" which is guest curated by the sound artist Derek Holzer (of Tone Wheels and SoundTransit.nl fame). Having been immersed in the content for the last several days, I can say with full confidence that the body of work Derek has assembled is a really interesting selection of sound objects and performance projects that is quite unlike anything we've featured in the journal before. Pictured above is an image from Derek's SoundBoxes project, which was just featured in a hands-on workshop context at the Share Conference in Belgrade. Hopefully by this time next week, the issue will be live – so hold tight!

The New Flesh: Experiments in audio video performance exceeding all reason! Avant garde video art in the omega age.

Featuring live performances by: Botborg (Germany / Australia), Nohista (France), Rybn (France), Rko (France), Skeeter (Canada), Mandelbrut (Canada), The Nod (Canada) and Tasman Richardson (Canada)

Cathode ray tube hacking, circuit bending, feedback, synthesis, live jawa cut ups, compression glitch, and other screaming beautiful oddities that defy documentation. Video that demands your presence, live, in person, and in the flesh.

Thursday May 12th, $10.
Doors open 8:30pm, performance begins 9pm – ends at midnight
The Revue Cinema, 400 Roncesvalles Avenue, Toronto
Details available at: tasmanrichardson.com

Schematic as Score: Uses and Abuses of the (In)Deterministic Possibilities of Sound Technology

[Moritz Ellerich / Fabelphonetikum (rhizome schematic)]

'The only true wisdom lives far from mankind, out in the great loneliness, and it can be reached only through suffering. Privation and suffering alone can open the mind of a man to all that is hidden to others.' – Inuit shaman Najagneq, recorded by Knud Rasmussen1

'If you want to build a modular, my advice is not to do it if you want to have any friends, it takes too much time.' – Jessica Rylan2

Over the past few years, a strong reaction against the sterile world of laptop sound and video has inspired a new interest in analog processes, or "hands dirty" art in the words of practitioner John Richards3. With this renewed analog interest comes a fresh exploration of the pioneers of the electronic arts during the pre-digital era of the 1960s and 1970s. Artists and inventors such as Nam June Paik, Steina & Woody Vasulka, Don Buchla, Serge Tcherepnin, Dan Sandin and David Tudor all constructed their own unique instruments long before similar tools became commercially available or freely downloadable4– often through a long, rigorous process of self-education in electronics.

John Cage once quipped that Serge Tcherepnin's synthesizer system was "the best musical composition that Serge had ever made"5, and it is precisely Cage's reformulation of the concert score from a list of deterministic note values to a set of indeterministic possibilities that allowed the blurring of lines between instrument-builder and music composer that followed.

[John Cage's Fontana Mix (1958) uses a series of transparencies to generate a unique score each time it is performed]

David Tudor in particular has recently become the focus of intense interest, largely through the work of "hardware hacker" Nicolas Collins6. Tudor's transformation from John Cage's concert pianist to an electronic performer and autodidact engineer in his own right is archetypal for the contemporary media artist, who also must oscillate between the creative and the learning processes. His work "Rainforest" also stands out as an exemplary model of the collaborative process within a technically defined, yet socially open system. I will elaborate on this in my section of the current issue.

I consider it axiomatic that, for any art work to be considered experimental, the possibility of failure must be built into its process. I am not referring to the aestheticized, satisfying glitches and crackles valorized by Kim Cascone7, but to the lack of satisfaction produced by a misguided or misstepped procedure in the experiment, whether colossal or banal. These are not errors to be sought out, sampled and celebrated, but the flat-on-your-ass gaffs and embarrassments that would trouble the sleep of all but the most Zen of musicians or composers.

The presence of failure in a musical system represents feedback in the negative, a tipping point into anti-climax, irrelevance, the commonplace, the cliche or even unintended silence. Many artists try to factor out true, catastrophic failure by scripting, scoring, sequencing or programming their work into as many predictable, risk-free quanta as possible ahead of time. (Spacebar, please.) But this unwelcome presence also guarantees the vitality of that hotly-contested territory – the live electronic music performance.

Another central argument of my research is that, in creating electronic music instruments, the builder is in fact simultaneously acting as post-Cagean composer by simultaneously constructing a highly restrictive collection of limitations and an indeterministic set of performance possibilities, each full of as much potential and risk as the builder/composer wishes to allow the performer.

This idea can easily be demonstrated in electronic dance music, where the internal workings of the Roland 808 drum machine and 909 bass generator have cast in stone the aesthetic conventions of that genre. Similarly, the Ableton Live software allows first-time users to easily create risk-free music from any audio sample they like, so long as that music conforms to the rasterized structure of German Minimal Techno. And the largest knob on the popular microKORG synthesizer presents the user with a choice of 8 programs, spanning the range from Trance to HipHop as if all other kinds of music could easily be distilled from them.

The resulting compositions from the most "easy" and "simple" software tools are often nothing more than "digital folk"8 art – the endless and endlessly similar permutations which are possible merely from the tweaking of a few basic presets. Perhaps the artistic tragedy of the digital age lies in the social and economic pressure to immediately release "results" which barely get beyond this initiatory phase.

[David Tudor's 'self-playing' performance patch9 for Untitled(Homage to Toshi Ichiyanagi) (1972)]

The artists selected for this issue of Vague Terrain approach this situation from the opposite angle. Often operating at the extreme edges of the DIY electronics scene (where most, after all, still want to build a "normal" drum machine or keyboard synth), their work represents some of the most radical and idiosyncratic artistic approaches to electronic circuitry of the moment. Their compositions take the form of systems which provide a map of what is possible, but lack a prescribed route on how to get there. The discovery—and the risk—is left to the moment of the performance.

Some of these artists, such as Peter Blasser or Jessica Rylan, are skilled electronics engineers, well-versed in the mathematical mysteries of the transistor and the integrated circuit. Where Blasser strives for a personal mythology and original iconography to represent his systems, Rylan evokes a logical and intellectual relationship with the instruments she creates in constant tension with an emotional and intuitive one.

The circuits employed by Lesley Flanigan, on the other hand, are deceptively simple. Lifted almost directly from the datasheet of the LM386 1/2 Watt audio amplifier, her schematic/score only hints at the range of possibilities within the beautiful speaker-feedback systems she constructs with it.

Even more deceptive are the systems soldered together live by the Loud Objects; Tristan Perich, Kunal Gupta and Katie Shima. Initially confronted with the overhead-projection of several anonymous black chips, the audience must wait for the process of connections which activates the circuit and awakens the sound within it to reach completion before their eyes.

The meticulously detailed "self-playing" chaotic synthesis patches of Jason R. Butcher likewise concern themselves with an interconnection of discrete operators in a complex network. In this case, the ready-made system of the Buchla 200 analog modular synthesizer provides Butcher an almost boundless territory to explore.

A young, autodidact instrument builder, Moritz Ellerich has chosen the phonemes of the spoken German language as core elements for his system. His Fabelphonetikum prototypes a rigorous approach towards manual and performative speech synthesis using a bare minimum of signal sources.

While speech between one person and another has concrete features which can be analyzed and modeled, speech between the living and the dead remains far more nebulous. Artistically building on the Electronic Voice Phenomenon research of Dr. Konstantīns Raudive10, Martin Howse sets up delicate electronic systems in "charged" locations. These systems can involve radio transmitters and receivers, noise generators, various recording devices, geiger counters, lasers and photo-receivers, all sensitive to the slightest disturbance in the hopes of receiving some signal from "the other side".

The Syncronator project, by video artist Bas van Koolwijk and sound artist Geert Jan Prins, also investigates a breakthough communication between the realms of the analog audio and video signals. For them, the ability to seamlessly transmit a signal between the two domains opens up a vast range of live performance possibilities.

And finally, I concern myself with communication through the use of David Tudor's classic schematic-score, "Rainforest". Here, the greatest possibility of failure ended up not in the technical realization of Tudor's drawings, but in the communication between the performers playing that system and from them to the audience assembled in the space to listen.

In every case, each artist or group was invited to submit a schematic or other graphical representation of their chosen composition system alongside audiovisual documentation of that system at work. Each instance of these compositions is not definitive, but only represents the relationship of that system to the performer under a certain set of circumstances. Future performances could and should evolve in an altogether different manner.

I would like to thank Greg J. Smith, Neil Wiernik and Corina MacDonald of Vague Terrain for this opportunity to guest-curate an issue and put my entirely-too-complex thoughts on this subject into some coherent form. I would also like to thank the invited artists for opening up their practice to scrutiny, particularly those who created original works for this survey. I welcome comments and correspondence, and look forward to future discussions expanding the topic.

Derek Holzer, Berlin
April 2011

Notes:

(1) Rasmussen, Knud (1927). Across Arctic America: Narrative of the Fifth Thule Expedition.
(2) Rylan, Jessica (2004). "IRFP Presents: Modular Synthesizer".
(3) Collins, Nicolas (2009). Handmade Electronic Music: The Art of Hardware Hacking. New York: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-99873-4.
(4) Vasulka, Woody ed. (1992). Eigenwelt der Apparate-Welt: Pioneers of Electronic Art. Linz: Ars Electronica.
(5) Prema, Krsna (2008). "How I Became a Monk".
(6) Collins, Nicolas ed. (2004). Leonardo Music Journal 14.
(7) Cascone, Kim (2002). "The Aesthetics of Failure: "Post-Digital" Tendencies in Contemporary Computer Music".
(8) Schultz, Pit (2003). "Computer Age is Coming into Age". Read_me 2.3, ed. Goriunova, Olga and Shulgin, Alexei. Helsinki: NIFCA, Lume, m-cult. ISBN 951–8955–74–3.
(9) Image source: Kuivila, Ron (2004). "Open Sources: Words, Circuits and the Notation-Realization Relation in the Music of David Tudor", Leonardo Music Journal 14 pp 17-23.
(10) Raudive, Konstantīns (1971). Breakthrough, an Amazing Experiment in Electronic Communication with the Dead. London: Colin Smythe, Ltd. ISBN 0900675543

Editor's note: The following post is by Jaenine Parkinson, the 2011 Artengine/Vague Terrain critical blogging resident. We'll be introducing Jaenine formally soon, the following post is a slightly modified version of a review that she wrote for the Artengine blog a few weeks ago. We'll be hearing more from Jaenine soon, as she is headed to the Elektra festival in Montreal this week.

Objet Indirect Object is a pan-institution, pan-media project concerned with analogue mechanisms in media art. Curated by Steven Loft, and Marie-Hélène Leblanc the project culminated with a series of events and exhibitions begining on 23 March. For me, the highlight was Catherine Béchard and Sabin Hudon’s Free-Fall of Possibilities on display until 23 April at Axené07 / Daïmön in Gatineau, Quebec.

Whilst enthusiastically trying to describe this work to friends, I have discovered that Free-Fall of Possibilities is actually quite tricky to put into words. “Imagine choreographed fishing rods,” I say waving my hands around, “dancing ceremoniously with cut-glass dishes and vases.” Puzzled looks abound. Luckily, in this format I can show you some pictures, both moving and still. You’ll see about eight fishing rods all standing upright in a circle around huddle of glassware. They are those familiar type of colored, cut-glass collectables that your Grandma keeps in the china cabinet for dusting. The fishing rods dip and rise, in orchestrated formations, clinking small vibrating weights against the sides of the glass vessels. The initial soft buzz you hear of their motorized movement is interrupted by the staccato, bell-like ring of the glass when it is struck.

Anyone walking into the room will trip the motion sensor that begins the dance of the fishing rods. Despite the fact that the artists/curators state that this work is about “human movement within space and time”, I really think human observers are superfluous to the whole event. The simple trigger-responsiveness is more about the self-preservation of delicate moving parts than any engagement with the audience. It’s not the human actors who are important here. Actually–to anthropomorphize these little robots–to me they seem introverted; huddled together in a circle, oblivious or dismissive of intrusive onlookers as they carry out a private ritual. If you leave they will just carry on. Sure, we could apply a theatrical reading (à la Fried) over this work but it is not useful. This work is about watching something beautiful and surprising unfold in front of you, not self-consious awareness of oneself existing in the same space and time as the work.

It is more useful to see Béchard and Hudon’s work as a digital update on the kinetic sculptures of Tinguely or Lye. The computer has enabled them to arrange lengthy sequences of movement that range from elaborate flourishes to quiet modulation. This is choreographed sculpture. This is dance without human bodies. This is performance art on demand. Here computer controlled machines act as tireless, obedient proxies for fallible human bodies.

Also, just like kinetic art of the sixties, Free-Fall of Possibilities could easily be seen as an autonomous musical instrument as well as a performative device. The whole contraption is geared up to produce sound: the soft hum of the fishing rod motors vibrating against the wooden floors, the buzz as they strain to lift and lower and the sharp ring as the small vibrating weight hits a glass rim. It’s like an elaborate music box, complete with mechanized ballerinas. It is as if the ghost inside the machine had a previous life as a stage director. It is this autonomy that is captivating.

Mulling over this work further, I think to myself, there must be some sort of male/female dynamic going on. I’m sure I’m not reading too much into it…the phallus and the vessel…need I say more. Could it really be a coincidence that this work was made by a male and female in collaboration? The artists/curators claim the work is a metaphore for the “little deaths” we mourn in our lives. La petite morte? Surely the reference didn’t escape them? The dance definitely has the feel of a mating ritual. Even the everyday materials used are so obviously gendered – the cut glass punch bowl: an icon of newly-wed domestic bliss, the fishing-rod: a classic symbol of the masculine escape from the domestic into nature.

This is an integration of the domestic and the digital. The vibrating baits hanging from the fishing rods are actually components harvested from cellphones. The glassware sits nestled in a nest of network cables. As an analogue extension of the electronic or a digital extension of kinetic sculpture Free-Fall of Possibilities fits perfectly with the theme of Objet Indirect Object. Although, is there really anything left that could fall outside of this hybrid category? Computers are so integral to our work that it is rare to find artworks these days that have escaped their touch.

'What is the relationship between man and machine? Is open source a sustainable way to run a creative society? Can digital creations have the subtlety we know in the natural world? These are the issues addressed by Scott Draves work; he creates art by writing software that runs an internet distributed supercomputer consisting of 450,000 computers and people, creating images as a form of artificial life, each with its own genome, generated by thousands of numbers that define how it looks and moves. The first versions of this algorithm date from 1992.'

Scott Draves: Pioneer of Generative Art
Devotion Gallery
54 Maujer St at Lorimer. L to Lorimer, G to Metropolita
May 13th – June 5th, 2011
Opening: Friday, May 13, 7pm – 10pm
More info at areyoudevoted.com/exhibitions

Toronto hosted its first Maker Faire event last weekend and Ryan Varga was on the scene to document the proceedings. Note the multiple appearances and sound bites from VT 12: Device Art guest curator (and our pal!) Rob Cruickshank.

Editor's Note: Artengine and Vague Terrain are pleased to announce Jaenine Parkinson as our new Critical Blogging Resident. Jaenine will start her year long residence with Artengine and Vague Terrain with a trip to the cutting edge Elektra Festival in Montréal. Over the course of the year Jaenine will be using the Artengine and Vague Terrain blogs as creative spaces for critical discourse around the media arts and creative technological expression.

Jaenine is a writer and curator from New Zealand. Prior to moving to Ottawa in January, she was the Director of an experimental art project space in the lower South Island of New Zealand. Her art history masters thesis examined interactivity in digital art and became the basis of an undergraduate university course she taught at the University of Auckland. If you want to get in touch please feel free to email her at critical@artengine.ca.

The Elektra 12 festival, presented in Montreal from 4 to 8 May 2011, followed a similar pattern to previous years. During the day was the “international marketplace”: a series of short presentations by artists and administrative types talking about their work. In the late afternoon were openings of exhibitions dotted around town. Then from 9pm there were performances at the theatre Usine C. I want to unpack the screen-based AV performances in a later post, but for now I am going to focus on two works that perform beyond the projecton screen and the speaker.

The best thing that Elektra had to offer was Kurt Hentschlager’s FEED—and they know it. It ran almost every night, sometimes twice in one night, and has been shown at five previous Elektra festivals. It is a work in two halves and the second half completely overshadows the first. So much so that until I came to write this I had almost forgotten about the first part: a projection of a featureless computer generated male body floating and replicating in a black void. Except for serving as a warning of how we might soon feel, I saw no real connection between this projection and what followed. And what followed was awesome.

I will never capture the experience in words. Every person I spoke to had a different impression. Before going in we all had to sign waiver forms acknowledging that we had read the warnings about how overwhelming the experience could be. No wonder the projection was so forgettable, we were all sitting there waiting for the pandemonium to begin. It was well worth the wait.

Theatrical fog flooded the room. I immediately began to assume that we are going to see something akin to a 1960‘s Expanded Cinema event, maybe with lasers if we were lucky. But the fog got so thick that the possibility of seeing anything was quickly ruled out. I couldn’t see my hand when it was right in front of my face nor could I tell if my eyes were open or closed. A strobe started up with accompanying pulsating sounds, and then the magic began. Rainbow colored vortexes and shimmering diagonal grids appeared, not in-front but inside my eyes. It was like an sober psychedelic experience. The scientists call these visions phosphenes. They are formed between the retina, as it is bombarded by light, and the visual cortex, as it strains to see something in the fog. You can approximate the FEED experience by pressing on your eyes or, of course, by taking hallucinogenics. Although it is more like the latter because you can always stop pressing your eyes at any moment and release yourself from the sensation. You can’t escape Feed. It is engulfing and can become quite claustrophobic.

[Typical phosphene forms]

At a few stages I had the urge to get up and move around, to feel untethered from three dimensional space like the faceless man in the prelude. Undoubtedly, that would be a heath and safety disaster. The bureaucratic mindset that had us signing liability release forms wouldn’t want us crashing into, vomiting over, or passing out on each other.

When the strobes began I was quite relaxed; the rhythm created through light and sound was temperate. With hindsight, Hentschlager was just easing us into it. The intensity heightened. He is obviously aware of, and manipulating, a correlation between the frequencies he could generate and naturally occurring frequencies in the human body like heart beats and brain waves. Hentschalger was playing our senses like they were dials on a synthesizer.

Previous discussions of FEED, which has been shown around the world, talk about it as fusing the human and machine providing a vision of our cyborg future. I can’t help but channel Lev Manovich and Donna Harraway here and argue that Feed also provides a vision of our cyborg past and present. Renaissance perspectival machines harnessed and manipulated the properties of binocular vision. Cinema (and its various Victorian fairground precursors) works because our brains see movement when shown rapidly succeeding images. To be quite literal about it, all technology is just that – an extension and enhancement of human capabilities. We have been and always will be cyborgs.

Another Elektra work that operates on sensory deprivation and manipulation was Just Noticeable Difference (JND) by Chris Slater. Only one person can experience it at a time and I was one of the fortunate few. You crawl into a pitch black cube and lie down, as instructed, on your back. In the beginning I couldn’t work out if the faint buzzing in my ears was just tinnitus, induced by the night’s performances, or the work. I waited patiently. Then my stomach grumbled – or at least it felt like it did. Then my foot began to twitch and my breathing became bronchial. In sensory deprivation chambers it is common to become more aware of the sounds and movements of your body, so I wasn’t sure of the origin of these sensations.

Although, quickly the just noticeable difference became a very noticeable difference. I almost screamed. There was a tapping on my shoulder from underneath me and the ceiling of the space lit up with flashes of red. The space began to feel more like a coffin. Then came the thunder and lightning – a deep rumble with flashes of light from above. As the storm subsided I was turned into a human drum. The floor had morphed into something like a robotic massage chair switched to the ‘karate chop’ setting. The effect was no longer subtle. In the end it was more like being on a carnival ride.

My comparison with fairground experiences is not flippant. Fairgrounds and amusement parks were the sites where modern technologies of grand scale and spectacle were made available for the public to physically experience. They were theaters of machines; both generating technological wonders and reflecting the pervasive techno-culture. Their decline has left a gap. Where do we go now experience technologies beyond the cinematic? Where do we go to confront, externalize, escape and make sense of our media dominated habitat? I am not the first to suggest that contemporary art, museums, international art biennials and fairs have slipped into this terrain and become increasingly spectacular.

In the face of this, contemporary art criticism is scathing of the spectacular. Any display of impressive and enjoyable technology is seen as dangerous, homogenizing, distracting, isolating and pacifying. Critics invoke Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle and Baudrillard’s Simulacrum and Simulation to express a suspicion of sensational affects. Any artwork using spectacular means and any viewer enjoying it are framed as critically unaware, or worse still complicit.

I am weary of criticism that assumes I and other viewers are easy dupes. Just because we sit passively, willingly absorbing, does not mean that our minds are not active. As Jacques Rancière argues “spectatorship is not a passivity that must be turned into activity. It is our normal situation. We learn and teach, we act and know, as spectators who link what they see with what they have seen and told, done and dreamed.” Through our interpretations we all actively construct meaning and knowledge. Then by communication with others we can transform the way a work of art is seen. Feed and JND definitely give us plenty to interpret. They offer experiences that we couldn’t otherwise know; an aestheticisation of senses and modes of perception beyond the dominant modes.

However, these works cannot elude the valid criticisms that, despite their content, spectacular works are in themselves spectacles of capital investment. They require a luxury of time, resources, funding and space to produce them. In their desirability and marketability they also marginalize less spectacular works, consuming everything from sponsorship to attention. Still highly contested, delving into these works is a roller-coaster ride of highs and lows.

This review was cross-posted to the Artengine blog.

Related Links:

Here is a video that tries to capture Feed – but the camera doesn’t have a retina or visual cortex, so can’t really convey the experience: http://vimeo.com/403872

Texts by Lev Manovich’s can be accessed here: http://manovich.net/articles/

Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto, 1991 is here: http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Haraway/CyborgManifesto.html

Jacques Rancière ‘The Emancipated Spectator’ ArtForum, March, 2007 http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0268/is_7_45/ai_n24354915/

For more on the debate surrounding the spectaclular in contemporary art see: Rethinking Spectacle, 31 March 2007 http://channel.tate.org.uk/channel

[Jean-Baptiste Weckerlin / The Cat Organ from Musiciana, extraits d’ouvrages rare ou bizarre / 1877]

Sampling as a recombinant procedure has an uncertain origin. In the course of the twentieth century it has achieved a central, even dominant position both culturally and technologically; the sample is as necessary for digital technology as it is for celluloid motion pictures—making it an technique of contemporary mediated cultures. However, it is clearly on view in a much older, historical device called the “cat organ” (or katzenkavalier), a “musical instrument” described in Juan Christobal Calvettes’ 1552 book chronicling King Felipe II of Spain’s travels in Europe1. A consideration of this early example of semiotic reassembly offers insight into contemporary ethical questions that could be asked about the use of sampling in digital capitalism. The operation of the cat organ was summarized by French writer and critic Jean-Baptiste Weckerlin in his 1877 book Musiciana, extraits d’ouvrages rare ou bizarre (Musiciana, descriptions of rare or bizarre inventions):

When the King of Spain, Felipe II was in Brussels in 1549 visiting his brother the Emperor Charles V, each saw the other rejoicing at the sight of a completely singular procession. At the head marched an enormous bull whose horns were burning, between which there was also a small devil. Behind the bull a young boy sewn into a bear skin ride on a horse whose ears and tail were cut off. Then came the archangel Saint Michael in bright clothing, and carrying a balance in his hand.

The most curious was on a chariot that carried the most singular music that can be imagined. It held a bear that played the organ; instead of pipes, there were sixteen cat heads each with its body confined; the tails were sticking out and were held to be played as the strings on a piano, if a key was pressed on the keyboard, the corresponding tail would be pulled hard, and it would produce each time a lamentable meow. The historian Juan Christoval Calvette, noted the cats were arranged properly to produce a succession of notes from the octave… (chromatically, I think)

This abominable orchestra arranged itself inside a theater where monkeys, wolves, deer and other animals danced to the sounds of this infernal music.2

The details of the cat organ present it clearly as an instrument cat lovers might wish was a fictional horror, much like the “mouse organ” on Monty Python’s Flying Circus3. It produces katzenmusic by torturing live animals as a productive means, causing them to mew on demand: literally cat-calls that are not merely cat-calls, but something more—a form of music semiotically reassembled from the distinct voices controlled by the device. As Weckerlin’s description of the procession shows, the cat organ functions symbolically, based on the association of cats with devils and an immaterial, supernatural order where normally antithetical animals come together in a peacable kingdom4. This separation of source from meaning relfects the action of a semiotic process.

To Weckerlin, and contemporary audiences, the horror of this machine lies with the fact that individual animals are significant to the device only in so far as they stand-in for the specific pitch they produce; in effect, they are living samples of abstract musical tones, and it is this transfer that is significant to understanding the device’s relevance to contemporary technology: the cat organ finds its parallel in the software application AutoTune where any voice can be correctly tuned to be perfectly in pitch, transformation of ordinary voices into pure musicality. In arranging live cats so the timbre of their voices would at one and the same time transform them into the various pitches of a musical composition, the cat implicitly employs an understanding of physical reality analogous to contemporary digital sampling and fragmentation. It reflects a specifically digital conception of physicality: the operative procedure is semiotic, the results dependent upon the reorganization of a collection of data samples. The katzenkavalier is thus an early symptom of the digital both conceptually and in approach: sampling, via the fragmentation of physical reality into discrete packets (the individual cats), for semiotic reassembly and manipulation as a new product: (katzen)music.

[Jingle Cats / Meowy Christmas, cover art / 2008]

The cat organ reappears (quite literally) in the 1990s as a pair of Christmas albums by the group Jingle Cats. They were a popular sensation—their first album, Meowy Christmas, was completely sold out at Christmas in 1993, and followed in 1994 with Here Comes Santa Claws, both albums feature music “sung” by cats’ meowing on key. As the “Jingle Cats” website notes5, in a disturbing reflection of the original cat organ’s basis, the music was created using real cats. This was possible because of digital synthesizer technology that could sample actual cat’s mews and then adjust them to be on key, thus allowing the use of real cats in the performance: these albums repeat the semiotic procedure of the cat organ. Both are symptomatic of the ability of digital technology to fragment a continuous physical reality into discrete packets allowing the disassociation from their source, the disassembly into component elements, and their reassembly as only the relevant data. Thus, an autonomous protocol neutrality enables and proceeds without no concern for the physicality of the material translated to digital form.

This neutral protocol so clearly on view in the cat organ is also a machinic one that incorporates the living into the non-living: cats encased in the instrument of their torture-performance is itself distinctly and specifically cybernetic. In this cybernetic dimension is a analogue to the digital transferal (and surrender) of human agency to the automated and digital computer where particular human concerns become data in the reconfiguration of social space to reflect the valorization process central to the financialization of digital capitalism.

Torture is at the foundation of this technical apparatus. The cat organ’s sampling process—where the animals as such become insignificant to its meaning and purpose, but essential to is form—is inherently contained within the foundational procedure of the digital, reflecting the same stripping of physicality from conscious awareness that is essentially the aura of the digital. That there is an ethical concern in relation to this historical infernal device’s use of sampling—the necessary foundation for the digital semiosis—implies a similar ethical dimension and critique may be relatable to the aura of the digital’s occlusion of physicality from consciousness. These ethical questions are emerging, however, not from the manipulation of sampled animal voices, but in the aftermath of the “Housing Bubble” of 2008 where the sampled and semiotically manipulated materials were at once both less tangible (securitized debt) and immanently visible (the human impacts). The dilemma posed by ethical questions about an instrumentality lies with that technologies’ fundamental ambiguity, an element that inheres to its aspirations towards the state of information: to pose an ethical problem for one also opens the other to the same questioning.

Notes:

Calvete de Estrella, Juan Christobal. El Felicisimo Viaje del Muy Alto y Muy Poderoso Principe Don Felipe (Madrid: La Sociedad de Bibliofilos Espanoles, 1930), pp. 73-77.
Weckerlin, Jean-Baptiste. Musiciana, extraits d’ouvrages rare ou bizarre (Paris: Garnier Freres, 1877) p. 349.
Monty Python’s Flying Circus, “Arthur Ewing and His Musical Mice,” Season One, Episode Two.
(4) Bertlestein, Lance. “Journalism, Carnival, and Jubilate Agno” in ELH, vol. 59, no. 2 (Summer, 1992) p. 375.
(5)Jingle Cats website, http://www.jinglecats.com, retrieved 12/01/2010.

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Our ninth VT Audio Edition is live! Contributed by the Ottawa-based Michael North (aka Tex Mackenzie), "A winter into spring walk in the neighborhood" is a live processed mix of field recordings collected over the past few months. Michael describes his perspective on acoustic ecology as not being focused on documenting soundscapes "…but to convey his emotional response to the environment through improvisational processing" – essentially, aural psychogeography. Jump through to the release page for more info and a download link.

photo: Mea Kusma

Vainqueur (René Löwe) is an important figure in the past twenty years of electronic music, and someone who has made a significant contribution to the sonic landscape of Berlin. His piece 'Lyot' released in 1992 and remixed by Maurizio is now a classic of the techno canon. 'Lyot' and his subsequent recordings on the Chain Reaction label in 1996 and 1997 introduced a sound that transcends genre conventions, and presents something textural, dense yet spacious. There is something almost topographic about Vainqueur's music, the signature ebbing rhythms seem to be outlining forms that become palpable to the ear, mapping a terrain discovered in time. His compositions incorporate dub production styles and subtle hints of house and disco while pushing the techno palette into new shapes. His early music helped to define what has become known as 'dub techno', yet René resists this narrow classification of his work, pointing towards his many musical inspirations.

He works closely with long time collaborator Peter Kuschnereit (Substance) both under the Substance and Vainqueur moniker, and as Scion. In 2006 they founded the label Scion Versions for their own productions. They perform live sets internationally, often featuring vocalist Paul St. Hilaire (Tikiman). In the fall of 2010 René released his first solo Vainqueur 12" since 1997 on Scion Versions, entitled Ranges, a release that maps out a natural continuity from his previous work.

I had the opportunity to speak with René before a Scion performance with Tikiman at the Club Transmediale (CTM) festival in Berlin in February.

CM: What were some of the things that inspired you when you started producing music?

RL: Well we're talking then about the late 80's and very early 90's, and the main thing at that time was definitely Detroit and Chicago sounds. So I was into that around 1987. The Berlin wall was still here, I was living in the East. At that time there was a radio show from West Berlin during the week sometime in the middle of the night and they played new music, like early hip hop, house, and Detroit sounds. I managed to figure out their playlists even though they didn't announce any of the titles and sometimes it was even a DJ mixing. So when the wall came down I already knew who the right people were.

Before the wall came down I had to send my grandmother to buy records for me in the West because at that time older people were allowed to travel. The first day the wall came down I went to a record store, I bought a record and I started talking with the people there and they figured out that I was the guy whose grandma was buying records.

CM: Can you tell me about the beginning of the Detroit – Berlin connection?

RL: In 1991 I started working at Hard Wax. At that time Mark Ernestus already had some connections to Detroit, and soon after UR came over the first time, and Carl Craig of course which was a big deal. I met all these people whose records I owned...that was really great.

Then outside of Berlin we occupied an empty building that later became an official nightclub, it's called the Waschhaus. That was the first residency that Peter and I had. It was early 1992 or so. For about a year and a half I was organizing the parties and booking people. We had a lot of big names. Carl Craig DJ’ed for the first time in Germany there, then there were Derrick May and Juan Atkins. Basic Channel did their 3 live performances there, of the 6 in total that they ever did. It was a great time.

CM: When did the dub influence in Berlin first appear?

RL: The dub influence came pretty late, in the middle of the 90s, like 1996-97. Mark had these Saturdays after the store closed where he presented the reggae he had found in New York in a basement somewhere. It was a bit similar to when he went first to Detroit and Chicago and came back with a lot of big boxes of classic 12”s and other stuff he found somewhere, also in a basement!

That was my introduction to reggae, and my first reggae record was a 12” with mixes of tracks from a Congos album. I realized that these sounds, or at least the way the sounds were treated, had a lot in common with how I use sounds. That's why I bought that record - I thought, “hey man, this is like 30 years before you did it! But it sounds really familiar.” So that was how it started, and after that I bought a lot of reggae.

In a way it’s kind of funny because nowadays we are related to dub so much, and for me it’s just one influence. Music these days has bass anyway, so it’s not something unique that only dub techno or dubstep has. Bass is everywhere.

CM: But dub is also about studio technique, versioning etc....

RL: Well that’s another interesting thing – most of the pieces that I put out on Chain Reaction, I mixed them live right on the board, with no edits, it’s on the record exactly as I did it on the mixing board. There was no computer hardware, just a drum sampler and some synths and effects and my board. So they are basically just synthesizer and effects and the board. And the way I treated the sounds and introduced them into the track has a lot of similarities to the way people did it in dub music, but I wasn’t aware of that connection at the time. Reggae was not on my map. It came in the end of the 90s.

CM: As you say a lot of people associate Berlin with the dub techno sound...

RL: The dub aspect is just one; I wouldn't really separate the music into categories so much. In my music I think if you want you can hear similarities to disco, or sci-fi jazz stuff from the early 70s.

In recent years I've been buying a lot of music from that era because I realized that there are many productions similar to what I've done. Of course its a different time and sound, but it's interesting because the way the tracks are arranged and mixed is similar. There are similarities for example between people like Lee Perry or Dexter Wansel, an early 70s Philadelphia producer, they both made music that is very complex in a way. They create a very dense musical atmosphere, and it's like a journey where a lot of new things happen, it's a sci-fi type of approach. I think some of my pieces are not so far from that approach.

People tend to reduce it to the dub comparison. Actually I think that the music I've made in recent years, especially with Tikiman, or the 12” I put out in October 2010, is all quite different from a lot of dub techno. My pieces would work without the bass and the beats, without them you still would get the idea of the track. In most cases I think that if you leave that out then there's not much left, there isn't anything that holds the piece together without the bass and beats.

CM: What do you find inspiring or influential now?

RL: At the moment I am searching for interesting music from the end of the 60's to the end of the 70's. I'm a bit disappointed about the current situation in terms of sound, which is probably why I'm into this old stuff. It's not because I only like real instruments, it’s because of the way those pieces were produced back then – they're so rich, there are so many sounds, so many people involved, and you can hear that a lot of time went into it to make it sound a certain way, it's not like it was done in just one night. It's a piece, it's not just another track…

CM: With computers now, everybody's just throwing out tracks I guess...

RL: But isn't it bizarre, that everyone now has a supercomputer essentially where you can run 30 or more stereo tracks in CD quality in parallel on it without crashing. All the technology is available to make really great, precious recordings, and yet we are shrinking everything down to mp3. I'm not really interested at all in that kind of sound quality, but it's an interesting time to see how things will develop.

I'm not really that optimistic about music at all at the moment, it's a question of the way society in general uses music. If it's going to be like wallpaper in your life then of course mp3 is the right format. I think surround sound has the potential to be the sound format of the century, but it will not become that sound format because there is no interest in rich audio in society.

The other aspect of electronic music right now is that everyone that makes music has to make music that functions well in a live situation, in a club or a concert.

CM: That's an interesting point given that the theme of this festival is 'live'... there's often a tension between producing and presenting work live.

RL: Well the question is - what would you appreciate more in the end - an unexpected, interesting live performance that might sound like crap but is kind of unique, or a decent composition on a recording format? That's the main question. In the end the quality of music in general will go down if you can only do music that works in a live situation if you want to make your living out of it. People like Perry and Wansel who I mentioned earlier relied on a functional record industry that could provide the money required to spend time in the studio. But who has the time and the resources these days?

CM: What makes up the Scion live show?

RL: We have a set of sound bits we took from several releases of Tikiman with Rhythm and Sound, but we're not playing the instrumentals, it's a very freestyle way of getting little bits of several tracks together into one new piece. If you know the originals you will hear familiar bits, it’s like a live reinterpretation.

The performance that night was short but sweet – an immersive experience with Tikiman’s voice reverbing in and out of the mix and a special floor synced to bass frequencies that made the music an animate presence in the space. A spacious and textural sonic fiction enjoyed through the mind and body alike.

To find out more about Scion / Substance & Vainqueur, stream music and find out about upcoming shows check out their website at: scionversions.de

[photo: basic_sounds]

Seasoned MUTEK veterans are well aware that some of the best programming at the festival can be found in the Savoy Room at Metropolis. This year was no exception and VT chum Tomas Jirku recorded his set last Friday and justshared it on SoundCloud – cruise on over and give it a listen (unfortunately it is streaming only). See also Tomas' recent release on the basic_sounds netlabel.

Editor's note: In this post Vague Terrain and Artengine's critical blogging resident Jaenine Parkinson continues her reflections on Elektra 2011. This year long series of posts is dedicated to providing a space where our resident can exploring bloggging as a "creative space for critical discourse around the media arts and creative technological expression."

'Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.' – Walter Benjamin

[Frank Bretschneider EXP (Raster-notion) Photo courtesy of Elektra]

The majority of Elektra 12 performances were characterised by pulsing, glitching, looping, staccato sounds and swirling, strobing, twitching, projected graphic visualizations generated by solo performers on laptops in front of a big screen. I’ll admit up front that this is not my scene and after a while I developed an acute case of ADD (the arduous length of some of them was definitely a contributing factor). My wandering mind kept getting stuck on one question: What value do the artists and audience place on this experience being a live performance?

Well, to begin with, the setup they had at Usine-C was definitely much more impressive than anything you might have at home. Also, the artists were quite possibly adapting, remixing and producing their performances on the fly in response to the (rather stagnant) audience. But you would have needed to have heard previous performances or recordings to know. Oftentimes, the guy (at Elektra they were always guys) behind the laptop would start grooving along to the beat. But we can’t really see his laptop screen or what he is doing. The projected visualizations became the only visual evidence of what we were hearing. With this style of performance there seemed to be no components that, to my mind, could not be recorded and played back: devoid of any claim to being live.

[Abstract Birds & Ircam Les objects impossibles Photo courtesy of Elektra]

Although, the same protest could be made about any standard pop or rock concert where all the sound and imagery is mediated and processed through technological systems. Since Milli Vanili everyone lip-synchs. The only difference is that with your lip-synching singer there is still a nod to the generative action we are familiar with from traditional musical and physical performance. But the show could very well go on without them. With computer generated AV performances we must release our hold on the aura of the original gesture. The pairing of sound and movement, simulated or not, is absent. There is a correlation between image and sound, but never image, sound and gesture. The only element of live performance that remains is the performers presence in the same space as the audience, controlling the event. It is boiled down liveness.

But why do they do it? Why do they hang onto this last bastion of liveness? Why do they clamber up on stage in front of everyone, especially when it is very difficult for the audience to deduce exactly what they are doing behind their laptop lid? Perhaps it is because live events have high cultural currency. There are social constructs and dichotomies that remain, which position the live above the mediated; the manual above the automated. Being live gives the work a unique status as rare and irreproducible: it confines the work spatially making it only accessible to those present. Being live also renders the work as an open text, giving the artist freedom to respond to the specifics of place and audience. It also releases them from the perfection required of a single recording, and opens up to improvisation and risk taking in the moment. All these cultural constructs are desirable enough to warrant framing presentations of these audiovisual works as live.

[Mark Fell Multistability (Raster-notion) Photo courtesy of Elektra]

It is important to acknowledge that what counts culturally as ‘live’ has changed over time in relation to technological development. We can have a ‘live broadcast’, where the audience is only present in the same time, not the same place, as the performer. We even accept the potentially oxymoronic notion of ‘live recordings’: one-off performances that audiences listen to at another time and another place. With all this stretching of the definition of live, what we are left with, critic Philip Auslander suggests, is affective liveness. What we are willing to accept as live—based on cues and demands imbedded in the delivery of the work and it’s social coding—that is what live is.

Maybe what I was sensing was that this type of performance had stretched the definition of live just a little too far for me. And I’m not the only one who has felt this. The organization TOPLAP, an affiliation of artists using live coding to improvise with music and visuals, are all about exposing the process as performance. The first two demands of their manifesto are: “Give us access to the performer’s mind, to the whole human instrument. Obscurantism is dangerous: show us your screens.” Theirs is one possible way to address the question of how to render a claim to liveness in a performance. Even a duo or group of performers can add tension and more explicit communication of live improvisation.

[Martin Messier Sewing Machine Orchestra ]

Other performers at Elektra 12 provided examples of different ways to convey liveness in performance. Louis-Philippe Demers, Armin Purkrabek and Phillip Schulze’s can-can dancing robots were mechanized stand-ins for human performers. Martin Messier work Sewing machine Orchestra was performed by a bank of computer controlled 1940s Singer sewing machines. (Interestingly, Messier admits his presence on stage is redundant, although he still does it.) Others incorporated elements of traditional performance: staging, movement and props. For instance, 1024 Architecture, who’s highly entertaining performance Euphorie, used layers of translucent screens to catch their projections and performed with customized controllers (think light-saber guitar solos). Then there is always the possibility of using actors. Daredroid was performed by a woman (not devised by a woman) wearing a costume that turned her into a drink dispensing machine with legs and breasts. This is no game substituted living avatars into a first-person shooter style gaming system. In the end I am just more willing to read these works as live than the laptop solos that dominated Elektra 12 performance series. Perhaps we will get a more balanced diversity of performances and performers with Elektra’s biennial expansion, planned for 2012.

Related Links:

• For more from Philip Auslander about the evolution of the concept of liveness see: www.vimeo.com/20473967
• For more about live coding watch: http://vimeo.com/20241649 or visit: www.toplap.org
• For a review of 1024 Architecture’s Euphorie at Elektra 12 see: http://createdigitalmusic.com/2011/05/with-neon-guitars-and-immersive-projection-1024-architecture-become-audiovisual-rock-band/

With special thanks to Tasman Richardson for his insight into live AV performance.

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Our tenth VT Audio Edition is live! Contributed by the Torun (PL)-based Porcje Rosołowe, proprietors of the Pawlacz Perski Tapesî netlabel and atmospheric ambient maestros. Jump through to the release page for more info and a download link.