Untitled: A Thesis Title Should Go Here
So this is a Thesis introduction, it should be clever, insightful, and witty. One should, I assume, attempt to talk about oneself by way of introduction, a starting point as it were. I don’t really want to talk about myself at this juncture, so instead I’m going to plagiarize an excerpt from an interview with me, that may or may not be fictitious.
“Can you tell me about your work, what do you make?” Josh looked pensive for a moment as if I’d caught him off guard. “Well… we’re always looking around at the world, and at art too, but the problem is that we can look at a work, a scene, or a situation, and apprehend it... or think we apprehend it. You know, because the visual cortex is always feeding data to your parietal cortex which in turn uses that data to make what are essentially models of everything, including the world around you, and ostensibly you are operating based on those models and not actually working from the external world.” At this point Rachel (his wife) interrupts, “So in laymen's terms that means...” she ribs at him gently bringing a smile to his face. “So what I mean,” he continues, grinning, “is that vision, what we see, or maybe rather what we think we see, is not only, heavily mediated by our neurological functions, but it’s also, something that we lend a lot of weight to in our daily comings and goings.” At this point he pauses and takes a long draught from his pint glass before continuing, “I guess the point is should we be leaning so heavily on our sight as our primary sense?” He allows a long moment to pass before continuing, “I mean to the exclusion of our others, as I think often happens.” He sets his glass down with a shrug in something like a punctuation, at which point his friend Margaret, who has been coloring with his daughter, looks up and adds, “He makes sound work,” in a slightly annoyed tone that conveys her amusement at his having used so many words without actually giving a direct answer to my question. “Yeah, I make sound work.” Josh admits with a grin, seeming amused by the undercutting simplicity of the summary.
So then there you have it, I make sound work. The motivation for this comes from a variety of sources: a long standing love affair with sound and music, a frustration with objects, a desire for a more immersive experience, an attempt to make something new, an effort to notice what is often overlooked, a means to express my way of seeing. I do it because I enjoy it, because it makes sense to me, because it’s difficult and rewarding. Like Daniel Boon heading west, I’m looking for a place with a little elbow room.
Despite the indications to the contrary given by the preceding simile, I don’t see myself as a pioneer. I’m not sure I even believe in originality. After all the well worn argument concerning the impossibility of thinking of a thing that does not exist, would itself not exist were there not at least some truth to it. In 1903 Mark Twain wrote about originality in a letter to Helen Keller who had previously been accused of plagiarism.
“Oh, dear me, how unspeakably funny and owlishly idiotic and grotesque was that ‘plagiarism’ farce! As if there was much of anything in any human utterance, oral or written, except plagiarism! The kernel, the soul — let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances — is plagiarism. For substantially all ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources, and daily used by the garnerer with a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them; whereas there is not a rag of originality about them anywhere except the little discoloration they get from his mental and moral calibre and his temperament, and which is revealed in characteristics of phrasing. When a great orator makes a great speech you are listening to ten centuries and ten thousand men — but we call it his speech, and really some exceedingly small portion of it is his. But not enough to signify. It is merely a Waterloo. It is Wellington’s battle, in some degree, and we call it his; but there are others that contributed. It takes a thousand men to invent a telegraph, or a steam engine, or a phonograph, or a telephone or any other important thing — and the last man gets the credit and we forget the others. He added his little mite — that is all he did. These object lessons should teach us that ninety-nine parts of all things that proceed from the intellect are plagiarisms, pure and simple; and the lesson ought to make us modest. But nothing can do that.”
That’s the thing about the myth of originality, in some respects, it is a way for us to puff ourselves up and boast about what we’ve done, but what have we done? Have we been more than bodies, more than passive receptors, infected by the influenza of the milieu from which we originate? At best we have worked to make curatorial decisions about some aspects of our own personal context, consciously choosing to expose ourselves to certain strains of influence while quarantining ourselves from others. At worst we are simply blindly blown back and forth by each wake and current that chances to intersect us, unable to account for the course on which we are carried. The point is that nothing exists in a vacuum; everything is impinged upon by something else. Whether inside or outside of our control, we are all of us subject to influences from one direction or another.
Influences are tricky things; in one respect because they are not always obvious as such, which consequently can make them hard to pin down. (Fortunately or un, I’m one of those people who’s prone to extended and in depth introspection and cognitive self exploration.) In another respect because influences can be used to shape others impressions of you, which in turn can lead to a certain level of ...curation in the way people present their influences. (I will endeavor to eschew pretension in favor of honesty in my curation here.)
In pursuit of such honesty I will admit that there are very few visual artists that I can really list as influences; this is partly because I don’t get out as much as I “should” and partly because I hate art. (Alright, so that last part’s not really true; I just wanted to say it because seems shocking for someone in my position to say, and because it could be partially true [although, it isn’t really]). There is so much more going on in the world besides Art. So many things have such a larger impact on who we are as people and the way we see the world than Art does. When it comes down to it, artists are, I think, just taking in everything, passing all that input through their filters, and reintroducing the same material back into the world, albeit in a (more or less) modified form. As such other artists are really only useful as sources from which to cop strategies or methods of reintroduction. (Hmmm, that came out sounding a bit more cynical than what I’d intended.) To be clear here I’m speaking of other artists as producers of artistic media, and not in view of their personhood. Before moving on into the discussion of those whose creative production has influenced my own I would like to, by way of disclaimer, note that I believe it is invaluably important to have some connection to creative individuals and/or community as an artist. These people are likely to be more influential than an artist who’s work you may follow or happen to see. I think that this probably has a lot to do with the conversations being two way rather than one way.
So anyway, some of the artists I’m into and why, in no particular order, are as follows: James Turrell, because of the way he is able to re-contextualize the world around you and shift your perceptions of space; Kenneth Goldsmith, for the questions his work raises about content and originality, as well as UbuWeb; James Bridle, for The New Aesthetic, and for the way in which he uses real world data to create compelling fictions; Jayson Musson, provides art criticism that is both rigorous and entertaining; Tino Sehgal, challenged some of my notions about where a work of art lies and how to deal with it; Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, blew my mind with their approach to constructing narratives. John Cage’s work and theory, have also had a big impact on the way I think about sound. I like what Dan Deacon said about John Cage:
“To me, the biggest lasting influence Cage has is the idea that music is listening. That music isn’t only notes on a page that a composer puts there. It’s the sound of a leaf blower; of the rain hitting the windshield coming out from under an overpass; the slowly developing choir of cicadas. It not only empowered composers to work with found sound and non-traditional sounds with greater freedom, but it also empowered the audience to find beauty in the chaos and noise of an industrialized world. Basically that anything can happen and anything is music.”
I would like to clarify that, despite the implications of the above quote, I don’t really see myself as a musician (because I’m not sure I fit all the implications of that moniker).
Now that we’ve got some of the Art influences out on the table, lets move on to some of the real core influences (these being largely life experiences) that have made me who I am today. Which, as I see it, is more relevant to understanding my work, than me talking about the artists I’m into. (Although for those of you who are into that I promise to give you a little more of that sort of thing before the close of this paper.) As I introduce some of these things I’ll try to stay within a rough sort of chronology. We’re not going to travel any further back in time here than age 15, for the simple reason that I think a lot of child hood stuff is predominately the influence of parents, genetics, and temperament.
The first big influential event, when I was 15, my father was murdered. This random and senseless event had such a wide reaching impact that it’s really too broad a subject to get into in any detail here. It will have to suffice to say that this event would be something that would have profound implications on the choices I made for a little over the next ten years of my life. The next set of influences can be broadly categorized as the mistakes and blunders of my late teens and early twenties. This of course includes such hits as a drug problem, heart breaks, unhealthy relationships, trying to figure out who I was, and serious damage to relationships with my siblings. Another big influence in my life was meeting God, this sparked a deep interest in theology and the Bible. Also in my early twenties I rediscovered my child hood love of making things and art. At this point, in an attempt to avoid going off into the potentially boring realm of a protracted personal history, let’s blow through some of the rest of these experiences in list fashion:
Denton TX, art school, a tight group of creative/art school friends, community, service/volunteer work, summers abroad, working doing AV production and electronics repair/installation, meeting Rachel, a year living and working internationally after college, learning other languages through immersion, circumnavigating the globe, reverse culture shock, driving a school bus, exposure to Louisiana culture, marrying Rachel, working as a dinosaur repairman, the birth of my daughter, parenting, Houston TX, grad-school, teaching.
There’s at least one more category of influence (maybe more, but definitely this one) that needs to be addressed. Music/sound/the aural world, whatever we want to call it, I make sound work so it has to be dealt with. I’m not even really sure where to start with this, so I’m just gonna dive in to this list and take it as it comes.
Trent Reznor, I feel like there’s a certain level of synchronicity between the arc of his work and my own life; Dan Deacon, both because the way he makes and talks about his music feels more like a contemporary artist, and because he opened up a new way of thinking about audio work for me; cicadas, the cacophony of their drone during their short summer season is one of my favorite sounds; Dan Nakamura, his work was seminal in helping me develop my philosophy on the aesthetics of transitions; the sound that the spring type doorstops make, glorious; Inon Zur, I was spending a lot of time listening to his ambient sound works when I started working in sound; Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, I love their compositional style; brown, the feel of its phonemes in your mouth when it’s pronounced properly (the feel of certain words in ones mouth is very important); Ben Prunty and Anodyne, recently I’ve been getting into these and a few other folks who are doing sort of minimal electronic composition stuff for small time independent video games; Shiny Around the Edges, a band from Denton whose records are doing something that I think might work well for the sort of work I want to make; WNYC’s Radiolab, not only for Jad Abumrad’s production, which is amazing, but also for the way the content engages my senses of wonder and curiosity; WFMU, all kinds of crazy interesting programing, especially the 365 Days Project, I hope they do this again soon; other people’s field recordings, there’s something intensely interesting about listening to sounds that other people have chosen to capture and collect; Hearing Voices, a collective of independent producers and a show that is often as interesting in form as it is in content; The Dust Brothers, these guys did for sampling what Nokia did for the mobile phone; intros, outros, and hidden tracks on records from the 90’s, something about this phenomenon has left an indelible mark on me; the impact of chopped and screwed, I cant seem to get enough of things being slowed down and repeated, slow may well be the new fast; newbreed music, drag, witchhouse, chillwave, slowcore, or any of a hand full of other terms used to describe a certain underground electronic music subgenera or sound that’s marked by downtempo beats, drones, atmospheric sounds, layered compositions, and heavy use of noise and distortion; Girl Talk, Gregg Gillis’ approach to making music taught me a lot about distillation; glitches, distortion, playback technology failing, there’s a certain aesthetic to these sounds that I find incredibly appealing; John Cage, 4:33 had a huge impact in the way I think about sound; the phenomenon of mashups, recycling disposable pop culture, how novel; remix culture, a culture of appropriation, because there is no such thing as originality;
While the above list is in no way exhaustive, It is a start.
Before we move from the topic of influences I’d like to mention some of the other things that haven’t fit into the three previous areas, but that I think may have bearing on the things that influence me or are in and of themselves influences. My curiosity is rampant and as such I love reading, learning, and educational media. As a kid I would sit around reading the encyclopedia all afternoon. As an adult I have spent way too much time on wikipedia. I’m a self styled linguistic hobbyist; I often find myself studying and/or pondering etymologies trying to figure out where different words came from. I took three years of Latin in high school. I’ve studied Russian and Chinese in immersive settings. I love traveling, history, culture, and geography. I greatly enjoy games, puzzles, and other things that have detailed systems or strategies. Finally, I’ve at least a passing interest in philosophy and critical theory.
It’s my study of and engagement with these interests that inform the content of my work. I’m interested in how people, myself included, see the world. Experiences, philosophies, viewpoints, and thought processes are areas that I enjoy mining and exploring. Through the exploration, excavation, and subsequent explication of these areas from my own life, or occasionally the lives of others, my studio practice becomes an exercise in understanding and relating the internal spaces created by these ideas and structures. This is done often by analogy, because it is a powerful tool for communicating and understanding. If you think about it many times when we relate to another person, thing, or situation it is because we are able to see an analogue in our own life or experience. Analogies are also often incredibly effective tools for teaching/learning new ideas or concepts by pairing them to ones we already grasp or understand. Some of the most interesting internal spaces are areas of overlap. The interstitialities between things in opposition, that are far removed from one another, or even unrelated are some of the most fertile grounds in which an artist can work. Within these crosshatched zones is where the best art resides, unable to be comfortably placed wholly in one jurisdiction or the other.
The Interstitial space between the fantastic and the mundane is one specific place in which I often seem to find my work. Exploring the mundane to find pockets of the fantastic or searching out the converse, areas of the mundane that exist within the fantastic, is a common venture for me in the studio. One of my early sound works, Relax/The Stress is Gonna Kill Ya, is a great example of pulling the fantastic from the mundane. All the sounds in the piece originate from some object, situation, or entity that I found to be a source of frustration, annoyance, stress, anxiety, or negativity. After collecting these sounds I began manipulating and arranging them. I wanted to see if it would be possible to transform them into something that was antithetical to their original source material. Would it be possible to break apart these mundane things and get inside of them? Would there be something fantastic lurking on the interior? Not surprisingly (since I’m discussing it here), the work brought me to some satisfying conclusions to these questions. Looking back at my personal history of making it seems like the dichotomy of the fantastic and mundane has been a thematic thread that has been present from the beginning. Perhaps it’s because these interstitial areas are typically behind the curtain that I find them so fascinating. I’m always drawn to seeing something new or something old in a new way.
Perceptual phenomenology is another area of interest within which my work often operates. This is may not be surprising given my interest in science, philosophy, and points of view, as well as my curiosity about roots, origins, and how things work. How we intake and understand the world is key to understanding how we receive and process a work of art. This is as important to consider as it is beneficial. An artist is much more likely to be effective in communicating, if he or she has a firm grasp on how the communication they put forward is received. Understanding that transmission and how it works is also important if one wishes to begin manipulating it. Manipulation of perception is one area that is at the fore of my work right now. An early foray into this arena involved a two hour composition consisting of: processed brown noise, sounds plausible for the installation space, field recordings of the installation space and elsewhere, samples of sounds that would not be found to be naturally occurring in the installation space, and a single utterance of the first name of each person who was known to be in that space during the two hours in which the piece would be played. These elements were sequenced and mixed into a subtle composition, that was broadcast from a four channel stereo setup installed above the drop celling of the exhibition space.
The goal of From Above was to subtly alter the aural topography of the space by existing in the perceptual periphery of those individuals inside the space. At it’s conclusion many of the individuals within the space described a heavy feeling and the experience of hearing their name but being unsure where it had originated from. This work was my first attempt at altering aural topography (aural topography being my own coinage used to describe the natural or inherent sonic qualities of a space), but it has since become an abiding interest. Aural topography does much to influence and shape our perceptions of space on a very primal level; through it’s manipulation the entire gestalt of a given space may be transformed. This line of inquiry has produced work that necessitates the use of interventionist and guerilla methods in it’s public exhibition in the interest of facilitating perceptual shifts. As the audience becomes aware of the work in a space it crosses the liminal threshold of perception, entering into the foreground of the persons’s attention, raising questions both about the space they are in as well as their own perceptions. The goal being to produce intersections where perceptual shifts can allow a brief moment of disorientation and free fall as the rug of expectation is pulled from under the individuals feet.
I’m interested in changing perceptions and causing/enticing people to see things from a different point of view. I believe that attention changes perception and perception changes experience. There is something to be relished about the precious fleeting moment of intellectual dysphoria and confusion when something doesn't quite make sense. It’s an opportunity to reevaluate and question ones assumptions, or perhaps just a chance to see something wonderful. I want to point things out. I want to force connections and route new neural pathways. I enjoy the exploration and explication of phenomenological minutia and the nuances of the everyday, because therein lies the heart of the fantastic. Wonder, curiosity, and discovery are strong motive forces in my practice; I strive to communicate these things to others and create shared experiences.
My work also contains elements of narrative in most pieces, although it’s not always at the forefront of each composition, it might accurately be described as an undercurrent of narrative, although some people see more narrative threads than others. I’m interested in narrative and story telling in part for their immersive properties. There’s something strange, mysterious, and wonderful about the way that you can become so lost in a narrative that you leave your own immediate bodily reality and are transported to somewhere entirely different; this phenomena seems especially present in the act of reading. I think that this likely has something to do with the way in which the technology of reading acts as a direct data transfer. What I mean is that when an experienced reader is engaged with the material he or she is reading they cease to internally vocalize the words internally. Thus rather than being a proxy for spoken word, the written word becomes data that the brain is able to more rapidly input and process, bypassing the conscious transference from symbol to sound to meaning and going directly from symbols to meaning.
In seeking out a medium with that sort of immediacy sound seemed a logical choice. Firstly, it predates written word, and indeed the written word is a storage and transmission technology for spoken language. Secondly, of all our senses hearing is the fastest and most direct, as it must pass through fewer processing centers to interpret the raw sensory input data. As a matter of fact, sound is capable of being directly received by the lower brain and triggering motor functions, bypassing the need for processing and interpretation by the higher centers of the brain. The classic anecdotal example of this is the runner who's tensed body springs to action at the sound of the starting gun. Scientists have proven that this response time is quicker than conscious thought, which gets into a whole fascinating discussion of phenomenology, neuroscience, and how our mind constructs our experienced reality. Unfortunately that moves outside the purview of this paper, so we must press on with the topic at hand.
Another distinct advantage to making sound based art work is that sound’s natural properties include change and duration, (sound is, in fact, change in air pressure over a duration); meaning, it exists in time effecting “space” within that dimension. Time and change are in my estimation essential components of a good work of art. This is especially true of time. All great works of art require a commitment of time from the viewer. In non-time-based works this is achieved by arresting the viewer and enticing them to supply a duration through their own exploration and engagement with the piece. Time-based work, on the other hand, has a prescribed duration which the viewer must submit to before they can fully engage the work. In some ways this takes some of the onus off of the viewer. It however does not guarantee the viewer’s engagement with the work, as the viewer may exercise their own agency and choose not to submit to the prescribed duration. As a matter of fact, viewers, unruly lot that they are, are often quick to balk at an imposed duration and walk away. This is a significant hurdle for time-based work to over come and in some ways can be seen as an inverse of the engagement obstacle faced by non time based work.
The solution to both is seduction. Seduction is a tricky art form, like rocking a rhyme that’s right on time, it takes practice, variation, and an attentiveness to your audience’s needs and desires. In the face of this truth, I must recognize that the audience I am ultimately trying to seduce is myself. I realize that this may sound narcissistic, or at the very least awkward... If we can let that hang for a moment, I’d like to point out that not making what you want to see, but rather making what the audience wants is called pandering. Now, let me back down a little bit from that hardline justification, and say that we all make the stuff that we find compelling, usually, out of a desire to share that with others. Indeed I want to give my audience a glimpse of what I find wondrous, fantastic, seductive, enthralling, funny, or interesting. Who’s reactions and opinions can one better gauge and target than one’s own? Besides, at the end of the day don’t we have more in common than we’d sometimes like to admit?
I fully acknowledge that often initially I’m the target audience, but through a process of revisions, time, and critique. I am moved away from the center toward a better and often more broadly (if only slightly) palatable work. My tastes run toward low frequencies, droning sounds, repetition, dense layers of sound that must be sifted through, alternating bombast and self-negation. I like things that are absurd and non-sequitur. I also like clever witticisms and word play. There is a duality between the fantastic and the mundane and the inverse found within each that I frequently return to, as I’ve found it to be a very fertile ground for the creative enterprise. Because of this, I love the boring. I like to slow things down, so you can crawl inside and inhabit them for a little while. I love opaque symbolism and allegory, being able to talk about two things at once. I’m also very taken with the idea of holding two thoughts that don’t fit at the same time. I love the tension of something that doesn't resolve the way you expected, or the mental dissonance that comes when your brain’s amazing pattern recognition abilities are frustrated.
In pursuit of these things I employ a variety of stratagems in the production of the work, drawing on a range of sources such: as field recordings (mine and others), sampling (digital and analogue), recording (instruments, found sounds, and performed noise of various types), I also process and digitally manipulate sound (generated and sampled). The compositions tend to be layered, nuanced, and dense. Sound has a certain materiality to it. On some level my work with sound is a way of exploring it’s material properties, of pushing against it’s plasticity. Whether I slow something down, stretch it out, shift its pitch, or introduce any of a series of distortions, the choice to do so most often arises directly out of a desire to achieve a particular feel from the sound. It’s touch; sound’s vibrations move more than just the endolymph fluid inside our cochleas. Hearing and touch both provide data about the physical world and it’s forces that sight cannot. Sight may provide clues that we can use to make assumptions about aspects of the physical world around us, but many of these assumptions move directly back to the experiential knowledge provided by either sound or touch. For this reason I think it is important to try to lend more of our conscious attention to these other senses as opposed to blindly succumbing to the primacy of vision.
The work is mostly composed before hand and then presented via the internet, although in thinking about how work gets presented mutations have occurred that are expanding the way I think about what the work is or can be. Wrestling with issues of presentation has been almost as exciting as making new work because it provides a new set of problems and parameters to be solved and reckoned with. In a way I suppose it is a way of making new work. What makes these problems so interesting are those mutations introduced to the form and goals of the work. This addressing of presentation is part of what led me to the notion of aural topography. It helped show me the performative possibilities the work lends itself to. Presentation concerns have also opened up the possibility of reintroducing object making into my practice. Experimenting with presentation has been (and my sense is, that it will continue to be) an amazingly fertile field to plow. Looking for new ways to present the sort of work I want to make has yielded some exciting fruit. Essentially it’s allowed me, in some cases, to move from making work about things that interest me, to making work that actually becomes instances of what I’ve been describing. My work altering aural topographies is one example, in that it provides the stimulus around which perceptual shifts can occur.
Making work rooted in sound that has no real physical component, it is frequently a challenge for my work to find its audience. However, as perceptions continue to shift about the role of technology in a fine art context, sound as a medium is becoming more viable than ever. Although, time-based and experiential/event oriented work is difficult to commoditize, and doesn't always fit well within the traditional confines of the white cube, I see that as a benefit, as it allows room for experimentation and freedom from preconceptions about what this sort of work is and how it should be presented.
As I’m wrapping up my time in graduate school I feel very excited about the possibilities of what’s ahead. Armed with the creative and critical apparatuses necessary to generate, refine, contextualize, and direct my work I’m moving forward from this point ready to embark on a career of making. Though it’s never clear what lies on the road ahead until you come upon it, having a destination and a map to plot a course is essential for any journey. One should remember however it’s not arriving at the destination that makes the trip, but rather it’s the experience of getting there.