Andrea Polli: Even as a child, I had been interested in mathematics and computers. These were the days when you had 5 1/4" floppy disks and had to insert a disk with your operating system every time.
Sonics of Environment
Leah Oates
Leah Oates: Can you speak first on how you came to the media of sound art and what your progression was as an artist?
Andrea Polli: Even as a child, I had been interested in mathematics and computers. These were the days when you had 5 1/4" floppy disks and had to insert a disk with your operating system every time. I would play with the computers and write simple programs using mathematical concepts, mostly things like randomness and looping, and sometimes using the text to speech capability of the computer to make these very funny mechanical sounding words, but mostly printing text and colors to the screen.
I would follow Scientific American magazine and when I was in college, I remember an issue that came out with a big picture of the Mandelbrot set or some other fractal on the cover. All my friends and I–and everyone who was into computers at that time–got really excited and started typing in the code the magazine provided and playing around with different images. Of course right around that time the book Chaos came out and the whole thing exploded, lots of interest in these kinds of recursive algorithms as changing the world. Stephen Wolfram came out with a book not too long ago called A New Kind of Science that does a good job codifying everyone’s ideas and hopes for the new paradigm.
One thing that fascinated me about these systems and using mathematics in general was that it is so abstract. I was making paintings and drawings and was frustrated with the way these works didn’t seem to have the beautiful intangibility that I found in mathematics. I thought that even an abstract painting was really direct and representational–after all, you could see the paint on the canvas. The other thing that frustrated me about painting and drawing I think is that the final result didn’t see to me to unfold the way a computer program would.
Simo Alitalo: When I went to University of Turku my major was musicology. I was supposed to became musicologist but I later changed my major to Philosophy. I started to work on my graduate thesis about the Ontology of Musical Works and then got interested in film studies and especially how sound and music relate to images in a filmic language.
I have always been interested in sounds. When I was actively engaged in music I was very curious about the acoustics and physics of sound: what makes different instruments sound the way they sound, what makes Ben Webster sound different form Albert Ayler, etc. I was also interested in musical avant-garde and the philosophical questions it brought into the fore ground: are there boundaries to music, what lies beyond those boundaries, if something is not music any longer what is it?
LO: Both of you use sound from nature, science and environment in your work. It seems in some of the work that there is an inherent political statement on how people treat the earth. But on the other hand it may be that the sound work you make is to create environments that are about a fuller experience of nature and of being human. Can you elaborate on what your aims are with your work?
AP: It’s funny the metaphors that people use, when you talk about "the way people treat the Earth." This comes from the idea of creation, the Garden of Eden, the idea that man is the caretaker of the Earth and all its creatures, it’s a very pervasive metaphor. I’d like to turn that around, and instead have people think of themselves and their lives as dependent on the Earth and its creatures. I mean, that’s the real issue with what’s happening with, for example, climate change. Climate change isn’t a problem for the Earth; the Earth is just fine and will continue to be fine for billions of years. The problem with climate change is that it’s hurting us–larger storms, sea level rise, loss of food supply for Inuit people, etc.
So, how do you go about changing that metaphor? Well, you think it’d be easy, I mean the Earth’s natural forces, to me anyway, are so gigantic and overwhelming, like the recent tsunami, how could people really believe that humans have dominion over that? And even the scientists I work with say that over the many years that it’s been tried and massive scales, it’s so far been the case that man can only ‘influence’ the weather, not ‘control’ the weather. In other words, you can have an impact but it’s so big and so complex that you can’t predict exactly what that impact will be, especially in the long run (brings us back to chaos theory here).
My approach has been to use sound, which can have a very emotional affect on people, it very literally ‘touches’ people, to try to express these giant forces of nature. To both express how vast and uncontrollable they are, but also to put them on a human scale, so it’s kind of like a person you can have a conversation with. I guess this brings us back to this Garden of Eden idea that God is a person who talks to you. It’s something I think people need to help them to understand things that are unimaginably large and complex.
SA: Since early childhood I have spent my summers in the countryside and I think that this seasonal change between two different soundscapes–city and countryside–has affected my aural sensibility. I am very much interested in the processes of nature and how repeating phenomena like waves, rain or wind in the pine trees can create so rich and varied soundscapes. I’m interested in how temperature gradients in the air can effect how far away we can hear. Other thing that interests me in environmental sounds is how well balanced a natural soundscape can be.
In a city soundscape we usually have a lot of droning sounds going on at the same time: car tires, air conditioning, lighting, heating, different machines, etc. All these things create continuous sounds. They are usually caused by a motor and a circular motion of one kind or another; these stationary "pedalpoints" can mask all the other sounds quite effectively. In natural environments the situation is quite different. You can hear through other sounds. I have coined a concept "Transaudiple" to describe this situation. Even with a broadband noise like wind present you can still hear small sounds further away. Because of this the acoustic space sounds bigger and more transparent. Studies show that even living beings like birds during "morning chorus" try not to block out each other. They all try to find an acoustic space or niche where they can be heard without masking others out.
LO: Sound art has become more mainstream in the art world even though it is not object-oriented. Who are other sound artists who you are interested in and please speak about how sound art has progressed as an art form. What do you think its place is in the art world currently?
AP: In terms of gallery artists, I really like Christian Marclay’s work, he seems to have bridged that gap between sound and object really nicely, reminding people that the sound is really material in some way. In terms of sound, I’ve been really involved in the Acoustic Ecology movement and the related phonography movement, many people around the world who are interested in listening to the soundscapes of the world, natural or man-made and creating recordings and other kinds of projects to address the soundscape. That’s very fascinating to me. I’m also interested in what people in the Microsound community are doing, dealing with sound on the computer in a very material and almost sculptural way, it’s something I think I’ve been trying to do with some sound projects.
I guess my perspective is that the art world as we know it is kind of in flux or transition, between sound work and other intangible media work, the traditional art world is struggling to keep up, figuring out how to exhibit and archive this kind of work (or, unfortunately, sometimes ignoring it), but it’s not going away and people are creating all kinds of alternative venues, some of them quite large and well-respected like Ars Electronica, that are getting a lot of attention that maybe museums should have had if they were keeping up.
SA: I think that it is important to remember that a part of history of avant-garde is also history of sound art. Marcel Duchamp and Kurt Schwitters among others were also sound artists. It is not just something that DJs invented yesterday.
I am interested in all artists who are interested in sound as an artistic medium in its own right. Because I work with installations I am specifically interested in those colleagues who work with this medium. So to name a few whose work I try to follow: Robin Minard, Nigel Helyer, Ed Osborn, Gordon Monahan, Paul DeMarinis, Christina Kubisch and of course Andrea Polli. Another criteria that is important to me is "the non-musical use of sound" as it was stated at least in some early Sound Culture "manifestoes." I find it important in my own work to try to understand the uses and practices of sound and hearing outside the domain of music.
Music and its ideologies have a tendency to be very border conscious. And it seems that music defines itself by absorbing everything that it considers meaningful sound practices and proclaims everything else meaningless. And from a musical standpoint, this may be a very sensible and justifiable policy. What interests me is what is left outside. The uncharted territories, the white areas on the acoustic world map. If you compare the visual and musical arts you notice that within visual domain there are many different practices or genres like sculpture, painting, graphical arts, video, computer arts, etc. And new genres pop up nearly every day. In music the situation is much more conservative, you only have one genre: music, which is manifested in different styles. Historically, visual arts have this tendency to expand while music has a tendency to define its borders. And what interests me is what lies beyond those borders. For this reason I am not so interested in varieties of sound art that, for me, are essentially music and could easily be included within musical canon. I find it a bit annoying when curators want to have a DJ at the opening but are afraid to call it dance music and hence it is called sound art.
LO: Sound art is non-object oriented compared to painting, for instance, which is the ultimate art object. Thus artists who make sound art have to come up with innovative ways to make a living and promote their work. Do you edition sound recordings for instance and how to you get your work out into the world?
AP: I make my living from teaching. I realized a long time ago that my rent and student loans weren’t going to get paid if I depended on my artwork to pay them. Of course in the 90s there were lots of possibilities to go into professional web design and programming work, but for me I felt that doing that kind of work wasn’t developing my art so I stayed in academia. I do make money off my work, and I have multiples, audio CDs and DVDs. I get paid for giving talks about my work and get commissions and grants at times, although not enough of course. Also more recently I’ve been getting paid for writing about my work, so that’s been nice, but of course none of this comes even close to the teaching salary and the nice thing about teaching is that you’re in a community of other artists and part of your job is to stay current and be active, so for me it’s really a great way to do work.
SA: Because I work with installations I think that I am producing still art objects. That is how I see my work. But because these objects project sounds in a space they in a sense also include the space they are in.
When I have tried to document my work I have bumped into many sorts of problems. I have come to the conclusion that stereo CDs wont do the job because you lose the sound space and how sounds move in a multi-channel work. Another problem with the CDs is you lose the context. The audience tends to relate to sound coming from a CD as if it were music. This has probably something to do with the history of recorded music and acousmatic sound.
I think video is more suitable media for documenting sound installations even though it does not do right to the spatial sound but maybe these new multi-channel formats will solve that problem.
LO: Both of you collaborate with artists and with others from different fields such as scientists. How has your collaboration with artists differed from your collaboration with scientists? Please elaborate on this and on your collaborative process in general.
AP: This is an interesting question, and my answer will probably be different from what you expect. I think that on the level of the concepts of the work, there’s no difference, both the scientists and artists I have worked with have been heavily involved in the work on the conceptual development side. I was almost going to say that the scientists have been more involved in this, but not really, just in a different way, for example a scientist might have an idea of some natural phenomenon and might be able to point out aspects of a data set that illustrate that phenomenon, while an artist I’m collaborating with might talk about the form of the work from an aesthetic side. Both of those things to me are formal.
The difference between the two for me has been when you get down to the nitty-gritty making the work. Not being a scientist familiar with all the scientific tools, I usually can’t be involved with the hands-on scientific work. So I can ask if data sets can be formatted in certain ways but I can’t actually do it alongside the scientists. With other artists it’s different, all of us can get into the code of what we’re doing and make adjustments. So there’s a little bit of a disconnect unfortunately when working with scientists, where you have to use language to communicate the ideas rather than working directly. So this requires a lot of clarity and a lot of understanding of what the science is.
SA: Like I mentioned earlier my background is in music, playing jazz and rock and other early influences where the experimental theater and situationist street actions we created in Turku Doomdsdays. When you play jazz, it is about listening to others and knowing where you are in relation to chorus and what is going to probably happen next. So you have be aware that the "timecode" is running all time and you have think on your feet or fingers.
In theater, our method was brainstorming. Brainstorming, preparation and improvisation. When I later started working in radio it reminded me of the earlier work processes in music and theater. A lot of listening and improvisation.
At that time everything was still analog. So when we were mixing a more complex section of a radio piece we could have six or eight big Telefunken tape recorders running at the same time. All the timing was done by cutting the right amount of leader tape in the necessary places. Then mix was done on "fly" and I would "conduct" and a sound engineer would start the tape recorders with faders. If the mix did not come right on the first few tries you would have only so much time to get everything right before you had to move on. Decision-making was probably one of the more important things that I learned in radio. If you are working in a production that involves other people and their time you have to be able to make decisions and then you have to able to live with them. So now when I work with other artists I draw from this background.
LO: Please speak to those who are interested in becoming sound artists. It seems one needs to shift one’s perceptions on what art can be and think less about creating an object but about creating an environment. Is this accurate?
AP: I think to start out with the idea "I’m going to create an environment" seems to go back to this Garden of Eden idea, I mean it’s a top-down approach and I think it’s much more interesting to just experiment and try things out. Start playing around and see what happens. The thing about sound art, I think, is that it unfolds over time, it’s not one sort of perfect image like a painting or drawing or even photograph–although I think there are similarities between sound and photography in terms of process. The thing with sound is that it "happens" and you have to kind of let it happen and especially when you’re starting out it’s best to not be too precious about it or you won’t ever make anything.
To me the best way to start working with sound is to start listening to your environment. Really listening in detail, take it all in, figure it out, you’d be surprised at how much is happening sonically even in what you might call a quiet space. Read Murray Shafer’s Tuning the World.
SA: I think that the idea about sound artists creating environments is a good one. Sound envelopes its listener. We are all center points of our own hearing. But when you are creating an environment you must be aware what is the context of the environment you are creating. To my mind this is one of the crucial differences between music and sound art. I think that music is a context-rejecting art form while sound art is a context-binding one. What I mean by this is that in music there is an ideal of autonomy. Music does not refer to anything outside of itself. The identity of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is not dependant of the context where it is heard, whether it is a concert hall or elevator.
I think that sound art gets its meaning through contact or conflict with its context. When I started as a sound artist my first projects were done outdoors in public spaces. Those works had no or very few visual elements. But I could use the whole social, cultural, environmental, temporal, meteorological, etc., context of public spaces as my sounding board. My return to gallery spaces reintroduced objects to my work. Afterward I have been thinking that it might have something to do with a need to have something that would substitute for the contextually rich public spaces.
LO: What are some useful resources to hear and show sound art such as websites, festivals, galleries and museums that are local, national and international? Where can one see and hear your work?
AP: Turbulence does a lot of online sound-based commissions, my project "Heat and the Heartbeat of the City" is there, and also the Whitney Museum’s Artport that has my project "Atmospherics/Weather Works." I like Statsfield, an mp3 label that has my work "Retina Burn" and lots of amazing microsound works that you can listen to online. The Dutch Electronic Art Festival (DEAF) in Rotterdam always includes a lot of sound work, VIPER is an International Festival for Film and New Media in Basel, Switzerland, and Lovebytes is a festival in Sheffield, UK, run by a couple of sound artists. Here in New York, I’m involved in the New York Society for Acoustic Ecology and we have a monthly web-radio show called Giant Ear))) on free103point9, a great organization for sound and transmission art works.
SA: It seems that sound art events tend to turn into festivals. One reason may be that in addition to exhibitions there are usually symposiums on different aspects of sound and other events too. This summer in Berlin there will be the second Sonambiente exhibition. The first one was in 1996 and it aimed to be the definitive sound exhibition at that time. And it was quite interesting. I hope to see how they manage the second time around. Sound Symposium, which is held bi-annually in St. Johns New Foundland, is one of the longest-running festivals that exhibits a lot of sound art, especially installations and performances. Sound Culture is a very important event that started as a Pacific Rim event but has now evolved into an international event. Sound Culture has so far been organized six times: Sydney (1991), Tokyo (1993), San Francisco (1996), Auckland (1999) and Perth (2004). In 2002 there was a kind of mini-Sound Culture in Phoenix, Arizona. World Federation for Acoustic Ecology is also a very important source for me to keep up with the latest developments in Soundscape Studies. They also publish a magazine called Soundscape and have an excellent website.
LO: Please speak about current projects and what you are thinking about for future sound works.
AP: I’ll be showing a piece about climate in the Arctic at Exitart from April-June, the piece is called "N" and it’s a collaboration with UK-based artist Joe Gilmore and meteorologist Dr. Patrick Market. This summer I’ll be going to Taranaki, New Zealand for a workshop with several other artists and hope to work with some Pacific-based climate data there and then I’ll be doing a residency in Taipei. I hope to do a work related to the Antarctic and have been developing a few new works related to global environmental issues, including sustainable energy and global satellite (gps) information.
SA: I started working with hydrophones–underwater microphones–a few years ago. I have been studying what happens on an acoustic level when water starts to freeze and when ice starts to melt. I have incorporated these sounds into various installations. Another thing I have been interested in is the wave dynamics of water, what happens soundwise when waves hit the shore. When I was in Perth, Australia, I figured out a way to record this without getting too much unwanted noise. I am currently on residence at Location One. I will continue this project here in New York and hopefully I can present some results of it while I am here. It may be because of my radio background that, beside my installation projects that may be more abstract, I have also created projects and installations that are more narrative in nature. I have a special interest in odd 18th Century figures. I did a huge project called "Transit of Venus" (1999) together with Nigel Helyer. It was centered around Finnish naturalist Herman Sporing who was one of the scientists on Captain Cook’s first voyage to New Zealand and Australia.
While I am here in New York I will do research for a project about Peter Kalm who was a botanist and a pupil of Linnaeus. He visited North America 1748-51. He published a massive travelogue of his journey that is considered an important source of American history. I am planning to do a project that would consist of an installation, a radio feature and maybe a website centered around his travels in Hudson valley. I have also few radio projects in the pre-production phase and I am working on a theater/performance piece about German poet Friedrich Hölderlin.
