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| The Whispering Behind the Machine Linda Vēbere, Art Critic A conversation with Paul DeMarinis Exhibition The Messenger 17.04.–06.06.2010. kim? / Gallery RIXC | |
| What do we really know about modern technologies? What aspirations, dreams and desires lie behind our communication driven techno-culture? This has been often asked by artist Paul DeMarinis, who has been making noises with wires, batteries and household appliances from the age of four. DeMarinis has been working in the field of electronic media since the 1970s and is regarded as a pioneer of early electronic, interactive art. Being one of the first artists to incorporate computers into his works, he is keen also to unearth abandoned technologies of the past. His works display fire turning into loudspeakers or sound being recorded in a stream of water, adding an air of magic to physical phenomena simply because the ideas revealed in DeMarinis’ works have never been marketed. The electronic media artist studied film with Paul Sharits and electronic music with Robert Ashley at the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College, and later worked with David Tudor. Currently he is a Professor at Stanford University in California. | |
Paul DeMarinis. The Edison Effect. Installation. 1989-1993 | |
| Linda Vēbere: In 1973 you created one of your first pieces, The Pygmy Gamelan, but what is your background as an artist, and how did you start making art? Paul DeMarinis: As a teenager I did all different kinds of art. I did drawings and wrote stories. And at college I studied classical music and film-making, which was my grounding in art making. At graduate school I continued by doing electronic media. About that time I met some of the artists who had worked with 9 Evenings, which was a collaboration between Bell Telephone Laboratories and various artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and John Cage. Some of these artists, in particular David Behrman and David Tudor, came to my graduate school as artists-in-residence for various tutoring projects. They were all artists, musicians, but they had learned how to build electronic circuits. From them I got the first idea that you could do this. The media I was involved with was already technological, but I became more directly involved with the technology as part of the creative work, and not just as a tool for producing works. This was a very liberating thing, because I had never studied any engineering in school; also, I was able to learn from this first generation of pioneer artists the beginnings of these things. L.V.: Did the use of computer technology in art-making provide you with more new possibilities? P.D.: Not at that time, no. You have to understand that those technologies were really weak and they had to be programmed in machine language, in zeros and ones. And all of the assembly and compiling of programmes had to be done by hand, on paper, and then punched into the machine. Very few people were really interested in it then. The reason why I got into it was that I understood the potential of computers, and because it offered a solution in wiring everything up in my first piece The Pygmy Gamelan. Still, it was very expensive at that time. And all this was before synthesizers, before sound-making was influenced by computers. The only people involved were techno futurists like Howard Rheingold and Stewart Brand, and a few people who thought they could make some money out of it like Bill Gates. They understood the theoretical potential of it. It was a few thousand people and among them was a handful of artists. Along with the computer I continued doing many other things. The computer didn’t really figure centrally in my works until 1978 or so. By 1982, the early days were all over. Computers became a business machine meant for commercial purposes. I kept using computers and I was always searching for more powerful things, especially when working with sound. I moved on to another area called digital signal processing. I did a lot of work with the analysis of speech, pieces like Music as a Second Language (1991). | |
 Paul DeMarinis. The Edison Effect. Installation. 1989-1993 | |
| L.V.: Most of your projects have a dimension of musicality to them. Have you ever made any musical pieces? And how important is sound / speech in your works? P.D.: In the earlier years I did some instrumental pieces, but just as a student. I was never a really good conventional musician. It takes physical talent and a lot of hard work to be an instrumentalist. I have composed pieces, but they are not instrumental pieces, rather electronic compositions. L.V.: But along with John Cage the perception of music was extended. P.D.: It was extended for a while, that is absolutely true. And I was considering what I had done in composition. But it began to deviate for me rather early – way back in the 1970s, with the idea of Pygmy Gamelan. This was a composition, not an instrument. Right away I took a visual arts approach to it. There is a real, significant difference between a sound piece and an instrument to make a piece with. There is a radical split of what the object is. Whether the object is a cello, or it is a painting. The object itself becomes very important. L.V.: But what is your perception of music? P.D.: Having gone in about 15 seconds from classical music to John Cage when I was 18 years old, when I discovered it I certainly was open to all of those ideas, also to post-Cagean ideas of sound installations, sound environments and soundscape which were beginning to emerge. In the 1980s in the United States, not just in the arts but in every field of endeavour, everything shrank back from the historical avantgarde heights to rather rigid and old definitions of what art was. This was a shrinking back from the great postwar political and artistic challenges. It happened in politics, with the ascent of the right wing, and this happened all around the world. And the stuff that was called music back then, like Philip Glass – which is nice wall paper for entertainment, movies and theatrical soundtracks, wasn’t really very interesting to me. And since I always had a connection to visual arts through film and I always kept doing installations and objects, by that time I think that my connection to music began to wane. Also, the issue with The Pygmy Gamelan was: what to do with it? How to present it? They could play by themselves. They didn’t need players. They were just responding to electricity in the air, so I started doing installations with them. I set them up in space where they can play for weeks. This piece catches electromagnetic fields from people’s bodies too. You could interact with it, but not in a deterministically controllable way. L.V.: Your works are dedicated to revealing normally unseen physical forces at play, one of them being electromagnetism. Why is such an approach important to you? P.D.: This is a lifelong fascination, I suppose – the idea that there is this other reality that interpenetrates our space and is absolutely coincidental physically with it, but has a very different shape. If you look at the corner of a building you see these odd shaped things – antennas. They have a form different from all the rest of the architecture that we have made. That is the real shape of space. It is the shape of waves, the shape of the universe. The internet and MP3 players and FM radio are so well engineered to exclude everything else that you don’t get the feeling of space above the ground where you see the sky, the stars and other galaxies. And when you listen to a short wave radio that is not very perfectly tuned you hear other stations, as the mind automatically hears things near and far. I grew up with this experience. And it is a sense that I got about the electromagnetic space. The romantic sense of reality envisages that everything is vibrations and that everything is connected together. And since in the United States we didn’t have a romantic period, it keeps wanting to happen. The United States went from 17th century to 19th century industrial modernity. And there is a lot of hankering for this romanticism. Waves have maybe more of an allure in our culture than maybe in Germany, where the romanticisms had been already figured out and they stayed on the radio waves. L.V.: You have mentioned media archeology as an artistic inspiration. Could you tell something more about that? P.D.: I guess I had an interest in recording technologies and communication technologies, record players, tape recorders, telephones and telegraphs. I always kept up reading about this as I added other interests. The predominant interest for me is the multiplicity of possible technologies compared with the few that we actually see marketed, and all the possibilities that were latent. What potential people saw in the computer, and what it actually is – those are very different things. I am interested in translations between the marks and noises that are embodied in communication technologies. There have to be levels of translation going on, and ultimately preservation of some kind of meaning and intention along that change. What interests me is how the devices alter our ways of our communicating and assigning meaning. I have been reading about these technologies since I was a child, and when I started working with them I already had a lot of knowledge and ideas. The way that The Edison Effect started with one of my first big pieces was when I was living out in the countryside and I had built a laser around, 1985. Compact discs were the new thing and they were starting to be commercialized. And I thought to play a regular record with a laser. And sure enough I could play recognizable strains of music from the record with it. I began to re-conceptualize the phonograph playing in an optical, visual mode. A lot of things are different from when you play a phonograph with a needle. Also the ray of laser can be viewed as the ray of vision, which the ancient Greek philosophers identified with touch as intentional contact. And you can also sharpen your fingernail and put it into a groove of the record and hear it through your bones, and you can do this through the ray. This becomes an optic way of touching. Within the next few months I had dozens of ideas for pieces and I spent the next few years starting to make pieces, which now are shown all together in a suite called The Edison Effect (1989–1993). By the time I had finished this piece it had increased my interest in these early technologies. The next piece Gray Matter (1995) dealt with the telephone. Then came The Messenger (1998–2005) with the telegraph. But I don’t know how much I would like to take up media archeology in the future, and sometimes I think I have done most of the pieces I have wanted to do with it. However there is a polemical viewpoint, which I wouldn’t put into a category of inspiration, but which is the point of the work: that these devices manifest certain power structures. Slightly alternate technologies can disrupt that, and for a moment make you think about the actual technology and how power, whether it would be the power of the state or the power of your love, is encoded in the technology. L.V.: Do you see a mythical dimension in technologies nowadays, since mostly they seem to be very sterile and enclosed into a rational shell, yet still we seem to be obsessed with information technology? P.D.: Well, I think that rationalism is a mythology too. Would someone believe that there is rationality in the 21st century? There is also the question about utility, and whether these technologies are really useful. If the volcano in Iceland were to keep erupting for dozens of years, then air travel to Europe would become impossible. The viability of other things would become more prominent. Airplanes have utility, but that utility is not absolute. It is not defined by the airplane or the computer, it is defined by what people want to do, and you find a way to do it or you find a way around it. And I think that often communication technologies, in particular, we put in the way of communication. The same people make photographs and videos in order not to experience the moment, rather than to capture and to re-experience it. It has been speculated that the Finns were the early adaptors of mobile phones because they really don’t like to talk to each other, but they have to. Mobile phones make it easier to communicate with other people without having to face them. I think that a lot of times these technologies are put in the way, or they are replacements for things, and by looking at these alternative things you can get to mythical dimensions. These deeper mythologies ride along, for example: the idea that our mobile phone technology is like whispering into a little seashell. It is kind of like wishing, we whisper our wishes into our mobile phones. The dichotomy between instrument and the piece and the materiality of the object is what I am concerned with. Media objects, especially recordings, are quite hapless objects. A phonograph record without a phonograph – what is it? A movie film without a projector – there can’t be any meaning until it is flashed on the screen at so many frames per second. Otherwise it is just a bunch of meaningless individual pictures. You can look at a strip of film for a long time, and never be able to understand what is going on. And you can project it once on the faultiest projectors, at a wrong speed, and you know that when she turns around she means business! You know that the shadow is a dog walking by. Without the medium of theatre, the myths cannot even be grasped, any more than the pictures make the moving images of the film. But this represents an era of optimism and representation. We are not in that kind of time anymore. We are pessimistic about the future, and everyone wants to keep future from happening. This subject interested me in pieces like The Edison Effect or Early Media Goes to the Movies (2008) which dealt with taking the cinema out of the movie. The piece included decinematized scenes from Jean-Luc Godard movies. This is what really interests me: the record without the record-player, the book without the reader. It is almost like a strange stone that spacemen could find. And I suppose photography is half a media technology for that reason, because we read it with our eyes, but by the time you get to a film or a phonograph record, or anything digital, you need a machine to read it. | |
 Paul DeMarinis. The Pygmy Gamelan. Installation. 1973 | |
| L.V.: Can art contribute to science by making technologies more available to non-scientists or the general public? Or what is the relationship between art and science? P.D.: I don’t believe that, and I don’t think there is any relationship besides what we have on a higher intentional structural level of society. The thinking is different. Often times I am involved with people who want to bring together artists and scientists, and I have been dealing with scientists all my life and I really like scientific thought. I am not quite bilingual, but I can understand scientific papers and how they make meaning. When it comes to discussing aesthetics, because scientists often say that there is beauty in science, what they mean is something very different. What they mean is some kind of conceptual symmetry and simplicity, which is not where beauty comes from in art. Architecture can be symmetrical. But there is just no tradition of symmetry enhancing the beauty of artistic output. L.V.: But a lot of art nowadays is not about beauty. P.D.: A lot of art is not about beauty, but that is where the connotation goes with scientists. That is what they want to know about art – how it makes the beauty and the sublime. This is what art is for most people who are not artists. Art and beauty has gone out of art for artists, but I don’t think it has for the other 99% of the people in the world. There are a lot of interesting works by artists who are dealing with science and technology. But I find that they are about whatever the headlines in the newspaper said last week. I don’t think it contains any particular interest they have, except for science as authority. Science is ultimately what we believe about the world, who we are and where we came from. Most of the relationship between art and science comes down to that. That said, there are some people interested in the way of knowing science, and that presents some real philosophical problems for the artist who chooses to deal with that, because there are very different ways of knowing. And the shared language is like a fata morgana. It evaporates as soon as you look at it. L.V.: With the 20th century and authors like Thomas Kuhn the perception of science changed, namely we cannot view science as telling us the objective, ultimate truth about the world. It is, rather, just one of the stories of what and how the world is, which can also be told through art. P.D.: There are rather few scientists who seem to embrace Kuhn’s ideas. Philosophical and anthropological theory is way beyond that idea, but I do not think scientists are on board. Any more than people are about beauty. Scientists who would entertain the discussion are the ones who are fully aware that the social issues in science like research, power, money, fame do play a strong role. In hard experimental science there is a belief that they are getting, if not at the ultimate truth, then at least an example – if you can smash protons together with enough energy, that you are going back closer to the Big Bang. It is not ultimate, but it believes that there is convergence that is not subject to a set of ideas or myths. Another reason for art not being able to come together with science is, as I mentioned earlier, that right now people fear the future. In art this fear of the future is coped with by recycling the past, whether it is media archeology or the postmodern style or crisscrossing between design and fashion in art. Science, on the other hand, doesn’t have this fear of the future, so I think in avantgarde times there might have been more of a chance for a meaningful dialogue between art and science. However, I do think that biosciences are much more open to understanding the malleability of facts and interpretation. There is a lot of potential there for the kind of interpretational thinking that goes on in biosciences and art. L.V.: Your award-winning piece The Messenger (1998–2005) features three parallel telegraph systems based on your incoming e-mail messages, and it will be exhibited in Riga until 6 June, 2010 in kim? / RIXC Gallery. Could you tell us a bit more about it? P.D.: It is a piece about the telegraph, communication and democracy. The democracy aspect comes out of a time when the internet was being touted as a technological phantasm for the ills of the world: to bring enterprise to the former Soviet Bloc, human rights to China, open markets and so forth. Everyone was talking about the evangelism of techno-utopia. I had found I knew enough, from reading the history of it, that the same thing was said about the telegraph in the 1840s. The telegraph was going to bring democracy to countries because there would be free communication. By looking back in the earlier patriarchal era of the 18th century proposals for the telegraph, you find quite a different pattern for the way that these same technologies could have been configured, and it led me to the thought that it is via agreement, again – carried out on a higher intentional social level, that electricity communicates bi-directionally. There is nothing about the wire that lets you communicate bi-directionally. You have to arrange two sets of wires or change polarity. This is why Thomas Edison became such a great success – he invented the first practical duplex (bidirectional over one wire) telegraph. Otherwise you had to put two wires there and that’s an agreement, and it is double the cost. I was thinking about the internet, but I was talking about it from the viewpoint of the very first glimmerings of electricity and communication, using electricity to send messages. But the piece changed, because the world changed. Although the original version used my e-mail in exactly the same way, the meaning in the current version becomes rather different, because the meaning of public and private e-mail in 1998 and e-mail in 2005 had evolved rapidly. The broadcast utility of the internet had almost entirely coopted this bidirectional flow. You can post stuff by blogging, but you cannot talk back to Amazon.com. You cannot email the President of the United States and expect a real reply. It could more likely happen if you wrote a message, and put it in an envelope with a stamp and sent it to him. It is interesting to see a piece change its meaning. | |
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