INTERVIEWS
Hank Bull - Beyond the Eternal Network
Roy Caussy - An artist with a truck
EXHIBITION PROJECTS
2010 Strawberry Jam
2011 My Big Family
2011 CO-LAB
Interview with sound artist and curator crys cole.
How did you start making sound art? What was the inspiration?
You studied fine arts in university. Did you ever study music? Is music part of your background?
I began listening to experimental music in my teens, and I have long been a music enthusiast and collector (of many types of music). I always dreamed of making music myself but felt stunted by the fact that I didn’t play any instruments. I dabbled a bit with percussion and turntables in my late teens and then when I moved to Montreal in 1998 I found an incredible community of artists with whom I could explore sound. I began playing with broken electronics and turntables and developed my sound organically from there. I have always been an intent listener, with very strong aural memories from my childhood, I can’t explain why but sound and music have always moved me in a very deep way. The visual arts of course play a very influential and inspiring role in my sound practice as well. I am a hugely inspired by movements like dada and fluxus which informed and birthed many extraordinary sound works/artists. Also, I have always appreciated the mundane, the banal… I think that this reflects in my work.
How did you find your style? Why are you attracted to minimalistic sounds? How do you choose your "instruments"?
For me it happened very organically. I began making sound work that was somewhat noisy and raw, but it quickly developed into something more minimal, more discreet. I find that minimal textural sounds can be so transfixing when allowed the space to really listen to them. I enjoy the more concentrated listening that comes from minimal playing. This said, I am not opposed to more elaborate and complex work and I love exploring this when improvising with other artists. For me, though there is a centering effect in paring down my palette when playing. Reducing the inputs and sources to still create a captivating piece is a challenge that I enjoy. As for how I select my ‘instruments’ – I am always playing with objects around me, be it scratching on the table I’m sitting at, or tapping glasses and dishes… I have a selection of tools that I use to ‘play’, and enhance, any source that suits my fancy in the moment. I always come with certain ‘instruments’ to a performance, but always find a way to incorporate objects or the room itself into the performance. This is one of the spontaneous aspects of my improvising that I enjoy… not knowing what else will present itself until right before a performance.
You've traveled to Europe last year. What was it like performing in Europe in contrast to in Canada?
My experience performing in Europe was wonderful. Of course every venue and community was different, but I do feel as though there is openness there for more experimental music that is still developing here in Canada. I could be wrong, but the arts play a very important role in many European countries and through this I feel that the understanding or at the very least the openness to creative exploration in many forms is supported more widely. There isn’t as strong of a need to categorize the work or have it be consumable.
How is the sound art scene in Winnipeg? Aside from working as the artistic director of Send + Receive Festival, why do you choose Winnipeg as your base?
Winnipeg has an extremely vital visual art community. This said, there is a very, very small sound art scene here. Essentially most activity around sound in Winnipeg is based around the send + receive festival, which has been active here for 12 years now. There is a committed audience, with new people coming each year, but the core group of artists who work in sound has stayed relatively small. I choose Winnipeg as my home base for the time being because it allows me to run this incredible and unique festival.
Have you lived in Vancouver? What's your impression of the Vancouver sound art scene?
I have indeed. I lived in Vancouver from 2002 – 2005. I developed my sound practice as a solo artist very much while I was in Vancouver, where as in Montreal I mostly worked in collaborative free improv settings. Vancouver has a strong core of interesting artists working in sound and in the last few years I have seen great community development there as well as excellent new events popping up. I think like most cities these movements ebb and flow, diminishing due to lack of venues or artists leaving the city, but then a new venue, gallery or driven artist/programmer will appear on the scene and rejuvenate things again. Vancouver has always had a great history of interest in sound with people like Hildegard Westerkamp, R.Murray Schaefer and Barry Truax in academia and places like the Western Front, Sugar Refinery, BLIM and more creating spaces for experimental sound performance. It also has a rich history of noise music and jazz.
What's the biggest challenge working as a sound artist/improv musician? What's the biggest challenge being a female sound artist?
Hmm… the biggest challenge I think is probably the same challenge all artists I know face, which is finding the time to focus on your own practice!
As an improviser in Canada, the community is fairly small and in order to play often, particularly when you live in a smaller city like Winnipeg, you must be able to travel to perform and to play with other artists. Of course travel is wonderful, but not always easy or affordable.
As for being a woman in the field, I can’t say that it has ever really been an issue for me. Certainly I am aware of the smaller number of women working in sound + experimental music, but the field that I play within is in a sense genderless… what I mean by that is that the artist is somewhat faceless, the image of the artist is almost irrelevant, the sound comes first. I have however, had positive responses when people come across my work and find out that I am a woman, because there are less of us playing in free improv and working in sound. People definitely seem interested in hearing female ‘voices’ in the field.
How do you relate your work at send + receive Festival to your own practice? Is it difficult to combine the two? Or do they compliment each other?
s+r is the perfect place for me in many regards. I am so passionate about sound art and having the opportunity to bring artists from around the country and globe to present here in Winnipeg is extraordinary. It compliments my practice in that it is constantly developing my links to the global community and building strong connections to my peers. Of course I do not perform at the festival (I did once in 2007 prior to becoming involved), but the connections and opportunities that it has brought to me, as well as the inspiration acquired from the work presented at the festival is invaluable. Certainly there is some conflict, when you are wearing two hats in a related field, but for the most part I think that they compliment each other quite well.
What is your favorite sound? Which other sound artists would you recommend if you were to put together a play-list?
My favorite sound… oh wow, impossible… there are so many! I am constantly captivated by sounds occurring around me, and love to sit and listen to a wood fire burning and my old steam heaters spontaneously making music.
As for a playlist, I do this every week with send + receive radio – which I host Sundays on CKUW 95.9 FM. Hard to do a definitive list but that said, some of my favorite artists (who have inspired my work) would be, Keith Rowe, Walter Marchetti, Eliane Radigue, Evan Parker, Akio Suzuki, Fernando Grillo, David Jackman (Organum), Alvin Lucier… the list goes on…
Anything else you want to share about your work?
Just something that I wanted to elaborate on about my work is that my approach really emphasizes the act of listening, a sense that we use at all times, to the point that we barely notice so much aural activity around us.
By working with microsonics and ‘environmental’ sources, I like tuning the audience (and my own) ears back into subtle and perhaps insignificant sounds. Heightening peoples’ awareness of these small gestural sounds also opens their ears up to the sounds around them and to the sounds that they are generating as well. During my solos, i see this as a collaboration, in a sense, with the space and the audience.
crys cole was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada in 1976. A self-taught sound artist, cole began exploring experimental music in the 1990s. She pursued Interdisciplinary studies in Fine Art at Concordia University 2002-2006. She has performed live extensively in Winnipeg, Vancouver, and Montreal including venues such as cre8ery (2009), Ace Art Inc (2009), VIVO Media Arts Centre (2009), Access Gallery (2008), BLIM (2005), and Or Gallery (2003). In June 2009, cole made a two-week tour in Paris, Berlin, Cologne and Brussels, performing solo and in collaboration with Rinus Van Alebeek, Julie Rousse, Clare Cooper and Christine Senaoui. Recently she has also toured in Italy with Oren Ambarchi (AU) + Massimo Puppilo (IT). She's currently the artist director of Send+Receive Festival in Winnipeg.
How did you start making sound art? What was the inspiration?
You studied fine arts in university. Did you ever study music? Is music part of your background?
I began listening to experimental music in my teens, and I have long been a music enthusiast and collector (of many types of music). I always dreamed of making music myself but felt stunted by the fact that I didn’t play any instruments. I dabbled a bit with percussion and turntables in my late teens and then when I moved to Montreal in 1998 I found an incredible community of artists with whom I could explore sound. I began playing with broken electronics and turntables and developed my sound organically from there. I have always been an intent listener, with very strong aural memories from my childhood, I can’t explain why but sound and music have always moved me in a very deep way. The visual arts of course play a very influential and inspiring role in my sound practice as well. I am a hugely inspired by movements like dada and fluxus which informed and birthed many extraordinary sound works/artists. Also, I have always appreciated the mundane, the banal… I think that this reflects in my work.
How did you find your style? Why are you attracted to minimalistic sounds? How do you choose your "instruments"?
For me it happened very organically. I began making sound work that was somewhat noisy and raw, but it quickly developed into something more minimal, more discreet. I find that minimal textural sounds can be so transfixing when allowed the space to really listen to them. I enjoy the more concentrated listening that comes from minimal playing. This said, I am not opposed to more elaborate and complex work and I love exploring this when improvising with other artists. For me, though there is a centering effect in paring down my palette when playing. Reducing the inputs and sources to still create a captivating piece is a challenge that I enjoy. As for how I select my ‘instruments’ – I am always playing with objects around me, be it scratching on the table I’m sitting at, or tapping glasses and dishes… I have a selection of tools that I use to ‘play’, and enhance, any source that suits my fancy in the moment. I always come with certain ‘instruments’ to a performance, but always find a way to incorporate objects or the room itself into the performance. This is one of the spontaneous aspects of my improvising that I enjoy… not knowing what else will present itself until right before a performance.
You've traveled to Europe last year. What was it like performing in Europe in contrast to in Canada?
My experience performing in Europe was wonderful. Of course every venue and community was different, but I do feel as though there is openness there for more experimental music that is still developing here in Canada. I could be wrong, but the arts play a very important role in many European countries and through this I feel that the understanding or at the very least the openness to creative exploration in many forms is supported more widely. There isn’t as strong of a need to categorize the work or have it be consumable.
How is the sound art scene in Winnipeg? Aside from working as the artistic director of Send + Receive Festival, why do you choose Winnipeg as your base?
Winnipeg has an extremely vital visual art community. This said, there is a very, very small sound art scene here. Essentially most activity around sound in Winnipeg is based around the send + receive festival, which has been active here for 12 years now. There is a committed audience, with new people coming each year, but the core group of artists who work in sound has stayed relatively small. I choose Winnipeg as my home base for the time being because it allows me to run this incredible and unique festival.
Have you lived in Vancouver? What's your impression of the Vancouver sound art scene?
I have indeed. I lived in Vancouver from 2002 – 2005. I developed my sound practice as a solo artist very much while I was in Vancouver, where as in Montreal I mostly worked in collaborative free improv settings. Vancouver has a strong core of interesting artists working in sound and in the last few years I have seen great community development there as well as excellent new events popping up. I think like most cities these movements ebb and flow, diminishing due to lack of venues or artists leaving the city, but then a new venue, gallery or driven artist/programmer will appear on the scene and rejuvenate things again. Vancouver has always had a great history of interest in sound with people like Hildegard Westerkamp, R.Murray Schaefer and Barry Truax in academia and places like the Western Front, Sugar Refinery, BLIM and more creating spaces for experimental sound performance. It also has a rich history of noise music and jazz.
What's the biggest challenge working as a sound artist/improv musician? What's the biggest challenge being a female sound artist?
Hmm… the biggest challenge I think is probably the same challenge all artists I know face, which is finding the time to focus on your own practice!
As an improviser in Canada, the community is fairly small and in order to play often, particularly when you live in a smaller city like Winnipeg, you must be able to travel to perform and to play with other artists. Of course travel is wonderful, but not always easy or affordable.
As for being a woman in the field, I can’t say that it has ever really been an issue for me. Certainly I am aware of the smaller number of women working in sound + experimental music, but the field that I play within is in a sense genderless… what I mean by that is that the artist is somewhat faceless, the image of the artist is almost irrelevant, the sound comes first. I have however, had positive responses when people come across my work and find out that I am a woman, because there are less of us playing in free improv and working in sound. People definitely seem interested in hearing female ‘voices’ in the field.
How do you relate your work at send + receive Festival to your own practice? Is it difficult to combine the two? Or do they compliment each other?
s+r is the perfect place for me in many regards. I am so passionate about sound art and having the opportunity to bring artists from around the country and globe to present here in Winnipeg is extraordinary. It compliments my practice in that it is constantly developing my links to the global community and building strong connections to my peers. Of course I do not perform at the festival (I did once in 2007 prior to becoming involved), but the connections and opportunities that it has brought to me, as well as the inspiration acquired from the work presented at the festival is invaluable. Certainly there is some conflict, when you are wearing two hats in a related field, but for the most part I think that they compliment each other quite well.
What is your favorite sound? Which other sound artists would you recommend if you were to put together a play-list?
My favorite sound… oh wow, impossible… there are so many! I am constantly captivated by sounds occurring around me, and love to sit and listen to a wood fire burning and my old steam heaters spontaneously making music.
As for a playlist, I do this every week with send + receive radio – which I host Sundays on CKUW 95.9 FM. Hard to do a definitive list but that said, some of my favorite artists (who have inspired my work) would be, Keith Rowe, Walter Marchetti, Eliane Radigue, Evan Parker, Akio Suzuki, Fernando Grillo, David Jackman (Organum), Alvin Lucier… the list goes on…
Anything else you want to share about your work?
Just something that I wanted to elaborate on about my work is that my approach really emphasizes the act of listening, a sense that we use at all times, to the point that we barely notice so much aural activity around us.
By working with microsonics and ‘environmental’ sources, I like tuning the audience (and my own) ears back into subtle and perhaps insignificant sounds. Heightening peoples’ awareness of these small gestural sounds also opens their ears up to the sounds around them and to the sounds that they are generating as well. During my solos, i see this as a collaboration, in a sense, with the space and the audience.
A Listener’s Lab
Interview Two
Date: January 17, 2010
HB: Hank Bull
DZ: Debra Zhou
Hank Bull was born in Calgary, Alberta in 1949 and now lives in Vancouver. A multimedia artist as well as an arts administrator he has been an important member of the legendary Western Front Society since 1973. He is the also the founder and executive director of Centre A (Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art) since 1999. He became involved in radio and television in 1975 and, in collaboration with Patrick Ready [as HP], produced a weekly show of original radio art which ran for eight years. He has been active as an organizer of international artistsá projects using electronic networks and continues various pursuits as a áTOTALmediaá artist. His works have been collected by National Gallery of Canada, Netherlands Media Art Institute and many private collectors.
– CCC artist profile
I interviewed Hank as part of the program for Art’s Birthday 2010 at Centre A. The interview was streamed live at http://www.ustream.tv/channel/art-s-birthday
DZ: First on all, can you tell us how Art’s Birthday started?
HB: The first Art’s Birthday in Vancouver I remember was 1974, but Art’s Birthday had already been around for quite sometime by then. In fact it had already been around for 11 years. It started in France and we brought it to Vancouver and it started slowly to be repeated in different cities. Now it’s happening all over the world.
DZ:I read through stories that Robert Filliou proposed the concept of Art’s Birthday in 1967, is that correct?
HB: I think that the actual date of origin is somewhat lost in the mist of time. I was trying to look it up somewhere in this book Whispered Art History. I know that the 1,000,010th birthday of art was celebrated in 1973, so that would suggest the first time would have been in 1963. In anyways, the story according to Filliou was a French poet and artist, a philosopher of art. He has all sorts of wonderful concepts and one of them is Art’s Birthday that he proposed that, when you think about it, that 1 million years ago, there was no such thing as art. At some point, there was no art. There was just life on the planet. At one point, art appeared. According to Filliou, it happened on the 17th of January, and it took place when somebody, I don’t know who, dropped a dry sponge into a bucket of water, and that was it. That’s what caused art to be born. Therefore he said “now we have art and we should celebrate that by having a birthday party”. He wrote a poem called the Whispered Art History:
It all started on the the 17th of January, one million years ago.
A man dropped a dry sponge into a bucket of water.
Who that man was is not important.
He’s dead, but art is alive.
I mean, let’s keep names out of this.
As I was saying, on the 10 o’clock on the 17th of January of a million years ago.
A man sat along by the side of a running stream.
He thought to himself, where the stream run to and why.
Meaning, why do they run, where they run, that sort of thing.
Personally, once I’ve observed a baker at work, and a blacksmith and a shoemaker at work.
And I noticed the use of water was essential to their work.
Or perhaps what I’ve noticed was not so important.
Anyways the 17th goes on till the 18th, and then the 19th, the 20th, the 21st to 22nd, 23rd to 24th, 25th, 26th, 27th, 28th, 29th, 30th, and the 31st of January.
Thus time goes by.
So that was his original thing. He proposed to this town, I think it was a small town in Germany, and said let’s have a birthday party for the art and the town bought the idea. And they closed the schools. Everybody had a paid holiday from work. They had bands and music in the street. Everybody had a festival. It happened again the next year and so on.
So he had another idea that we should have this festival, and after a few years or more, let’s have two days, and a few years more, let’s have 3 days, and 4 days, and so on until eventually a millions years from now we will have 365 day of holidays and we don’t need art anymore. So we can go back to life again. That’s the basic piece.
DZ: How did this idea travel across the world? For now I can see people spreading the idea over the internet or (through) travelling around so much, but how did they do it the past? I guess the question is also linked to the (origin of the) eternal network.
HB: Exactly. Filliou had this idea of eternal network. That’s another of his conceptual poem or artwork if you like. And the eternal network says we are all on a network that we are all connected. Someone’s sleeping and someone’s awake. Someone’s rich and someone’s poor. Someone’s happy and someone’s sad. Always. And that they were connected on the network. You maybe a baker, an artist or a housewife. And this image of people on a vast network was very appealing at that time. There was a happening here in North America, especially Vancouver, the idea of mail art that artists corresponding and connecting with each other. So now the postal system can be a decentralized art work, and anyone can be at the centre of the artwork. Suddenly there was the photocopy machine and you could reproduce something cheaply and mail it to people. The stamp cost 5 cents. So the mail system became a place for experiment. Filliou found out about that and eventually he came here to Vancouver to discover that there were artists starting their own galleries, collectives and magazines, their own ways of doing things and they were connecting to people in different cities on a network. They in return discovered his idea of the network and it became very inspiring. So the art’s birthday became the event that celebrates this sense of network.
DZ: I know that West Coast Canada engaged very early on with the technology, like the telecommunication art. In fact the first telecommunication art project in the world Interplay was initiated by Bill Bartlet in Victoria, Can you talk about that project and is it related to the eternal network?
HB: Oh yeah it all fits together (laugh). Bill and his partner Peggy were interested in using new technology to develop networks, not just the mail system but there were other tools you could use to communicate. They were disappointed with television because it’s really a one-way communication that’s not interactive. I met them when they were just stating. They referred to a German playwright called Bertolt Brecht he wrote an article on radio. He said radio is not really a medium of communication. It’s a medium of distribution, and, in fact, a medium of control, isolating the listeners rather than building a community. These technologies can only be called communication technology if it’s a two-way conversation. So they really set about making the television into a interactive medium. They worked with a couple of technologies that were new at the time. One was a device that was invented by a Canadian ham radio operator in Prince Edward Island. You know ham radio guys are talking to each other around the world and playing chess games and so on. He found a way to send pictures where a video cam could grab a still and encode that into sound, very rough black and white sound The sound would be transmitted by shortwave radio and would be reconstituted on the other person’s television. It would come down the screen very slowly. After 15 seconds you would get a picture. This was super exciting. We got this machine and hooked it up with a telephone, so we could do all kinds of events to connect. Bill and Peggy started doing that and caught on. The other thing that was new was mail art. It wasn’t called mail art. Computer companies were using it to send information back and forth. It was again a Canadian company IP Sharp that gave us access to their bandwidth. Basically they were renting telephone lines and allowed artists to experiment. That became an international network as well. It happened for several years before the internet came along. A lot of the activities happened quite early on in Vancouver. I was also involved in artist radio and television too.
DZ: That leads to my next question. Can you tell us about your history with the Kunstradio? You did a lot of projects with them early on.
HB: when I came to Vancouver I was 23 years old. I didn’t have any money. I collaborated with a very close friend Patrick Ready. We were playing with audio cassettes tapes. That was another new invention. Here’s this tiny little thing and it was really exciting that you could use cassettes. It was really cheap. So we started making radio plays, and we sent letters to each other and record on cassette. We started to experiment with weird sounds and of course imitating old time radios and mimicking various forms of communication. Around that time they started the co-op radio where’s right across the street from us now. We were invited to do a show on this new community radio station which became the HP radio show. We were part of a generation that was discovering sound as an artist medium for experiment all over the world. Our sense of sound, certainly for me, wasn’t really coming out of music or literature. It was coming out of the visual art or sculptural practice. I always thought that sound, especially what we did with HP radio as a sculpture, a social sculpture in the Josef Beuys’ sense. You could cover this vast area and engage people with the telephone and interactive radio. It becomes this huge sculpture. The sound fit into it as well. At a certain point we would do this event that we have two telephones. One of them would be sending sound back and forth. The other would be sending pictures. In the early 80s fax machines came so we started sending faxes. Art’s birthday took off again in early 80’s especially around the fax machine. I remember art’s birthday in 83, 84, 85. A lot of them were fax parties. So your fax machine would go nuts on art’s birthday.
DZ: Western front is one of the earliest places to organize Art’s birthday celebration? What about other galleries and museums?
HB: The Front was the centre of it. And there were others in Vancouver. To go back to your other question about Kunstradio, Vienna came to the network very early. Robert Adrian was involved in the computer network, early email and slow scan event. He produced some very interesting events from his end. His wife Heidi Grundmann had a very legitimate radio show on the National Radio Station about art. She would go to the Documenta and Biennales to interview the artists and so on. Then she realized that there were artists using that medium itself. She became very interested in artist using radio and sound. The show evolved very early on and became a sound art show even still today, a very important show. So we might be being broadcasted right now on Kunstradio which runs every Sunday night on the National Austrian Radio. If you go to their website (http://www.kunstradio.at) you will find a huge archive on Art’s Birthday. They’ve really become an important node. So this global network that we have today is largely because of the efforts of Kunstradio, and Western Front is very closely connected. Right now at Western Front there are other events happening for the Art’s Birthday.
DZ: One of the early telecommunication art theories is that instead of artists making objects, they are creating a space. From the first telecommunication project till now, almost 40 years, there has been big improvement in technology. For example, we are streaming live! That would never have happened 10 years ago. How does that affect telecommunication art? And also what is new right now?
HB: It all moved on very quickly. Sure Fluxus artists imagined a global network, a global brain a long time ago. You can see mail art as an early model for the Internet. But it’s true that we are in a completely new situation. Now everybody’s got a cell phone. You can just about stream from a cell phone. That interactive technology has become real so that the idea of Bertolt Brecht is real. Now it’s just huge. There’s a whole kind of vernacular creativity goes beyond the art world. The whole idea of the eternal network is happening in the global sense. You almost feel like some amazing balance that would tip at certain point that, suddenly, out of this accelerated hothouse, rapidly evolving communications and creativities, there would be some new thing. We will come out of it. Maybe it won’t take a million years to go back to life, maybe it will be sooner than we thought.
DZ: there’s also this interesting thing that we discovered through researching Internet streaming. I was calling up some internet companies to ask about how to set up wide bandwidth internet here at Centre A, one of the companies said that the service is extremely expensive, for example a commercial T1 line, and that’s because they don’t want to make it into a common commodity. Why do you think is that (besides the technological aspect)?
HB: I think it goes back to the theory artists making space. I think it’s a very nice image: artists making space, artists making life. There’s a sense of freedom about that idea. There’s a sense of freedom for me that now we are here having the world tea party. What is the world tea party? It is a space. There’s no big shows, no spectacle. There’s just this space where we could be together and have a cup of tea. Which is great right? Then we become the art. I think it’s very democratic. And of course there are thousands of people out there trying to figure out how to make money out of it. I am sure there are all sorts of people thinking “what do me do wrong? We allowed the Internet get out and it’s free and we are not making any money off it and it’s a problem. And they continue to try to. They commodify it and it’s surveillance. There’s this dystopia scenario that can very easily be rolled out. But seems to me that each time these forces of management, control and exploitation try to reinforce their position, the subversive voices comes in and very quickly dissolve the situation. Not just activists and legal system but also j-walkers wh invent something that goes around the system of control. I think that’s the creative space of play that we are in right now. Marshall McLuhan said long time ago that you have the surveillance of people looking down, but you also have the people looking up. With these technologies, they go both ways. So it’s very hard for the force of control to keep their stuff secret now.
DZ: Thank you for all the great and honest answers. I have one more question. What’s your view of artwork exhibited on the cyber space? Of course it’s very different than participating in an event. For example, people who are watching us at home and people who are sitting here physically. What’s your view on cyber-based art and exhibitions? I know it’s a big question.
HB I think it’s about what’s on your mind really. We used to do these radio shows called the LUXE Radio Plays. We get together with a bunch of people who are not professional actors. We made up stories, we scripted them and we performed them as live performance using old style sound effects. We had rolled-up carpets pouring rice down tubes and breaking glasses. It was actually quite a lot of fun to watch for the audience there. You would see some people holding sheets of paper reading to a microphone, and a bunch of other people with objects, but you might be imagining people going over the Alps on a hot air balloon or something coming in from outer space going to the bottom of the ocean. In your mind the scenario would be completely different from what you are seeing with your own eyes. So when you talk about art on the Internet, it’s kind of conceptual isn’t it? We imagine all kind of people in different cities celebrating art’s birthday. We can actually go into that space. I think a lot of interest for online art is among people who are online. People who are online are going to make online art and look at other people who are online and make online art. They live in this world which’s like an online cult of streaming audio freaks. So you might be typing a letter or doing a spreadsheet or something, but on the corner of your monitor, there’s stream coming from Antwerp. And you can look at it more closely if you want to, or sometimes you have three or four things ongoing at the same time. People live in that world but at the same time we are sitting here across from each other. There’s always this tension happening between what’s in the real world and what’s happening online. It’s interesting that a lot of commercial galleries are like“ oh interesting that we ill go online and sell all the work online”, and it hasn’t worked out. All the big commercial galleries closed their online sites because people need to meet to engage that. Its not a bout making a sale, it’s about what art does, and I think it’s really important to have this space in which we can actually meet in order for this online thing to work. You can’t have one without the other.
DZ: I think we had a similar discussion when we talked about performance art and who is the audience. Let’s go back to the Net-based art. There’s always this possibility that nobody out there is watching right? You can have 0 or 100 visitors on your website while doing this live event. Similar to a performance artist doing a performance in a forest with nobody watching. Does it still make it art if nobody is watching?
HB: Oh yeah totally. Actually I was just inspired by Kate Sansom on my Facebook. She has a piece called “to-do”. I didn’t really look up the work but I am going to borrow that idea. It’s great to have ideas, but you don’t actually have to make the ideas. Why not just make a list of the ideas? One idea I have is to shoot a series of photographs of pine trees in Vancouver which are normally located in very ugly gas stations and next to a street lamp or something like that, but you know what it’s a subject that’s been done to death. You don’t actually have to take the photographs. It’s just a nice idea. You can actually list hundreds of ideas and you don’t actually have to execute them. So is that art? Why not. I think art is about intention. What is it that you mean? What do you mean to do? So what you mean to do is being alone in the forest and drop a dry sponge into a bucket of water. And it’s art and it’s fine. It’s about what you are thinking. What’s in your mind and what’s coming out of your mind.
[The end]
Interview Two
Date: January 17, 2010
HB: Hank Bull
DZ: Debra Zhou
Hank Bull was born in Calgary, Alberta in 1949 and now lives in Vancouver. A multimedia artist as well as an arts administrator he has been an important member of the legendary Western Front Society since 1973. He is the also the founder and executive director of Centre A (Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art) since 1999. He became involved in radio and television in 1975 and, in collaboration with Patrick Ready [as HP], produced a weekly show of original radio art which ran for eight years. He has been active as an organizer of international artistsá projects using electronic networks and continues various pursuits as a áTOTALmediaá artist. His works have been collected by National Gallery of Canada, Netherlands Media Art Institute and many private collectors.
– CCC artist profile
I interviewed Hank as part of the program for Art’s Birthday 2010 at Centre A. The interview was streamed live at http://www.ustream.tv/channel/art-s-birthday
DZ: First on all, can you tell us how Art’s Birthday started?
HB: The first Art’s Birthday in Vancouver I remember was 1974, but Art’s Birthday had already been around for quite sometime by then. In fact it had already been around for 11 years. It started in France and we brought it to Vancouver and it started slowly to be repeated in different cities. Now it’s happening all over the world.
DZ:I read through stories that Robert Filliou proposed the concept of Art’s Birthday in 1967, is that correct?
HB: I think that the actual date of origin is somewhat lost in the mist of time. I was trying to look it up somewhere in this book Whispered Art History. I know that the 1,000,010th birthday of art was celebrated in 1973, so that would suggest the first time would have been in 1963. In anyways, the story according to Filliou was a French poet and artist, a philosopher of art. He has all sorts of wonderful concepts and one of them is Art’s Birthday that he proposed that, when you think about it, that 1 million years ago, there was no such thing as art. At some point, there was no art. There was just life on the planet. At one point, art appeared. According to Filliou, it happened on the 17th of January, and it took place when somebody, I don’t know who, dropped a dry sponge into a bucket of water, and that was it. That’s what caused art to be born. Therefore he said “now we have art and we should celebrate that by having a birthday party”. He wrote a poem called the Whispered Art History:
It all started on the the 17th of January, one million years ago.
A man dropped a dry sponge into a bucket of water.
Who that man was is not important.
He’s dead, but art is alive.
I mean, let’s keep names out of this.
As I was saying, on the 10 o’clock on the 17th of January of a million years ago.
A man sat along by the side of a running stream.
He thought to himself, where the stream run to and why.
Meaning, why do they run, where they run, that sort of thing.
Personally, once I’ve observed a baker at work, and a blacksmith and a shoemaker at work.
And I noticed the use of water was essential to their work.
Or perhaps what I’ve noticed was not so important.
Anyways the 17th goes on till the 18th, and then the 19th, the 20th, the 21st to 22nd, 23rd to 24th, 25th, 26th, 27th, 28th, 29th, 30th, and the 31st of January.
Thus time goes by.
So that was his original thing. He proposed to this town, I think it was a small town in Germany, and said let’s have a birthday party for the art and the town bought the idea. And they closed the schools. Everybody had a paid holiday from work. They had bands and music in the street. Everybody had a festival. It happened again the next year and so on.
So he had another idea that we should have this festival, and after a few years or more, let’s have two days, and a few years more, let’s have 3 days, and 4 days, and so on until eventually a millions years from now we will have 365 day of holidays and we don’t need art anymore. So we can go back to life again. That’s the basic piece.
DZ: How did this idea travel across the world? For now I can see people spreading the idea over the internet or (through) travelling around so much, but how did they do it the past? I guess the question is also linked to the (origin of the) eternal network.
HB: Exactly. Filliou had this idea of eternal network. That’s another of his conceptual poem or artwork if you like. And the eternal network says we are all on a network that we are all connected. Someone’s sleeping and someone’s awake. Someone’s rich and someone’s poor. Someone’s happy and someone’s sad. Always. And that they were connected on the network. You maybe a baker, an artist or a housewife. And this image of people on a vast network was very appealing at that time. There was a happening here in North America, especially Vancouver, the idea of mail art that artists corresponding and connecting with each other. So now the postal system can be a decentralized art work, and anyone can be at the centre of the artwork. Suddenly there was the photocopy machine and you could reproduce something cheaply and mail it to people. The stamp cost 5 cents. So the mail system became a place for experiment. Filliou found out about that and eventually he came here to Vancouver to discover that there were artists starting their own galleries, collectives and magazines, their own ways of doing things and they were connecting to people in different cities on a network. They in return discovered his idea of the network and it became very inspiring. So the art’s birthday became the event that celebrates this sense of network.
DZ: I know that West Coast Canada engaged very early on with the technology, like the telecommunication art. In fact the first telecommunication art project in the world Interplay was initiated by Bill Bartlet in Victoria, Can you talk about that project and is it related to the eternal network?
HB: Oh yeah it all fits together (laugh). Bill and his partner Peggy were interested in using new technology to develop networks, not just the mail system but there were other tools you could use to communicate. They were disappointed with television because it’s really a one-way communication that’s not interactive. I met them when they were just stating. They referred to a German playwright called Bertolt Brecht he wrote an article on radio. He said radio is not really a medium of communication. It’s a medium of distribution, and, in fact, a medium of control, isolating the listeners rather than building a community. These technologies can only be called communication technology if it’s a two-way conversation. So they really set about making the television into a interactive medium. They worked with a couple of technologies that were new at the time. One was a device that was invented by a Canadian ham radio operator in Prince Edward Island. You know ham radio guys are talking to each other around the world and playing chess games and so on. He found a way to send pictures where a video cam could grab a still and encode that into sound, very rough black and white sound The sound would be transmitted by shortwave radio and would be reconstituted on the other person’s television. It would come down the screen very slowly. After 15 seconds you would get a picture. This was super exciting. We got this machine and hooked it up with a telephone, so we could do all kinds of events to connect. Bill and Peggy started doing that and caught on. The other thing that was new was mail art. It wasn’t called mail art. Computer companies were using it to send information back and forth. It was again a Canadian company IP Sharp that gave us access to their bandwidth. Basically they were renting telephone lines and allowed artists to experiment. That became an international network as well. It happened for several years before the internet came along. A lot of the activities happened quite early on in Vancouver. I was also involved in artist radio and television too.
DZ: That leads to my next question. Can you tell us about your history with the Kunstradio? You did a lot of projects with them early on.
HB: when I came to Vancouver I was 23 years old. I didn’t have any money. I collaborated with a very close friend Patrick Ready. We were playing with audio cassettes tapes. That was another new invention. Here’s this tiny little thing and it was really exciting that you could use cassettes. It was really cheap. So we started making radio plays, and we sent letters to each other and record on cassette. We started to experiment with weird sounds and of course imitating old time radios and mimicking various forms of communication. Around that time they started the co-op radio where’s right across the street from us now. We were invited to do a show on this new community radio station which became the HP radio show. We were part of a generation that was discovering sound as an artist medium for experiment all over the world. Our sense of sound, certainly for me, wasn’t really coming out of music or literature. It was coming out of the visual art or sculptural practice. I always thought that sound, especially what we did with HP radio as a sculpture, a social sculpture in the Josef Beuys’ sense. You could cover this vast area and engage people with the telephone and interactive radio. It becomes this huge sculpture. The sound fit into it as well. At a certain point we would do this event that we have two telephones. One of them would be sending sound back and forth. The other would be sending pictures. In the early 80s fax machines came so we started sending faxes. Art’s birthday took off again in early 80’s especially around the fax machine. I remember art’s birthday in 83, 84, 85. A lot of them were fax parties. So your fax machine would go nuts on art’s birthday.
DZ: Western front is one of the earliest places to organize Art’s birthday celebration? What about other galleries and museums?
HB: The Front was the centre of it. And there were others in Vancouver. To go back to your other question about Kunstradio, Vienna came to the network very early. Robert Adrian was involved in the computer network, early email and slow scan event. He produced some very interesting events from his end. His wife Heidi Grundmann had a very legitimate radio show on the National Radio Station about art. She would go to the Documenta and Biennales to interview the artists and so on. Then she realized that there were artists using that medium itself. She became very interested in artist using radio and sound. The show evolved very early on and became a sound art show even still today, a very important show. So we might be being broadcasted right now on Kunstradio which runs every Sunday night on the National Austrian Radio. If you go to their website (http://www.kunstradio.at) you will find a huge archive on Art’s Birthday. They’ve really become an important node. So this global network that we have today is largely because of the efforts of Kunstradio, and Western Front is very closely connected. Right now at Western Front there are other events happening for the Art’s Birthday.
DZ: One of the early telecommunication art theories is that instead of artists making objects, they are creating a space. From the first telecommunication project till now, almost 40 years, there has been big improvement in technology. For example, we are streaming live! That would never have happened 10 years ago. How does that affect telecommunication art? And also what is new right now?
HB: It all moved on very quickly. Sure Fluxus artists imagined a global network, a global brain a long time ago. You can see mail art as an early model for the Internet. But it’s true that we are in a completely new situation. Now everybody’s got a cell phone. You can just about stream from a cell phone. That interactive technology has become real so that the idea of Bertolt Brecht is real. Now it’s just huge. There’s a whole kind of vernacular creativity goes beyond the art world. The whole idea of the eternal network is happening in the global sense. You almost feel like some amazing balance that would tip at certain point that, suddenly, out of this accelerated hothouse, rapidly evolving communications and creativities, there would be some new thing. We will come out of it. Maybe it won’t take a million years to go back to life, maybe it will be sooner than we thought.
DZ: there’s also this interesting thing that we discovered through researching Internet streaming. I was calling up some internet companies to ask about how to set up wide bandwidth internet here at Centre A, one of the companies said that the service is extremely expensive, for example a commercial T1 line, and that’s because they don’t want to make it into a common commodity. Why do you think is that (besides the technological aspect)?
HB: I think it goes back to the theory artists making space. I think it’s a very nice image: artists making space, artists making life. There’s a sense of freedom about that idea. There’s a sense of freedom for me that now we are here having the world tea party. What is the world tea party? It is a space. There’s no big shows, no spectacle. There’s just this space where we could be together and have a cup of tea. Which is great right? Then we become the art. I think it’s very democratic. And of course there are thousands of people out there trying to figure out how to make money out of it. I am sure there are all sorts of people thinking “what do me do wrong? We allowed the Internet get out and it’s free and we are not making any money off it and it’s a problem. And they continue to try to. They commodify it and it’s surveillance. There’s this dystopia scenario that can very easily be rolled out. But seems to me that each time these forces of management, control and exploitation try to reinforce their position, the subversive voices comes in and very quickly dissolve the situation. Not just activists and legal system but also j-walkers wh invent something that goes around the system of control. I think that’s the creative space of play that we are in right now. Marshall McLuhan said long time ago that you have the surveillance of people looking down, but you also have the people looking up. With these technologies, they go both ways. So it’s very hard for the force of control to keep their stuff secret now.
DZ: Thank you for all the great and honest answers. I have one more question. What’s your view of artwork exhibited on the cyber space? Of course it’s very different than participating in an event. For example, people who are watching us at home and people who are sitting here physically. What’s your view on cyber-based art and exhibitions? I know it’s a big question.
HB I think it’s about what’s on your mind really. We used to do these radio shows called the LUXE Radio Plays. We get together with a bunch of people who are not professional actors. We made up stories, we scripted them and we performed them as live performance using old style sound effects. We had rolled-up carpets pouring rice down tubes and breaking glasses. It was actually quite a lot of fun to watch for the audience there. You would see some people holding sheets of paper reading to a microphone, and a bunch of other people with objects, but you might be imagining people going over the Alps on a hot air balloon or something coming in from outer space going to the bottom of the ocean. In your mind the scenario would be completely different from what you are seeing with your own eyes. So when you talk about art on the Internet, it’s kind of conceptual isn’t it? We imagine all kind of people in different cities celebrating art’s birthday. We can actually go into that space. I think a lot of interest for online art is among people who are online. People who are online are going to make online art and look at other people who are online and make online art. They live in this world which’s like an online cult of streaming audio freaks. So you might be typing a letter or doing a spreadsheet or something, but on the corner of your monitor, there’s stream coming from Antwerp. And you can look at it more closely if you want to, or sometimes you have three or four things ongoing at the same time. People live in that world but at the same time we are sitting here across from each other. There’s always this tension happening between what’s in the real world and what’s happening online. It’s interesting that a lot of commercial galleries are like“ oh interesting that we ill go online and sell all the work online”, and it hasn’t worked out. All the big commercial galleries closed their online sites because people need to meet to engage that. Its not a bout making a sale, it’s about what art does, and I think it’s really important to have this space in which we can actually meet in order for this online thing to work. You can’t have one without the other.
DZ: I think we had a similar discussion when we talked about performance art and who is the audience. Let’s go back to the Net-based art. There’s always this possibility that nobody out there is watching right? You can have 0 or 100 visitors on your website while doing this live event. Similar to a performance artist doing a performance in a forest with nobody watching. Does it still make it art if nobody is watching?
HB: Oh yeah totally. Actually I was just inspired by Kate Sansom on my Facebook. She has a piece called “to-do”. I didn’t really look up the work but I am going to borrow that idea. It’s great to have ideas, but you don’t actually have to make the ideas. Why not just make a list of the ideas? One idea I have is to shoot a series of photographs of pine trees in Vancouver which are normally located in very ugly gas stations and next to a street lamp or something like that, but you know what it’s a subject that’s been done to death. You don’t actually have to take the photographs. It’s just a nice idea. You can actually list hundreds of ideas and you don’t actually have to execute them. So is that art? Why not. I think art is about intention. What is it that you mean? What do you mean to do? So what you mean to do is being alone in the forest and drop a dry sponge into a bucket of water. And it’s art and it’s fine. It’s about what you are thinking. What’s in your mind and what’s coming out of your mind.
[The end]
[Interview One] Roy Caussy - an artist with a truck 11/26/2009
A Listener’s Lab
Interview One
Date: September 17, 2009
RC: Roy Caussy
DZ: Debra Zhou
Roy Caussy is a Hamilton-born Canadian artist. His work explores the forces of balance, tension, energy and the release of these forces. The work often takes place within a landscape and evidence, or documentation, of these projects are brought into the gallery space as proof of their having taken place. Caussy perceives his role as an artist much like a voice yelling out into the expanse joining other voices which together take form and become a force itself. Having graduated from NSCAD University in 2006, he is also one of the three founding members of Mountain Club, an artist collective based in Vancouver.
I interviewed him before he left Vancouver, where he was the artist-in-residence at Centre A.
DZ: Can you describe the project that you are working on right now?
RC: I just bought a pick-up truck, and I am going to transform it into a traveling/living/studio space. The intention is to drive across the country and meet up with friends and work on projects. The whole idea is to connect project with project, and the distance I go through while traveling will be part of the experience. One of the elements of the project is a sound system, a home sound system with really good speakers that I’ll install in the truck. Figure out alternate power source as well to power all the equipments, like a record player, and stereo amp. I have a portable digital sound recorder with me in the truck and a couple microphones as well. So the whole aim is to do a bit of both, recording sounds that I come across or me and friends make, and play those sound clips out of the speakers of my truck as I am driving into landscapes. I will drive to a destination point, not sure exactly where, which will come about as the work progresses. I'll play these sound clips that I recorded into the landscape. Usually it’s a quiet landscape with no people around. The other side to it is working with the record player. I am thinking of playing certain records into the landscape as well. So far I'm thinking heavily of playing comedy records, like Steve Martin and Bill Cosby.
DZ: Why comedy records?
RC: Because there's something I really like about comedy. It is the need for an audience. It relies so heavily on audience, even more so than music does, because it's so directly communicating. Also comedy isn't actually funny but the comedians make it funny. In fact Most of the comedy is either about very awkward situations or a power relation, the oppressed talking about their oppression in a sense like that. It's all in the delivery that makes it funny which is up to the comedian. If you read the jokes themselves, they are not funny at all. So if you take away the audience, and you still have the performer, which also ties in with a bigger idea of this collective mind. The collective mind is always aware of things happening even though no one is actually there to see it or experience. Information just gets passed along collective. That's the beginning point of this project.
DZ: how to you plan to present the sound aspect of the project?
RC: I am hoping to compile the sound clips that I recorded, after I collect enough of them, I want to make a vinyl record. I really like the idea of people taking them and playing them at their houses. I'll make them very accessible and cheap, so people can sit in their homes and listen to various things that I've recorded. It could be, for example, me and some friends yelling into a landscape that has a lot of echo. Like taking the natural setting and putting it into someone's home environment, which I find quite nice. Maybe through various shows here and there, I'll be able to present one element from that.
DZ: I know your background is in sculpture. When did you start having the idea of incorporating sound into what you do?
RC: It's a combination of becoming really tired of working in a studio, and making these objects in my studio and presenting them in shows afterwards. I am slowing moving away from that. One way is to go on these trips, so my own physical body is moving through time and space and experiencing, and that experience becomes the art. I started going out into landscapes with a few friends. We'd just yell into the landscapes, like standing on top of the canyon and yell into the canyon, or yell across a ridge. I would never record them. I just did it. With this idea, as I explained it earlier, about world energy and affectation, which I am not sure, that me and my friends can go into the landscape even no one else is around but something has changed. What is the exact outcome? I don't know. Maybe it can never be known either. But that's beside the point. I just want to highlight that it did occur. That first triggered the use of sound. I was reading a book by 90 year old yoga guru. He brought yoga to the western world and popularized it and made it into what we know as yoga. In it he was talking about sound and brought up a really interesting point. He mentioned that it's non-verbal sound that communicates the most effectively with people. People feel sound first as communication and it is sound that cut through everything, barriers and walls. So when I think about that, I think about life as well. It is not language but the communication, the tone, the feeling of sound.
DZ:I remember last time you were talking about echoes that you yell into a landscape as a way to study the landscape. I found that intriguing.
RC: Yeah. The idea that landscape has a very specific frequency that's its own. When you yell into it, it's almost like echo sonar, like how dolphins and bats perceive the environment, because it is only that specific landscape can shape the sound bouncing back to them. So now it's also introducing the idea of a relationship that goes beyond being present in it.
DZ: When you say you want to record the sound of dragging the couch across the floor, and play it back to whales, are you trying to learn something from it, or a way to communicate with the hunchback whales, or something more than that?
RC: Maybe not so about establishing a communication with the hunt back whales, in a way, bring a notion through absurd means that communication is beyond what we think it is. Dragging the couch across the floor is communicating with the hunchback whales. It's entirely absurd, but at the same time it's not dismissive. You can't dismiss that as a joke because communication is so further beyond what we perceive it to me.
DZ: Would you describe your trunk project a sound project? What 's your definition of sound art? What comes to your mind?
RC: The definition is entirely loose for me. It depends on how the artists choose to classify themselves. Either they actively define themselves "I make sound art" or they accept the distinction other give them, that's good enough for me. I don't want to go into their art and really break it down according to the history of sound art and say oh this is not sound art because this and that small elements. It’s the same with sculpture. A sculptor is a sculptor in a sense of how they label themselves. Would I consider this a sound project? I guess so. I am very directly working with sound. In a way, I am using sound to get to an idea. It doesn't stop with the sound, but the sound is a vehicle for communication. Throughout my practice I've used varying ways about communication ideas, like the clay cup project. It's not really sound piece, not sculpture either, maybe installation, somewhat performative.
DZ: there was sound involved too. When people were smashing the cups right?
RC: Yeah. Exactly. It echoed so much in the space too. It was quite nice.
However, the truck project is bigger than a sound project, even the physical truck itself is a project. There will be documentation of the time I spend traveling in it. One of the reasons why I got the truck is because I was finding it difficult to do these sound project, I had to reply on other people's vehicle or spent money to rent vehicle which would get expensive. So I was "Ok I am just going to buy my own vehicle and be independent with it", but I still become depend on others for the execution of it. So far it's been me going with friends, more than just one person, trying to communicate with each other.
DZ: So what made you interested in making sound work is the idea of using sound as a communication factor, besides just words or speeches.
RC:I think that those bits of information I gathered all the time just come up. I didn't really seek out what the yoga guru had to say about sound, but it just to be in my environment and struck a cord with me. As I develop my practice, I am starting to move away from a consistency in method and material. I'll follow this sound project through for as long as I go, but for me it's a mean to an end. It's the right voice for this project and idea. When I first started to work with sound, I was quite amazed that now I am entering into the realm of sound, because I was so object-based for such a long time. Looking back, when I graduated from university, the stuff that I was working on right now is quite a big shift. There's no way I knew I'd take the direction I did.
DZ: Does it have anything to do with the shows that you see in Vancouver and the people that you meet in Vancouver? Is there any connection?
RC: The first sound project of which is going into a landscape and just yell. I brought a quarter inch audio reel with me, and I would go into a landscape with some friends, and we'd just yell. I was working with the idea of tape. Even I wasn't using the necessary technology, like reel to reel. Rather, the presence of the audio reel itself, did record the entire event. In fact it was being a witness, being present. Therefore, that reel, in a way has infused with this pattern of energy. The first one I did was in Hamilton before I got to Vancouver. Also growing up in Hamilton, playing music was an important part. So the first people I ask to do this project with was old band-mates. It seemed the most logical choice at the time. So I guess it came more from playing music in high school. We decided to transition away from writing our own songs to start jamming together, just let the music happen. We totally gave up any song structure. We can't write songs anymore but we could jam really well together. We could be in a garage for hours and just make sounds. It's steeped in music because we played traditional instruments, but we were also creating not just energy, but also a specific energy: the four of us were creating this one thing, we were also together communicating so much non-verbally, the style of base I was putting into it, or the tone of guitar, and it all affected us all to morph this energy ball to something more concise. At the end, when I listen back to the recording, it started with all kinds of chaos and then the four of us just fell into it and clicked for a moment. Maybe 2 minutes out of an hour jam, we had something amazing, solid, together and fluid. That was the beginning of working with the idea of energy people can create together. That let me into using sound with those purposes. How a specific group of people gathering together can alter energy, and turning it into something unique that only that specific group of people can create. There's something really nice about that. That's why I am letting go of the musical aspect but using the sound to highlight the idea of the alternative energy and pattern.
DZ: Actually that leads to the next question I have for you. Do you think there's an overlap between experimental music and sound art?
RC: for the most part, it's really depends on the context. In a sense, I stayed away from studying music and sound art. As I make projects, other people let me know of more projects that I should know of. I am avoiding labeling myself as a sound art or someone specifically engaged in the dialogue of sound art. In a way I could reach a broader dialogue. But my opinion is my opinions, but I think anything is context. Some context has higher audience rate. For someone who does experimental music verses sound art, they are presenting to different audience, for experimental music has a larger audience, even just using the title music as art. I don't know if it comes down to commercialism or elitist elevation. I went to some experimental music show and it was insane chaos, and there was no music but musicians were performing. In a way they are using these performative acts not about creating music, but really highlighting their relationship with their instruments. It depends on how you term it. But I don't think there's a difference.
DZ: what do you think of the Vancouver sound art scene? Do you see a lot of shows?
RC: I don’t go out much, really, but I would say I’ve seen more experimental music shows than sound art shows. In many ways, the sound art shows I ‘ve gone to see are less engaging, but the experimental music was always quite heavier in its sound and tones. Seems the sound artists come from this technology-based foundation, verses the experimental music comes from a hard-core metal type foundation. So it's way more entertaining to watch. They are just destroying themselves and their instruments to make this sound. There's a big Vancouver experimental music scene. I know of sound artists who go into the music venue to present works, which follows almost the same format. So is that really sound art then? Or is it borrowing the venue? It gets really blurry.
DZ: have you heard about concrete music (Musique Concrete)? It's an early French school of sound artists who started manipulating sound using tape recorder in the 50's. They were the first ones to use techniques of sampling, looping, reverbs. In the book on sound art that I am reading, they are clearly labeled as sound artist, but nowadays every DJ uses those techniques. We don't call them sound artists, because these techniques are so established. You think it's a natural progression of things?
RC: of life? (laugh) For sure. In many ways. For example, Our parents generation fought for the rights that they have. They have the struggle to get the concept of post modernism, but on a more physical tangible level, they had to struggle with racism and equality within society. Whereas as our generation, we just grew up as if it's give. We don't have to fight for it anymore, just use it as what it is because it is just there. We just accept it as the way things are. Life keeps progressing and changing but the pattern stays the same.
DZ: When Concrete Music started using sampling and looping, it was a revolutionary idea like a new way of looking at sound because they weren't just using music, but all kinds of sound from daily life. For sound artists now, if they simply use the techniques, it wouldn't make art out of it. They have to build a contextual base for it in order to make it "art".
RC: It's similar to something I read recently, Hans Richter on Dadaism. He is someone who's with Dadaism from the beginning and stayed through till the end. So he started talking about the next generation and how they are just taking all the things Dada has fought so much. It really changed the role of art within society. And now younger artists are using those things to create sensation, not trying to push anything anymore. Maybe just to push themselves, but that's it. Dadaism was trying to find a truth within humanity by trying to tear down and deal with all the inhumanity, like WWII. So you have Hans Richter like "who are these kids taking all the work that we did and make money and make a name off it”. I know within my own practice, I am trying to make honest work that's pushing the exploration of ideas and through that, sound has become one of the tools that I use. Whether it's a use of sound with conviction, it's hard for myself to say, but there is honesty in the attempt. That' s why I am trying to stay away from the history of it. It'll be interesting t find how other sound artists are trying to explore the same ideas. Ideas go around. However, it's hard to know anyone's intention really. Same with the book on Yoga. You can look like at peace in a yoga position, body relaxed, right breathing, but no one really knows if you are meditating. You might be thinking about a Starbuck coffee and no one would know.
DZ: Thanks Roy. I will put this interview on a blog-style website.
RC:It's funny to publish a blog on sound artists eh? The idea of compiling or using this written form to let others know about sound artists is funny: an entire silent format to communicate sound to others. It's kind of nice, but also super confusing.
DZ: Maybe i'll put a little sound clip of "this is Roy Caussy 's voice".
Interview One
Date: September 17, 2009
RC: Roy Caussy
DZ: Debra Zhou
Roy Caussy is a Hamilton-born Canadian artist. His work explores the forces of balance, tension, energy and the release of these forces. The work often takes place within a landscape and evidence, or documentation, of these projects are brought into the gallery space as proof of their having taken place. Caussy perceives his role as an artist much like a voice yelling out into the expanse joining other voices which together take form and become a force itself. Having graduated from NSCAD University in 2006, he is also one of the three founding members of Mountain Club, an artist collective based in Vancouver.
I interviewed him before he left Vancouver, where he was the artist-in-residence at Centre A.
DZ: Can you describe the project that you are working on right now?
RC: I just bought a pick-up truck, and I am going to transform it into a traveling/living/studio space. The intention is to drive across the country and meet up with friends and work on projects. The whole idea is to connect project with project, and the distance I go through while traveling will be part of the experience. One of the elements of the project is a sound system, a home sound system with really good speakers that I’ll install in the truck. Figure out alternate power source as well to power all the equipments, like a record player, and stereo amp. I have a portable digital sound recorder with me in the truck and a couple microphones as well. So the whole aim is to do a bit of both, recording sounds that I come across or me and friends make, and play those sound clips out of the speakers of my truck as I am driving into landscapes. I will drive to a destination point, not sure exactly where, which will come about as the work progresses. I'll play these sound clips that I recorded into the landscape. Usually it’s a quiet landscape with no people around. The other side to it is working with the record player. I am thinking of playing certain records into the landscape as well. So far I'm thinking heavily of playing comedy records, like Steve Martin and Bill Cosby.
DZ: Why comedy records?
RC: Because there's something I really like about comedy. It is the need for an audience. It relies so heavily on audience, even more so than music does, because it's so directly communicating. Also comedy isn't actually funny but the comedians make it funny. In fact Most of the comedy is either about very awkward situations or a power relation, the oppressed talking about their oppression in a sense like that. It's all in the delivery that makes it funny which is up to the comedian. If you read the jokes themselves, they are not funny at all. So if you take away the audience, and you still have the performer, which also ties in with a bigger idea of this collective mind. The collective mind is always aware of things happening even though no one is actually there to see it or experience. Information just gets passed along collective. That's the beginning point of this project.
DZ: how to you plan to present the sound aspect of the project?
RC: I am hoping to compile the sound clips that I recorded, after I collect enough of them, I want to make a vinyl record. I really like the idea of people taking them and playing them at their houses. I'll make them very accessible and cheap, so people can sit in their homes and listen to various things that I've recorded. It could be, for example, me and some friends yelling into a landscape that has a lot of echo. Like taking the natural setting and putting it into someone's home environment, which I find quite nice. Maybe through various shows here and there, I'll be able to present one element from that.
DZ: I know your background is in sculpture. When did you start having the idea of incorporating sound into what you do?
RC: It's a combination of becoming really tired of working in a studio, and making these objects in my studio and presenting them in shows afterwards. I am slowing moving away from that. One way is to go on these trips, so my own physical body is moving through time and space and experiencing, and that experience becomes the art. I started going out into landscapes with a few friends. We'd just yell into the landscapes, like standing on top of the canyon and yell into the canyon, or yell across a ridge. I would never record them. I just did it. With this idea, as I explained it earlier, about world energy and affectation, which I am not sure, that me and my friends can go into the landscape even no one else is around but something has changed. What is the exact outcome? I don't know. Maybe it can never be known either. But that's beside the point. I just want to highlight that it did occur. That first triggered the use of sound. I was reading a book by 90 year old yoga guru. He brought yoga to the western world and popularized it and made it into what we know as yoga. In it he was talking about sound and brought up a really interesting point. He mentioned that it's non-verbal sound that communicates the most effectively with people. People feel sound first as communication and it is sound that cut through everything, barriers and walls. So when I think about that, I think about life as well. It is not language but the communication, the tone, the feeling of sound.
DZ:I remember last time you were talking about echoes that you yell into a landscape as a way to study the landscape. I found that intriguing.
RC: Yeah. The idea that landscape has a very specific frequency that's its own. When you yell into it, it's almost like echo sonar, like how dolphins and bats perceive the environment, because it is only that specific landscape can shape the sound bouncing back to them. So now it's also introducing the idea of a relationship that goes beyond being present in it.
DZ: When you say you want to record the sound of dragging the couch across the floor, and play it back to whales, are you trying to learn something from it, or a way to communicate with the hunchback whales, or something more than that?
RC: Maybe not so about establishing a communication with the hunt back whales, in a way, bring a notion through absurd means that communication is beyond what we think it is. Dragging the couch across the floor is communicating with the hunchback whales. It's entirely absurd, but at the same time it's not dismissive. You can't dismiss that as a joke because communication is so further beyond what we perceive it to me.
DZ: Would you describe your trunk project a sound project? What 's your definition of sound art? What comes to your mind?
RC: The definition is entirely loose for me. It depends on how the artists choose to classify themselves. Either they actively define themselves "I make sound art" or they accept the distinction other give them, that's good enough for me. I don't want to go into their art and really break it down according to the history of sound art and say oh this is not sound art because this and that small elements. It’s the same with sculpture. A sculptor is a sculptor in a sense of how they label themselves. Would I consider this a sound project? I guess so. I am very directly working with sound. In a way, I am using sound to get to an idea. It doesn't stop with the sound, but the sound is a vehicle for communication. Throughout my practice I've used varying ways about communication ideas, like the clay cup project. It's not really sound piece, not sculpture either, maybe installation, somewhat performative.
DZ: there was sound involved too. When people were smashing the cups right?
RC: Yeah. Exactly. It echoed so much in the space too. It was quite nice.
However, the truck project is bigger than a sound project, even the physical truck itself is a project. There will be documentation of the time I spend traveling in it. One of the reasons why I got the truck is because I was finding it difficult to do these sound project, I had to reply on other people's vehicle or spent money to rent vehicle which would get expensive. So I was "Ok I am just going to buy my own vehicle and be independent with it", but I still become depend on others for the execution of it. So far it's been me going with friends, more than just one person, trying to communicate with each other.
DZ: So what made you interested in making sound work is the idea of using sound as a communication factor, besides just words or speeches.
RC:I think that those bits of information I gathered all the time just come up. I didn't really seek out what the yoga guru had to say about sound, but it just to be in my environment and struck a cord with me. As I develop my practice, I am starting to move away from a consistency in method and material. I'll follow this sound project through for as long as I go, but for me it's a mean to an end. It's the right voice for this project and idea. When I first started to work with sound, I was quite amazed that now I am entering into the realm of sound, because I was so object-based for such a long time. Looking back, when I graduated from university, the stuff that I was working on right now is quite a big shift. There's no way I knew I'd take the direction I did.
DZ: Does it have anything to do with the shows that you see in Vancouver and the people that you meet in Vancouver? Is there any connection?
RC: The first sound project of which is going into a landscape and just yell. I brought a quarter inch audio reel with me, and I would go into a landscape with some friends, and we'd just yell. I was working with the idea of tape. Even I wasn't using the necessary technology, like reel to reel. Rather, the presence of the audio reel itself, did record the entire event. In fact it was being a witness, being present. Therefore, that reel, in a way has infused with this pattern of energy. The first one I did was in Hamilton before I got to Vancouver. Also growing up in Hamilton, playing music was an important part. So the first people I ask to do this project with was old band-mates. It seemed the most logical choice at the time. So I guess it came more from playing music in high school. We decided to transition away from writing our own songs to start jamming together, just let the music happen. We totally gave up any song structure. We can't write songs anymore but we could jam really well together. We could be in a garage for hours and just make sounds. It's steeped in music because we played traditional instruments, but we were also creating not just energy, but also a specific energy: the four of us were creating this one thing, we were also together communicating so much non-verbally, the style of base I was putting into it, or the tone of guitar, and it all affected us all to morph this energy ball to something more concise. At the end, when I listen back to the recording, it started with all kinds of chaos and then the four of us just fell into it and clicked for a moment. Maybe 2 minutes out of an hour jam, we had something amazing, solid, together and fluid. That was the beginning of working with the idea of energy people can create together. That let me into using sound with those purposes. How a specific group of people gathering together can alter energy, and turning it into something unique that only that specific group of people can create. There's something really nice about that. That's why I am letting go of the musical aspect but using the sound to highlight the idea of the alternative energy and pattern.
DZ: Actually that leads to the next question I have for you. Do you think there's an overlap between experimental music and sound art?
RC: for the most part, it's really depends on the context. In a sense, I stayed away from studying music and sound art. As I make projects, other people let me know of more projects that I should know of. I am avoiding labeling myself as a sound art or someone specifically engaged in the dialogue of sound art. In a way I could reach a broader dialogue. But my opinion is my opinions, but I think anything is context. Some context has higher audience rate. For someone who does experimental music verses sound art, they are presenting to different audience, for experimental music has a larger audience, even just using the title music as art. I don't know if it comes down to commercialism or elitist elevation. I went to some experimental music show and it was insane chaos, and there was no music but musicians were performing. In a way they are using these performative acts not about creating music, but really highlighting their relationship with their instruments. It depends on how you term it. But I don't think there's a difference.
DZ: what do you think of the Vancouver sound art scene? Do you see a lot of shows?
RC: I don’t go out much, really, but I would say I’ve seen more experimental music shows than sound art shows. In many ways, the sound art shows I ‘ve gone to see are less engaging, but the experimental music was always quite heavier in its sound and tones. Seems the sound artists come from this technology-based foundation, verses the experimental music comes from a hard-core metal type foundation. So it's way more entertaining to watch. They are just destroying themselves and their instruments to make this sound. There's a big Vancouver experimental music scene. I know of sound artists who go into the music venue to present works, which follows almost the same format. So is that really sound art then? Or is it borrowing the venue? It gets really blurry.
DZ: have you heard about concrete music (Musique Concrete)? It's an early French school of sound artists who started manipulating sound using tape recorder in the 50's. They were the first ones to use techniques of sampling, looping, reverbs. In the book on sound art that I am reading, they are clearly labeled as sound artist, but nowadays every DJ uses those techniques. We don't call them sound artists, because these techniques are so established. You think it's a natural progression of things?
RC: of life? (laugh) For sure. In many ways. For example, Our parents generation fought for the rights that they have. They have the struggle to get the concept of post modernism, but on a more physical tangible level, they had to struggle with racism and equality within society. Whereas as our generation, we just grew up as if it's give. We don't have to fight for it anymore, just use it as what it is because it is just there. We just accept it as the way things are. Life keeps progressing and changing but the pattern stays the same.
DZ: When Concrete Music started using sampling and looping, it was a revolutionary idea like a new way of looking at sound because they weren't just using music, but all kinds of sound from daily life. For sound artists now, if they simply use the techniques, it wouldn't make art out of it. They have to build a contextual base for it in order to make it "art".
RC: It's similar to something I read recently, Hans Richter on Dadaism. He is someone who's with Dadaism from the beginning and stayed through till the end. So he started talking about the next generation and how they are just taking all the things Dada has fought so much. It really changed the role of art within society. And now younger artists are using those things to create sensation, not trying to push anything anymore. Maybe just to push themselves, but that's it. Dadaism was trying to find a truth within humanity by trying to tear down and deal with all the inhumanity, like WWII. So you have Hans Richter like "who are these kids taking all the work that we did and make money and make a name off it”. I know within my own practice, I am trying to make honest work that's pushing the exploration of ideas and through that, sound has become one of the tools that I use. Whether it's a use of sound with conviction, it's hard for myself to say, but there is honesty in the attempt. That' s why I am trying to stay away from the history of it. It'll be interesting t find how other sound artists are trying to explore the same ideas. Ideas go around. However, it's hard to know anyone's intention really. Same with the book on Yoga. You can look like at peace in a yoga position, body relaxed, right breathing, but no one really knows if you are meditating. You might be thinking about a Starbuck coffee and no one would know.
DZ: Thanks Roy. I will put this interview on a blog-style website.
RC:It's funny to publish a blog on sound artists eh? The idea of compiling or using this written form to let others know about sound artists is funny: an entire silent format to communicate sound to others. It's kind of nice, but also super confusing.
DZ: Maybe i'll put a little sound clip of "this is Roy Caussy 's voice".
Posts
