Q – You’ve talked about the notion of “viewer inference” – what does that entail for you?
A – It has to do with a permeability to viewer projection, drawing the viewer strategically into situations of inferral. I’m very interested in the conception of “absorption” as related to the perception of works of art, as outlined specifically by “Language” poet Charles Bernstein in his “Artifice of Absorption”, a critical text for me. What I learned from this concept was the idea that you could engineer the surface of your work in order to prevent a rapid “absorption” of its qualities into a preordained category of experience. In other words, the viewer, confronted with an “anti-absorptive” work, is continuously attempting to classify what he/she is experiencing, but the work consistently defies such attempts. contrepoint académique (sic) (2000) is a good example of this approach in my work – providing an ambiguous, continually shifting set of constructs, in that case the relationship between the pianist and the audience (which is taken up again in Public Relations), which keeps the viewer on his toes, and therefore keeps the listening-viewing process active, not deferential. Anti-absorption is not a negative idea, even though it sounds like it – it’s about stalling prejudices, keeping them at bay long enough for critical thinking to begin emerging.
Q – So if I understand correctly though, Rockford employs both absorptive and anti-absorptive strategies; when you mentioned “viewer inference” at the start, I imagine you were referring to a more “absorptive” kind of working…
A – Indeed. The dialectic between absorption and anti-absorption was the initial starting point. Rockford is part of Frontline, a large multimedia installation which intends to stimulate the viewer to think critically about the manner in which mass media filters the information we receive on a daily basis. In this work I wanted to engage with the seduction of commercial television – how it lets the viewer in, magically, hypnotically – and lulls any kind of critical thinking in the process. It was a metaphorization if you will of the general conception underlying Frontline. When I talk about inferral, I’m referring to the first 16 minutes of the work, involving automobiles in various stages of pursuit. This section was constructed in such a way to make it permeable to viewer projection. You can read anything into it – the material just lets you get away with whatever reading suits you – it tells you more about yourself than about itself – it’s just a bunch of cars after all, doing what cars do.
Q – I suppose even sociopolitical readings could be gleaned from this mass gathering of polluting agents…
A – Yes, pollution, energy dispersal, entropy, living inside one’s car (as is common in Los Angeles), the violence of machines, anything really. But this kind of thinking is quite idle – it doesn’t lead to anything more than a reinforcement of your own personal concerns. If you like car chases, it could be a totally different experience from someone who is more concerned with pollution. But again, it doesn’t really lead you to break with your own train of thought.
Q – If I understand you correctly, even if 16 minutes of car chases might repel you, that still falls under the category of “absorptive” work?
A – Yes, absorptive does not mean attractive, nor does anti-absorptive mean repellent. Even as repelled by the content of the work, you’re still being absorbed into it. Thrown back as it were into the confines of your own preconceived notions. It doesn’t have a transformative effect on your way of thinking. For me, social commentary, if it is to be meaningfully broached in a work of art, has to be embedded in the very structure of the work, very deeply embedded. It cannot be effective if it acts only on the content, superficial level of the work. Communicative strategies have to be designed which go further than that. I could easily see a viewer interpreting the first 16 minutes as “social commentary” – but for me, this section was my own comment on how anything really can be interpreted as social commentary if that is the way you as a viewer look at the world. If you’re oblivious to sociopolitical concerns, this section will not significantly alter your position.
Q – It seems like the first 16 minutes – half of the piece – is something of a conceit then?
A – That’s exactly it. A conceit. Lazy and submerging – designed to let your mind roam around, but not too far. The piece doesn’t demand that from you – the music is bubbling and hypnotic and says “just let go – don’t think too much”. It’s a clearing mechanism.
Q – Which might explain the anger some listeners have felt at the sudden loss of viewer entitlement, if I may call it that, at the 16 minute schism…
A – Yes, it’s disturbing because you’re actually saying : “no more inferring”. You’re now on provisional soil – hitting the ground running so to speak. In the first few performances, I actually ran to the back of the television monitors, and simulated a technical malfunction. The screens are completely fuzzy at this point. You can understand the discontent – not only was I not telling them what or how to think in Part I, I was actually encouraging them not to think! And now the viewer is unprepared for what follows. It makes the sudden break even more shocking.
Q – Getting back to the first part, I’m thinking of the very effective counterpoint between the three screens, as cars exit one screen to enter the other, symmetrical vectors…clearly designed to stimulate the viewer at least in a visual sense…
A – Yes – this is very important. The overarching concept underlying all of this is what I would call the “tactility of time”. That’s a term from composer Brian Ferneyhough which applies here. It has to do with the proportional relationship between concentration and the perception of the speed of time passing. We’ve all experienced situations of extreme concentration, where time appears to pass very slowly (or very quickly – depending on the quality of the concentration – actively engaged or frustratingly blocked), and situations where attention is not being actively paid to anything specific, and time passes quickly (or slowly – if this condition is a happy one or one more akin to boredom). Clearly, there is a lot of subtlety required in an analysis of this relationship, which I’m not qualified to deal with on a scientific level. However, it is clear that these things are related. This is why I chose to enact the work on three screens, so that right from the start, three elements always had to be considered simultaneously. (Projecting the work immediately unifies the three screens into one multi-screen unit, which does not have the same effect).
Parts I and II are radically different then, in light of the idea of the “tactility of time”. As a viewer I imagined that the first 5 minutes or so would be rather compelling – you would want to find out what kind of relationships existed between the cars in the three screens, how they interact, is there a pattern etc. At this point, you are trying to capture everything on the three screens, lest you miss a crucial element which might explain the thing. But after five minutes you come to the conclusion that not much of significance is actually occurring on an interactive level, or you come across the same kinds of interactions, which quickly tell your mind to stop paying such close attention to all three screens, and take them in as a unit. Suddenly, time begins to move at a faster pace because you’re no longer paying such close attention. You let some of the screens slip away, you don’t follow every interaction so closely. At this point, you may also be realizing that this piece is going to be about cars, and that’s all there’s going to be. You have no reason to believe anything else, because that’s all you’re given. You gradually become lulled – the screen counterpoint may be agile, but it’s not going to monopolize your concentration as much as it was in the first 5 minutes.
Q – You may be over-generalizing here…it’s possible that some viewers may not let go and remain completely fascinated by what you’ve set up…
A – Everything I say here is speculative of course – I have no way of really knowing what any viewer is going to experience. It’s an experimental situation – I may be completely wrongheaded about it – I’m only setting up variables and tweaking them to see what happens.
Q – What you’re saying then is that the mandate of the piece is clarified within the first five minutes…
A – Or at least what I want the mandate to be perceived as being, yes. That’s the conceit. When you mentioned the idea of visual stimulation, that’s exactly it. It’s a play of visual densities – and on the way in which we tend to group homogeneous elements together and understand them as a group. It’s comforting not to have to juggle three simultaneous trains of thought at the same time.
Q – I would imagine the music plays a huge part in establishing this kind of lulling response. It’s a kind of continuous fundamental which forces itself on the visual…
A – It’s an inversion of the “soundtrack phenomenon”, music as subservient to image.
Here the music is inducing you to not pay attention to what is going on visually, or at least telling you to not to make too much of it. The visuals are made subservient to the soundtrack here. It encourages overarching interpretations, it induces a kind of “essentialization”, or reductive thinking; oversimplifying the intricacies of interaction in Part I and telling you to look at the thing as a whole – and therefore induce time to flow more easily. It proposes a unified field, almost a narrative to adopt while looking at the three-screen interaction…
Q – …even as the music and the image follow a somewhat inverted path …
A – Yes, the music gradually slows down and becomes more lugubrious, while the cars gradually speed up over the 16 minutes. That’s another level. Violence becomes gradually aestheticized, or anestheticized (!) without you actually realizing it. By this point, you’ve become completely lulled, or bored, by the thing.
Q – It’s almost a perfect “fatalist” narrative : idealized Los Angeles, morphing into violent fiery death.
A – The sense of encroaching narrative also encourages the absence of creative thinking – you know where this is going – your sense of comfort within what you expect is being nicely reinforced by a very clear cut directional narrative.
Q – But at the 16 minute mark, everything changes…
A – While Part I was lulling and absorptive, Part II will be consistently, maddeningly provisional, active and creative on the part of the viewer. Suddenly, you’re struggling to figure out how to approach the work, with whatever tools you have. But the key word is “active”. Clearly it was a huge risk to create a work in which the first 16 minutes is basically a lie, a conceit, something to lull you into not thinking, to prepare you for the shock of scrambling to make sense of it…
In any case, the viewer is now confronted with a different kind of screen interaction, which will directly influence concentration, and the speed of time passing. In the Public Service Announcement narrated by Ralph Nader, the three screens now contain quite contrasting material, and really do monopolize your attention – time has become a sludgy affair.
It’s kind of interesting that at this point, you’re thinking so provisionally as a viewer that you abandon any pretext of normalcy returning to the fold. That’s especially evident in the Nader segment, where he’s describing corporate crime, which is visually illustrated by a burglary, complete from arrival to departure and eventual police capture. As a viewer at this point, it would be easy to make the connection between the voice-over and the imagery – at that point you could just listen to Nader and absorb the images as directly illustrating the narration. Not pay so much attention. But interestingly enough, there are two competing processes which impede such a natural connection. One, you’re now paying very close attention to screen interaction because of the rolling blackouts enacted in the static fuzz segment and the trailer segment. You’ve once again become sensitive to that dynamic, so you don’t really listen to what the narrator is saying. Two, you don’t trust such a natural connection between narration and image, as you’ve already been duped quite recently for falling into preconceived structural notions and being caught with your pants down. When such a gross illustrative narration falls into your lap, you don’t even notice it! In fact, this Nader segment almost explains the underlying concept of the whole work – when he talks about the California Energy Crisis of 1999-2000, which was the model on which Rockford was based…
A – In what sense? Clearly not an illustrative one…
Q – This comes back to what I was saying earlier regarding the embedding of the social commentary in the structure of the work itself. What I try to do generally is to create a metaphorical zone at the structural level – as the work progresses, it’s not the material which makes you aware of a social situation, it’s the structure, the underlying communicative stratagem which gradually becomes unveiled. It leads you as a viewer to think differently and attempts to make some far-fetched, but ultimately creative connections between a purely aesthetic experience and a social problem.
Q – This brings up a subtext pervasive in Part II which one could only call “performative”…
A – I conceived of Rockford as a performance, but with a fixed audio-video component. It was performative in the sense that I imagined the structure of the work as being a real-time performance, much as in my past works. When the 16 minute mark arrives, I conceived of it as an electrical grid failure – which is what I think it’s also perceived as to the unsuspecting viewer – a power failure, or at least some kind of minor electrical glitch associated with the equipment. I imagined what it would be like to cope with a sudden meltdown – that’s where the guitar interlude comes in, the stock footage of trailers rolling from one screen to another, the Public Service Announcement just lying there in the control room, which buys six more minutes to try and bring regular programming back online…
Q – In that light, you could interpret the first 16 minutes as a kind of overload…but retroactively…
A – The kinetic energy amassed by all these car chases leads to an overload of a different kind. For me it’s about empowering the viewer to make imaginative connections between an aesthetic condition and a social situation, but on a latent, almost subconscious level. In that way, you’re really getting at the roots of an individual’s potential mobilization, where you could effect a small change of mentality, disturb usual patterns of thought…to make a jump to a place where thinking about your place in society is a natural act. Which is why I don’t want to make overtly political art, because the message too often gets subsumed within the aesthetic realm, which renders it an object of contemplation rather than mobilization. If you work with the roots of what makes a person prone to proactive behavior, you’re laying the groundwork for eventual action. At this point, this is the manner in which I feel I can be most effective as a political artist.