Van Lengen’s current work focuses on the use of sound as a significant design component. Her designs mix environmental sounds into public and private space, often taking sounds from one space and playing or mixing them into another. Her most recent project is a collaboration with Joel Sanders Architects to create a sound installation within the newly renovated Campbell Hall, home to the UVA School of Architecture.

Peter Traub: Your 2003 paper co-authored with Ted Sheridan, “Hearing Architecture: Exploring and Designing the Aural Environment”, argues for a greater emphasis on sound and aurality as elements of modern architectural design. When and how did you become interested in sound and “designing the aural environment”?

Karen Van Lengen: I have always been sensitive to sound. I began to notice that my memories of certain spaces were not only visual but aural as well. For example Grand Central Station, or the National Gallery of Art in Washington. I was also influenced by Jean Gardener, who taught at Parsons and had a unique method for analyzing architecture. One of her criteria was sound and she helped bring my latent awareness into more focus. Ted Sheridan also taught at Parsons. He was both an architect and musician. He taught a special course using sound as a generating aspect of design. We began a dialogue that has continued for many years.

Diagram of Mix House by Karen Van Lengen, Joel Sanders, and Ben Rubin.

Peter: Are there particular structures or spaces, especially well-known ones, that you would consider great examples of aural architecture (even if hey weren’t designed with aurality in mind)? Could you tell us a bit bout them and what aural characteristics make them stand out to you?

Karen: There are many many spaces of the everyday that come to mind in my own experience however for this question I will offer only those known to the public. A few spaces that come to mind:

New York Public Library: Beaux Arts Library of 1910 by Carrere and Hastings on Fifth Ave. The reading room is one of New York’s heroic spaces both visually and aurally. Amidst the sea of desks occupied by the many New Yorkers who come to study read and work there is the oh so subtle sound of work – of books opening and closing of a few whispers – individuals in search of something personal and particular – united by the their collective desires to be there together sharing these personal pursuits collectively.

Grand Central Station: New York – the sounds of movement – of the beginnings and the ends of the days in the city – a city full of work, full of play, full of life – the sounds of direction and intention-purpose.

Palatine Hill in the Winter: few tourists visit the Palatine hill in the winter but because I lived in Rome I often went there to listen. To the special sound of the winter wind – as it moves through the ruins – it has a strange and eerie sound as if it were occupied – inhabited – it is a ruin that feels alive, particularly in the dead of winter.

National Gallery in Washington DC – 1941 – John Russell Pope: Here the interior fountains are located in strategic central spaces with domes to reflect their sounds. The art gallery corridors are arranged around these foci so that at the beginning and end of small sojourns through the building one has a complete understanding of one’s location based on the subtle sound of falling water.

Falling Water by Frank Lloyd Wright: of course the sound of falling water that is the major identity of the house, since it is built over a waterfall.

Villa Giulia in Rome: the movement through a series of highly articulated renaissance pleasure gardens that by a careful manipulation of the water and sectional play of spaces, offers the visitor an acoustical pleasure garden along the walk through the villa.

Sounds of footsteps in the dead of night in the winter in Venice: The fog can obscure ones vision and sometime it is only possible to hear the sharp definitive sounds of the unidentifiable echo from the nearby streets.

Hermann Goebbel’s Air Ministry Building located in the old eastern sector of Berlin: one of the few remaining Nazi buildings in Berlin. (1930′3) Here the sounds of heavy and directed footsteps along the endless and unforgiving corridors are highly accentuated by the reflective stone walls and floors. The sounds of people walking carry the overpowering sense of doom and fear.

Sounds of horses as they walk across a covered wooden bridge.

and so many more…..

Peter: How does increased consideration of aurality in the design process affect the design process itself and the structures that result? What are some of the technical challenges that you encounter in shifting the emphasis from purely vision toward a balance between vision and sound?

Karen: Designing with aurality is a challenge due to the process of measuring it in the design process. With visual studies we have developed many tools to study and delineate ideas including virtual and real models that include details such as shade and shadow or material and color studies in three dimensions. We don’t yet have easy tools to understand how sound will work in spaces. The idea of the model as a miniature replica of a room or a building does not work with sound. There are some very sophisticated software programs that acousticians use with virtual models to design concert halls, etc. however these tools are complex, expensive and not yet readily available in schools of architecture. I have found that teaching the awareness of sound, though not highly scientific, does promote awareness of the aural environment and helps students to begin to notice and record how other spaces and places work with sound. As technologies in this area continue to develop and become more accessible, I believe the interest in sound will become more important to architectural designers.

Peter: I ask this as much for my own work as for others: for composers, sound artists, and people interested in learning more about awareness of sound within an architectural context, what resources would you recommend?

Karen: There are many new books and articles that have emerged in the past few years as interest in sound grows. Without a whole bibliography I would give the advice of first learning how sound works – how it travels – how it reacts with space. There is an excellent short and uncomplicated book on the basic principles of acoustics by Robert Apfel, entitled Deaf Architects & Blind Acousticians. This is a compact guide to the principles of sound design. Then I would suggest that people simply listen – listen to spaces and try to record and remember those spaces that have significant aural qualities for them. Then to know why the aural qualities are transformative – what makes it so – space? Materials? Types of interacting sounds? I think this is the best way to learn about it.

Then one can read about the work of the small but influencial group of sound artists that opened up this territory seriously in the 1960s and 1970s like Bill Fontana, John Cage, Lietner, Alvin Lucier, etc.

Peter: How have other architects in the field responded the idea of the aural environment as a significant design consideration?

Karen: Until now there has been almost no interest in this theme. Lately however there is an increasing attention both in the disciplines of architecture and art. As recently as 30 years ago all architectural ideas and their documentation were made in paper form so any manipulation of sound could not be described in any experiential manner. In looking at published work one could see photos of the work but never hear the sounds of it. This made it difficult to describe any inventions related to aural qualities in a convincing way. Sound is now a regular feature of digital presentations and available on the web, so the field is ripe for discovery and development.

Peter: You collaborated with Joel Sanders and Ben Rubin on a project in 2006 called “Mix House”. We blogged about it last year and readers can learn more about it here. The house allows the inhabitants to mix outside sounds with inside sounds, process them, and play them back throughout the structure. What was the impetus for this project, and what has the response been like from the public, critics, and other architects?

animation of “Mix House” in action.

Karen: The Mix House was an opportunity to explore several themes:
1–The relation between sound and vision established by the large picture window. Modernism with its characteristic glass window walls exploited the large panoramic views of the exterior but isolated these views by negating their aural counterpart. This project effectively unified sound and vision again so that what was seen could also be heard.
2–The project also asks the inhabitants to begin to listen – to their environment – both the real exterior landscapes as well as mediated sounds of the interior.
3–The “mixing” of these sounds provided the opportunity for composition, play and for social interaction of the inhabitants. Learning to listen might suggest a different set of relationships within the family unit.

There has been widespread interest in this project especially with younger architects who are looking for dynamic means to explore the role of architecture in contemporary culture.

Peter: Although Mix House uses static physical design elements to influence the production, transmission, and reception of sound, it also makes extensive use of technology, such as computers, microphones, and speakers to control the aural environment of the house. How do you think about technology as it relates to designing the aural environment?

Karen: Actually the Mix House includes one moving picture window at the rear façade of the house that has the ability to track visual movement and sound simultaneously. The remainder of the house is static and uses new technologies to accomplish its goals. Technologies have, in a very short period of time, transformed how we relate to one another – email, cell phone, text messaging, etc. These will continue to evolve and shape our relationships. The Mix House uses technology to create a different set of relationships that demand the inhabitant to listen to a variety of experiential conditions that can be individual but can also be shared in an active way. This potential for listening and for dialogue is a very important aspect of this project and can be developed to accommodate public space as well.

Peter: What questions does a project like Mix House raise about the interaction of public and private sound? In Blesser and Salter’s “Spaces Speak, are you Listening: Experiencing Aural Architecture”, they discuss the concept of ‘acoustic arenas’, which are essentially the areas in which listeners can hear a sonic event because it has enough power to overcome background noise. Acoustic arenas can be created by structural boundaries, noise, social interactions, etc. It occurred to me that Mix House fundamentally plays with acoustic arenas, and through the sound/picture window and other means, mixes arenas that otherwise would stay separated, creating an interplay between public and private arenas. Is this interplay problematic in any way for you, or does it raise compelling questions? How have others responded to the mixing of arenas in Mix House?

Karen: The reaction at times is mixed. People ask, why do this? What I find compelling about the sound arenas is the “arena” quality – in which a space activated by sound allows the possibility for a new kind of social interaction – one that requires that the ears are free from headsets and cell phones – a space where friends or strangers can share a listening event – for me it carries the possibility of local and spontaneous interactive culture that I believe is important in today’s global-centric world in order to balance the displacement of the local and its habitat.

Peter: What have you learned from the process of designing Mix House in terms of the major aesthetic and design challenges that face architects who design for the aural environment?

Karen: When I started this work several years ago I thought that it might make sense to design the formal language of a space to reflect the way sound acts in space. I found this approach difficult and as I began to develop different ideas I came to the realization – working with Ben and Joel that instead of rejecting technology we might want to truly embrace its potential in shaping aural spaces. Formally, it is important to link conceptual ideas about space making with programs, sites and materials. Now I use the technology to reinforce these ideas in the shaping of environment – not to make a separate statement about it.

Peter: At the beginning of your answer above you describe this intriguing approach – of designing the formal language of a space to reflect the way sound acts in space – that ended up being difficult and not working out. While it is an avenue you ended up not pursuing, the concept sounds interesting to a non-architect like myself. Can you describe how this approach would ideally have worked, and also explain what the problems were that ended up making it unfeasible?

Karen: Basically with this approach one needs to collect and direct the sounds very carefully – something like an instrument. The structure can be too specific to one kind of soundscape or one location and can seem relentless – like living in an experiment with no visual or acoustical alternatives. I am more interested in the dynamic qualities of sound and associated shifting boundaries of space that work against this first model. Joel and I came to the realization that we could use technology to achieve significant results without turning the building into an instrument. However, I do believe there has to be a relation between the designed soundscapes and the architecture itself – these intersections can be subtle and fit within a larger spatial concept.

Peter: In terms of aesthetic preference, some artists who work with technology prefer the wires to both literally and figuratively hang out – that is, it is important to make the technology visible in a piece as it’s own sort of art object. Others prefer to hide the technology, making it as invisible and/or integrated into the environment as possible. It sounds from your answers above that you fall in with the latter group. How you think about the integration of technology with design – as within Mix House – in terms of it’s visibility and presence?

Karen: Correct, no need to show the wires, but there is a need to make the visual/aural connections clear and perceptible. So for example if we make a sound puddle installation in our Architecture School lounge and program it with the sounds of another space either inside or outside the building it is important to me to signify that relationship through orientation or visual connection so that the displaced sounds that compose the arena come from somewhere and are selected for a purpose. This I find interesting.

Diagram of the Naug Lounge Project by Karen Van Lengen and Joel Sanders Architects.

Peter: I know that you are very interested in Bill Fontana’s work (note to readers: Karen brought him to visit us at the University of Virginia this past March). How do you think your work and the notions of aural architecture relate to Fontana’s sound sculptures and vice versa? Do you consider his work influential to a project like Mix House? Are there other artists who you consider important or influential to your thinking about aurality and designing the aural environment?

Karen: I first came to know Bill’s work in the 1980’s. He had done projects in Berlin (Anhalter Bahnhof) Paris (Arc de Triomphe) and others that explored the power of sound to displace the immediate surroundings and also to connect places through sound associations. This displacement heightened the visitors awareness of place, and extended the limits of that place. I wanted to explore these ideas not so much for the purpose of displacement but rather as a unifying element that might bring landscape into spaces that had previously been cut off from it. This work taught me to think about my own projects in a different way. Also Alvin Lucier was important too. I have heard his piece, “I am Sitting in a Room” on several occasions and even performed it here at UVa with my students. It too is a ery powerful realization about how the voice interacts with spaces. Rooms have aural qualities that can be known by the interaction of the voice in the space to create a ‘tone’ for the room. Ted Sheridan, as I mentioned earlier, was a good colleague from Parsons during my early interest in this field. And finally David Hykes, founder of the Harmonic Choir was also a guest lecturer at Parsons. He taught the students how they could interpret the space of the room through harmonic chanting. So there have been many people who have been influential in my interest and development of sound and architecture.

Peter: Do you have other projects currently in the works that focus on the aural environment, and if so, could you tell us a little about them?

Karen: Joel Sanders and I have are working on the design of the central space of the architecture school at the University of Virginia. The project uses sound spaces that are integrated into the design of the room with a specific program. These spaces are defined more by sound than by traditional materials and have the capacity to listen to various places both inside and outside the school. This center will become the public space of our building and hopefully become the space of interaction and dialogue stimulated by these sound puddles.

Greg Smith: 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? Continue reading on Serial Consign.

On September 21, 2007, Vitiello visited the University of Virginia. We sat and discussed his work for an hour in the university’s Jefferson Rotunda. The recording and transcript of that interview is presented below.

Listen to the full interview. Approximately 52 minutes.

Peter Traub: Welcome Stephen Vitiello. This is an interview that we’re doing for the Networked_Music_Review blog. To start us out, could you tell us a little bit about your musical background and where your interest in electronic music came from?

Stephen Vitiello: My background, it really went from being in punk rock bands and rock bands and sorta noise rock to kinda gravitating toward sound track and starting to collaborate with visual artists in the late 80s and being exposed to other ways of making things, other processes, and realizing that I didn’t have to play guitar straight pick down, and that there were other ways to approach a guitar. Through that being introduced to someone like Fred Frith and then from Fred Frith understanding John Cage - different ways of manipulating instruments and the prepared guitar then exposing me to the prepared piano. A lot of what happened was, as I would collaborate with different artists I would really start to try to think ‘what’s a kind of process that would work with their process?’ Different people work so differently and their colors are different or their thought is different, and so just through that I really learned more about experimental music than I did, rather than coming at it from a point of studying classical art or experimental music, it was really that exposure to image making that taught me about sound making. Eventually I went through about ten, twelve years of doing that and got to a point where I felt really luck to have done all I had done, but felt that I was tired being the support team and that it was time ideally I would make a CD that was my own music, or something that started as a CD without being a CD of soundtracks for example, which lead to the World Trade Center residency and a four night event in Cologne called per->Son with Frances-Marie Uitti, Pauline Oliveros and Scanner, and then also being put into a world of improvising and collaborating with sound makers rather than visual art makers. From that I’ve just moved step by step but more and more in a solo career and more and more invested in site so that I tend to think less about making music than I do about making installations, even if a musical installation is present in the sound.

Peter: In ’site’ you mean as in place, location?

Stephen: Yeah, exactly, yeah this place that we’re sitting in is so overwhelming it’s hard to imagine just making something here that would not be a dialog with the space. I think too that a lot of what happened is that I learned to create these participating dialogs with visual artists and somehow that moved into being a dialog with spaces rather than people.

Peter: When did that happen, because actually my next question was, when did you start making sound installations and what got you moving in that direction?

Stephen: In 1998 there was this series of concerts in Cologne called per->Son, and what was incredible about them was that they were in a church, but it was a church rigged with a 64 channel sound system. It was amazing. Andres Bosshard is a Swiss sound artist who also creates these structures that other people perform in. That was the first time I was really in a space where they’re performing to space, both the acoustics but also this incredible electronic possibility, and I remember really really distinctly that I tried to study the people who I was going to be working with. I had heard Pauline Oliveros on NPR and thought ‘oh, I guess this is interesting’, and when I walked in and she was sound checking and moving her sound through that space and the way that she listens to space, I got chills and thought ‘what have I been missing?

Peter: Was this an old Gothic cathedral?

Stephen: No, it’s fairly modern.

Peter: I guess what I meant was, why does this cathedral have a 64 channel sound system?

Stephen: Well, it was right near the media academy. The media academy, the KHM, made the arrangement to have this performance at the church, and then they brought in the speaker system just for the event. I think with someone like Pauline, she would’ve been doing something similar if it was a purely acoustic thing in the way that she would listen to the church, but in this case, we were really working with somebody who you could say, ‘ok, start with this bird sound, and I would love for it to spiral and then start moving really fast and then zip and disappear and then explode into all the speakers’. He had each speaker connected to a fader on the mixing board and he was performing the mixing board and that definitely made me more aware of space.

And then the following year being invited to do this residency at the World Trade Center where I had six months. That was my transition from being a musician to being a sound artist and being really given the opportunity to experience the sound of the building and the sound of my studio and both technologically finding ways to do it, and also just tuning myself to listening to the place. A lot of what I did was, I was kind of ripping off - I had read an article about Maryanne Amacher, and how she had this residency in the New England Fisheries and she had microphones mounted out to the water that always ran to a feed to her mixing board so that whatever she was working on she had this environment - so I though ‘ok, i’ll do that but I’ll do it with the World Trade Center’. Really what I found was that the sound of the building was the best sound - there was nothing I could do to add to it that was better than the sound itself. Also career-wise at the end of the residency there was an open studio where all the different studios in the World Trade Center - there were about sixteen artists - were opened and about a thousand people came through in two days. That was the point where I started to get invited to make installations and to be in exhibitions. Also, that show the year before in Cologne was the first time I was invited - Jack De Kuiper approached me, he had this label JDK. That was the first time I was invited to do a CD that was my own rather than a CD of compiled soundtracks. Those two years gave me incredible opportunities and encounters and kind of a chance to learn through these opportunities.

Contact microphones on the windows of the World Trade Center.

Peter: In terms of the World Trade Center piece, obviously there’s this aspect about it because a very horrible event suddenly brought new resonance to the piece afterward. Did people come and discover it again? How did that affect the work to you. I mean, it sort of cast an entirely different light on it, one that was obviously unexpected at the time that you were making it such that people will always view it in this way now.

Stephen: It’s been a big part of my career. Nam June Paik said I had a karmic debt to the World Trade Center, which is the last thing I wanted to hear. After I did it, it wasn’t such a well-known thing, but just some people came to know me through it. But the way that I represented myself up until September 10th, 2001 was always in relation to that residency. That night of September 10th I gave a talk at Brooklyn College and talked about listening and my sense of vulnerability through listening to the building and how hearing made me feel the distance and height of the building much more than seeing. Then the next day when that happened it just seemed minor and so irrelevant compared to people’s life and death, and my own vulnerability seemed kind of silly compared to that. But then I did start to get these calls and these interests in making it public, and there was a publicist who wanted to include it in his public interest stories and I just didn’t return phone calls. I was living really close to the World Trade Center with my wife and daughter, and so I thought, I don’t want to imply that I had something to do with that. Then there was a night at The Kitchen where artists who had been part of the residency presented their works and talked about their experiences about three weeks later. I talked about how I felt like I should shelve the project, but I felt very fortunate to have done it. But the response was across the board that I can’t do that. I had to find a way to share it in a way that didn’t exploit the situation but gave people the opportunity to hear something that they’ll never hear again. So I did my best. There was a Peabody Award-winning program that was incredible, called A Sonic Memorial, and they interviewed me and included some of the sounds. Then I made a piece out of it that was at the sound gallery Diapason, and then it was at the Whitney Museum. But I tried to keep it outside of things that were about the destruction where even the sonic memorial was about the memory of the building rather than about more images of the towers falling. So I guess the quick answer is that it is something that has weighed upon me and something that I feel sort of happy to have captured but I try to keep in perspective that it’s my experience in relation to something that is far more horrific.

Peter: To change gears a little bit, we talked about this a few minutes ago [prior to the interview], you have this new installation “Smallest of Wings”. Could you tell us a little bit about it?

Stephen: It’s actually a piece I did in 2005 at the gallery that I work with in New York called The Project. It used hummingbird wings that I accidentally captured in the Amazon and moth wings that were recorded. There’s a really interesting artist named Joseph Scheer who does these scans, these very very high definition scans, of moths that he captures in upstate New York with his colleague Mark Klingensmith. There was an NPR piece about the work, and they had done some really nice low frequency recordings of moth wings to go with the radio piece, and I asked if I could use them and they said sure. Somehow in the gallery it was a small piece and it sounded good, and then when United Technologies Corporation and Creative Time approached me about doing that piece in a large environment, I went back and listened to it and I thought ‘god, this sounds terrible’. The moths sound kind of flatulent. The idea of the piece was something that I loved and I wanted to go back to, so I gathered a lot more recordings and went back to the moth recordings and found I had used two minutes out of thirty minutes, and I found other elements that I liked.

I was asked to do it in Broadgate Arena, which is an ice skating rink in London, which off-season is used for all sorts of public events and high end rentals. So I worked with a man named Alban Bassuet from Arup Acoustics, and worked with him to recompose the sounds for a much more intensely spatialized space. It was 18 discreet channels plus four subwoofers. I asked for grass and they gave me grass and I asked for this sorta large structure and they ended up renting part of a geodesic dome, but we’re gonna recreate it in New York and build a new structure for it. It was about giving it this intensified experience of these birding wings and moth wings and a kind of magical explosion of these very minute elements. What I found in London especially that I really enjoyed was the fact that putting it in a public arena and using natural sounds that are kind of familiar to people, even if not on that scale, it allowed for it to be enjoyed by a diverse public that might not have been so if I had done one of my more electronic pieces that some people knew or said ‘Stephen Vitiello does this kind of work and we’re here to listen to this kind of work’. Some people saw it as a nature show. They approached it from all different backgrounds, and the piece wasn’t didactic enough to tell them ‘you can’t appreciate it if you just want to hear this as National Geographic’ or ‘you can appreciate it if you want to consider this as sound art with a history based in this and this and this’. It was wonderful to do it. It was by far the largest project I’ve ever done, and it was only up for four-and-a-half days. But it was on 24 hours a day so that you did have people through the night and the day. It’s a place that gets such an incredible movement of public. The corporate sponsor knew that it was a very high-visibility site, so potentially 500,000 people go through there in a week. What portion of the those people stopped, lay down, sat, listened was hard to know, but what was interesting was that during the week the crowd got larger each day. Some of the people I saw day to day who worked in the area would sort of skeptically look at it, and on the second day they would skeptically stick their head in, and by the end they were laying on the grass drinking beer and having a good time. I had sort of seduced a certain public into something that might have felt alien but I was able to kind of cross that threshold.

“Smallest of Wings’” at London’s Broadgate Arena.

Peter: What was your approach to the sounds in the piece? How much did you treat them electronically, if at all?

Stephen: I manipulated them in time and in structure, but I didn’t manipulate them heavily - everything is rooted in the sound that it was but it might be intensified. So there was a bird that was kind of going [knocks several times on the table] on the birdfeeder and I used that and I would put that in spaces but I didn’t slow it down and didn’t speed it up. Just by isolating it and maybe playing with EQ a bit, that just became sort of a space structure that happened every once in a while. The biggest sound that happens continuously is this ’ssshhhhewp’.

There’s two sections - the first section is loosely called ‘America’, the second section is loosely called ‘Amazon’, and most of the sounds in the first section came from upstate New York and were very much edited as a multichannel thing where they were really placed ‘this over here, this over here, this over here’. Then when it moves into ‘Amazon’, it was such a dense - the recording was a stereo recording - but there was so much information going on in that recording that primarily what we did was just spatialize that stereo recording over the 18 channels. It was definitely two ways of working where one was more compositional in terms of organization of sound, and the other was more spatial and compositional in just terms of what’s the beginning and what’s the end, but also how it’s treated over the space. Being in the Amazon was the densest sound I’ve ever been in. It’s the only place I’ve ever been in where you don’t hear man-made machines except twice in the week when a little Cessna plane came in. But it’s just between the cicadas and the birds and the Yanomami people that I was with, although they walked more quietly than you can imagine. When certain things were going on there were probably 125 tracks of information in terms of what you were hearing just through a stereo microphone and a DAT recorder.

Excerpt from “Smallest of Wings”.

Peter: Just an incredible stratification frequency-wise? Like everything sort of occupies its own space?

Stephen: Yeah, it does really - and differently during the day, because if you put a graph on it, there’s a peak in cicadas in the late afternoon, but in the morning when the howler monkeys wake up and the bats fly home there’s a very classical, interesting shape that you can treat over the 24 hours. So I’ve tried to take segments of that whole 24 hour cycle and put them into about a 46 minute composition. Then I also did binaural recordings that were more just discovery-based, just a real-time 15 minute walk-through from one place to another.

Peter: I guess that brings me to the next question: you talk about the Amazon and upstate New York and these are obviously very specific sound environments, and my impression of your work to-date is that you take a lot of these sounds and then you put them into a gallery space, and I’m wondering, how do you think about site in your work? Do you consider your gallery pieces site-specific? Are their varying levels of portability in the work, and how does the site of the gallery where these installations end up relate to the environments from where the sounds come? There seems to be sort of an inherent tension there that you obviously are aware of, and do you consider yourself playing with that?

Stephen: I definitely try to play with it. I don’t know what portion of the pieces live in galleries versus museums or public spaces or non-traditional spaces, but it’s definitely true that the least exciting is to be given the white box gallery. And yet the gallery I work with and it’s the gallery I love - it’s in Manhattan on 57th street - it used to be in Harlem in a house that had really odd sound corners that I could play with and now they’re in an absolutely standard white box. So I absolutely try to… there’s works that are site-specific that are meant to be heard within the site or within the area, and then there are these questions about how do you transfer them or how do you carry them? I also try to treat the site of where they’ll be re-presented, whether it’s a white box gallery or a corridor of a museum or something, as another level of site-specificity, in terms of the quality and placement of sounds, in terms of the access points for the audience. Sometimes I really want you to be aware of where the sounds came from, sometimes I don’t.

I had this crazy thing happen, I had this piece in Paris at a museum - I was co-existing with another artist - and it was using solar-cells to amplify light frequencies and then a microphone outside running through a Max patch that would come in at random bursts, and there was just a two sentence description of the process on the wall, and the assistant to the other artist in a fury ripped it down and said ‘this is not how art should be represented’, and I thought ‘maybe your art’, but I kind of felt like, there are times you want people to understand, and if I’m using solar cells that transfer light frequencies into audio, I think it might be interesting for people to understand that’s a source of sound as they move through the space - and that their shadow is changing the sound. It’s not that I want it to be a science experiment or just an experiment with technology, but hopefully a piece that explores a technology. I guess I re-conceive that with every different opportunity. And even CDs, being on compilations, I tend to kind of think in site-specific projects. You get all these requests to be on compilations that have these very specific themes, and someone writes ‘we’re doing a CD about the death of Maurice Blanchot’ - well if I’m gonna have to think about Maurice Blanchot and invest myself in his writing, that’s very different than if someone says ‘we’re gonna a do a piece re-conceiving of a Stockhausen composition’. So just to really treat every situation as new and fresh as possible and try to find my point that I might connect to a listener.

Peter: Going back to the environmental recordings, what drew you toward eco-acoustics and environmental sound - it’s kind of a far way to come from playing guitar…

Stephen: But I have to say there’s a large population of people who follow that path for some reason - and it’s time and it’s technologies available, but going from guitar to prepared guitar to environment - something maybe the resonance of the guitar cavity breaking out. I feel like I stumbled upon it - the recordings I did at the World Trade Center were kind of field recording, although I didn’t think of it at the time, using contact microphones outside the building and hearing the building through the building. Then that led to being in this exhibition at the Cartier Foundation where I was doing the piece with the solar cells, and then they said to me ‘we really like working with you, the next show is sending five different artists separately into the Amazon to work with the Yanomami’, and I was suddenly going ‘wow, that’s interesting’, but I suggested that they either take David Toop or Chris Watson - David Toop being a writer but also a composer having worked with the Yanomami in the 70s, and Chris Watson being this brilliant master of environmental and field recordings. But they said ‘we like you and we know you already and it’s gotta go quick’. I immediately had to start learning about the technologies, and in some ways I got it incredibly wrong. I ended up calling Royer Microphones, who make these beautiful ribbon microphones and they told me that it would be fine to take a stereo ribbon mic out into the Amazon, and so I did that but when I came back and I called them, I talked to somebody else who said ‘that’s the most insane thing possible - you don’t want wind or breath or anything to hit the ribbon’ - and I thought ‘hmmm, that’s weird, but it worked’.

A radio piece on NPR’s ‘The Savvy Traveler’ about Vitiello’s Yanomami recordings. Produced by Michael Raphael.

I think that experience had a great effect on me as a new way of composing and listening through technology. It was the first time I really thought outside of a city. I had always been such a New York person and in kind of urban, dense noise – that it was a different rural dense, if you can even call it rural – Amazon-dense noise. From there I just started investigating, listening more, getting some more of the so-called useful field recording gear. Then when I moved from New York to Virginia, I started this whole long three year project that really began with listening to the sound in my back yard, and this crazy thing with having 12 hunting beagles on one side of the yard and three pit bulls on the other, and fireworks and gunshots…

Peter: These are your dogs, or a neighbors?

Stephen: No, a neighbor’s. It was at first just thinking ‘God, what am I doing here’, and then thinking ‘boy, this is a really curious intersection of noise and city noise and forest noise - or country noise - and suburban noise and hillbillies and rednecks and art people and hunting people. From there I got a grant from Creative Capital that allowed me to buy this beautiful Schoeps Microphone, which sort of really upped the quality of my portable rig and encouraged me to go through the state and do field recordings. The more I’ve done that the more I’ve moved away from playing bass and guitar and the things that I used to do, or even using a sampler in terms of a keyboard-based way, to just other ways of manipulating either sounds in real-time or just capturing other environments.

Excerpt from Vitiello’s “Dogs in the Yard, Birds Overhead”

Peter: That actually brings me to a question I was going to ask a little later but you brought it up so we’ll talk about it a bit - the question of gear and technology. Because it’ s something we often don’t discuss in masterclasses, and people think it’s boring or they don’t want to discuss it, and I think it’s actually really important for students to hear about that stuff. So you go out now and you do environmental recording - what do you bring? What kind of mics do you find work best? Why do you use the gear that you use? What advantages does it have?

Stephen: Part of it always has to do with economy and what you can afford, and then what you can carry. I think there are these certain developments in how people [unintelligible] in the late 40s, early 50s the portable tape recorder becoming available - there’s other steps - but then the laptop just exploded how people could have access to technology. And now at the moment these portable recorders like you’re using which really can do very nice quality stereo recordings potentially in 5.1 with this this new Zoom recorder and under $500. There’s a part where I travel with whatever I can carry or whatever I can afford, but I’ve tried to build up an arsenal from high tech to low tech. The recorder I use is a Sound Devices recorder that comes more through the film industry, but that a lot of people feel has been the next step in great sound after the Nagra, which is still far more expensive, but it has really good preamps, it’s quiet, it can record at a high fidelity, and it’s like the size of a hardcover book…

Peter: And this is a hard disk recording system?

Stephen: Yeah. And it’s about a $2,400 recorder, and then they also make a four channel one which is more like $4,000. And then the Schoeps microphone, which I really could never have afforded without this grant, but it’s about a $5,000 gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous stereo microphone, and it’s one that a lot of people in the film industry will use for foley sound or sort of capturing sounds. It’s not great for humidity…

Peter: You notice that difference, when you use it in a humid environment?
Vitiello making a field recording in Varina, VA.

Stephen: Yeah, it’ll crap out sometimes, if it’s real humid. So a lot of people at that level will buy the Sennheiser MKH series, which are a little less expensive. They’re really durable, really clean sounding. But I just love the character of the Schoeps. It’s more magical than any microphone I’ve ever heard. I had bought a really good Sennheiser shotgun mic too, but ended up trading it in and getting another Schoeps hypercardioid mono microphone. But at the same time there’s something to be said for carrying around a $3 homemade contact microphone. For people who are doing gorgeous recordings using old Sony Walkman Pro cassette players, every machine has its own character. I would love to have a multichannel - there are a couple of companies now coming out with very reasonably affordable four channel little mics that are tiny and look interesting. So I guess the point is to never overwhelm yourself with the technology, because it’s easy to say ‘oh, I can’t record that because I don’t have the right microphone’. If it’s a great sound you’re gonna get something interesting whether it’s with a $300 Zoom recorder or a $2,400 Sound Devices recorder. I think whatever you have, try to get to know that technology as well as possible, and really use it like an instrument. Which is why I think it does have a place in the classroom, because in the classroom you may be talking about a particular instrument or the quality of a certain cello built in a certain place, and in truth each microphone has its sound, each has its limitations. You can remarkably record now very inexpensively, and something like a contact mic will pick up a surface sound that my Schoeps will not pick up. So I think the main thing is to do the research, see what you can afford, and then enjoy what you’ve got.

Peter: To continue on this thread for a little bit - so gear obviously can add its own coloration to sound and to your environmental recordings, as can external sounds like planes flying overhead and dogs barking and humans and so forth. How important is ‘purity’ to you? You were talking earlier about and you describe on your website this recently discovered forest in Virginia that you went and did - I assume you did - a good several days of recording there?

Excerpt of one of Vitiello’s Virginia field recordings

Stephen: Yes, several different visits, yeah…

Peter: And was this place free of man made noises?

Stephen: Not at all, no

Peter: How do you think about that in terms of the recording? Is that a part of it, or if a plane flies overhead does that ruin it aesthetically for you, or does that make it more interesting?

Stephen: Well, it depends. In general, what’s interesting to me more is capturing experience, and so a sense of purity seems to me only one sort of experience, and maybe an almost impossibly privileged sort of experience. And I know there are definitely schools of thought in terms of the acoustic ecology movement to retain that purity of the forest. So sometimes the sounds I feel like I want to work with might be devoid of a plane flying overhead, but in ‘Smallest of Wings’ there’s a really deep plane that flies overhead and what I love in that piece, because the piece is outdoors in the dome, but you see through to the sky, is you really don’t know at certain times where the plane you’re hearing is in the recording or if it’s outside, or whether the birds that you’re hearing may actually be outside the installation. I think I try to look for unique experiences and would never want to claim that purity is something to be demanded, it just might be encountered sometimes. It really is the case that it’s just not two magical microphones that are floating in space. They’re clipped to my glasses, I’m moving through, I’m breathing - you don’t want to hear too much of that, but enough of it just to understand that there is this human presence and a human encounter with a place.

Peter: Just to change gears a little bit again, this goes back to the environmental recording thing, but specifically I’ve got a question about one of your installation pieces, “Hedera”. You take samples of George Bush and Tony Blair, and especially I think there was that mistaken open mic that they had at that one conference where they left it open where you heard them say some things that I think they rather didn’t want to have public. And you take that and - on your site you say - you convert them into the sounds of bells and rain. And is that convert as in convolve?

Stephen: It was convolving…

Peter: And I guess my question is, and this is to get at understanding you compositionally, what do you see as the connection between these seemingly very disparate sound worlds? Why choose to connect their voices in animal sounds or bells?

Stephen: I was working - as I was doing these Virginia recordings - I was reading this book called ‘Chatter’ which was a really really interesting book on U.S. surveillance systems and the way that this idea of chatter and the voices in the aether that we’re capturing and listening into them and listening from all these different bases all over the world with these gigantic ears that are pointed towards the cell phones of terrorists but also the chewing sounds of George Bush. I was doing recordings in this state park in Virginia and just loving to listen to the interplay of the different insects and animals and the frogs in particular, and thinking that we still don’t classify that as a spoken language even though it’s very much like this idea of voices in the aether. From what I understand, the people who destroyed the World Trade Center, they actually were recorded in the days leading up, but they were recorded in a dialect that they didn’t yet have a translator for, until the day after. So just because we don’t understand it, it’s kind of foolish to think that the way when you listen to the frogs and the way that they interact, it’s kind of silly to me to think that’s not a language. So I was thinking about the state and Virginia also having a large military presence and just this idea of chatter and then I kind of stumbled upon that recording of Bush and Blair being recorded - two people who probably have hundreds of people listening in for them, suddenly themselves caught, and wanted to integrate that and wanted to keep it sometimes audible but just keep it as source material for my own folly, and I put their voices into these little speakers that were in ivy that was growing through the gallery through the month as the exhibition went on. So the speakers were getting slightly more covered and slightly more tinted with the actual foliage. I know I had a reason at the time and I’m trying to remember why I transferred them into bowls and bells and rain, but maybe it was just this idea of the way that we don’t classify nature as having a voice. It was then taking this voice and transferring it back into some voice of nature.
Closeup of a speaker in Vitiello’s “Hedera”

Peter: How loud were the voices played out of the Ivy?

Stephen: Really quiet…

Peter: With the intention of sort of drawing people in? Is there voyeurism aspect to it with their conversation?

Stephen: There’s definitely a voyeurism aspect of it. There’s also a ‘wall have ears’ kind of feeling. As you move into the architecture you start to hear these whispers and whispers that maybe weren’t meant to be heard. There were these little three inch speakers that I actually kind of inherited. I was in this exhibition called ‘Treble’, where I did my first large suspended speaker piece, and Steve Roden had a piece in the basement with I think 80 three-inch speakers. And when the exhibition was over they said ‘Steve doesn’t want them, do you want them?’, I thought ‘great’, and I ended up making all these quiet little pieces that spoke to these little three-inch speakers. But also Steve Roden does these gorgeous little quiet pieces, and I think I was also influenced by the hand that touched the object that came to me. It was definitely about drawing people in and finding just that threshold where you just hear and you just understand that voice and then maybe it dips and becomes something else. A non-linear narrative in which things go in and out of recognition.

Excerpt from Vitiello’s “Hedera”

Peter: Going back to your suspended speaker pieces. You’ve done a number of those, and several of them were collaborative with Julie Mehretu. Could you just describe a little bit about that collaborative process. Also, with these pieces, they all use the same principle, which is very low frequency waves that are driving the speakers that are inaudible, but you see the speakers move. Obviously this is something that you have to go there to experience, you can’t really get it online…

Stephen: And the videos don’t really do it either…

Peter: Is there an audible component to the pieces? Do you hear the speakers cracking or making some sort of noise?

Stephen: You don’t. You sometimes hear a cracking or sometimes a distortion or something a little high will just push the speaker. What’s interesting is, it was part of Bumbershoot, this rock and roll festival in Seattle, and some of the phonography people from Seattle came and did these audio pieces based on the whole exhibition. One person put his headphones on and pointed a mic, and as soon as you pointed a mic you actually heard the low frequency, but with your naked ear you didn’t. In the pieces with Julie, there’s both the inaudible speakers that are very architecturally designed, but then there’s also separate speakers that have an audio element, but that audio element is taking the waveforms that moved the low frequency and processing at an audible frequency other field recordings. So there’s a kind of interaction even though it’s not synchronized. But those pieces, they really came out of being in all these sound shows and starting to realize that all these drones from different rooms weren’t necessarily complementary. I thought maybe it would be interesting to make a silent piece. One of my favorite people in the history of contemporary sound art is Terry Fox. He had this piece at the Capp Street Project that was silent but implied sound. It was a big wrecking ball that was suspended back in front of glass, and the idea was that if there was a earthquake it would shake and smash it. I guess I started thinking, ‘what could I do that would be about sound without having to produce sound?’. I’m by no means the first artist to work with those low frequencies and the moving surfaces, but I just tried to find my own use for them, and very much got involved in responding to the architecture of each site. So the first site was at a sculpture center which has a 40 foot ceiling. So that 40 foot drop and then a little 12 inch speaker, it was a really interesting thing to work with. For that, Vito Acconci, also one of my favorite artists, gave me a studio visit and helped me tweak the shape of that. It seemed successful and I got a number of opportunities to do more, and people wanted their own version, and I just hit a point where I felt like I shouldn’t do any more because, for a long time I didn’t want to become just the World Trade Center guy - you mine an idea as far as you can push it to the point where you don’t just end up repeating yourself, and I think I’ve hit that point. It’s taught me a lot about working with physical space as much as anything. It seemed to give people pleasure, in the way the speakers moved, the strangeness of it, the way it felt - organic, even though intellectually you know it’s purely synthetic.

Vitiello’s “Untitled” with Julie Mehretu

Peter: What are your thoughts on interactivity as it relates to your work? Is your audience typically passive in experiencing your pieces? Can they influence the outcome? Is it something that’s important to you?

Stephen: It’s funny, with the suspended speaker pieces - all the time people think that they are interactive, and you see people going ‘ha, i made that change’. I had another piece in 2001 at PS1 with this rotating speaker, and again people thought it was interactive, so there’s an expectation that the audience brings. In truth I’ve experienced very very very little interactive work that was really interesting. There’s some great work that was done in the 60s through experiments in art and technology where they absolutely activated spaces. People like John Cage and David Tudor working with engineers were far more adventurous than we’ve been in the forty years that have come since then. So the only form of interactivity that I think is really interesting is just in giving people an environment in which they can move freely and maybe hear things differently - sitting, leaning, talking - in a sense that’s interactive. Just having a room where things are always changing with the speaker relationship. I think I’ve encountered a lot of interactive work and heard a lot of the talk where people say that interactive work - that all other work is irrelevant now that it’s in the hands of the viewer, but I actually think that that’s silly propaganda. I’m sure there is good work, but I’ve heard so much work and seen so much work where it’s so much more about the technology and so little about the content.

Peter: It’s interesting, because it seems to be something that we take, especially in academia, we take it as a given that interactivity is so important or working with controllers is so important. I recently finished this interview with Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, and he had this interesting quote at the end of the interview, he said ‘interactivity sometimes seems to me like you’re too lazy to write a script’. Because their pieces are all very scripted, and he said “ok, maybe I’m overreacting, but I went to school where it couldn’t be good unless it was interactive.” And I wrote in my question here, “it made me wonder if all our focus on interactivity somehow diminishes or discourages work on pieces that are more scripted and as such are very effective in their own way” and then I said “what do you think of the current emphasis on interactivity in electronic music and sound installations?” So is it something that you just have no interest in going there in your work?

Stephen: Not so much. There was definitely a point where in order to get a grant or a project you had to put interactivity into it. I think what happened was that it got way too much hype too early, so as a series of art forms developed, there was all this attention on it immediately and it was still in its infancy. It wasn’t allowed to grow to the point where it deserved audiences. Because it was so expensive to do, then there was that high expectation. At least for me I’m not interested in it. It may change, I may encounter new ways of thinking or new technologies that make it interesting, but I’m much more interested, for myself, in creating these immersive environments that give people a place to experience sound and not so much - I just fear I’d fall into the gadgetry too quickly. Early on I did two commissions of web projects and by nature they were meant to be interactive and also a six year project for a CD-ROM, which by the time it ended the media was obsolete. When it started we were in the New York Times and people were saying ‘this is one of the first great uses - CD-ROM as an interactive medium’, but it was at a point where to put three-second sound clips on the web, it was pretty unlikely that anybody was going to hear them. I didn’t have the internet at home and it was great to explore, and I did it because it was an opportunity and I enjoyed the process, but it didn’t give me the future of where I wanted to go. I would love to know more work that’s being done, but I think there are more good examples in the past than we’ve brought into the present. Even Leon Theremin’s early instrument for dancers to move through an environment and activate sounds, seems so much more provocative than things that I’ve encountered recently.

Peter: We have time for one last question, and this is actually from something we talked about a little bit earlier and I promised you I was going to ask you about it. Today you’re visiting us at the University of Virginia and you’re going to be giving a lecture in a little bit at the Art School, and you mentioned that most of the time when you go out and lecture and talk about your work, you talk to art school audiences, much more so than music department audiences. I think that’s really interesting: it’s telling about the work and about the background, and I’m just wondering what you make of that? Why you think that is?

Stephen: My fulltime teaching position at VCU is in the School of the Arts. Even though I think of the arts as audio-visual, there’s still an expectation it’s a visual arts medium, and we’re set in different ways of working, whether painting or sculpture, but the more that we move into the present and into the future, the more that we work with sculpture that is audible or that has audible content. It’s impossible to think of video art, except, for example, without sound. It’s never surprised me, I’ve had two or three commissions ever - one through the Univ. of Richmond - but rarely through music programs. I think that if you look at the history of sound in the arts, or even a lot of modern, contemporary composers - and I don’t think of myself so much as a composer - but if you think of someone like Philip Glass, a lot of his audience and his support and funding for the longest time came through the art world. Maybe it’s changing, but it seemed like he wasn’t considered a true composer within the academies. I don’t know if I have the answer, but I definitely feel like where the work that we’re doing lies, it seems to be that there’s a different audience that expects interdisciplinary play more within the visual arts world and less in the kind of strict music world. Maybe that will change. For me, always getting funding, for example, was nearly impossible because I couldn’t get funding as a composer or musician and I couldn’t get funding as a visual artists. Then these interesting cracks in the wall started to open up. Creative Capital, for example, having this emerging fields category that they fund, was really valuable because it allowed for a whole number of art forms, primarily digital art, and other art forms that fall in-between. I think inevitably things will change as the audiences change and as our concept what composition is changes, but I don’t know that we’ve really still fully considered what John Cage was talking about in ‘The Future of Music: Credo’ in 1937. Even though that feels absolutely contemporary, I think the academies and the concert halls still have not quite accepted that that might be the future or the present.

Peter: That’s my thing about it. It’s almost to me, sort of representative of kind of a deficiency in music departments. They don’t recognize this expanding field and this area, and for them site specificity is the concert hall, and it’s gotta be there and if it’s not there then ‘well, we have a harder time considering it music’. It seems like so many people are working in that area right now that it begs more attention. I think the other thing - part of it - is the ability for people to actually experience the work. It’s one thing to have a piece that can be played around by performers and travel and gets performed in front of a large audience in concert halls, it’s another thing to have a very specific piece that can only be heard by a couple of people at a gallery, so if only a few people hear it it doesn’t get written about or talked about in classrooms as much.

Stephen: That’s a problem in the art world, even important visual artists who make pieces that are pushing certain edges, but then just go to the home of some rich people and their friends come over. I do think a lot of people have been smart enough to make CD versions of what they do, and that places on the internet such as Ubu.com are incredible because you actually now can go and hear such a wealth of concrete poetry, sound art, experimental music, free texts, lectures that were given. That is one way that the internet is making things so much more available. You may not hear it in the bandwidth that you wish, you may not hear it in 24 channels, but it means that you can hear the thing and get a sense of the thing and get a sense of it to the point that you might want to seek it out on a larger scale.

Peter: Well, I think that is all the time that we have, so thank you very much for talking with us and for visiting, and we look forward to hearing more from you.

Stephen: Me too. Thanks.

What appeals about real-time video manipulation, about ‘live cinema’?

The world is catching up with vjs in enjoying a spot of real-time video manipulation: just watch people using PhotoBooth on any modern Mac. It’s compulsive, it’s fun! That term ‘Live Cinema’ is something close to my heart though: I reckon you can specifically and deliberately combine a lot of whats good in established cinema and clubbing to give a completely new way of expressing yourself as a VJ-esque performer while engaging with audiences’s own creative thoughts. The key to it is an improvisational use of narrative, rather than forcing a fixed story down their throats, you could be a cinematic incarnation of the oral storytellers of old, weaving tales on the fly, or providing the scenarios and juxtapositions that people find themselves compulsively mapping their own narratives onto. Stepping back from that, I’m interested in anything that uses media to make people interact or think in unexpected ways, which has taken me from playing with the conventions of one-man theatre to storytelling installations. And the tools are really hotting up at the moment, things are getting interesting.

Describe the live show you’ve developed and have been playing at various festivals…

‘rbnesc’ is a project fusing cinema and live experimental visuals. Presenting a series of character scenarios, it invites the audience to construct narrative and cultural critique: rbnesc >> urban escape. So its about the urban condition; whats happening, the forces acting on it, whether we should be accepting it. Some of this is overt, such as pasting up provocative quotes, some of it you can’t miss, given my visual obsession with CCTV cameras (hard not to living in the UK) and some is for the audience to map their own actions and consequences from the loose narrative arc I present. I hope they wonder whether the escape in rbn_esc is a valid solution…

How does it come together technically ?

I use Ableton Live talking to Vidvox’s VDMX on a macbook pro, with two behringer control surfaces. It allows a sophisticated audio-visual mix, and a template for the performance means I can somewhat improvise the mixing while keeping it together as a whole. I’m really happy that we’re at a point where an ‘engine’ to churn it out in realtime is clearly achievable, but boil it down and its only semi-live, its far from my ideal of being that proverbial oral storyteller, drawing on an archive of memories to make something new every time. Still haven’t seen the kind of interface to be able to truly improvise a fresh take each time. Well, ironically enough, that is except at the cinema in films such as Minority Report.

If you can produce content and have an ear for a soundtrack, it really isn’t that difficult to make an audio-visual setup for yourself with a modern laptop that can quite adequately get you to a ‘semi-live, semi-meaningful’ state, akin to rbn_esc as-is. Get some kind of audio sequencer that you can program in the building blocks of a DJ mix and sound effects, load the shots of your ‘film’ into a vj program that can perform your editing and montage on the fly, and tie it all together with as much midi and ‘knobs and sliders’ as you see fit.

What lead you to dedicate such efforts exploring narrative within live video?

Even starting out as a VJ, I found myself dividing a night of club visuals into discrete sets, each with some kind of theme, playing with hook and flow. Then I got involved in a little theatre outfit, and we explored how my responsiveness onstage with laptop and camera could enhance the act of a stand-up storyteller. Soon enough, we were delving into tv-like documentary sections with b-roll footage edited live to the storyteller’s semi-improvisational speech, we were having the storyteller interact with pre-filmed snippets of his other characters, not to mention many a coup de théâtre switching live cameras with staged pre-recorded chunks… it was a fun time, and really showed the potential of live, improvisational audio-visual media.

What differences emerge from playing similar set of audiovisual material, as opposed to playing a similar set of music again?

You can listen to that cd seemingly ad-infinitum, but the dvd will only get a play or two. there’s just something different in the way we experience a film to music. i don’t have the answers here, but thats kinda the point: there’s space between these two forms and that’s what we’re exploring. it could be that the film’s devotion to a all-consuming narrative and its set up to deliver an exact experience to you as you watch it means it leaves nothing to interest you on a second viewing, or it could be that the visual image is literal rather than abstract and once you’ve seen it, well, you’ve seen it. at the moment, I can only perform one route through my live-cinema piece, and so i have to rely on fresh audiences - not so hard given its a niche entertainment form - but my next big project is about giving me the tools as a performer to truly start exploring this.

As though to prove the live video performer is not checking their email, you were involved with an innovative trade show presentation with large touch screen technology, can you explain that?

I was asked to work with a production company developing a vj installation to be used as a central attraction of a motor show stand. A groundbreaking project as a whole, working on three 65” touchscreen plasmas surrounded by the public was quite something. Imagination, the production company, created a bespoke application that allowed us to playlist content submitted from the public around us, which we then published and imported into the vj setup I created on the central screen. The real innovation though was in the project’s raison d’être: interacting with the audience to create films that embrace them, putting the audience up alongside the über-produced brand films playing on the mighty LED walls. For that, and for realising it was vjs who could make the magic there, Imagination deserve a lot of praise.

How did it feel to VJ in that kind of spotlight?

We were making a five minute mix every twenty, all day, every day, in front of people who’d never seen anything like it. It was quite something, especially when they saw themselves on the six meter high led wall we were outputting to, or heard their voice booming over the stand’s PA. What really impressed me, was how working on that kind of surface really transforms the act of performance - arms flailing everywhere - and how an interface designed specially for it can really communicate to the public just what it is you’re doing.

Relentlessly, digital tools are making it easier to make music or video. Who are VJs producing work you admire, and why do they stand out?

- the Light Surgeons for so early on nailing the idea of an audio-visual performance broken out of the screen and into the fabric of the venue.
- bauhouse for so perfectly realising what I see as the vj/av approach in their high-end ‘montage on the beat’ productions.
- visualnaut, a good friend and collaborator over the years first with avit and then with narrative lab. Simply put, he’s a genius.
and I recently bumped back into ameoba, whose been trailblazing crazy-yet-superrefined a/v for years now. A welcome meeting, he’s a true original.

What attracts you to Quartz Composer?

If you look at a modern Mac desktop running Motion, you soon realise we’ve reached some kind of threshold in the development of all this realtime stuff: we can proverbially vj with after effects. Translating that to the realities of what you need as a performer, Vidvox’s VDMX combined with Quartz Composer seems the dream ticket. Still in beta, and with an interface that is yet far from streamlined, it does the magic trick of handing you the keys to the studio, where every bit of kit is free. Want another preview monitor? There you do sir. And if there’s some visual trick or bit of interactivity it can’t do, chances are you can make it yourself in quartz composer and it will load in as if it were coded by Vidvox themselves. At the high-end, thats pretty empowering. And if your needs are more specific still, you can take your “plug-in” QC knowledge and make native Mac apps yourself with a bare minimum of code, or if you’re willing to take the plunge (and its well worth it), then you’re extending QC itself with custom coded plug-ins or partnering QC based rendering engines with bespoke interfaces. If you’re on a PC and feel the ninja-fu, go immerse yourself in the world of VVVV. You won’t have the system-wide integration enabling things like VJ apps using it for plug-ins, but you’ll get a much richer environment to build your own castle with.

Video content and improvisational abilities are important for Vjs, but beyond those aspects, what ways have you enjoyed video artists involving themselves in simple or sophisticated ways within events / environments?

The ford project certainly grabs a handle on the future we were promised, where it isn’t just about ever bigger tvs broadcasting ever more channels with ever fancier graphics: its embracing of the audience through user-generated content and face-to-face interactivity really changes the relationship between media and the masses at events. The VJ set that was the most pleasant surprise to see last year was a beautifully simple operation from exyzt, who took a little wireless camera and ran around the clubspace and stage with it, always getting nice motion and feeding it into a framebuffer on a laptop, controlled by a playstation controller. So their performance was the two of them dancing, one with controller and one with camera, sampling and triggering on the fly and wiggling the joysticks to overlay graphics on the action. Fun and a consistent visual flow that fed the club back onto itself in the best way. As exyzt are a bunch of supertalented renegade architects with a string of huge installations and production pedigree to their name, it was doubly interesting to expect some mapped space super production and instead see something so simple. And of course, they hit the same theme of embracing the audience there.

What’d you learn from your AVIT experiences, and how do you feel about the global network of VJs today?

AVIT marked the moment in time when VJing transitioned from people-inventing-vjing-in-isolation to VJing being a recognised term and vjs being networked up in their home towns and beyond. Fuelled by the internet, there was a mounting pressure for VJs to meet each other and actually see VJ practice that wasn’t their own, and avit was one of the main releases for that: it started as the physical spin-off or incarnation of the then-new and skyrocketing vjforums.com. In the UK, three years after our first event we produced a week long symposium that really hit home to us that we’d met our objectives and the vj world was established: the work was good, the networks were in place, organisations were forming and taking up the baton. So now, for me, the focus has to be delivering on the potential of VJ practice, which means groundbreaking works, which means putting rocket boosters on interesting projects and talented people. Who and how, that’s an interesting project, and a continuing one. [posted by Sean Healy aka Jean Poole on Sky Noise]

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 artis 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 naiïve. 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 an 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. [posted by Greg Smith on Serial Consign]

CTHEORY: You have mentioned before that the problem with some realtime performances of laptops is that the result(s) can be easily dismissed by the listening public as “spacebar music”. Do you feel that performing your own compositions from your laptop is a sufficient way to engage a concert audience?” Continue reading The Microsound Scene - An Interview with Kim Cascone by Jeremy Turner, CTheory, 2001.

The creation, dubbed “Stribe” by Josh, could have been a one-off. But instead, he’s working on making it into a tool for others, with completely open source hardware and software. The whole system is built on the popular Arduino platform, making it uncommonly easy to modify. It’s a work in progress, as you can see lacking an enclosure. But ten have made it out into the wild, people are already programming custom software, and more are coming.

I got to hang out with Josh while he was in town this weekend. Luckily, he’s a fan of early music, meaning we met at a concert of a viol consort that was playing my music — an unusual collision of 15th and 21st Century music technology.

Josh gave a demo of the Stribe, for myself plus Phil Torrone of Make and Limor Fried (aka lady ada), creator of the x0xb0x open-source 303 clone. It’s still a project in process– there’s more to be done in firmware and support software and documentation — but it already shows some real promise. I snapped some shots, studied the Max patches, and mostly listened to Limor and Josh talk about the challenges of starting a DIY hardware business. (I hope that DIY builders start to share experiences, even informally, as they work to make the business end work so they can keep building.)…” continue reading Hands-on, Interview: Stribe Multi-Touch Controller by Peter Kirn.