| Pieterjan Ginckels is a young Belgian artist whose recent project 1000 BEATS/1 BEAT is a seven-inch single featuring a single beat in an edition of 1000. He collaborated on the project with Barcelona-based, British artist Cristian Vogel, and Magnus Voll Mathiassen from the Norwegian design studio Grandpeople. | 
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Pieterjan Ginckels is a young Belgian artist whose recent project 1000 BEATS/1 BEAT is a seven-inch single featuring a single beat in an edition of 1000. He collaborated on the project with Barcelona-based, British artist Cristian Vogel, and Magnus Voll Mathiassen from the Norwegian design studio Grandpeople.
Pieterjan Ginckels is, ach ja, een YBeA, een Young Belgian Artist die vooral geïnteresseerd is in dit soort kruisbestuivingen. Zijn recentste project ‘1000 BEATS/ 1 BEAT’ bestaat uit een 7inch single in een prachtig ontworpen hoesje, waarop op een zijde een compositie staat, en de andere kant één enkele beat bevat, die is vastgelegd in een zogenaamde locked groove. De Belg vroeg welbewust aan twee autoriteiten op het vlak van muziekproductie en van grafisch ontwerpen om samen te werken aan dit project. De in Barcelona wonende Brit Cristian Vogel, die bekend staat omwille van zijn werk als producer van techno en intelligent dance music met releases op labels als Tresor en Novamute en onder de noemer Super_Collider, werd gevraagd om één beat te creëren. Verder koos Pieterjan Magnus Helgesen van het Noorse ontwerpbureau Grandpeople om de hoes te verzorgen. Grandpeople is een gewaardeerd collectief van getalenteerde grafici dat werkt voor internationale spelers in reclame, muziek, en wereldwijd in gerenommeerde tijdschriften gepubliceerd wordt.
Tom Nys: 1000 BEATS/ 1 BEAT is an overtly participatory project. Could you mention some differences from a normal work of art, in respect to this involvement of others?
Pieterjan Ginckels: I make an appeal on specialists in certain fields other than visual art. Their work positions itself next to mine; it influences me and pushes me forward. This piece certainly didn’t spring from the realm of visual art. Instead I started making connections between influences from quite a heterogeneous field of interests, a process in which the result does not situate itself firstly in the fields of music, performance or design, but in that of visual art.
Magnus Voll Mathiassen: We at Grandpeople usually work with products that have a defined target group, or at least we have an idea of what the target group can be. For this project we had one simple brief: to make visuals that gave the seven-inch an object-like feel—nothing more—meaning that the object itself was more important than thinking result. For us result is usually connected with response.
Cristian Vogel: Any type of creative production I do is collaborative. If this is the same as “participatory,” then it hasn’t been too different to any other piece I have been involved in. The one key difference is that in this case I’ve never met any of the other participants—all communication until now has been 100-percent email.
TN: For each party involved, the project is a lot about letting go: all three of you have to give up certain things in order to give other people and other situations the opportunity to take 1000 BEATS/1 BEAT further—away from your contribution. Is that an easy thing to do?
MVM: We seldom feel ownership of what we make. On the contrary, we enjoy watching things we have done, let people handle it with care or not, and see what happens. We are voyeurs to our products.
PG: I like to involve other people—to enlarge the input, basically because it is more fun. It is often hard not being able to control every aspect of a project, so finding the right people to work with is essential. I would like to see this “letting go” happening in visual art as it can be found in music—producers, remixes, guest appearances, covers.…
TN: There is an element of chance involved. Is that something that is new to your way of working, or is this the case more often? In which ways is it different and/or similar?
PG: Chance is essential to my practice. I set out a certain set of rules in order to shape an idea; this constellation of rules creates a condition. Within this condition, I have to realize my work. For 1 BEAT I wanted to invite Cristian and Grandpeople respectively to create a beat in a locked groove and to design a record sleeve. But I cannot control what my work will look or sound like. In the same way I can’t foresee the amount of turntables that will be presented at the installation 1000 BEATS, nor will I be able to see the setup of the available sound systems.
MVM: We are quite used to this. We operate with software, hardware, and production that is not really accurate all the time.
TN: Do you feel 1000 BEATS/1 BEAT can instigate a different sort of reception than you are used to with your other work?
PG: The reception you talk about is one of the main reasons for creating the project. I think the project opens up to the audience in a different way: it’s more a do-thing than a see-thing. This openness can be found in a work such as Heimatschutz as well, where the work is intentionally left blank.
MVM: Since we are just a small part of the production—a part of a collaboration—what the others have made can easily back up our contribution, conceptually and aesthetically. The difference between this project and the commercial commissions we do is that in this case the exhibition space allows us to see the actual feedback by every single person. For a designer this is somewhat strange—exciting and horrible at the same time.
TN: What are your expectations about the public taking part?
PG: I expect people pitching up and down the turntables and messing with the volume faders. I expect them to walk around in the space: this way, they are the most important controlling factor of the installation. They will walk around in this soundtrack like points in a diagram that shows the relations between different audio sources.
MVM: We like this part—whether people hate it or love it—total lack of public interest, on the other hand, that would be a killer. But I don’t see how our part, as designers, will have direct influence on the actual happenings where this will take place
TN: The project also seems to inscribe itself in a musical tradition whereby the manipulation of vinyl is essential, as featured by certain protagonists like Christian Marclay, Philip Jeck, Thomas Brinckmann, or DJ Spooky. Is this relevant to you?
CV: Not really. I’ve been a DJ for 15 years. Vinyl itself holds no mystery or myth for me; the records are just heavy and sound unique. My record collection as a thing is strange though—sometimes useful messages emerge from it, like slow osmosis.
TN: The visual aspect has always been extremely important in the musical realm. What are your thoughts about this? And how can music play a part in visual arts?
PG: This is the major theme of the performances Nononoise Live and Nononoise Soldiers Of The Night + Oranges (LIVE!!!). I wanted to play with the visual aspects of concerts. I composed a soundtrack and invited my closest friends to perform it on stage. They were asked to construct their own “placebo-instrument” and had to find a way of playing it. The result is an odd playback show, like a living sculpture consisting of a dozen people performing their own choreography around their self-made sculptures.
MVM: At Grandpeople, we spend more or less 50 percent of our working days listening to music, so it should have some sort of influence on our work. We always want to work together with visual artists, it is almost written in the production and performance of music, but does it work the other way? I am aware that music is highly influential in the meditations and processes that might form part of the creation of visual art pieces, like a CD playing in the studio where painting or design happens. Yet this seems to be mostly ignored in the final dissemination of visual art. A credit would be nice: “When I painted this I was listening to an album by Night Of The Brain,” for example.
