Joe Diebes in correspondence with Jo-Ann Conklin
In one of our early conversations, you said that the works in Song of Transformation are not sound art. What did you mean?
The term “sound art” suggests work that is best experienced wearing a blindfold, in the way that paintings are isolated when displayed on white gallery walls. Once an artist adds a visual aspect to the work—and I mean more than just putting some speakers or headphone listening stations in a gallery—the term doesn’t apply anymore. Though my work in this exhibition emanates sound, I’m primarily concerned with how sonic/musical structures relate to other orders of experience—visual, conceptual, spatial—and so my impulse is maybe of a cinematic or an operatic nature. Coming from a music composition background, I get very deep into the technicalities of my sonic language, but any decision in the sonic realm is connected to a conceptual or visual aspect of the piece I’m working on. I’m interested in finding ways that music and sound can suggest the unseen dimensions of physical objects and alter our perceptions of them. Sound can be an overlay onto the visible that connects something that’s right in front of you to something very distant, and perhaps very abstract. I think there is a lot of creative potential in the zone between what is seen and what is heard.
How did you come to study with La Monte Young, and what did you take from that experience?
I approached La Monte because my work was becoming more about space and less about manipulating passing time, and he occupies an extreme position in terms of thinking about the vertical aspect of music, rather than how it develops horizontally. He has had a sound installation running at his loft space in Tribeca for over ten years that consists of one immensely complex chord. He has gone very deep into the physics of sound, particularly harmonic relationships and overtone structure. And this is what I studied with him—essentially physics. He’s arrived at a profound mind/body relationship with music. The danger of getting very abstract and mathematical is that things become cerebral and disconnected—which is a major reason why art-music has become so esoteric. I gained a lot of technical knowledge that has certainly been a great resource, though perhaps the most significant thing I gained from the experience is the conviction that things can have uncompromised conceptual integrity and at the same time work on a physical level.
Shortly after graduating from Yale you became involved with the art collaborative GAle GAtes et al. The group was well received, performed at the Whitney Museum, and was described by Peter Marks of The New York Times as “an adventurous troupe with one foot in the world of postmodern art and the other in downtown performance.” Sounds pretty interesting. How did the collaborative come together and what were the performance/installations?
GAle GAtes was a group of visual and performing artists from very different backgrounds that worked in a huge warehouse space in Brooklyn for several years: Michael Counts, Michelle Stern, Michael Anderson, Tom Fruin, Jeff Sugg, and myself. We collaborated in many different capacities, and everyone had studios there so there was a lot of exchange and mutual influence. We were best known for large-scale performance pieces in which an audience was led through various installations inhabited by performers, ranging from a network of bridges built over a water-filled gallery to a mini-opera in an artificial forest. The visual component of these pieces was created by Counts and had no narrative line as in conventional theater, and I composed the sonic environment. I wasn’t under any obligation to support a scene the way composers for film and theater usually do, and so I found ways that the sound could take the visual plane in unexpected directions: how what is seen can be palpably transformed by the subliminal action of sound. I also began to think environmentally about sound, which I thought of as weather enveloping the performers and audience in an atmospheric and spatial experience. What was great about it was the absolute freedom to experiment. I could have an idea and hear it in conjunction with a fully mounted production the next day. There was no waiting to get a venue and rehearse in a bare-bones way in a different space and all the administrative hassle that makes creating this kind of work in New York a tricky thing. And we did so many shows—hundreds of performances. Thinking about how my sound worked with visuals, and how audiences responded, was greatly facilitated by the fact that we would exhibit night after night. I also did my first installations there, developed my opera Strange Birds, and curated performances by other artists and musicians. I consider these years to be a foundation much more important than my formal composition study. It opened up areas that I’m sure I’ll explore for the rest of my life.
Installation has become an important medium for you—utilizing sound or music in combination with video or sculptural objects. This has moved your work from the concert hall to the art gallery. What do you gain by presenting your work in this context?
The gallery sets up a completely different mode of reception than the concert hall by operating on the viewer/listener’s time frame rather than the composer’s. I’ve never felt particularly synchronized with the events taking place at a concert—long boring stretches where my mind wanders, and then, after being lulled into not paying attention, something happens and I miss it. Linear music works by pulling the audience through time as if they were attached by a string, and either you go along for the ride or you spend the duration of the concert removed from the experience. I think of my compositions as inhabitable psychic spaces, rather than being a linear development in time. I don’t really have a desire to manipulate the listener’s experience in a precise way moment to moment, bringing their emotions to premeditated rises and falls. I would rather allow the listener to come and go, to be struck by the sonic aspect for a while, but then start making conceptual associations and float on those thoughts for a while without feeling obliged to stay on track. It’s interesting to see how differently people respond to these installation works, spending anywhere from a few minutes to hours, glancing off its surface or digging deep into it. The individual experience is also informed by the spatial aspect of my work, which suggests that the trajectory in time will be connected to the physical movement through the piece, and there are infinite paths to choose from.
So, one way to looks at your work is through the elements of sound, space, time, and the human body.
These elements are all related, but maybe the best approach is to think about the body of the viewer/listener as they navigate the work. Because the sound sources are distributed in space, the experience has everything to do with how one physically moves through the piece. The sonic panorama is always shifting with one’s physical position and the way events happen in time has to do with how long one stays in one place before moving on to another perspective. There is no unified timeline, as each sound source (sunflower or bird cage) is on its own trajectory, and so every unique physical path through the installation will also be a unique intersection of sonic events. This is very different from the typical proscenium experience of video or film, or even surround-sound works that imply a “sweet spot,” or fixed listening position. In those works, the body de-activated as the viewer/listener sits or stands in one place while vicariously experiencing a preset duration and sequence of events. In Aviary and Sound Field, the spatialization of the sound sources in a non-hierarchical way, or in a way that doesn’t suggest any one perspective, motivates choices and an individually unique experience.
I want to ask you about your working method, particularly your compositional method and use of computers. In an article published in PAJ about your musical installation presence, you describe the creation of that work in four parts: writing the parts, sampling the performances, composing the resulting samples, and presenting the finished work. This is a fairly non-traditional mode of composition. Did the creation of Aviary and Sound Field follow a similar path? If not, how did it differ?
presence, as well as String Quartet No. 2, is largely about the relationship of performance to composition, and how this relationship can be inverted using current technology. Classical composition rests on the idea of writing a linear score that will later be interpreted in performance, and so the compositional decisions remain hypothetical (and there are many cases of scores that were never performed). My goal was to capture the vitality of live performances and freeze them as digital assets with which to compose, allowing my choices to come directly from the sounds themselves, eliminating much of the distance that exists between the note on paper and the final sound it produces.
Aviary and Sound Field were composed quite differently. The visual element plays a much larger role in these works, and, though I had ideas for the sonic material, I constructed the visual installation before really getting into the sound. Even between these two works, which were conceived as complementary, I had different processes. I usually find a compositional procedure that best suits the material and concept at hand. Aviary uses samples of bird songs and calls, whereas Sound Field uses synthesis (sine tones and white noise). These materials are conceptually very different: samples are about displacement, whereas synthesis is about replacement, which I find to be an inherently darker idea. In Aviary I left the bird sounds largely unmanipulated because I wanted to emphasize the relationship between absence and presence brokered by technology. Sound Field deals with more complex issues having to do with the character of technology itself. I wanted to approach this work as a simulation and so used purely synthetic materials.
You use a computer program to mix the sounds in Aviary and Sound Field so that the patterns are never repeated. Tell us about the technology used and its effect on your creative process. Are the sound sequences truly random, or random within limitations that you determine?
The technology itself is less important than why I use it, though I should begin by describing the technique. In the case of these two installations, the sounds are being generated on the fly by a computer algorithm that I composed. This program contains both set rules of the piece and a substantial random component. As an example, in Sound Field one of the things each flower does is emit pseudo Morse code messages. I know these messages will consist of several beeps (some long, some short) separated by short silences, even though many of the variables—the exact number of beeps, the exact length of beeps/silences, pitch—are randomly chosen at the time of performance. With many flowers executing these messages at the same time (without being synchronized in any way), a complex result is quickly arrived at, one that will continually reinvent itself.
The unpredictability relieves me from what I believe to be the fundamental problem with composing linear music—that the time perception of the composer is vastly different from the time perception of the listener. If a composer spends a month on a ten-minute piece, working on each second of the piece in a progressive way, then there’s no way for him/her to understand how the work will be experienced by someone hearing it for the first time. One ends up either relying on the crutch of tried-and-true compositional formulas, or formally experimenting in a way that is uncommunicative.
I prefer to be surprised by my work, and to hear it the way any listener would hear it. My own subjectivity comes into play through the ranges within which I limit random choices. What I usually do is begin with the widest range and then limit from there. For example, I might begin by allowing every available frequency within hearing range. I then let the installation run and spend some time in it, and after a while it becomes clear to me what the range needs to be—maybe just the region between 400 Hz and 2,000 Hz. Then, I decide if this range should be changing over time, and so I spend some more time walking around, making changes to the algorithm. In the end, works such as Sound Field can have hundreds of variables changing over time in various ways, though this complexity is arrived at not through the joy of playing with computers (and there’s often little joy in that) but through the process of listening.
You have drawn inspiration from birds, creating several works in addition to Aviary that are based on their songs—including two music installations, Passerine Song Cycle (1996) and presence (2001), and your opera Strange Birds (2002). What draws you to birds?
Birds have a lot going for them, and have always struck me as a more advanced species. They are spare in their language—elliptical—and yet they say everything that needs to be said through melody. I once read that a bird’s aural acuity is ten times more sensitive than humans. You really hear this when you slow down bird calls and hear how beautiful these melodies really are—this is why in Aviary I’ve slowed down the bird calls to a speed that we humans can register. Humans exist on a hopelessly two-dimensional plane, confined by gravity, and our homing instincts are pretty lame. It seems that technology has only just begun to get us closer to birds, through airplanes, GPS navigation systems, the internet. And people have begun to speak like birds—especially in the vernacular—through short phrases that have more to do with intonation than the words spoken. These were my thoughts for my opera Strange Birds, which is set thousands of years into the future, after humans have dispensed with language, and so the piece has no libretto.
In contrast to bird songs, the audio in Sound Field is made up of sine tones and white noise in Morse code. Is there a message to be decoded?
When I began working on this piece I wasn’t sure what the flowers were going to say to each other, though I knew they would be speaking in a secret code. And so I built up a more and more complex vocabulary of messages, without wanting to understand what they were saying. I was interested in abstracting the process by which machines communicate. And so in Sound Field I used sine tones and white noise, which in many protocols, from Morse code to modems, are used in data transmission—communication system that have taken on an almost organic complexity. The message of the piece is not really to be found in the simple sequences of beeps or white noise that each flower transmits, but in the aggregate sonic cloud through which something more raw and primal has been reconstituted from elements that are sterile and controlled. The aggregate sound somehow conjures a ghost from the machine. I’m imagining a division of reality into the fabricated world in which we live and some kind of natural environment that precedes it. The ghost is a transmission from one world to another via an electronic filter.
Tell us more about this ghost.
It’s no revelation to say that our culture at large doesn’t connect directly with the natural environment. The fact that we even give it a name means we don’t really consider ourselves a part of it. Nature comes to us in the form of an apparition mediated by technology. And by technology I mean not just the devices cooked up by engineers at computer companies, but a self-perpetuating force that has something of the supernatural about it. Aviary gets at this in a pretty direct way because it uses recorded sounds that, like ghosts, may have originated at a specific time or place, but float freely through the ether in a kind of limbo, between what is present and absent in physical terms. Sound Field deals with this same idea from a slightly different approach. Though there are no references to nature in the form of field recordings, it aims to synthesize the complexity and unrepeatability of natural processes by having a certain untamed energy emerge from many layers of random behavior. The question is can we get at it or not? Or do we even want to? My own perspective on this issue changes depending on my state of mind. Sometimes my purpose is sincere, and I feel that I’ve succeeded in using technology to point towards a natural beauty, and other times it feels like an ironical gesture, a sham. And I think the viewer/listener’s experience also hovers between these two perspectives. This is an uncertainty that seems symptomatic of our culture as we embrace technological advances while at the same time feeling duped by the whole process.
I want to emphasize that the strength of the installations is experiential—Aviary is light and airy, soothing and lovely; Sound Field is dark and heavy. With that said, I am curious about the implications of displaying the two works together. Each piece alone speaks to a relationship between nature and technology (as mediated by humankind); together they can be viewed as two expositions on the same subject or, more sinister, as a cautionary tale concerning technology supplanting nature. Do you have a specific reading or argument in mind?
I’ve found that people respond to these installations quite differently. You may find Aviary to be a pleasant experience, but some people have found it to be disturbing. Others have found Sound Field to be a meditative environment. My own feelings about them change over time, so they are not encoded arguments for or against technology. When I came up with these pieces, my state of mind was more waking dream than exposition, though like many dreams Song of Transformation relates to whatever problems the brain is trying to solve during the day. I’m so immersed in technology myself that I can’t possibly have an objective view of it. I make art with machines, so it’s not surprising that technology has become my leading character.
I think my main project is to reconcile machines and poetry. In the end these works are enigmatic to me, and if they weren’t I would have discarded them. I have left a lot of space in this work for the eyes, ears, and mind to wander across a suggestive set of cues, and my hope is that the viewer/listener’s experience will be open, unresolved, and ultimately creative.
June–July 2005