mhc on 17 Jul 2000 07:47:26 -0000 |
[Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]
<nettime> Interview with Mark Bain |
Interview with Mark Bain-- by Molly Hankwitz and David Cox January 2000 Jan 3, 2000 Artists' Television Access, San Francisco CA MH: Can you talk about the origins of your work and key ideological determinants that lead you to proceed with a body of work looking at resonance and sonic waves? I mentioned a project I thought of using the Brookyn Bridge as a huge sound instrument. It makes a great humming noise if you've ever stood down below it. It really vibrates and hums wonderfully.There seems to be a bit of an interest at the moment in wave theory and notions of transmission of energy and such...is there a reason for that sort of resurrgence of interest, do you think? Bain: It has been a connecting of two different elements in my past, one being, my coming from a family of architects and engineers. I've been around architecture all my life with my grandfather and father and even great grandfather. At the same time, in my youth, working a lot in sound, even playing in bands and things like that. Where those two elements having collided has influenced the work I am doing right now...As far as sound and structures, I have been looking for a certain dynamic that is connected to solid structures and architecture. One of my key interests is looking for a liveliness in stable elements, and, in looking at that, seeing that stable items are essentially not stable, are instable, in fact, so I'm trying to mine these areas --these hidden messages--you might say---of transferring through architecture. I've developed a multichannel system, about 46 geosensors, that I can plant in different places that are highly sensitive vibration transducers that pick up energy which travels through solid materials, and because solid materials have molecules, the energy travels efficiently so you can really listen to areas from great distances. So when you talk about mic-ing the Brooklyn Bridge, of course, that is possible. I've even thought about doing a whole series of monuments, like doing the Eiffel Tower, doing, you know, the Arc de Triomphe or some other places. Lately I've been doing live mixes, basically running a multichannel array of sensors into a mixing console and doing a live mix to sort of put it together on two channel DAT and then I've also started to work with a DV camcorder and using the audiotracks on that to record audio while recording visually the object from which I am recording the sound. For example, on something like the Eiffel Tower or Brooklyn Bridge, it would probably be interesting to use sensors that have radio beacons or radio transmitters so that I could get far away from the subject, videotape it and mix it at the same time, and still listen to the object... DC: Your work seems to examine carefully this idea of there being a secret, a hidden meaning a kind of sub-meaning to buildings and architectures and the intervention of time seems to be an influence with your high speed work as well, films like INSTABILITY, where there is this emphasis on events over time and the hidden becoming revealed through scientific means by revealing patterns that would go unnoticed otherwise both sonically, with the buildings, but also visually, with the films and that seems to overlap a little bit with the culture jammer ethos which seeks to reveal hidden meanings... Bain: People aren't used to listening to their buildings. They might listen to the inside, or sounds outside spaces, but not to the actual architecture itself, so it is always interesting to get that sound and do something with it and lately I've been doing these projects where the sound is recorded and then installed into other architectures so it's the transference of one architecture's acoustic energy into another's. What is interesting about those projects is that for the most part people have a really hard time dealing with those sounds because they are quite heavy. And that is the strangeness of it. These sounds are very very heavy, low-frequency, and maybe not comfortable. You can have a comfortable space or, for example, the field I recorded in Poland....it was a beautiful, beautiful field with this nice vision of a landscape except the sound underneath was like a heavy trembling, it was almost like a sound of fear, sound of energy, sound of something, kind of crazy. MH: This phrase of "architerrorism," with which you have referred to your work, is this still a pertinent idea to you, the idea of terrorizing buildings, as in the 'projectiles' project? MB: For me, the idea of "architerrorism" is interesting in relation to general architecture because, to a certain degree, developers and architects are terrorists in themselves...in the sense that most common people who live in the street or who live in these buildings don't have ownership on the properties, and so the decision to make buildings or to develop areas of cities or towns is really out of their hands. They might have some sort of voting connection to the city or something, but otherwise its pretty much just "money talks" and for me I have a problem with the fact that that is considered legal and right, yet, some of my projects might be considered "terrorist" so maybe we should sort of flip those definitions. MH: Hypocritical in that you are doing it for art and who is the real terrorist? MB: A perfect example of this that is happening right now is Paul Allen who used to be with Microsoft, bought out the Seattle Seahawks, and then he used it in a game with the city. He threatened to pull the Seahawks out of Seattle unless Seattle built him a new stadium. Now Seattle already has a stadium, for football, built in 1976. It's a beautiful structure, actually a structure that my grandfather worked on or built in his firm. So in February, next month, they are going to implode this huge concrete stadium so that they can build a new stadium and to me that is completely absurd. DC: How does that tie over with some of the events happening recently with the events for example of the WTO in Seattle, with this unwillingness to take lying down the values of big money or big corporations? MB: I'm not sure how many people from Seattle were actually involved with the WTO. I think a lot of those people were from the outside, from elsewhere, which I think is good--and Seattle is just an area. But with the example of the King Dome, its...uh well... we've been highjacked. Even at the time when they were voting it in. Essentially Paul Allen funded a whole ballot that was off-season voting, in other words voting that didnt take place at the normal time and rallied all the Seahawk fans to go out and vote for this amendment to keep the Seahawks in Seattle thus to demolish the old stadium. MH: So the politics of architecture and urban planning are very closely linked to arguments related to public and private, and where those interstitial lines overlap. Your work is very much about that in a sense,the public and private, those kind of marginal borders areas. MB: Yes, i think so. DC: So what is going on with your work now, especially the issue of the retrieval of artifacts. I remember when we visited you in Boston last year and you showing us your collection of sort of retrieved, found seismic paraphernalia from MIT. Bain: Scientific debris. DC: Is that hunter-gatherer impulse still at work? And how? MB: That's a certain archeology of technology that has to be considered. There is a strange wastage out there of technology where there is a certain time-frame where things are new and they have to be new and all the old gear gets thrown out even it works perfectly well and that's very common. I see that wastage and there should be something done with that. DC: And do the Dutch sympathize with this? Bain: Yes, I think they do but the prblem with holland is its just too darn clean! There aren't as many scraps to be had. It's a lot better coming over here to the States. In fact I've done projects in Holland and have had to come to the States to actually get my materials and ship them back. DC: Is that because America is more wasteful or because its not as good at being clean? I mean what's going on culturally there, as you see it. Bain: Its larger, more industrial. There is more money here, more technology. MH: So who is influencing your work now? Who is stimulating your work? Julia Scher? MB: She's a freind of mine and she certainly does some interesting stuff with her surveillance installations. She's more of a personal influence. Other people more: Matt Mullican, Gordon Matta-Clark, of course, the Dadaists. Right now its interesting because there is a certain trend I'm noticing of artists working in architecture as a sort of vehicle working within or against or some how involved with art and architecture and its influence. DC: What about the Situationist International and Constant and the idea of the destruction of the derive and playfulness?Are these ideas that you are familiar with and which resonate in your work? MB: Well, certainly play and the idea of taking back a certain amount of energy out of your city and the derive also of going through spaces. There was quite a nice show at the Witt deWitt in Rotterdam last year, of all of Constant's work. He was Dutch. That was quite amazing to look all that work in one place. MH: Amsterdam had quite a lot to do with the Cobra movement and the development of new ideas about the role of architecture in a more open- minded kind of society where commerce was less the defining paradigm. MB: Of course Holland is a strange place architecturally anyway; its all reclaimed land. There's this fear of water in a sense or there's always this idea they are below sea level. DC: They are always keeping water at bay. The dykes and such. MB: Yes, for example I was involved in a show at De Appel in Amsterdam called 'An Architecture' and that involved installing 4 mechanical oscillators into a non-loadbearing wall that was acting basically as a diaphragm. When I activated it it was pumping infrasonic air throughout the whole building--this is a 3-4 story building--and that was extremely effective but the problem with Amsterdam is that all the buildings are connected side by side and so the neighbors complained that objects in their living room were moving around on their tables... MH: Spirits at work! (ha) Bain: (ha) ...so then they called the environmental police who shut down my project. It was only open for one day at the opening and then was shut down. DC: What's happening in the future. What major projects are you getting ready for now? MB: Now, I'm working on an interesting project which will be at Expo 2000 at Hannover. Its nice because it involves enough funding that I can do a creative project. Its going to involve robotic lighting systems and architectural spaces using just light and shadow influenced by Moholy-Nagy early Light-Space Modulator. I'm collaborating with my brother John, and we will be working with off-the-shelf robotic lighting units that they use in theaters and clubs and things, and basically going into the guts of these things and reworking them completely. DC: I saw a copy, I think, of the Light-Space Modulator at the Bauhaus Museum in Berlin. MB: The original one is at Harvard, so if you ever get the chance to see it...(hee) MH: Moholy-Nagy is obviously interested in what happens when you automate the abstract collision of light on surfaces and the kind of patterns that result from the mechanization of the direction of natural forces which I suppose is also, the tendency of Dada to invoke, shall we say, the latent forces at play either in pictures before they're cut up and stuck together or in the natural world before it is mediated by technology. So are we still in the Dada period and is it going to continue well into the new millenium? MB: It still feeds into a lot especially some of the New Conceptualist work. The Light-Space Modulator has always been considered as the object and what's interesting about that is that Maholy-Nagy never really considered it as the object. He looked at it as what was happening with the light, patterns on the wall, in the space itself. That's what I'm interested in completely. MH: People tend to look at your resonating motors and that's not really the work, it's the effect of the work, isn't it? MB: Yes, it's terrible especially for my documentation. It's completely difficult to do documentation except for my recordings because if you put it on slide all you see are the small motors or in the installations you might see large cracks, a cracked wall which i've had in one project, or at one point I had a floor that collapsed as a result of these devices. On another project I'm using one of these machines that is one of these things, a Stairclimber for old people to go up their stairs. I've installed this machine in my studio where I have a large window in the space that is maybe about 6 ft. high meters up and I built a 6 meter beam at an incline that's shoved through this window so what you do is ride this chair outside the architecture... DC & MH: Great. (hee, hee) Bain: You pass the envelope of the wall. and then outside my studio is this non-used space, like this garden, no one is back there, all this grass with a nice view of the canal. I essentially got selfish and built the chair for myself --it's a way to add a new space to your building--so that I could go outside and read or have coffee or something like that. MH: Where the most sympathetic areas of the world for your work? Is it Japan, or? Bain: Well, when i was doing the project at De Apple there was a curatorial program of about 5 people and one of the people was this Japanese woman who was terrified of my work. She was scared shitless about my work. She thought I was going to bring the building down. She was one person who didn't want me to be involved in that show. Japan yeah, maybe it will be a strange facination for them but certainly being in Europe, I certainly get more support and openess for my ideas and because of that exposure, then I can bounce back to the States and there is increasing interest in my work here, so that's good. DC & MH: We should be winding it up now. Thanks. (smiles) Bain: Thanks. (c) all rights reserved, Hankwitz/Cox, 2000 ******************************************************************************** ************************************* Molly Hankwitz is an architect and media curator from the United States. David Cox is a filmmaker and Lecturer in Digital Media at Griffith University. ________________________________ molly cox mollybh@netspace.net.au # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net