Sawako Kato

Sawako Kato.

    I have been making sounds with a laptop computer, field recordings and things around me for years. Although I deal with field recordings (often natural sounds), I’m not a stoic naturalist. I need electricity to live. I am the kind of person who sits in front of a computer screen for over ten hours per day. For me, having grown up in the city, artificial environments are the new ecology. They are as familiar as trees or volcanoes or mountains or sunlight. I am as used to the hum of refrigerators and air conditioners as I am to cicadas and bird songs. I therefore have an interest in the fusion of the digital and the organic.
    My artistic activities started with video work, then shifted towards sound, especially field recordings. My work is like a personal and intimate diary, both non-fiction and fictional. My creations usually start with capturing and collecting sound moments rather than creating melodies myself. Although many musicians want to create their own sounds and use them to fill the sound environment around them, for me, listening is more important than making sound and I have a strong feeling that I am only one part of the sonic environment.
    When I work with other musicians, I often feel that they try to “play” too much—they practice to avoid mistakes and try to show off their abilities as musicians. All of this is what I like to avoid with my sounds and it requires a very different type of approach. The sounds necessary for my work must contain a story and evoke memories of other senses, like sight, smell or touch. I’d like musicians to live through sound moments.
    Deep thoughts about field recordings give me an interest in sound cognition and background listening. Your ears are focusing on one part of the sound environment. I’m interested in the shift in modes of hearing from the “music” mode to the “sound event” mode or vice versa. When you are talking in a cafe, your ears don’t concentrate on the background music or noise. Then, as soon as your favorite hit song is on the air, the focus of your ears shifts away from the voices and toward the music. I’m interested in this shift of attention and my recent projects have tried to move and float between these categories of "music" and "sound." I have been making "music" in order to make abstract sound and noise. It is a construction for deconstruction.
    After capturing and collecting sound, I collapse and layer the materials using a computer. This step is like working with clay. I grapple with the material itself. Sometimes I can’t predict what will happen next. It’s like playing dice. This attitude is tied deeply with the digital tools that I use. They allow you to deal with sound like a laboratory, creating new species with DNA manipulation. And this whole flow can be created using only a home computer.
    I then organize the resulting sounds and add meaning—or do nothing and the audience adds meaning.
    Recently, I have returned to the video art. When I started to work with video several years ago, computers were too slow to process it and there was less software available. Now, computers have enough speed for real-time visual processing. Both sound art and video art are time-based works and returning to video art gives me more time to think about the differences between audio and video. I’m especially interested in the immersive, atmospheric character of sound.
In addition, I now have many collaborative projects in progress with artists like RF (a developer of spongefork and a musician) and heller (Sébastien Roux and Eddie Ladoire), among others. I provided some materials for Ars-winner skoltz_kolgen’s "Silent Room" project, which will be published in a DVD, CD and booklet format. Many of my collaborators are not "musicians" in the traditional sense, but rather "mutants" who are good at more than one medium—visual arts, programming and so on.
    Sometimes people ask me, “What would you do if you couldn’t use computers?” My answer is simple: I would just continue to create works with the things and sounds around me.