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RB: Is this the natural evolution from something like Res Rocket Surfer?
PM: Sure, it’s expanded by a quantum leap because it’s millions of people.
GL: But this point’s been made ten years ago by folks like John Oswald.
RB: Which is kind of why I was asking about Res Rocket...
PM: They were doing it as an esoteric sound art statement, like Christian Marclay too and I think that they didn’t have the vocabulary that they could expand outside of that.
GL: You mean a vocabulary that can’t address teenagers?
PM: Well expand out to anybody else outside of that very specific vernacular. They were limited to me by that style of their dialect by that artsy...
RB: Which is now a question about elitism and music, and whether the avant garde must be elite in order to be the avant garde.
GL: But I mean if it’s contemporary with John Oswald and Christian and so on, and the work of Public Enemy for example with their cut-up and the same anything goes attitude...
PM: And John Zoran and all those guys. I like elements of it. John Zoran I’m not so big a fan of, Christian I feel coolly neutral about, John Oswald I like his work.
RB: You’re talking about the audience as DJ. What happens then, when it’s collaborative with the audience? What’s the role of the artist then?
GL: For me the issue is not about music at that point it’s about interaction and interactivity and what that term means when you have a 100 people or 1000 people collaborating on something, this is a mess and it’s a very challenging situation and managing group scenarios like that is a really interesting interaction design problem and my own personal work, I’m open to whatever it ends up sounding like. Like with the mobile phone concert I had no preconceptions about what it was going to end up sounding like and the act of doing it was actually a research question, which is to say, what happens when you have this kind of sound? What’s the result? The kind of interactivities that emerge from a situation like that really vary very widely. First of all your phone itself is something you have a very deep personal connection to. Your phone rings: even in the concert scenario you feel, “Whoa, my phone’s ringing, that’s me that they’re trying to reach,” even though there’s no one at the other end but my dialling system.
PM: That’s pure social engineering. I don’t have a relationship with my cellphone, I have a deep relationship with the company. The phone will change every year and a half.
GL: I heard contrary reports from some people in the audience, where for example...
PM: That’s sad.
GL: Well, it’s also a fashion item that people get really attached to. But one person described it like this: if you’re ever in a car accident where someone rear-ends you, you don’t say to yourself, “Hey, that person hit my car”, you say, “Hey, that person hit me”. and one of the reports I got from the mobile phone concert was somebody saying, you know, even though they knew intellectually there was no one at the other end of the phone when their phone rang that they were “Oh, there’s a call for me” and this was a real psychological event that was iterated thousands of times over this audience of several hundred people of someone saying ‘Oh, there’s a phone call for me. Oh, it’s just this concert.”
PM: Okay, so let’s apply this idea to when you hear a familiar sound or familiar voices, we’re looking at the idea of the uncanny. The human body and the human voice have been disincarnate for most of the last century and these are free-floating variables of representation of self and then how we deal with that psychologically, I mean that’s kind of what the core issues are, if we’re looking at code equals life and you’re playing with the voices of people... the whole Spooky motif was meant to be kind of a pun on the uncanny, if you look at what Freud was talking about with unheimlich for example, there’s just so many different layers of how human context is what’s important right now. It’s such an important thing for artists to kind of engage that and think about and try and create new ways of understanding this kind of stuff and art should be about expanding consciousness and your understanding of what’s going on in your environment.
[pause as mobile phone rings!]
RB: We’ve seen a lot of discussion this week about generative art, and the whole question about whether that’s art...
GL: The whole generative thing, man, it’s sooo 1970s.
PM: I’m pretty tired of it.
GL: I mean, it’s totally like back to computer art in the 70s with like this generative thing, it’s like William Latham and Roman Verostko and Manfred Mohr. I mean, they’re great but that’s like 70s. I mean, I totally respect Manfred and Roman for keeping at it because they’re artists and they’re still programming in their 70s, and I hope that I’m so lucky when I’m in my mid-70s and I’m maybe still programming but in context of the current dialogue I’m amazed to see so much generative art and people saying “Look, when you hit a button, you get another variation!”
RB: So what happens when you combine that with the collaborative audience, an unknown variable put into the generative algorithm?
GL: Well, that’s interactivity. Once they’re involved in some way.. when you think generative, it’s usually all about the algorithm.
RB: Right, so this isn’t purely generative. Is that then more interesting?
PM: I tend to think of it as much more of a social entropy that kicks in because there’s too many voices and it turns to cacophony rather than euphony and I’m fascinated with the idea of polyphony: many, many rhythms and styles being able to operate simultaneously and interact with one another and again that’s a Deleuzian issue of multiple timeframes operating within the same context. But the voice and the body are very specific markers of humanity but all of that is now post-human, whenever I hear James Earl Jones’s voice, you know saying “This is AT&T”, I have flashes of Darth Vader, he was also one of the main characters in Kunta Kinte...
GL: His voice has become a brand. And you can apply it to whatever you want.
PM: Right, so what does that mean for him as a human being? He’s a signifier that’s really specifically become attached to various economic, social and advertising issues just as a branding of himself. Warhol was an artist that really dealt with these motifs in a fascinating way and if you look at people like Jeff Koons and his celebration of celebrity by becoming one or Matthew Barney’s idea of biological surrealism, with his whole idea of himself as a kind of expanded theatre. He’s got all these mutation and DNA issues going and like sexual motifs...
GL: ...and castration...
PM: Yeah, castration issues, or you know, but it’s still about permutations of the self and that’s what most of the nineties high art that’s been celebrated in the conventional art world’s all about. But in the digital art world and in the sound art scene, we’re doing that on almost a daily basis, that most of these conventional art world types, they can’t hang with that because it’s too fast, our whole scene changes really quickly.
RB: So if the nineties has all been about obsession with self, what is the subject, what is the issue that is being explored in the musics of the naughties?
PM: I can’t think of an overriding motif. What do you think?
GL: I think it’s too fragmented. Everything’s fragmented. In fact maybe that’s it.
RB: Fragmentation?
PM: Too much of everything, all the time, everywhere.
GL: Yeah, anything goes in the software world. Anything fair.
RB: Baudrillardian exstasis?
PM: Some days I just wake up and look at a wall of records and then realise that’s all so obsolete because I have a 30GB iPod now, I don’t need to carry the bulky records around, I don’t even need to think about them, they’re just files, and different ways of organising the files. And that’s a nice feeling but there’s also a strange sense of loss, the nostalgia of the record cover sleeve, of the graphic design...
GL: Or even the nostalgia of when you could look forward to an artist releasing an album.
PM: I just don’t feel it any more. I don’t know what entices me about pop culture except for like the seduction of like watching a racehorse, like who’s number one, who’s five, who’s four, who’s three?
GL: And you care about that?
PM: Not any more.
GL: At the Saturn, you were like, “Ooh look, my friends are number one”.
PM: Sure, I was happy to see that, I was happy for them as people. That means they’re making money and having a good time. And getting a lot of hot girls at their shows. And that’s a good thing! [laughs] If it was people I didn’t know, I wouldn’t care about it.
GL: It seems very ephemeral to me. I mean, like, they’re number one today and tomorrow someone else will be number one.
PM: Sure, that’s the racehorse thing.
GL: And who decides? Does the popular vote decide?
PM: You decide.