1995
Tape 3b
I mean, there was no reason for him to buy a 180 books, I almost sold him 200 but no reason in terms of dollars. (Well, but nowadays, I mean, in his place, the place is full of books, he must be some kind of book dealer). May be (It's a library, it looks like a book store), because it has many copies of the same book. well I couldn't see (well, I went there once but you know, the place is full of newish books). May be he has, but you know, you can't talk strategy with Eric. He just doesn't, he just doesn't. Unless it's gets in there in about 6 seconds he is not there, but he also I don't think he, I don't know what he was thinking but it was more like it was part of his collection. He collected it, which is also not a bad way to sell something - to have it in your collection sort of speak. (But how was it presented, I mean). You're right, you're right that was the first diptych and that's where it came from, the idea that the sound work would be installed in a gallery it would not superimpose itself on any other work but yet it needed to be exposed in some way in the gallery, people had to know that it was there, so my solution was to make this diptych that would be hang not in an exhibition space but in the office, in the secretary's office and that it would always be there, that it wouldn't be changed. It would be small, modest but it would always be there so people could walk into the office and say {what's that” and then you would say - “Oh that's, over there?”. So it wasn't an announcement in the gallery context (Yeah, but there isn't anything in the diptych about this being a portable work and that's). I don't know, when he closed the gallery and gave up those spaces he took the work out and he has it in London and says that he wants me to reinstall it. I said “Eric!”, he said “you can modify it, can't you?”. But in fact because it was free of it's environment, except for, I mean, I did tune it in that room, I don't know what would happen but it is it is in a way more portable, I mean nothing is unportable or portable (Because the room is not unlike other rooms?). First of all there is no visual component so I didn't turn this piece with my eyes opened so that another dark space is another dark space. What I actually did with the sound in that room that uses the acoustics of that room isn't portable, I suppose, but it's not something I analysed (But that's what I was asked you. Not about the darkness but the dimensions of the room, are they like?). It wasn't about, because the dimensions disappear in the darkness, you know, it is relatively small room, well not really small (Well, they don't disappear in relation to the acoustics). True, but this also was a continuous sound so it's not something where you got a shape, reflections or anything like that and as soon as you open a window the piece disappeared like that. As soon as you saw the light you became familiar (Oh, I see, the room could be made artificially dark?). Yeah, it had shutters on the window (I see, I took your word “darkness” literally meaning after sundown. That's why I asked about the opening). No, no, you shut the window, you could go in there and shut the windows but you had to get it tight and you had to get it light-tight or it wouldn't appear and never knew because it didn't come on immediately - you could sit there for a while. Few tricks to play on the folks. (I have seen artworks, visual artworks, that play with darkness. Very nice student piece where he made the room completely dark in the day time, just put, I think in the corners of it small lights, like stars and your sense of that is what you say about your sensing when you can hardly see is very true there. OK, what about *** I mean, that's happened soon after, it was thought of before but wasn't realised to 86) and I was in the middle of the break down of the Petra project. *** who is now the artistic director for the region around Nice had this idea to take this chateau with a big park around it because being partly a public park for the local town and had a lake and the woods. It was very developed kind of park, part was under control of the agricultural school and she wanted to make it into a sculpture park but she had a very nice idea that it wasn't a conventional sculpture park that was indeed works of which mine typified the situation sort of speak (What did she know about you that she heard Ville Celle thing?) She heard Celle and she heard ARC I think but nobody have ever heard of her, kind of because she was in Brittany and you know. But she was very clever and kind of used me to kind of break open the park because there was resistance from the committee, you know and I spent, I had this whole team of engineers building Generation 3 and the funding for the Metropole collapsed and I was stuck with all these guys on my payroll sort of speak and so I said I wanted really to do some research too. There were some of the engineers had ideas I wanted to go further with and so I took this whole engineering team down to Brittany and rented for practically nothing a huge mill which was a house and the farm so I had outside, inside and housed, shit, there must have been 7 of these turkeys, one of the largest mistakes of my life. Fist of all that you can multiply manpower and get software built the way you multiply manpower the worst it gets, too many cooks plus some of them were French and all the ego problems of, but I did in fact finish the development of Generation 3 and I also did a lot of experiments outside because if you don't have *** chamber, outside is the best next thing and big open field gives you the same absence of reflection so you can tell, isolate what's happening from what's being reflected so a lot of research which I use now in terms of source sound, sources (you tried out?) yeah, things which nobody has every, because the whole technology because it's about creation or sound re-enforcement, like in a stadium when you got 60,000 to hear the same voice it's all about spreading sound, dispersing it as much as possible. But of course in building terrains I wanted to do the opposite. The physics is there it's just that nobody has ever done it, I mean, it's one thing to have a theory and is another to make it work so it was a change to take all this theory and inverted it in a way into tools which I could use, so it was very good. I mean it was very good summer, very intense and then in the spring I had to make this piece but nobody told me that it rains in the spring, I still have my boots, they are up to my knees, I made it in the mud (could you hear it in the rain?). You could when it was on but it was vandalised two years after I did it because in the end its setting up a very kind of complex in order to get this image to move on a lake it is not very easy you can't put something on the lake (I didn't see anything to compare it to any other of your work because it, you can't get in it, it's over there unless you are in a boat, could you get on a boat?). You could, I mean, it moves when you are on a boat in a centre because it isn't moving any more, you are an illusionist from the shore. It's like walking behind the mirror, or something, I mean, it's an illusion. it doesn't run past you, you have to be on the shore for it to happen. A very, very special speaker system that very carefully aligned, set in the bank of the lake to get this thing to move. I mean, it's one thing to create an illusion if you have somebody sitting in a chair in a middle of a stereo field you can do lot's of things but outside walking along this strip of land dividing this stream and the lake is entirely different problem. Anyway at the end the speakers are buried right at the lake shore, into the bank of the lake and at the end there is always a little battle with the curator where they want to make their statement in a way and its usually *** point. I learned now to just walk out when it happens, you think you get a piece while, shit, you got the speakers honey, but you ain't got the sounds. See you later. She insisted I mean these speakers had to be not only camouflaged in a way that no one would see them because of the nature of the piece but also that somebody was going to have the stupid idea to steal the speakers out of these boxes thinking that they did this special thing if they did the speaker because it was the box that made this thing happen and with the orientation of 4 of them *** together and she said - no, I have on budget for a landscape designer and you have to work with him and I said this very, very simple having been in that area and having been stung by nettles throughout this piece we just plant nettles all over this hump and nobody will go there and the piece will be, nobody you can say at certain points you can say may be the sound is coming from over there because you know, you catch part of the speaker or something like that and that makes you curious to look at it so there had to be a real barrier against this and she said, all right, OK, we just have to work with this landscape, you can imagine working with some provincial garden designer who insisted that we have to plant flowers on each of these speakers (did you not explain the notion of nettles to him?) Of course, but he was horrified, you want me to plant weeds? So he did the French thing where he said of course, no problem, we put nettles here, you don't worry about a thing Monsieur, au revoir, you have a good trip to Paris. I came back, little squares of flower of course which I kicked over and pulled down and threw into the lake and said come back and plant these nettles you bastard and he went on strike and in fact it got to be too late to plant them and they were never camouflaged and two years after the piece was there somebody did come along and take out the speakers and they had this stupid local engineer who was supposed to check the piece who never checked the piece and who didn't know what it was anyway and speaker system he never heard of anything like this. The problem for me is that its possible for a demo piece to be taken as piece of mine and this piece for, until Zachariadus who went there as a director I couldn't get it to turn it off even though it had nothing to do with my work, I mean, it was making a sound, yes, but the engineer had also turned it up very loud because he said I can't hear it. I remember this wonderful television crew coming to the opening and the sound man just insisted, you know, where is the speaker, we need a signal here, signal, signal and without the nettles of course he went over with a pole and microphone and put microphone right in front of the speaker and there it was on television. This music on the lake but where is the light? We have sound there as a tradition, sound lumiere, now why can't you just add some lights? (Fireworks even) Yes, (What about the plausibility of the sounds, I mean, how did you reconnoitre the place acoustically?). We spent a lot of time there, I found the place immediately, I mean, she called me up and she said come to *** I'll pick you up and just three days after she called me I was there and I walked round this whole park with her and you know, there was lots of staff there. It was everything from forest, to lake, to field to *** to roads, huge kind of estate and I remember walking down the hill to the lake and finding this strange isthmus because it was a milk pond. There was a stream and milk pond was for the storage and the stream was on the right which also fed the milk pond but it also run the thing where there was water enough to run. So the strange situation of having a running water on one side of this road, piece of land and this still water on the left and I know when I started walking down that isthmus that, that was place. (But what sounds were there?) Normal staff, normal part staff in fact the moving image on the lake is not plausible at all, it's so subtle that it's, I mean, sound its could be, and the phenomenon of it could be completely implausible because its so subtle (What I was thinking in terms of the I guess both pitch and sound character is because what I am concerned about is the notion of a shift into the new place and you know and what was on your mind as you were). Wonderful story because the town's people defended this lake by saying it was their fishing preserve so they insisted that *** barred it off and she got fences to try to keep them out. They ** fences to come fishing and I was using like a model air plane controller, very complex radio thing to control because the system was weak. The only ?? way to the lake was half kilometre away, up the hill, so I had to send signals to that to control, I was at the lake. So I was sitting on this , you know, they kind of assumed that I was a fisherman, I had this model control you know, they didn't know what was going on and three of them *** all of the sudden this sound comes out of the lake. Their expressions were perfect. I did it - the lake spirit had spoken. I was just sitting there moving my little controller. I had this idea of moving image of course, because I had to build speaker system first and the whole thing of water is wonderfully reflective of sounds. It's really a mirror that you don't realise it's there you know (but you did, I guess I want to know, these speakers are directed to the water - but it must be at a very oblique angle?) I don't remember now, no, I don't think they are (well, in what sense do you use the reflectors?) Well, it was just a good foundation and also it keeps it alive out there, it doesn't get absorbed. I think the images actually made because the intersection of this ** I don't remember. I didn't build the speaker system and I can't repair it. (You didn't build the speaker system?) No, I mean my engineer did but I did the design for it. If Denis refuses to call the engineers (So Denis took the piece over, you took ***) Right, he became director. (How long after the piece was up?) Very recently and before that I was in conflict with him because when Metropole project collapsed the bank took all my money and part of my money was their money and it was terrible. Anyway, the sound itself is a rather deep sound, this moving image, it's not a growl but it's **** (You wouldn't say it's from like...) No but it's from that area but it's much bigger sound and it's not plausible and its movement on the lake where you can't see anything is not plausible at all but you can walk past it and you know it's there and it's also, I mean, in the area where this thing doesn't happen everywhere it only happens on two sides of the lake when you are in the zones of these four sources. Within that area there is another high sound that's really shimmering which makes a dome over the whole thing so you walk, when you are in the place where you can perceive this moving image you walk into it into an enclosure in a way (but the movement of the *** of whatever, does it repeat?) No, you never hear it coming back to do the same thing, its a process. This idea that I do with many pieces that have an activity which is set up a process which evolves obviously (so in that way it's very much like a living thing, it, you know, doesn't go back to the same place). No, it just keeps evolving and this connects with the idea of dynamic electronic statement. The electronic system has dynamic statement of idea and it's like it has a mind of its own. It's a model of our mind, and it's even more, I mean, with the system I am working with now it is, it's literally I'll show it to you, literally I draw the system on the computer screen and it is the system. It's a way of programming where you draw to programme so it's object oriented so you connect this box which says it's the filter with this box which says it's **attenuator** and the filter and the **attenuator** are connected as you draw it so it's like a drawing but it's a dynamic system. It is real the instance to drew a strike. (this would have made your life easier in Brittany?) Well, to a certain extend Third Generation had that kind of interface *** well, yes, I was working no longer with hardware, I had them write a language for me, a special computer language which I could work in in *** which is written statements you know lines which had a certain kind of punctuation but it's so it's pictures of the system of the process, pictures of the process. These are verbal statements that define the process but to the slight typing of the text which in fact is not something that you read but which you type and it does it. (But in the building of the work you know, you try things and compare, would it have made that process quicker to have this *** generation). No when I set up this thing the language was built to built the possibility of comparing so the preparation for executing this piece of building with this language (is already there) building the power for instance. This system is much more flexible so that I can do much more (when did you first use this system?). I never used to build this thing. (So all the things from now are third generation. How did Grenobe come about?) I should go on a little because I have always described the mood in the catalogue, I think ***** as a walk and I originally thought people should be told to walk around the whole lake which takes about 20 minutes and on either side of the lake is this place, this *** sort of speak so it's about meeting this sound, encountering it's not about going to this place but it's about being told that the sound is down on the lake and walking down and listening for it, entering this enclosure finding this moving body on the surface, walking on, walking around the lake encountering it again on the other side so it's much different form, I don't know why this walking (No, no it's unlike, I don't see what else you can compare it because you are on the outside of it, right, rather than being inside it). Well you are going into this enclosure ......................
VERY SORRY ABOUT THE POOR QUALITY OF THIS WORK. THE OBSCURITY OF THE SUBJECT COUPLED WITH VERY POOR GRAMMAR, LACK OF CLARITY OF THE RECORDING IN CERTAIN PLACES (BACKGROUND NOISE ETC.) HELPED TO MAKE THIS THE MOST PAINFUL EXPERIENCE SINCE I SAT MY EXAMS!
A LIST OF PEOPLE'S NAMES COULD HAVE HELPED A LITTLE BIT.
***** - means I couldn't hear what was said.