[Laiwan is a mutidisciplinary artist based in Vancouver. Her work
revolves around issues of the body, technology, machines (analog and
digital) and the psychological impact of these on our somatic and
psychological integrity. Her recent installation, Quartet for the Year
4698 or 5760 presented at the Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery in
Vancouver (http://www.belkin-gallery.ubc.ca/laiwan/) featured
interactive musical composition within the gallery as well as a Web
component. I interviewed her via email on the subject of this recent
exhibition as well as the role of the Web in her "machine art".]

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Valerie Lamontagne: Could you talk about the global project for your
exhibition/Web piece Quartet for the Year 4698 or 5760 as well as what
role the Web component plays within this project?

Laiwan: Interesting you should call Quartet a 'global' project. I've not
considered it to be global. I see it as a modest attempt to explore some
philosophical questions: Can machines improvise? What is spontaneity and
improvisation within computerized culture? What is music to a computer's
ear? Is general ambience music? What happens to the improvising body -
the body of spontaneity - in the computer, in the virtual? Etc.

The Web can be accessed globally by those who have the technology,
however, I see the function of some sites as filling a kind of cerebral
'solipsistic' desire. Instead, I try to make sites that explore
philosophical questions about the nature of the Web medium and in this
regard to explore global issues concerning technology and the effect
this medium has on perception. I guess this intention can be interpreted
as 'global'.

The Web component of Quartet is a virtual complementary site to the
physical gallery installation. In the gallery, as a visitor, you can
experience the cacophony of the quartet as a myriad of sounds invades
into your body. As a viewer, you can bodily interrupt the film images
projecting onto the circular screen. You can see the computers attempt
to interpret the audio events in the gallery -which include sounds made
by the audience- into printed musical notation. All this can be
experienced in 'real' time and space.

Meanwhile, the Web site offers four interactive versions with which the
viewer can play some kind of Quartet alongside access to information
about the project.

V.L.: You are a video, installation & Web artist as well as a writer. Is
the Web, therefore, the inevitable answer to all of your needs as a
polymorphous artist. Is it the quintessential artistic tool embodying
all of these arts?

L.: No. I would like the answer to be this simple, but I feel a
responsibility to explore your question with the intention to perhaps
reveal a 'global' desire for computer systems to 'solve' or 'answer to'
the complexities of lived-experience, of polymorphologies.

It's a strange contradiction to say we have 'polymorphous' experiences
within this very homogeneous tool, the computer. Is the virtual world of
the computer truly polymorphous and of difference (within its pixelated
interface) or an illusion of multifaceted options, a simulation of
various media?

As an interdisciplinary artist I enjoy being challenged by various
spatial and temporal problems. Virtual time and space however, isn't so
much a temporal and spatial challenge as it is a learning challenge of
software and technical troubleshooting. This is a heady test. There is a
spatiality and temporality here that is frustrating and physically
cramping. The muscles in the neck and shoulders suffer from the tedious
point and click activity. There is too much sitting and missing of meals
as we get lost in this virtual time and space…

I've always wanted an art practice where I could choose the medium that
is appropriate for the concept. The idea must govern the medium I choose
to work with. So my choice to work with improvised music and with Lori
Freedman (who is an amazing bass clarinet virtuoso whose forte is
improvisation) was a result of my developing ideas and critique about
machines. I was wondering if the special quality of being human - as
opposed to a machine- is that we are spontaneous, that we can improvise
in every moment. It was a response to what philosophers call
'calculative thinking' and is an logical progression from my last
project "Machinate: a projection in two movements".

V.L.: The Quartet for the Year 4698 or 5760 Web site makes extensive use
of interactive software. The installation component also featured a
daily performance in the gallery by the musician, Lori Freedman with
whom you collaborated. It is where you invited audience members to
"play" the musical notation based on daily recordings of the
installation that were fed into a computer for interpretation. Could you
talk about the importance of interactivity in "real" space and on the
Web? In your opinion, what are some of the epistemological differences
between these?

L.: Interactivity is a sophisticated and complex event. At this time I'm
not certain I understand the full implications of calling something
'interactive' and I'm still exploring this word and the phenomenological
experiences associated with it.

In the Quartet installation, there was no formal structure in place to
encourage members of the audience to play the printed notation. There
was only the reference to an invitation in the project description in
the gallery and the invitation that was spoken informally by word of
mouth. For me, the question became not what and how the audience would
play and how it would sound, but whether the idea alone of the audience
attempting to play the notation was enough. We may not have needed to
hear them play it -and we didn't because no one took up the invitation.

I see this as a form of 'conceptual interactivity'. For Quartet this was
appropriate because the challenge was to see if the computers could
interpret the audio events in the gallery into music notation. Of
course, at this time, computer technology is limited in its ability to
do this, and so what was being printed out in many ways made no sense.
It did not accurately portray what was acoustically happening in the
gallery. It was a 'fake' document that appeared authoritative as the
computers worked hard pretending to know what it was doing, as if
totally in control (until it crashed, which it did often) so that it
could confidently print out something 'real'. This is what interested
me. I was challenging this authoritative accuracy that computers appear
to have.

The purpose of the invitation was to direct the audience's attention to
the 'nonsensicality' of the computer's interpretation and to our
assumptions that the 'score' was accurate and meaningful. The 'score',
for those who read music, made little sense. It had slight relationship
to what was happening acoustically in the gallery and I expected this.

The interactivity that was meaningful to me was the performative
activity of the sounds of the audience and the microphones in the
gallery. The mikes were placed so that they could pick up all sounds and
these were then fed along with Lori's music into the computer for the
score. As well I wanted the rotating door to be perceived as a solo
performer during those times when Lori was not performing live, so it
was also miked. This door had a wonderful vacuum sucking sound whenever
someone walked through it, and it was so architectural with its own
presence and design. I wanted to emphasize the musicality of the
architecture; that everything is an instrument and a player; and, that
the audience contributed to the composing of Quartet. It meant that any
acoustic event as well as spatial ambience was being perceived musically.

All this brings me to your question about the epistemological
differences between Web and 'real' interactivity. To try to analyze the
differences between the two is quite complex, never mind that
'interactivity' alone is a complex idea and experience.

What do we want when we intend something to be interactive? I think an
interactive artwork is not interactive unless an audience member engages
in an activity that completes the work. Another way of saying this is
that the work is incomplete until an audience member physically engages
in an activity (and is not just looking at it) and this synergy of the
work and the audience member creates an artwork that is more than the
two individual parts. It becomes a new thing or event. I think the miked
rotating door and the audience sounds contributing to the 'score' works
in this way.

In many ways, the interactive versions of Quartet can be seen as another
form of 'conceptual interactivity' as it isn't truly interactive. The
audience is limited, based on the programming and software, as to what
can be done and how deeply they can interact. So it is not truly
interactive at all and most computer interactivity is like this. I have
not resolved my dissatisfaction with Web and CD-Rom interactivity. The
limitations are in many ways overly predictable with its point and click
dependencies.

My main intention and investigations here in the Web Quartet is not in
'interactivity', but on how the Quartet and Lori's performative body are
reshaped, reconfigured, deconstructed and reconstructed -
phenomenologically and musically- to become a totally different entity
once entered into a digital world. (I am thinking here particularly of
interactive version 4).

V.L.: In describing Quartet for the Year 4698 or 5760 (on the Web site)
you say that we are moving from "analogue to digital information systems
and from industrial to information-based economies". Can you expand on
this idea and the impact that this shift is having on the cultural
production of traditional art forms such as literature, music and film
as well as the integration of these art forms into the digital realm.

L.: The shift is something Virilio explores in his essay "The Third
Interval: A Critical Transition" [<a href="#bot" name="top">1</a>] In some ways the shift appears to
have already happened, and in another way, it isn't a shift at all in
the real sense. That's why Virilio calls it a 'critical transition',
we're stuck in-between the modes of analogue and digital;
industrialization and 'informationalization'.

If we look closely at the modes of production within a computer-based
economy we can see that production is still highly mechanized and
industry based. The sweatshops still exist; poor workers are still
exploited. Somebody has to manufacture the technological mechanisms.
Labour in the physical sense is still a critical component of
information-based economies; and within this, a certain new type of
labour has evolved and is being made invisible. The exploitation of
these new types of labourers- the information gatherer and producer, the
thousands of database entry workers etc.- is inherited from
industrialization. Information has not freed us. It has not liberated us
from material and environmental exploitation. These have just become
subtler and more hidden. It also frames a lot of this new type of labour
to be free- unpaid for- because it is invisible.

In relation to cultural production of traditional art forms such as
literature, music and film, this critical transition manifests in
different ways. For example in literature, digitality is changing the
nature of reading and writing, issues of public and private, of
immediate dissemination and durational absorption. This can be witnessed
with new novels that can be loaded onto the Web immediately, as soon as
it is written. It can bypass editors and publishers. It can contribute
to the 'solipsistic' desire that is becoming a cultural phenomenon. It
can make reading and writing a completely solitary activity, more
solitary than it already is.

Of course you can see I'm concerned about the physical because I have
not talked about the great literary possibilities in the digital of
hypertext and non-linearity which Roland Barthes believed would liberate
writing. This is because my concern is that we are not
conscious/conscientious of this tool, the computer; and that we rush to
accommodate its reconfiguring of our bodily being in the world all for
the cause of production. It is the value of production inherited from
industrialization that is constructing our 'informationalization'. This
is not new. It is an old habit and of the same coin.

V.L.: In "playing" the interactive musical components of the Web site I
was reminded of the electronic game resembling a drum machine which
requires you to mimic a series of musical sequences. What I particularly
remember about playing this game was how it highlighted one's
ineffectual somatic response when confronted by technological
"perfection". However, in your text: and your flesh will be made word
(featured on your Web site) you seem to be critiquing our uncritical
"neither-nor" transition into the digital. Are you then calling for a
re-integration of the somatic within technology or are you advocating
for a greater and more seamless integration of the digital into the
everyday?

L.: What a great line: "ineffectual somatic response"! I like the rhythm
of the words. Yet, I do not know what it really means. I've not
experienced somatic responses to be ineffectual. Sometimes they're slow,
yes, but not without effect. Take a 'gut reaction' or a feeling of
nausea, they are both so immediate and existential. They can
instantaneously make you break out into a sweat. This is the delight of
physical, fleshly response.

I think the desire or aspiration towards the 'perfection' of technology
is in some way related to 'solipsistic' desire. This aspiration seems to
be based on a desire for a model of human relationing that is as
controllable and programmable as it is in computer technology. We don't
want the messiness of human relationing. This may not be a conscious
desire in a larger cultural sense, but in truth, all the objects we make
in the world, including computers, are mimetic manifestations and
signifiers of ourselves.

What I'm calling for in my essay is a consciousness, conscientiousness,
of our choices. When we are in a physical moment, let us truly embody
and embrace that physicality. When we are in a virtual space or time,
let us recognize it for what it is and not mistake it for anything else
but a virtual experience. I am not saying that these experiences are
separate unto themselves for they are not. We don't really know yet what
kind of consciousness is possible, but we can approach temporal and
spatial moments with an attitude that questions assumptions and
expectations; where we can throw out old habits; and be creative with
what is revealed. There are no answers, and information and its
attendant technologies are not an answer, just as returning to a
Ludditism is not an answer.

I do call for a return of a valuing of the somatic- the carnal and the
fleshly-only because life would become so utterly boring without such
physical pleasures, and yet, such somatism cannot be purely selfish and
greedy. An attention to a larger consciousness, on a global level, is
what I am interested in.

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NOTES

[<a href="#top" name="bot">1</a>] Paul Virilio, "The Third Interval: A Critical Transition" in the
anthology ReThinking Technologies, edited by Vereena Andermatt-Conley,
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 1993. pg 9

[This interview was previously published in MobileGaze.1
http://www.mobilegaze.com]