serial consign

Last fall I posted about espaceSONO, a sound art show at the SAT in Montreal curated by Tobias c. van Veen. Tobias is an old friend who is active as a musician and DJ, curator and critic and in his spare time he plugs away on his Ph.D in communication & philosophy at McGill. I have wanted to interview Tobias about his creative practice for a while, but we have held off having this dialog for several months so we could specifically address his new turbulence-commissioned project, 'til death do us a part. Tobias will be performing this piece and participating in the Programmable Media II symposium in New York City tomorrow at Pace University.

[tobias in the mix at noplacard feb. 2008 / photo: cato p.]

Your recently launched turbulence piece 'til death do us a part is decidely lo-tech. Not only is underlying reel-to-reel technology slightly archaic but even your references are coated with a fine layer of dust. Listening through the piece, it feels very much like an autopsy for "dead media." Could you talk about the inspiration for the piece?

Only in the 21C would recording technology scarcely dated -- the magnetic tape, still in use, of course -- be called 'archaic'. Yet perhaps 'archaic' & 'inspiration' traffic together at this moment when using reel-to-reels to call forth the voices of the dead. If a reel-to-reel is dead media, it is because when, at the height of its use in the 1960s, it was already being used to conjure the spirits of the dead by Konstantin Raudive. Blank tapes, a kind of virgin media, thought Raudive, could capture the transient souls lost on their way across the River Styx. He called it Electronic Voice Phenomenon or EVP. Raudive devoted volumes of research to the recorded phonemes of dead spirits that had to be intrepreted & deciphered from the background wash of hiss & hum that make up the line level noise of virgin media. This virgin media of the blank reel was, even at this time, in the 1960s, already dead, or rather infused with the dead. So perhaps dead media has been with us since its virgin birth.

Inspiration, then, for this project, 'til death do us a part, came from Raudive, but perhaps it was breathed into me from the start -- from Latin 'inspirare', to breath upon, already means to be guided by divine influence, to communicate with the otherworldly. If there is a muse to the 21C soundpoet, perhaps it is with the inspiration of technics, then -- the secrets that technology whispers gently into our ears while caressing our fingers with delicate wires.

Wires is perhaps where it all began in any place, when called upon by Turbulence.org to create a piece that addressed the theme of the 'network', in terms of the ongoing investigation of technological networks by Turbulence with their blogs & events dedicated networked sound, networked performance, and networked arts. From 'network' led me to two propositions:

• that any network is a relationship of reciprocity between machines, i.e., that of love, wherein love contains all the gamut of affective responses from anger to eroticism;
• that if, as a human partially wired in the network, I must be able to engage in this affective economy of reciprocity, that is, to love the machines, and be loved back.

...and frankly I am no coder nor programmer; for me, artistic practice is anti-WORK, it must not be WORK, it must be PLAY... which is not to say that there is no thought nor investigation to the practice (on the contrary); rather, I sought to set-up a network of machines in such an intimate setting that their subtle frequencies could be touched, literally, in the crossings of wires & bent circuits, caressed to gentle joys by organic hands. Thus (and art never produces 'logical' conclusions, nor conclusions, for that matter): the reel-to-reel machine diptych, or wiring of two R2R machines into each other, with a small mixer, and a Roland DSP to spatialize monophonic signals.

Keeping art-making as PLAY-based as possible is commendable, that is no small task. To provide counterpoint to this statement, could you talk a little about your WORK (i.e. your academic research) and how that relates to and informs your creative practice?

I would like to continue living under the illusion (please excuse me) that life itself should press PLAY. We all know work is unavoidable. If I may rewind an old tape from the late 1940s: "Entertainment is the prolongation of work under late capitalism. It is sought by those who want to escape the mechanized labor process so that they can cope with it again" (Adorno and Horkheimer, _Dialectic of Enlightnment_, Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002, p. 109). My illusion is such that I cannot discern if my work is an escape from the reduction of art to entertainment or vice-versa. If artplay is mere catharthis, then perhaps workplay serves as a reset button so I can try again *not* to entertain people.

The lines between PLAY and WORK are not only blurred under the 'production of labour' but under two further factors: (1) what Derrida saw as the play of the text -- which is to say, of all meaning, framing, context -- that nonetheless operates by way of a 'certain' (which to say, calculable) economy (which is to say, a 'certain labour') and (2) that any art which demands of me to once again remain seated in front of my screen, fingers on the keyboard, reduces any radicality of its content to the repetition of mechanized eye-hand coordinated movement indistinguishable from the gestures of research. Hakim Bey has something going on when he calls on the occult forces to disrupt the wires & lie once again breast-to-breast. 'Reach out and fuck someone'. The computer-screen interface reduces much of the differential play to be found between WORK and PLAY into a rote repetition wherein the content is subsumed to the constraint of the same movements. ART must interject at the level of affect, which is to say, it must replay the body, but only if the brain also slips out of gear and into the great roaming state where one is irrevocably drawn to what Hunter S. Thompson called 'The Great Magnet'. Given that onscreen re-presentation somewhat taints the affective force of the exhibitionist machine-love that is a performance, the dead sound itself is the last hope in tearing through the barrier from the zone of the dead to the last living alive. Which side 'we' are currently on is unclear.

To bring to bear all that would fall under WORK to this PLAY would be a challenging task. Some would say it is philosophy of technology. 'It' encompasses texts on turntablism and sampling as a practice of upsetting the force of the 'proper', thus deconstituting the limits of property law; ontological anarchy and strategies of disappearance in rave culture, preforming the conditions under which any 'exodus' (such as in Paolo Virno) must be thought (or Zizek's 'act' of alternative society); the question of technoculture, or rather what AfroFuturism has to teach 'Western' philosophy (a lot); deconstruction as a kind of graffiti, or rather, graffiti as tagging up of Derrida (RAMM:ELL:ZEE and Derrida have some throwing-up to do); the question of technics -- is it not the 'essential' supplement to humanity, that which is excluded to render us (more human than) human? It's all a lot of noises from the dead too.

In terms of providing an arena for exploration, how would you compare reel-to-reel machines to turntables and DJ culture? Given your background in the latter, I'm curious as to your perspective on what each of these tradtions offer.

Turntables were never meant for the production of live remixing, the collapse of conductor to studio producer in the performative realm. The Technics SL1200 was taken as an object & accelerated into an interface for gatherings of flesh, facilitated by rhythm. This was done by tilting the deck sideways for scratching, weighting it down for tracking, laying it with a felt slipmat, and conjoining it at the hip with a mixer capable of contouring the eclipses between the grooves -- vinyl. The hands had to learn a new instrument in the caress of technics: the drifting finger on the rough spinning platter to slow the tempo, the sharp intake on the record label to accelerate, the delicate dance of fingertips on the vinyl to scratch the needle. The turntable-record-mixer apparatus is a tactile instrument requiring the ears of a violinist, the focus of a conductor & the inventive approach of a jazz player. The ears had to relearn how to hear: the headphone in one ear, the mix in the other, the blend in the hands on the knobs & the cut. Of course it falls prey to the formulae present in all of these domains and more; it is too easy to become an addict of START/STOP, the slow fade, and the dull choice in beats. But once challenged, the turntable opens itself to a new language -- which can be, and has been, put into symbol.

It is my intent to seek out combinations of machines that open themselves through touch, machines never designed for the performative intervention on their surfaces or intimate interiors. The R2R machine, this performing network known as EAROS, to hear the erotic life of machines, in the attempt to listen-in on the voices of the dead, this is the urgency of 'TIL DEATH DO US A PART. This urgency is such that I am performing this improvisational tango with the mechanical as the TACTICAL TAPE LOOP DIVISION (EVP-UNIT) on several occasions, including as official entrant in the World Telekinesis Competition in May 2008. On my team are Konstantin Raudive & William Burroughs (both deceased, respectively).

[william burroughs poses for andy warhol / photo: bobby grossman]

Well then, from bent-circuit to beat poet. What specifically caused you to "draft" Burroughs to your team? His tape loop experiments with Brion Gysin? The cut-up method in general? Any specific moments in his fiction? Beyond that, and on the topic of "dead voices on air" did you ever see The Ghost of William Burroughs? Perhaps it is a distant cousin of 'till death do us part...

Burroughs asked to be on the team. That polite yet persistent junkie kept drifting across the blank media demanding a piece of what he (along with Gysin) sought. Via a cut-up that took some time to decipher, Burroughs revealed something of the erotic to be found in cutting-up the dead. Jouissance through cut-up is something of a scarcely erased technecrophilia. Raudive was already drafted, though he keeps insisting that telekinesis has little to do with EVP. He's stuck in the Reel, though, so its tough titties for him.

Since moving to Montreal in 2002 you've been quite active promoting sound in a variety of forums including events, radio broadcasts and sound art exhibitions. Montreal has slowly developed a mystique quite similar to that of Detroit, where people in other cities have a romanticized perspective of the "local scene" in the city based off one or two festival visits a year (i.e. Mutek, Elektra, etc). As an insider, and something of a outspoken statesman, what are your thoughts the local audience and cultural infrastructure for adventurous listening in Montreal?

A city deserves to be tasted on foot: drunken staggerings from the bar, eyes rolled back in the sockets, feet on fire, hailing cabbies in poor, broken Quebecois gleaned from failed attempts at late-night love. This is Montreal. Montreal seduces you, embraces you with tropical warmth, then buries you under 8 months of glacial winter. And what is a 'scene'? If a 'scene' is a series of physical spaces, havens of culture, then Montreal remains a vibrant, if not one of the most vibrant, places for arts experimentation in North America. It is a city of venues and festivals. But, alas, things are changing: rents are going up; lattes are coming in; SUVs are zipping by; a few venues are disappearing (RIP, The Spectrum). The physical infrastructure of a vibrant arts scene has been stamped with its due date. New neighbourhoods will break out (the shift is on from the Plateau and Mile End to St. Henri) and perhaps old politics will intervene (if the pro-separatist Parti Quebecois gets in, the economy tanks -- which is good for artists), but world economics is intervening now, and the City of Sin won't last as the City of Cheap.

But let's talk about the most significant component of a scene, as other cities, from NYC to Toronto to Vancouver to SF, are expensive yet produce good art. What is necessary for a scene is a collective of people supporting each other, or rather, lines of fracture that connect various kinds of people to each through informal networks. This kind of scene existed for adventurous techno & house when I moved here in 2002: it was personified when I attended a lazy-afternoon BBQ, listening to unreleased tracks on the stereo while the smoke from blunts mixed with the friendly talk of three dozen of the city's artists, DJs and promoters... mutually supporting remixes were struck; wax circulated; invites to play granted; articles partially written in the heads of the scribes present. This is a functioning scene.

The breakpoint for me was in 2003-2004 when many musicians began fleeing to European climes (read: Berlin). When Force Inc.'s Montreal office folded the writing had long been etched in the run-out groove. Montreal is a great festival city, but it simply isn't self-sustainable for many performing artists in the electronic arts: there's not enough places to play, and the places that exist are controlled by rather short-sighted cliques. What I say here doesn't hold for every kind of music; some forms fare better than others (such as musique actuelle, noise, improv, and so on). But electronic musicians don't fare so well here, and for the most part, the myth that Montreal is all about avant-garde beat-driven techno and house is exactly that, a myth. Toronto and Vancouver both have far more engaged scenes that support local events. Most clubs here remain entrenched within the logic of 'beer & broads' -- both at cheap prices.

But this is an old story... and yet the story could have been different: if some festivals had accepted DJs into their line-ups earlier on, recognising the historical role the DJ has played in disseminating electronic music, but also as an artist in their own right (and at stake here is a much-needed education in techno-turntablism: the electronic scene could learn from hip-hop here, most techno DJs being glorified jukeboxes); some festivals could have opened themselves to collaboration and a diverse approach to events rather than aiming at a brand-name monopoly; and connections to the AfroFuturist heritage, much lacking in the popular culture though omnipresent among the producers, needed to be rendered explicit.

But Montreal never understood the music that came from Detroit -- Montreal is all about what I call 'poutinehouse'. The galaxy-to-galaxy mythos of the offworld futurist, the political wiring of Underground Resistance, the cyborg of sci-fi: these are not the imaginaries of Montreal, though they be those of electronic music's most challenging, innovative and politically inspiring aspects. Thus there often remains a profound disconnect between the moods & atmospheres of interplanetary electronic music (and its politics) and the cozy, neighbourhood feeling of Montreal and its quartiers that somehow leads to a barricading of the status quo. The exodus imparted the unfortunate effect of leaving behind the detritus that now defends its 'hometown hero' status. More significantly, the threads that once connected the improv-experimental scenes and the beatculture are almost severed. Is it any surprise that under these conditions the experimentalists look upon DJs with disdain? In Montreal, being a DJ means being affiliated with beat-driven music as a cash-drawn culture. Very few aesthetically radical & skilled DJs exist, and those who do are shoved aside to the margins.

The indie scene fares better here, whether it be home-taped noise music or the post-rock scenes that continue to trammel the globe. In the indie scene, collective situations, from living to recording to playing, are more or less the norm. And for a time, I'd say this collectivity infiltrated the electronic scene here too, with VJ and DJ collectives (mix_sessions comes to mind, as well as tri.phonic), particularly orbiting around SAT circa 2002-2004. But this is no longer the case in the electronic scene, where the remaining DJs compete tooth-and-nail for bottom-of-the-barrel slots playing music to people who, high on coke, prefer a persistent stream of regurgitated electrotrash, and where, for the most part, DJs who have control of the clubs defend them for the petty fortresses of irony they are. Montreal is all about irony, in this regard -- ironic retro-fashion, ironic microhouse music, and ironically disastrous abuses of coke. Detroit's AfroFuturist mythos, Berlin's bunker jouissance and the West Coast's technoshamanism are all far too transcendental for Montreal's urban hipster.

What this city needs is someone to come in & shake some shit up. But why should anyone expend the energy when Berlin continues to thrive? I have hope for Montreal, but it comes from all the other vibrant music scenes that are too busy incorporating the innovative sounds and techniques of electronic music into their palette to give a damn about the petty politics of the clubs and festivals. The global culture has shifted too: the Dionysian rites of rave culture are long dead, and technoculture no longer thrives alongside a rebellious counterculture; these are all factors in the wasteland that is the 21C. The time is nigh to regroup & rethink what a 'new music' might mean, today, and how the experiences of jouissance that *do continue in great festivals all over Montreal* can be expanded to mean once again a general infection of everyday life with the renegade spirit, rather than just a weekend catharthis that keeps the wheels of the machine grinding down this fragile sphere...

What have you got in the works for the rest of 2008?

The art of disappearance.

I often describe people I write about here at Serial Consign as friends and peers and both of these terms definitely apply to David McCallum. David is a Toronto-based artist and musician whose subverts electronic hardware, software and networks towards playful and performative ends. He has a background in physics and music and received a Masters in Art and Technology from Chalmers University of Technology in Göteborg, Sweden.

I met David in 2006 at Mutek, and got to know him and his work through his excellent curation of our Vague Terrain issue on locative media. David's creative practice is quite varied, and perusal of his recent work reveals interests in improv performance, modified timepieces and insect orchestras.

A shorter version of this interview was previously published on View on Canadian Art.

Your Warbike project (pictured above) takes the commonplace activity of cycling through the city and monitors telecommunications signals to transform the modified-bicycle into an instrument. Could you talk about the history of this project and how it relates to your perception of sound and the city?

It's funny, to call cycling "commonplace" is a pretty urban perspective, and specific to cities with a vibrant downtown. I grew up in the suburbs of Toronto where bicycles certainly weren't something that were commonplace outside of recreation and a mode of transportation for children. One of the interesting things I think about this project - and other bike projects - is that it gets people on bikes who wouldn't normally be there. The downside, of course, is that some people have spent too long off a bike to feel comfortable trying the artwork. It doesn't do much good to say, "Don't worry, it's just like riding a bike".

The project started as an experiment exploring wardriving software when I had just acquired a wireless network card in 2003. A popular wardriving software for some reason had MIDI options in the preferences, which is kind of bizarre for a networking program. I had written a simple program to turn that MIDI data into sound and would ride to and from my school building with my laptop on and the speakers up in my backpack.

What I found was that on my rides, my perception of the space had changed. This was a route that I took several times a day, so I thought I understood the spaces. But the backpack was screaming at me something different, that there was something else going on here that I couldn't perceive.

The experience of hearing aspects of a space, or learning something about them in a tangible sense, is far more powerful than being told explicitly, which is an abstract way of knowing something and removed from direct perception through one's own senses.

The Warbike was my effort to share that experience with people. I thought that my changing relationship to the space was fascinating, and I'd hoped that others' experiences would be as well.

Well, on the topic of other peoples experience, how did you find that people responded to the project at the Sound Cycles and Mobile City exhibition at Interacess? I imagine an artwork that you take for a ride may have proven a bit challenging for some people.

Well, interaction is an interesting challenge. Just because you as an artist find an activity that is incredibly fun, doesn't mean that the public will react in the same way. The hardest hurdle is just making people feel comfortable to interact with the work. Artists and children are already accustomed to touching interactive art, but others aren't. We're raised to do things we have permission for, and it's hard to convince people that they have permission to touch something.

The second is making sure that the audience is comfortable with the method of interaction. Bikes, it turns out, are not one of the comfortable methods. If the Warbike was exhibited in the country, maybe people would be more comfortable with it. But there aren't many networks on country roads, so the Warbike is fundamentally an urban cycling project (Although, come to think of it, using it in areas with fewer networks is a little more rewarding. You do feel like you're discovering something secret). Many people are afraid to bike in the city (and for good reason!).

There wasn't a lack of people wanting to ride it, but there definitely was a type of person who was just happy knowing what it did without feeling the need to ride it. Some were uncomfortable cycling, others it seemed just didn't think they would get more out of the work by experiencing it. You can't win 'em all.

[david mccallum performs i swallow]

I know that you frequently work in software environments like Max/MSP and Pure Data. How has being fluent with code affected how you address technology in your work?

I wish that I were fluent! I think that what I do is more hacking than programming: I use my limited skill set to bash other people's tools into submission for my own purposes.

I'm a strong believer in the craft of new media. Contemporary art seems to have divorced itself from the artisan history of the arts, and I don't think that because the tools in new media are abstract that it's somehow a field where it's okay that the designers are also not craftspeople. There are aspects of a medium that you can only understand by experience. If you don't understand the medium, the work itself risks being naïve. This isn't guaranteed, but the risk is higher. I also think in some sense all artwork, despite the content, is also a comment on the form and medium - and how can you comment on something you don't really understand?

You also run the risk of been seduced by aspects of the tool. Early new media was fascinated with technology and the technology became the end, and not just the means. It was an important process to go through, but I'm certainly glad we've outgrown that. Now that we have a better understanding of technology we can hopefully divorce ourselves from the fetishism and appreciate it as what it is: a tool. Not understanding the medium runs a dangerous risk of falling into the gee-whizardry of technology. I've seen too many middle-aged artists making astoundingly boring art works exploring virtual reality and computer-rendered spaces. The sooner that artists stop using Second Life, the better.

By all this of course I also mean to say that working with technology is fun! I learn much more about myself and the work by working through the problems myself.

[david mccallum, personal art noise thing (PANT), 2005]

I'm a bit less weary of virtual worlds than you are, but I certainly agree that "craft" is something to strive towards in any medium. That said, could you perhaps point out a few examples of media artists whose engagement with technology falls into line with your ideals? What are some artists and projects that have directly informed your work?

I'll try... People like Garnet Hertz, David Rokeby, Mark Böhlen, Leah Buchley, Ken Gregory, Jim Ruxton, Darsha Hewitt and Stephanie Brodeur, Rob Cruickshank, just to name a few. These artists make beautiful work that also comments on the medium of technology and our relationship to it, which I think is tough to do if you don't engage the medium.

I used to say that a conceptual artist is someone who doesn't understand the medium that they work in. Now I'm starting to wonder if conceptual artists actual believe that conceptual art is itself a medium, which is kind of terrifying; even philosophers need to learn to write.