When one enters 3rd Streaming in New York City to witness Woolfalk’s current show, Chimera, one is immediately drawn to mannequins wearing felted costumes and floating on brightly-painted, patterned murals. These are Empathics, a new and fictional species in Woolfalk’s work, who contain genetic elements of both plants and humans. Their existence is a sci-fi-inspired commentary that speaks to many things — including the transformation of identities through biological hybridization — but the more important underlying vision is that of increased unity across all forms of existence. To express this singular vision through craft, Woolfalk utilizes an impressive array of mediums; murals and installations are supplemented by huge, full-color lithographs of Empathics in their costumes, as well as paintings created “by them” and displays of objects used in their fictional rituals.

Folkloric and scientific, fable-driven and meticulously chronicled, Woolfalk’s exhibits also show her as both participant and narrator. In her videos, Woolfalk narrates as a scientist, with the resolute calm found in any biology film. But her work deviates from the usual script in that the scientists describe a transformation they themselves undergo. Woolfalk and “other scientists” find evidence of Empathics in the wilderness of Upstate New York, and through exposure to their bones and spores, decide to undergo a series of changes that will lead them towards becoming chimeras themselves. Over the twinkle of atmospheric music, animations break down the ways in which spores enter the human body — but one soon finds that this is not only a biological transformation; it is also mystical. The scientists enter a ritual of guided dream therapy to learn how to embody their new state of plant-human consciousness, and through the introduction of a performance art element, the transformed beings emerge from behind the wall where the video is being projected, donning costumes that are on display.

The merging of a complete physical and digital reality is what Woolfalk says makes her utopian-driven work “real”. “When you come in[to the gallery], I want you to be in a world — but it’s our world,” she explains.

The world within the exhibit also reacts to the world outside the exhibit. Mythology dictates that Empathics create beautiful headdresses to disguise a second head which sprouts as part of their shift to dual consciousness, and such guises helps keep things from getting awkward in public or at their jobs. They also literally sell their skins; magical costumes they shed during the process help bring in extra income for their research. Regarding this very intentional detail, Woolfalk laughs and describes living in Brazil and studying folkloric performance, where “people are engaging in fantastic stories about struggle… and simultaneously selling trinkets because they need them… they actually help pay the bills.”

SAYA WOOLFALK ARTIST INTERVIEW CONTINUES BELOW

Woolfalk’s work is “becoming more of a fable” as it progresses, acting as a fantastical other reality that reflects the artist’s real-life external influences. The creation of Empathics, for example, was first inspired by the works of feminist science fiction author Octavia Butler, who discussed the idea of plant-human utopia.

“Originally, it was about physical action and ritual that would make [a] new place,” explains Woolfalk. But when conceptualizing what this transformation process would look like, Woolfalk began speaking to biologists at Tufts. Through discussions of the natural world, she began to “rethink physical adaptation and metamorphosis”.

“It’s not just that humans can just act on their environment and become whatever they chose to; the places that they are, the things that they encounter cause micro-transformations,” Woolfalk continues.

Such a statement is more than just environmental or a comment on slow changes through intuitive guidance. Woolfalk seeks to “break down categorization — not just human, animal, or interracial, but also intercultural or interbiological.” She welcomes “the possibility of all kinds of mixing”, and notes that her next iteration upon this theme “is the idea of consciousness between humans and technology.”

As Woolfalk continues to develop as an artist, she is not only incorporating the influence of anthropologists and science fiction writers, or folklore and biology. She is also growing to incorporate her audience as part of the exhibits. For her, “Audience has become part of the structure and circuit. I consider how their experiencing what I’m doing in order to feed it back more clearly.”

Woolfalk’s multi-faceted works all shrink down to a very natural process of evolution — one that welcomes the inclusive mixture of many ideas and techniques. Though each of Woolfalk’s works is fully-conceptualized prior to its creation, its final product is ultimately unpredictable, subject to flux as her ideas morph through what she consumes and how her mind processes. Each piece is “changing and emerging as it’s restructured by the logics I’ve been thinking about,” she explains. “[It is natural] to work in two dimensions — then three dimensions, then four dimensions… There’s a porous relationship between the pieces. It’s an organic process between logic and intuition.”

Ω

Related posts:

1. Saya Woolfalk‘s Hallucinatory Chimeras: The Empathics
2. Mandy Greer Artist Interview : Timeless Textile Landscapes
3. Sarah Applebaum Artist Interview : Crafting Ahead Of The Curb

music art film review - REDEFINE magazine

Saya Woolfalk Artist Interview: The Possibility Of All Kinds Of Mixing

Parapsychological Concepts Shuffled in Through the Side Door

When brainstorming on how to take Matmos’ legacy one step further, Daniel, being the English professor and academic that he is, fell in brain-with a meta-concept. Instead of simply making a concept album and sharing its particulars, why not make a concept album with a concept that will never be truly revealed?

“The situation that we’re in now — where I make art and I have to talk about why I have to do it — when you’ve done this for eighteen, twenty years, that starts to affect the way you think about it. There’s art, and then there’s discourse about the art,” explains Daniel. “How can I respond to [our reputation for concept albums] and create a situation in which I never actually reveal the concept?… what that was a telepathic situation…”

The Marriage of True Minds is primarily based on a series of Ganzfeld experiments, designed to test individuals for ESP. Participants were placed into mild sensory deprivation, wearing ping-pong balls over their eyes and headphones playing white noise. Daniel then attempted to telepathically transmit to them the basic concept of the record, and participants would relay aloud what they saw, heard, or felt. Using a combination of collaged fragments from these recorded sessions and original material, the album was eventually constructed. This basic premise is no secret; Matmos made it public early on. But even though one can see both the responses from participants and Matmos’ eventual musical output as crafted from those responses, a bit of a chicken and the egg conundrum remains; it’s unclear which elements informed which, since Daniel’s exact transmissions have remained a mystery.

“[The concept is] not disclosed in any other way than through this attempt to transmit, which is already fraught with all kinds of charlatanry…” says Daniel. “I liked the idea that there was simultaneously total honesty about what we did but also this kind of hard kernel which was obscured.”

Rather than conducting ESP experiments, Matmos could simply have created an album concept and never revealed it to anyone — but the route they took was much more exciting than a simply obscured one. Matmos aren’t insidiously leaving listeners in the dark with no way out, but have left behind plenty of bread crumbs which could help anyone who is curious and willing piece together bits of the puzzle. In the end, you probably still won’t know what exactly the cookie in their pocket tastes like, but you can become increasingly certain that what they have is a cookie and not a leg of lamb. Thanks to the slippery nature of the mind, one can hone in on the exact concept in only infinitely smaller degrees, never likely to reach its true nature.

“When I narrate it, I guess I would say that I always had one thought, and the thought was the concept of the new Matmos album. But concepts, as such, can have both sonic and visual and semantic content and formal content. And that’s kind of what’s beautiful about language, right?” explains Daniel. “The word ‘knife’ denotes a signifier but it also has all of this kind of funny, seemingly arbitrary stuff about k’s and n’s and soft f sounds and hard kuh sounds that any concept you try to hold and focus winds up leading to all of these associative tendrils that lead out from its singularity.”

MATMOS BAND INTERVIEW CONTINUES BELOW

Love in darkness. Machine noise. Some speaking. Smoke. Whispering. A derive around the city. Fresh fruit in your hand. A city that works, functions. Sort of skipping in the pavement. Find the metros. Adverts made up. Fresh sky. Turn into a bakery. Buy a baguette. Fresh bread. Walk out again. Keep on walking until you reach … reach the end of the road. Suddenly see a storm. At the center of it there’s a black polygon. It’s kind of … what shape is it? Slowly moving. Out towards the boundaries of the space.

“I see the infinity symbol morphing into a Gordian knot. Scribbles on a piece of paper or an electron cloud. Jesus Christ on the cross. An hourglass. Some sort of insect that’s bifurcated with many legs and small black eyes. Flaming scythe sort of moving in circles, creating the effect of a tornado viewed from above. Some sort of cube with a star of David jutting out from its sides. A galaxy viewed from far away slowly whirling around its center.”

“The noise is undulating. It’s like a wavering maybe. It’s hard to speak because the sound of my voice is interrupting. There’s like a white triangle. Waves. There are waves. They kind of pulse. One, two, three, four, five. Waves of darkness that pulse in and out. They’re really regular. They move into the circle, there’s like a circle at the center. A circle of white and the blackness consumes it. It disappears and it disappears and it disappears, disappears. A bit slower. Disappears. Speeds up. It’s like these luminous rings and they move away. Everything is slower. They dissolve. Now there’s just a stillness.”

Trilling flutes. Clashing. Birds. Traffic. Expressway bridge. Distant trumpet. More flutes. Steps down a hallway. Doors. Kind of a grunting, an UGH. More trumpets, like an alarum. Woman whispering. Quiet. Birds, birds again. A fountain. Quiet. Distant conversation, not really audible. I know it’s conversation, at the fringe of your hearing. More flutes. High strings, and a siren. Whispering, a sigh. Someone saying “I don’t know.” A woman’s voice. “I don’t know.” Three notes struck hard, like on a piano. Someone jokes. Conveyor belt. Boxes dropping. Red.

 

 

More transcripts and images can be seen via
verylargegreentriangles.tumblr.com

 

The Beauty of Interpretation

Even if Daniel wanted to — which he doesn’t — it seems likely that even he couldn’t even relay with exact precision what he was transmitting, for even in concentrated and intentional states of thought, the mind wanders and associates however it feels compelled to. What is more important, then, is that their clever idea has the potential to be recycled henceforth into infinity, by them or by others.

“We really could keep going. There are so many transcripts that are so awesome. One of them… should so clearly be a thirty-minute film on its own,” says Schmidt.

“The results of the experiment — when we did the first one — were so poetic and beautiful and just weird that I felt like, ‘Oh, this could really be a record, and not just a gag,’” adds Daniel.

Matmos collected so much material from their sessions — which were pulled from experiments at their home with friends and acquaintances, as well as at a residency at the Ruskin School of Art at Oxford — that they created a Tumblr blog to “slowly… cough out all of the transcripts and photos”. The Tumblr is a multimedia gold mine of documentation, containing text transcripts, bizarre book excerpts, and images of sonic patterns from the sessions, all designed to encourage philosophical questioning of whether the images, the words, or the thoughts were the “real” original source, or some combination of all those things. The level to which Matmos have likely thought about all aspects of this project seems fairly preposterous, but also makes sense when one strains to understand the mode under which they operate.

While all albums are crafted through extensive decision-making processes, The Marriage of True Minds required Matmos to facilitate and then wade through mountains of source material, while attempting not to be bogged down by the weight of infinite possibility. Such decisions are not always easy, which might be part of the reason the record took five years to create.

“On our end, it was kind of a free association of — ‘How do we want to work with this transcript?’ We would be very loyal to the details in the cases of some songs, and with other songs, we would be really loose, and say, ‘Well, I want to use this, and I want to use this, and I want to use this’”, Daniel recalls. “There were all sorts of choices that we got to make — and that’s the fun start with working in this sort of conceptual restraint manner. It doesn’t mean that you have no freedom; you actually have tremendous freedom. I think it almost foregrounds the freedom because of how you interpret.”

The source materials Matmos had to work with were often extremely abstract. Perhaps they’d choose to incorporate a pentatonic melody someone heard, or Chinese checkers someone saw, or the sound of metal brackets. But what does any of that mean, and how can it all be translated into a cohesive sonic product? The methods of construction were as variable as the sources themselves. During the beginning of the process, Matmos would project ideas to participants on a track-by-track basis. Later on, the format became much looser.

With the album’s first single, “Very Green Triangles”, a transcript from musician Ed Shrader was used almost in its entirety. In the similarly-themed “In Search of a Lost Faculty”, varied triangular visions were turned into a sonic collage.

“It was late in the game when we decided, ‘Let’s make a song that’s all the triangle images from every session and kind of pull across things from lots of sessions,’” says Daniel.

The mystery of the triangles is one that stands strong on its own and by default, brings up one question that begs to be answered: were triangles a part of Matmos’ original album concept? It seems that either Matmos are clever tricksters who have considered this question inside and out — including how they might talk about it in interviews — or the phenomenon was completely unrelated to their original transmissions.

“We didn’t know that the triangles were going to be there until we listened to them all, and we were like, ‘Oh, boy, people sure are talking about triangles a lot,’” says Schmidt.

“We even speculated that maybe the kids at Oxford had a joke between them of, ‘Let’s all talk about triangles,’ because it was eerie,” Daniel adds. He later expands on the band’s other theory that prior to each session, the last thing participants saw before lying down was the camera hanging in the air above them, the legs of a tripod forming a triangle.

Another unknown of the whole project is how much psychic potential the band members or their participants had by default. Nobody was screened, and everyone was allowed to participate. The large sample size truly allowed Matmos the ability to see the studies not just in terms of the response, but in terms of how the responses varied when external factors — including themselves — were taken into consideration. They learned early on, for example, that intoxicated individuals would give amusing responses, but not of the caliber that they were looking for. They also learned that people who were not familiar with them were preferable in a lot of ways.

“We noticed that people who were too familiar with our work would sometimes produce kind of parodic versions of perhaps what they thought we wanted — and that concerned me,” says Daniel. “I’m glad we had a chance through the residencies to deal with people who –”

“Had no idea who we were,” finishes Schmidt.

“Yeah, had no agenda,” Daniel continues. “Or, you know, just older academics at Oxford, professors –”

“Who really had no interest in who we were,” Schmidt finishes again, this time with more oomph.

“[They] just didn’t care, and could approach the experiment as just an experiment… and it was really helpful — the more we did it, to start to think about the patterns that emerged, and to sort of watch the album happen. I mean, it’s a little like looking at faces in the fire; if you think that you’re going to see them, you start to see noses and eyes, so out of this morass something starts to emerge — and you think that it’s there, but maybe it’s you,” hypothesizes Daniel.

Through the years and all of the possibilities that have come and gone with The Marriage of True Minds and its related projects, it’s exciting to know that Matmos are still in love with their original meta-concept and still find humor in the fine push-pull of sharing and not sharing its details. Schmidt’s closing thought on this topic is a humble representation of their love for this.

“What we end up giving to the world,” he says, “is really meager compared to the incredible amount of stuff that we’ve seen and heard as a result of it.” say

Ω

Related posts:

1. Spectral Hypnosis: Matmos, Motion Sickness Of Time Travel, Clark MP3 Downloads & Streams
2. Liars Band Interview: WIXIW Confusion
3. Spectral Hypnosis: Tim Hecker & Daniel Lopatin of Oneohtrix Point Never, Seattle’s Stenskogen

music art film review - REDEFINE magazine

Matmos Band Interview: Psychic Sessions and Meta-Concepts Form The Marriage of True Minds

About the “gun-shy” music video, from director Kris Moyes (via Grizzly Bear’s website)

“The idea came from a question:- if the creative energy of any living organism could be seen, what would it look like? Ed, Daniel, T and Bear demonstrate where their creative energy is located by extracting their hair, nails, skin, sweat, tears and blood. This is an invitation for a very rare glimpse of what creative energy could look like on a molecular level, if it could be seen.

Is this is where their music comes from?

The 2nd half of the video takes on a more metaphysical or alchemy-like shift. We see the impact they have on their environment, throbbing leaves, boiling a river, steam, hovering in air, lightning bug-like sparkles in the afternoon sun etc.

This turning point in the story came out of a very creative conversation I had with Daniel Rossen and belief I have and I think the band share is everything is connected.

In the filming of this clip we used various scientifically explainable methods known to the natural world, soap film interference, rapid crystallization, splitting of the light spectrum etc to create the impression that these visual phenomena actually comes from them.

Of course this hypothesis would not hold much weight in the various scientific circles, but, it is a good question to ask. Science has tried unsuccessfully to explain where creativity comes from. Why some humans have a creative drive and others do not, why this person can draw but does not have a musical ear, or why this person is better suited to the clarinet and not the guitar, and why some people can play every instrument they come into contact with.”

Ω

Related posts:

1. Grizzly Bear – Shields Album Review
2. Whim: Grizzly Bear, Dirty Projectors, Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti, Jens Lekman MP3 Downloads & Streams
3. Bear Hands – “What A Drag!” Music Video

music art film review - REDEFINE magazine

Grizzly Bear – “gun-shy” Music Video

Troy Micheau (REDEFINE): I’m Troy Micheau; I’m interviewing you for REDEFINE magazine. This is Robert Henk-eh… am I pronouncing your name right?

Robert Henke: Yeah, perfect! But I’m not very anal about my name, [even] if some people say Henk-ee… it’s just letters.

On Ties Between Art & Engineering

Troy Micheau: Yeah, it’s true! So, read a lot of interviews with you, and a lot of times you call yourself a sculptor or an engineer, and your work with music, as well as Ableton and things like that, would reflect that also. How would you characterize your identity as an engineer and your love for mechanics and detail with your appreciation for abstract and very open-ended art?

Robert Henke: Well, I see a lot of similarities between fascinating engineering and fascinating art. Both have to do with craftsmanship; both have to do with finding a simple solution for a complex problem. And it has to do with elegance and needs inspiration. It’s underestimated how much inspiration goes into good engineering, and how much artistic thinking is involved in good engineering. And, of course, it’s underrated how much engineering goes into pretty much every successful kind of art. So, for me, there’s not so much a difference in the working method. There’s more a difference in the goals you want to achieve. Engineering mostly wants to find solutions – general solutions – which are useful for a lot of people. Art doesn’t normally want to have a solution for a problem. It’s a different kind of thinking.

Troy Micheau: On a side note, I was talking to a friend who was at the [PNCA concert] last night, and we were talking about people who would’ve designed the presets in synthesizers — back in the ’80s, specifically — and saying that those guys, as engineers, were actually probably the most influential on the sound of electronic music for a whole decade and probably even more than that. They are not people that we generally know very well, yet their presets set the tone for a lot of things. I’ve read about you talking about the 808 before, and what the circuitry looks like in there.

Robert Henke: We could talk about this more, if you’d like . If you want to go more in detail — because I did find it fascinating how many people are involved in an artistic process who never shows up in the public notion. I’m always surprised when it comes to, let’s say, bigger multimedia art. In the public, there’s very often the notion of a single artist doing it, because there’s the big name at the exhibition. In fact, there’s a lot of people working for this artist to enable this art. Very often, it’s simply omitted because it doesn’t fit in the public perspective of the genius artist. In a way, the faceless engineer who’s building the synthesizer therefore is creating an artifact which just enables art. [It is] of course equally important in the whole game, [but other than] in a very rare exception situation, this person stays invisible. I don’t think we know who actually built the 808. From all that is known in the public, the circuitry is not from the Roland founder himself, as far as I can tell from reading his biography and other available sources. So it was some other person, or a group of persons at Roland, who made these decisions of how this thing should sound like. And those are [such] influential decisions. And there’s so many of those things going on where we have no idea.

Troy Micheau: There was an exhibit at a museum here last year that was all about video games going from the ’70s up until the early 2000s, and it displayed the names of the designers very prominently. It was like this art exhibit that was all about showing off these guys and saying, “Nobody knows who made these, yet all of these are all part of our childhood and really helped develop our world views and our interactions with technology.”

Moving on from that, though. You work a lot with arrangements and dynamics more so than song structures and things. I was wondering how — or if — this reflects your general thoughts on time and the experience of time. Last night, you were saying when you got to the end of your piece, you felt like, “Oh, I don’t really want to stop now, but it just seems like the right spot.”

(At this point, the old homeless man steps in for a sustained conversation and ends with, “Music to me is Old Tom Jones. Cat Stevens. But I’m older.”)

Troy Micheau: That break actually reminded me of a thing that I wanted to ask about. You have a laser light show coming up.

Robert Henke: I’m talking about this excessively tonight. Yes, and it’s the biggest thing I’ve ever done, so I’m pretty excited about that. Back to the question about time. I have a very strange relationship with time when it comes to music. I, for instance, have a serious issue with memorizing melodies and things like that, which drives me up the wall. So, playing in a band was always a big challenge because I always forgot about things and I always needed to write things down. On the other side, I have a really amazing memory for spatial things, so I feel that, in a way, I am living completely in the now. And my approach to music is probably shaped by that. I give up doing things which, in the creation process, need me to memorize long melodic movements and things like this, and instead work on the evolution of timbre, which I can for some reason much easier grasp. So I guess this is, for one reason, why my music is what it is.

The other is — I just like generally the idea of music as a state. This was something which always fascinated me with early techno music, where you go into a club and you lose a sense of time. That there was repetition, but repetition is meant to be endless. That’s the whole idea of the endless mix. You go in a dark basement; there’s no lights, so there’s no hint if it’s morning already or not, and there’s no clock on the wall, and no one cares. I found this extremely fascinating, and later, I understood that this idea of music as an endless situation is a very old one. Basically every kind of ritualistic music works the same way. For me, the kind of rhythmic music I’m interested in and my drone soundscape work are facets of the same thing. They’re both endless; they’re both not meant to work as three-minute radio pieces. So, rhythm is just another — a special case of timbre to me.

ROBERT HENKE INTERVIEW CONTINUED BELOW

Installation Works

Fragile Territories __ 2012 – 4 WHITE LASERS & MULTI-CHANNEL SOUND

Henke’s most ambitious installation to date, Fragile Territories uses a series of powerful industrial-grade laser beams onto a thirty meter wide by six meter high wall, coordinating bright shapes with changing sonic atmospheres. The installation is supported by Laser Animation Sollinger and is currently installed at La Lieu Unique in Nantes, France.

Eternal Darkness __ 2012 – SITE-SPECIFIC SOUND INSTALLATION

Henke was given the unique opportunity to create a site-specific sound installation in Berlin. It was housed inside an abandoned water reservoir full of unpredictable sonic behaviors, which created massive low-end frequencies and bounced sounds off walls in endless echoes. The installation is on view through September 2013.

Fundamental Forces __ 2011 – ULTRA HIGH DEFINITION VIDEO & MULTI-CHANNEL AUDIO; COLLABORATION WITH TARIK BARRI

Henke and Monolake partner Tarik Barri collaborated on an audio-visual research and installation project which focused on “movement, acceleration and the interconnections and attractions between visual structures and sonic events, we as well as the underlying mechanics in each of the domains.” Mathematical operations led to the emergence of sonic structures and visual shapes, which were then transformed by further code manipulations. It has been on view in Berlin, Graz, Vienna, and Montreal in 2011 and 2012.

On Audio-Visual Performances

Troy Micheau: I’ve seen you refer to your work as sculptures, talking about them in a very visual way. You’ve started to incorporate more visuals into your work over the years. Now, Monolake will only play at places where there can be visuals and surround sound and things like that. I was wondering if the incorporation of the visuals came with more articulation in the music at the same time, because I listen to your sounds now and I can hear pieces of metal dropping with a decay as opposed to earlier Monolake releases which were like a field recording with a kick drum. Both awesome, but very different.

Robert Henke: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, for my visual explorations, there are numerous explanations. As far as Monolake is concerned, it really also came from a very pragmatic marketing perspective. Simply the fact that, if you have reached a certain level, people expect some kind of show. And I’ve found that a person behind a laptop is just not very interesting, especially at a larger venue. At some point, I just thought that it was a good idea to add a visual component. Also, because [of] the usual framework of where I’m booked, a lot of people also have a visual situation going on, the last thing I want to have is that someone [else] is making visuals. I had this in the past, ten or fifteen years ago, when Monolake was not in the position it is in now. It happened to me very often that I would play somewhere, at a festival, and some random assigned VJ did some stuff while I was playing, and a few times it was just completely horrible. I thought, this is completely working against my attention. So then you have two choices: either you insist on playing in darkness, like the Autechre solution, which is a very valid solution, I think — or you find someone or [have] some idea on how to incorporate video in some way. This is just the path that I followed the past three, four, five years as far as Monolake is concerned. And so far, it has paid off, because it has indeed provided another channel of attention, and it has helped put things on YouTube, etc. etc. From a very simple marketing perspective, it’s a very good thing to do — as well as being on stage, as a matter of fact. I performed Monolake in the center of the audience for a while, and I gave up because it worked so much against the expectations of the audience…

The other thing is that I always had an interest in art, and I always found visual art interesting and a topic worth exploration. It was just that I was too shy to make my own visual experiments public, because I didn’t consider them as “art” enough; it was just my hobby. I took photos since ages [ago], and I always enjoyed setting up lights in areas of parties, and I was always very aware of visual environments. But I guess I just never felt a strong enough urge to explore this on a more serious level. This just changed during the course of the last five years, more or less by accident. I got asked to do a sound installation in a situation where I felt that sound was inappropriate. And I thought, why not do a video installation instead? And this just worked out very well. One comes to another, and suddenly I had a bigger video installation going on – like a really big one, for my position in this whole art world, not art world – and from there, things just developed.

LIVE PERFORMANCE VIDEO OF MONOLAKE WITH THEIR AUDIO-VISUAL SETUP

Troy Micheau: I really see — especially in more experimental and electronic forms of music — that video and audio are very necessary for each other. It’s very rare to go see anybody anymore without some sort of visual things. The band I perform in — we have visuals and stuff — and to me, I can’t imagine not having it. I’m interested in where this movement is going in the next ten, fifteen, twenty years, especially if we can buy albums that we could be watching on our iPads and things like that.

Robert Henke: Exactly. There’s also, product-wise, everything ready to be delivered with visual content. The CD is dying; instead you have something on your iPad — so why not have something on your iPad that’s a movie too? It’s just a normal part of music as delivered. See YouTube; people go on YouTube because they listen to music. What happens is you go on YouTube and you see a random photo someone took. If you have good luck, it’s the cover of the album; if you have bad luck, it’s something. Then it’s better if the video content which is running there has a useful connection to music. So yeah, I guess that’s where it’s going.

On Digital Audio Workstations, Hardware, and Software

Troy Micheau: As someone who has been a part of developing a DAW (digital audio workstation) for the world, where do you see those things moving? For example, when I use recording software, sometimes it feels limiting to me, because I have to interface using a mouse or a mousepad, whereas something that I could actually be inside of or actually be using my hands to sculpt or have speakers around me and have it be more of an environment that reflects the [6-channel surround sound] show you did last night, seems more ideal. Have you given any thought to where you would like to see software move in the future?

Robert Henke: There’s tons of answers here. But a few things I find quite obvious are that there is still all kinds of software with too many steps necessary to achieve things, simply because a lot of concepts still come from an engineering perspective and come from a tradition. Audio workstations came from the tradition of tape machines, and tape machines came from the tradition from… what? Good question. But just the record button, the play button, the transport – those are all very old concepts, and they’re not really musical concepts. They’re concepts derived from a technical necessity. I could certainly see that at some point in the future, there will be evolutions of this concept which just work on a very different paradigm. For instance, who says that you need to press record? Assuming that memory [will] cost nothing, maybe you are recording, always. You have something like the Time Machine on the Mac – just in your music software! So you just play. You change things, and you don’t need to save; you don’t need to think about anything. You just say, “Hey, let’s go back to what I did at 2013, on my birthday, at 3 o’clock in the afternoon. Let’s see if this was good. Let’s copy a part of this into my current project.” I can’t see why this won’t be possible, especially if you look at, for instance, where MacOS is heading. Those things are getting very step-by- step incorporated into the operating systems. The time of the save button is something that will vanish at some point because [it won't be] necessary anymore. So a lot of constraints will probably fall. Or playing according to a click. Software will be smart enough to imply what it means if you play a groove. And maybe you need to set one marker afterwards to refine it, but you will never, ever need to play something against a click anymore. That’s a strong belief of mine. The machine will be smart enough to figure out what you mean.

Troy Micheau: That would definitely be awesome. Before I made electronic things, I was a drummer, so I learned for many years to learn to play to a click, and it’s just the most obnoxious thing to have to play music while this thing is in your ear.

Robert Henke: Of course! Especially because you’re completely losing your own sense of swing, because you always need to concentrate, [to be] in sync with this thing, instead of following your own rhythm. So that’s one thing. The other thing is that we can expect the computer, as a classical box, will vanish. Like the iPhone, iPad — those are so much more the current modus operandi. The mouse and keyboard will probably, for a lot of things, disappear. I can see a lot of implications for music software there, too. How do you create music on a touch-screen surface? Let’s imagine that in a few years from now, a touch-screen surface will have tactile feedback so it’s not just a glass plate. If there are faders on this thing, you can touch them; you can feel them moving. You can actually create all kinds of surface which feel natural. If there’s something like a guitar body displayed on the screen, you go over it and you feel the screens. You can maybe even feel them vibrating and stuff like that. There will be a lot more virtual concepts which don’t feel virtual anymore. Just how we are used to now – it’s completely normal that we can look at a street map and the street map is adapting to where we are. This doesn’t feel artificial to us anymore. We don’t perceive it as magic or strange; it’s just how it is. Or we can look from above down on earth. So I believe there’s a lot of those little things coming which will change the way music software will behave. They will all be changes which will go very slowly; nothing will very rapidly move but step-by-step, old ideas will vanish and that’s what will come. Or I could imagine that this whole thinking of a track will also be a thing of the past at some point. Because a track is just a container; a track itself is not musical. Especially not a midi track for instruments. Having empty tracks – you could imagine something as a user interface that doesn’t deal with tracks at all anymore; which, the way the software looks is the score. So there’s just the score. Part of the score is that you have a synthesizer in there. There’s many, many things I can imagine in there.

Troy Micheau: That’s awesome; you just hit all of my little points in there, especially the touch-screen.

Robert Henke: Currently, the touch-screen is totally annoying. I have all these iPad applications and I tried them all out for making music, and you see I have my little fader box, and I love it because it’s tactile feedback; it’s so much nicer than touching a glass plate. For the Monolake shows, I use an iPad, but I also use two of these [other] things. And I will probably get another iPad so I have more functions available at all times. But really critical stuff, which I actually play, doesn’t work so well on the iPad.

Ω

Related posts:

1. Decibel Festival 2012: Robert Henke, Biosphere, The Sight Below Live Show Review (Optical Series)
2. Matt Leavitt Artist Interview : When Engineering And Zen Join To Inspire Art
3. Portland Events: Six+Robert Henke, Nils Frahm, IASOS

music art film review - REDEFINE magazine

Robert Henke Artist Interview: Engineering Artistic Solutions

 

There is a moment on the new Flying Lotus record — let’s call it the first five seconds — when one has to decide whether to climb aboard Steve Ellison‘s shimmering magic carpet for the next half hour (or century… drugs like this tend to distort time a little) or to simply survey the beautiful landscape he’s laid out on his newest album-trip, Until the Quiet Comes.

I say this because like all Flying Lotus records, there are a myriad of experiences to be had within the layers of subtle details, ranging from active to passive and or up and down to goddamn spiritually ecstatic.

Flying Lotus – Until The Quiet Comes Album Review (cont’d)

There’s bouncy elven hip-hop, fashioned from skewered samples of jazzy breaks and the occasional A-list vocalist (Erykah Badu and Thom Yorke in this case), which works for casual listening and car speakers. And then there are the swimming oscillations of otherworldly sounds waiting, just behind those headphones, to constitute Ellison’s captivating psychedelic vision that is hilariously here, terrifying there, and beautiful all around.

Given that Flying Lotus’ tracks rarely break the two-minute mark, it doesn’t take long to realize that Until the Quiet Comes is the slow-burning baby-making stargazing jam to Cosmogramma‘s ass-disorienting free jazzing. This is the sound of geodesic space complete with melting patterns, good laughs, startling revelations, and all. He’s even kind enough to include a track called “DMT Song” just to make sure we’re all on the same page. That track by the way, is a beautiful snapshot of Ellison’s project past, present, and future, beginning with a gorgeously stupid trip report by Thundercat and ending with one of the more spaced out boogies on the album — one which captures both the giddy joy and monastic awe that makes his music so dynamic and powerful. (Editor’s note: see “DMT Song” feature below.)

Until the Quiet Comes is more concerned with suggesting space than filling it, so it might come as a disappointment to those who refuse to give themselves over entirely to the ride. Those looking for short but heavy, heady finger-drumming grooves might want to look into Ellison’s back catalog. But for those initiates willing to explore the inner reaches of the Flying Lotus universe, it serves as stark reminder that John and Alice were only the beginning of the Coltrane legacy of achieving individuation through sound.

- TROY MICHEAU

Track Analysis: Insight Into “DMT Song” & The Great Psychedelic Beyond

Quick Facts
DMT is a naturally-occurring psychedelic compound from the tryptamine family. DMT occurs in notable amounts throughout the plant kingdom and in trace amounts in mammals, including humans. However, it is only active as a psychoactive when ingested.

As summarized by Wikipedia, “Depending on the dose and method of administration, its subjective effects can range from short-lived milder psychedelic states to powerful immersive experiences; these are often described as a total loss of connection to conventional reality with the encounter of ineffable spiritual/alien realms.”

DMT is also a prime component of the plant-based hallucinogenic compound known as ayahuasca.

 

 

Flying Lotus’ last album, Cosmogramma, was termed after Ellison’s aunt, the late musician-turned-spiritual leader and wife of John Coltrane, A.C. Turiyasangitananda (formerly known as Alice Coltrane). “Cosmogramma” was used by Coltrane in a lecture, to explain how the material world as human beings know it is completely illusory. Themes on Until The Quiet Comes continue these themes, and “DMT Song” is perhaps the most astoundingly blatant indicator.

DMT, or Dimethyltryptamine, is a powerful psychoactive drug. Ellison has long been a cautious proponent of its use, though he revealed to Interview in 2012 that he has only done it twice. Nonetheless, those rare occurrences were enough to warrant a track dedicated to the topic.

In early 2009, Ellison shared a blog entry on Myspace about his first DMT experience. In it, he weighed its positives and negatives, his fears going into it and his insights coming out of it, only to ultimately summarize the experience by saying: “My brain was fed! It was by far the most incredible experience I’ve ever had… Even though I’ve had a bit of a ‘breakthrough’, I’m sure I’ve barely scratched the surface…”

(Humorously, Thom Yorke’s voice on Radiohead’s “Pyramid Song” played a particularly profound role on that first trip, and the oscillating in-and-out of Yorke’s voice in Ellison’s then-mutated world recalls the feeling of Yorke’s disembodied vocals in Until The Quiet Comes‘ “Electric Candyman”.)

DMT users have been well-documented to experience similar visions, events, and revelations. American teacher, lecturer and writer Terence McKenna can be credited for popularizing many of those shared experiences. Though it is certainly open to interpretation and may even be incorrect, it is my supposition and that of the album reviewer that “DMT Song” plays off two associations common to DMT trips. These include an opening sound, similar to that of cellophane crinkling, and an elf-like, echoing chorus, which is brought to life in the track by layers upon layers of Thundercat’s voice.

In the video at right, McKenna describes the crinkling sound that comes after one smokes enough DMT to cross from this reality to another one. “And when you [exceed that threshold],” he says, “this membrane-like thing, this chrysanthemum, will actually part, and there is this sound like the crumpling of a plastic bread wrapper, or the crackling of flame.”

Likewise, otherworldly beings, popularized by McKenna as “machine elves“, were described in his and his brother Dennis’ 1975 book, The Invisible Landscape, as “apparently autonomous and intelligent, chaotically mercurial and mischievous machine elves encountered in the trance state, strange teachers whose marvelous singing makes intricate toys out of the air and out of their own continually transforming body geometries.”

Though we can’t say for certain that Ellison is a follower of McKenna’s works, what is clear is Until The Quiet Comes‘ and Ellison’s respect for the psychoactive. It is important, though, that anyone being newly introduced to the substance through this music should research it thoroughly on their own and take the closing words from Ellison’s journal entry to heart.

“DMT isn’t a joke, its not a party drug, and it should be respected. As much as I feel that everyone should experience this, It really ISN’T for everyone and I ONLY recommend it for those who are seeking a spiritual experience. DMT will destroy your ego, and this reality as you know it. As amazing and profound and brief as it was, there are SOME people that should NEVER EVER have this experience. You know who you are, Please travel responsibly.”- - Steve Ellison of Flying Lotus, DMT n me, January 2009

The following resources are good places to begin your personal research into DMT.

- Erowid DMT Vault
- Essential Psychedelic Guide on DMT
- DMT on DanceSafe
- DMT: The Spirit Molecule (Film)
- DMT: The Spirit Molecule (Book)

- VIVIAN HUA

Ω

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1. Short Films By Kahlil Joseph: Flying Lotus & Shabazz Palaces
2. Flying Lotus – Pattern+Grid World Album Cover Review (w/ Theo Ellsworth Interview)
3. Bleep: Flying Lotus – Until The Quiet Comes, Lindstrom, Glass Boy MP3 Streams

music art film review - REDEFINE magazine

Flying Lotus – Until The Quiet Comes Album Review & “DMT Song” Track Analysis

SEE FULL REVIEW

Like its namesake, the film was not entirely one thing, but fully engaging as a combination of several features: live storytelling, illustrative media, and apt, adept scoring. Green’s charismatic personality made for a magnetic narration – funny, quick-witted, with an underlying poignancy that he’s undoubtedly developed over his own career that’s spanned a roster of documentaries like the Oscar-nominated chronicle of the radical late ‘60s group, The Weather Underground, as well as a similarly-scoped “live documentary” called Utopia in Four Movements, that was performed at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival.

The dreamy noise-pop of band Yo La Tengo was a perfect blanket for the audience to lay on and marvel at the film’s figure and his on-screen ephemera. The trio is no stranger to scores, having provided soundtracks to works like the undersea landscapes of surrealist French director Jean Painlevé. The jump seems only natural, to move from sonic illustrations of alien waters to adding color and dimension to quirky relics from Fuller’s abundant life. Their Mark Mothersbaugh-esque melody for the documentary’s opening sequence – images of a geodesic dome in flight – laid the sweet-but-slightly-kooky groundwork for the touching, strange, and extraordinary voyage that the audience is led through for the duration of the film.

We were introduced to Fuller’s incredible “Dymaxion Chronofile” – the largest collection of personal files belonging to any human being in history. Dymaxion is a Fuller vocabulary favorite, a combination of “dynamic”, “maximum”, and “tension”, and what a better way to describe a painstaking collection of every document that the man had ever come in contact with over the course of 63 years? The cycling through of these artifacts, comprised of notes, sketches, bills, film reels, clippings, etc., made the presentation more like a PowerPoint or TED talk, rather than a simple theater outing. It’s worth saying that the program itself was short — less than an hour — which stands in contrast to Fuller’s tendency to speak for hours on end (he once delivered a 42-hour lecture, humbly titled “Everything I Know”). In that time, we see the origin of Fuller’s quest to enact change (sparked by the tragic loss of his young daughter), the boom and bust of his various innovative endeavors, and his rise to relative fame for his uncomplicated but salient vision of almost utopian, sustainable living. Green led the audience through a timeline of various ups and downs, including moments of doubt in which Fuller doesn’t appear to be as iconoclastic as one might hope. Green scans through the files, the film, and plays some archival footage alongside some interviews that create a loose sketch of the figure that is Fuller.

But perhaps the most remarkable thing about Fuller is that he didn’t “achieve” much by common standards. He is mostly known for the design of the geodesic dome, which has well contributed to the field of architectural design but did not have the far-reaching effects that he had hoped for. We’re not all shacked up in domes, and our skylines are still primarily straight lines to the heavens. He was, however, a creature intensely convicted that an individual could enact palpable change in the world, and become indefatigable exemplification of the human spirit and willpower. The myth of the man was not necessarily in his actions (and in fact his resume includes a number of fantastic failures and near or total disasters), but in his ideas for sustainability and service that continue to have relevance in our world today – and that in itself is an accomplishment. It’s hard to imagine not being somewhat seduced by the mythos surrounding Fuller after his story was filtered through the thoughtful, affecting handling of Green and his musical collaborators. The tender oeuvre, in itss brief but touching run, was an elating practice in examining the extraordinary life of a man and the potential of his ideas.

Radio Documentary Series

The Green World Of R. Buckminster Fuller Film Trailer

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music art film review - REDEFINE magazine

TBA Festival 2012: The Love Song Of R. Buckminster Fuller Live Documentary Performance Review

Matmos

October 18th, 2012 Update: 3-D forms hover and float like spacecrafts in this music video by l-inc design. The group, fascinated by Matmos’ approach to their record (detailed below) “worked on the video without consulting the band, counting on psychic cues to guide them.”

Original track and Schwarz remix of “Very Large Green Triangles” to follow.

Pre-Order Matmos – The Ganzfeld EP

Matmos (cont’d)

FROM MATMOS’ PRESS RELEASE:

Instead of sending and receiving simple graphic patterns [as in the Ganzfeld experiments], test subjects were put into a state of sensory deprivation by covering their eyes and listening to white noise on headphones, and then Matmos member Drew Daniel attempted to transmit “the concept of the new Matmos record” directly into their minds. During videotaped psychic experiments conducted at home in Baltimore and at Oxford University, test subjects were asked to describe out loud anything they saw or heard within their minds as Drew attempted transmission. The resulting transcripts became a kind of score that was then used by Matmos to generate music. If a subject hummed something, that became a melody; passing visual images suggested arrangement ideas, instruments, or raw materials for a collage; if a subject described an action, then the band members had to act that out and make music out of the noises generated in the process of the re-enactment.

It’s a bit of a chicken and an egg conundrum in the creator-participant process, and it will be fascinating to see if Matmos decide to release original samples from the experiment alongside the record. That being said — not to take this experiment too seriously, Thrill Jockey have teamed up with Incase to release a limited edition of The Ganzfeld EP that comes with an individually signed and numbered box, in which the vinyl or CD will be accompanied by a pair of incase headphones and a pair of opaque goggles.

Motion Sickness Of Time Travel

Motion Sickness Of Time Travel is the solo project of Rachel Evans, and this edited version of “Traces” is little more than an endless wash of synths and drones pulling in and out like waves. At only close to six minutes long, it actually feels more or less like infinity, and though it is now sold out, it comes as the first of the label A Guide To Saints’ Cassette Diaries series. The entire series is comprised of recordings made in short durations (days, a week, or a little bit more), then hand-assembled, sprayed, and screen-printed!

Clark

We posted about Clark already this year, but this track, “Fantasm Planes”, comes off the EP of the same name, out September 3rd and 4th on Warp Records. Fantasm Planes will be the dancier counterpart to the recently released and highly excellent Iradelphic (and you can download “MFB Skank” and “Com Touch” from Iradelphic HERE).

Says Clark: “Ian Brown has always loved the sound of trumpets. I’ve occasionally liked the sound of flutes. And bass. Analogue bass and psychedelic melodies to trip out to on the dance floor. No hippy s**t though. This EP is more about conjuring the full mind-distortion that you get when you hear this music on loud sound systems, that’s sort of what Fantasm Planes is about. Refocusing the album into the context of metric rave gear, but with those full, saturated textures of Iradelphic still playing a vital part.”

This is headphone music that spirals down into and pulls itself out of murky electronic depths to reach psychedelic synth heights.

FANTASM PLANES TRACKLISTING
1. Fantasm Planes
2. Henderson Swooping
3. Com Re-Touch / Pocket for Jack
4. Brigitte
5. Secret Slow Show
6. Dove In Flames

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3. Spectral Hypnosis: BEAK>, Outlands, Nguzunguzu Full Album Streams & MP3 Downloads

music art film review - REDEFINE magazine

Spectral Hypnosis: Matmos, Motion Sickness Of Time Travel, Clark MP3 Downloads & Streams

Alexis Arnold Interview

What first inspired you to work with Borax crystals?

While I have had a fascination with crystals and minerals since I was little, their inclusion in my work happened somewhat by chance. About three years ago, I was force-rusting a metal sculpture using vinegar, salt, and soda ash when I noticed crystals growing on the concrete floor of my studio. Since I was working with concrete at the time, I decided to try and replicate the crystal growth with intention on the concrete and other objects. In addition to my aesthetic fascination with them, the crystals related conceptually to the project I was creating at that moment.

The conceptual and aesthetic functions of the crystals have morphed with each project since. Time (and its physical/visual presence) is an ever-present concept in my work, as well as a large factor in crystal growth. Crystals found in nature generally form over thousands of years. In my studio, I get to play with nature and adjust its time frame.

I mainly use Borax and Epsom salt crystals. This is because of their relatively cheap availability and non-toxicity.
The Crystallized Book Series was prompted by continuously finding boxes of discarded books/magazines, the onset of e-books, and by the recent disappearance of bookstores. Furthermore, I had been growing crystals on hard objects and was interested in seeing the effect of the crystal growth on malleable objects.

Was there a method or goal behind your choice of literature or the ways in they were presented that goes beyond the aesthetics? If so, what is it?

I try to incorporate mostly found books over buying specific titles, but select amongst them for the most conceptually and/or aesthetically appropriate. If I desire a specific title, I will buy it used. For example, the Bible and The Crystal World were purchased for particular conceptual reasons. I take titles from my own library collection as well. I choose certain books, such as The Catcher in the Rye, for the nostalgia people have for them. I have used a number of children’s books for this reason as well. One of my favorite found books for its conceptual tie to the project is a copy of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea published through the Classics to Grow On series. Dictionaries, encycolpedias, and phonebooks are some of the more commonly discarded books these days, hence they find their way into my work.

The series addresses the materiality of the book vs the text/content of the book. The crystals remove the text and transform the books into aesthetic, non-functional objects. The books, now frozen with heavy crystal growth, have become artifacts or geologic specimens laden with the history of time, use, and nostalgia. The stories included in books often exist in our memories while the book remains a spine on a shelf. I love how just seeing a book can conjure the story contained within. With the addition of the crystal growth, the story within the book remains in memory, but new stories can be created by viewers as well. The series also illustrates one of the things I love about books or magazines, which is the lingering presence of the reader through the bent and folded pages longer after the book has been read.

FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY‘S CRIME AND PUNISHMENT (Фёдор Миха́йлович Достое́вский – Преступлéние и наказáние)

Was there anything you learned about the structures of the materials you used that seemed particularly noteworthy or fascinating?

I enjoy how malleable books become when submerged in hot water, even hard covers. This allows me to transform the books into new shapes that reference geologic specimens or artifacts.

I find the structure of crystals fascinating. Each type of crystal shares the same molecular formula that repeats in a three-dimensional pattern, yet they present themselves in a myriad of shapes and sizes depending upon impurities, rates of formation, and environment.

Are there by chance any quotes or passages during your creation of these borax-crystallized books that seemed appropriate to the project itself?

While no particular passages or quote come to mind, I came across the book, The Crystal World, by J.G. Ballard while creating this series. The book is about a mysterious disease that crystallizes everything in its path from plant to animal to man, and certainly holds some inspiration for me.

Is there anything else you’d like to add?

This may sound odd, but I wanted to let you know I am a woman. I recently had an article written for a Brazilian newspaper (O Globo) where I was referred to as a man, so I have learned it’s best to clarify this.

For the remainder of 2012, Alexis Arnold has work showing in various San Francisco galleries. See it at Alter Space through August 19th and Gallery Hijinks through July 28th. She will be showing collages and Salon Dehon for the month of August, as well as large crystallized book sculptures at Root Division Biblio Babel show in November.

ALEXIS ARNOLD’S PAST OF OUR FUTURES SERIES
“The Past of Our Futures was an installation at Fort Mason as part of the San Francisco Art Institute’s 2010 MFA exhibition, Vernissage. The installation takes imagery from the domestic sphere, such as a set dinner table, to explore the human and natural process convergences and divergences through a narrative impetus tied to family, evolution, time, absence, and memory. In addition to referencing past memories, the work invokes a sense of a future post-human fall to environmental entropy.”

www.alexisarnold.com

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music art film review - REDEFINE magazine

Alexis Arnold Artist Interview: Crystalizing The Present

June 2012 Interview

My Pet Doppelganger is themed around the idea of each of us living with multiple doppelgangers in the digital age, correct? What first led you to this idea?

The word doppelganger means “double walker”. It’s about the contemporary notion of constructed and cultivated self-images. Anyone setting up accounts or profiles online is engaging in a kind of construction of an alternate self. Most of us have developed several of these over the years. I’m interested in what all of the doubles and duplicates look like in aggregate. This photography project is a way for me to abstract and formalize that exploration. A photo is quick kind of body-double, which of course has been around for much longer than so-called social media.

I would expect works like this would spark much conversation and that there would be other interpretations as well. Can you tell me a bit about other interpretations you’ve heard or related conceptual or theoretical conversations you’ve had about the series?

The work is very new so these conversations are just beginning. The thing that people seem to find most surprising are the formal drivers of composition. Many just assume there is some sort of computer algorithm at work but there is not, and this is very important from a conceptual standpoint. People are placed next to each other in compositions based on things like body language, a shared glance or facial expression. They also come together based on real-world social relationships. People that are actual friends will sometimes appear floating together. These are very intuitive things, things an algorithm or generative computer program could never do, and this how the compositions grow. I literally do feel like I “grow” them, like plants. The shapes and textures you see come from millions of unique and personal and sometimes chance relationships. Simples rules are aggregated into large groups and complexity emerges.

You made evident in previous interviews that you’re very much interested in biology. Was that central to this work, as well? If so, what are some of the parallels you saw while working?

It is still front and center in a lot of ways. I’ve always been interested in emergent behaviour in the natural world, and the way I describe growing compositions above is classic emergence. I guess if you were going to get technical about it maybe my interests have shifted slightly from realm of biology into behavioral patterns and sociology. But I’m an artist, not a scientist. I just follow my interests.

Taking a photographic approach is quite a departure from your previous work, at least in medium, though in principle it is similar. Why the change, and will you continue to work with other pieces?

I’ve learned that as an artist it is important to be rigorously breaking your own rules on a regular basis. If you can’t do that, you’ll just stagnate and die. This is much tougher than you might think and sometimes only results in incremental change, but it is how you keep evolving. Hey, there’s biology again.

Did you know much about the subjects that were photographed? Other than the obvious visual relationships found in the pieces, were there any patterns that came to reveal themselves, sociologically or psychologically speaking, with relationship to the subjects and how they were arranged in the image?

My answer would be see question #2! Yes, absolutely! This is another thing that people viewing the work might have no idea about. Everyone in the work is someone I know personally or at least tangentially. Many are people who are in my life every day. I could tell you a story about every image, so it is incredibly socially driven. In some ways you could argue that it is a giant self portrait via everyone that I know. (Although I haven’t gotten everyone yet; I’m still working.) But you know, this project has opened some other possibilities as well. It doesn’t have to be just my world, I’m working on potentially going to other places and doing the same thing with totally different groups of people. How would the work change if I were documenting a small village in Bolivia, or some particular groups of kids in Tokyo or some other city? Would there be entirely different colors? Different patterns? It’s fun to dream about.

You know there is one other thing worth mentioning. Many of the people in the photographs are other artists and writers. So really what you are seeing is this huge pool of creative people, some of whom are incredibly successful if you recognize them. I haven’t really talked much about this aspect of the work, but I think it is an interesting one.

In the actual act of photographing the subjects, what was the process like, and how much freedom of movement was encouraged or allowed?

It is totally freeform. At each photo session I encouraged everyone to just jump in the air and be free. Some were really brilliant about twisting and contorted and reacted in unpredictable ways. Some were nervous and stiff, some were just goofy. The goal was to capture some atom of identity at that moment in time. A lot is revealed about a person when you ask them to jump in the air – we owe a little to Philippe Halsman for that one. All-of-the-above works and makes this crazy swirling current of humanity.

Could you explain what you mean about Philippe Halsman?

Oh sure, Philippe Halsman was a photographer from the ’40s and ’50s (RIGHT). He made this whole series of photos called Jump Photos, the most famous were images of Marilyn Monroe jumping and one of Richard Nixon levitating in the air. He even worked with Salvador Dali making these really amazing photo experiments. He had this notion which he called jumpology, which was that you could instantly tell all these things about a person when you saw them jump off the ground – that their body language in the air gives all this secret information about their personality. I can say that it is definitely true. In some ways maybe I am continuing his project on a mass scale.

Is there anything else you’d like to add?

Yes — thank you! I’ve worked so hard on this, I really appreciate your interest and questions! Also huge thanks to everyone involved so far. This work is a true collaboration and it wouldn’t exist without everyone who has come and participated. It is not about tele-presence, it is about real presence; actually being there, so thank you to everyone involved.

www.davidobrien.com

February 2010 Interview

What is it about organisms and the natural world that most interests you?

My work is focused on the connections between biological and cultural evolution. The questions I explore manifest in games of unfolding, simulating and diagramming living systems. Some questions I ask myself are: how do multiple individually driven entities conspire to form patterns, which we can then point to as larger singularities? What changes as the field becomes populated and complexity arises? How does the figure emerge from the field? And then, of course, how does this larger structure feed back into the desires, motivations and evolution of individuals?

Do you have a background in science?

Honestly, I don’t. Art is often about doing something intuitive and then trying to understand why you did it and where it can take you. So, I’ve been more or less led into science by what the work is telling me. These days, a fair amount of my time is dedicated to studying scientific literature from people like Claude Levi-Strauss or Edward O. Wilson.

Are there any particular ideas you’re thinking of exploring in the future?

Well, concentration on the genetic process is definitely where my work is going, but I also bounce back and forth between all of the forms I’ve created so far. So, they all continue to evolve together.

How long does it take you to generally complete a piece?

Anywhere from a couple weeks to 6 months.

How much of a perfectionist are you? Do you pay attention to the details or mostly just the big picture?

I try not to plan things too much. All of the work is based on micro growth to develop the macro form, so I focus only on the small scale and let the overall thing take care of itself. In terms of details, sometimes it just has to be perfect. It has to be absolutely razor sharp. But then sometimes I have to force myself to get loose in order to try new things. Other times I experience a sort of cathartic backlash to all the precision and I just go off on something completely fast and messy just to keep myself sane. But I always return to the more meticulous and carefully constructed work. I notice that about myself.

Current Body Of Work

O’Brien’s most recent body of work, which is currently still untitled, is a look at the basic genetic processes which happen in the body.

(ABOVE) Meiosis
“Specifically, meiosis is the process by which sex cells split all of their chromosomes in half in preparation to accept and be joined to foreign DNA after sex. It is what happens in sperm and egg cells in us and in almost every living animal. It’s an endlessly fascinating thing, for obvious reasons… “Within [Meiosis], there are exactly 23 uniquely colored strands (female) matching the 23 ‘trajectories’ (male) entering from the perimeter.”

(ABOVE) Flower Bomb 2

Rapid Organic Growth

By mimicking a child-like creation, O’Brien captures the frenzied growth of nature without reservations.

“Nature is sometimes creeping slowly and sometimes out of control. Too much detail can lead to decadence, and sometimes physical force is required as a sort of mental catharsis. These things happen the fastest and are often the strongest colors I have been able to achieve. But they are also the things that I understand the least. They are viscerally connected to bodily movement and action and stand for a sort of plant-life explosion.”

(ABOVE) Mating Dance

Labryinths

At the very heart of this piece is a maze with only one way in and one way out, yet with many possible routes one can take to reach the end.

“What the maze is really about is the ability to wander within a very rigid, linear structure… With so much non-linear thinking going on these days, it is humbling to be reminded of the fact that there are still many things in life that are incredibly linear. We eat food; it goes through a line and comes out the other end. We are born once and we die once. What happens in-between is totally variable.”

(ABOVE) Ring Formation

Memes

“Meme is a term coined by the biologist Richard Dawkins back in the ’70s. It is supposed to rhyme with (and relate to) the word gene, only instead of dealing with the transmission of biological information, the meme is about the replication and spread of ideas. I began drawing these large swarms of colored people purely out of intuition well before I discovered memes. I only knew that they all followed each other and developed certain behavior and patterns. When I discovered the concept of the meme and learned a more about it, it fit perfectly with what I wanted to communicate with the drawings.”

(ABOVE) Blood And The Magic Number

Explosions

“It’s a re-thinking of the idea of [explosions in] platonic form. Instead of the triangle or the cube, I like the explosion as archetypal form. There is also the cloud and the spiral.”

www.davidobrienartwork.com

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1. Matt Leavitt Artist Interview : When Engineering And Zen Join To Inspire Art
2. Mandy Greer Artist Interview : Timeless Textile Landscapes
3. Gala Bent Artist Interview : Capturing The Graceful Failure Of Enforced Order

music art film review - REDEFINE magazine

David O’Brien Artist Interview: Manipulating Organism Through Art

Berndnaut Smilde

Hanging high up in the skies above us, we often forget that clouds are real things made out of materials and circumstances that are very much present in our daily lives. In his Nimbus series, Netherlands artist Berndnaut Smilde regulates temperatures and moisture in rooms to trap cloudy bodies within their walls. Truly a rare and appreciated sight and concept. You can see more unconventional works of art on his website.

Ryan Hopkinson

Apparently the schtick for UK artist Ryan Hopkinson is smoke and explosions. Not a bad schtick to have. In addition to rigging explosive charges to Valentine’s day heart bouquets and burning up men’s clothing, he has also created tornadoes out of artificial environments (quite similar to the Smilde’s clouds, indeed, though with more color).

Brice Bischoff

In this photo series set in The Bronson Caves in Los Angeles’ Griffith Park, photographer Brice Bischoff waves large sheets of colored paper and captures them as spectres. The collection was initially projected to be a digital iPad photo book, and Bischoff has written a small accompanying essay about the series, which you can read on his website.

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Related posts:

1. Filippa Barkman Does Hair… Grotesquely.
2. Obsessive Repulsive With Skinner, Ryan Bubnis, Jesse Reno
3. Ryan Bubnis Installation at Perihelion Arts, Phoenix

music art film review - REDEFINE magazine

Temporary Colors By Brice Bischoff + Clouded Rooms by Berndnaut Smilde and Ryan Hopkinson