Remembering How to Forget: An Artist’s Exploration of Sound
Scanner ABSTRACT This article is an introduction to the work of electronic sound artist Scanner, which explores the place of memory, the cityscape and the relationship between the public and the private within con- Manipulation or reorganisation of pre-recorded images and Having the technology to peel temporary sound art. Beginning with a historical look at his CD re- sounds is like the process of thinking. Thus editing becomes the open virtually any zone of infor- leases a decade ago, the article superimposition of consciousness or the intelligent structuring mation and consume the con- explores his move from his cellu- of this recorded experience. tents, I used the scanner device lar phone works to his more col- itself—a modestly sophisticated laborative digital projects in re- —Bill Viola cent times. With descriptions of radio receiver—to explore the re- several significant performance lationship between the public My work explores the relationship between sound and archi- works, public art commissions and private spheres. Working and film soundtrack work, the tectural space and the spaces in between information, places, with sound in this manner sug- piece explores the resonances history and relationships, where one has to fill in the missing gested a means of mapping the and meanings with the ever-chang- parts to complete the picture. In the modern recording stu- ing digital landscape of a contem- city, in which the scanner device dio, digital technology has allowed us to search beneath the porary sound artist. provided an anonymous window surface of sound and its image through the application of into reality, cutting and pasting software that visualizes a vibration, a note. Using machines information to structure an alter- that allow us to replicate and duplicate familiar sounds by native vernacular. It was a rare opportunity to record experi- “sampling” them, we experience notions of time and memory ence and highlight the threads of desire and interior narra- displaced from their reality. When hearing a sound sample, tive that we weave into our everyday lives. The sounds of an can one know whether it is of the present or of the past? How illicit affair, a liaison with a prostitute, a drug deal or a simple might its future use alter its status? How “real” is it? How discussion of “what’s for dinner” all exist within an indiscrimi- much is dependent upon one’s recollection of its source? nate ocean of signals flying overhead, but just beyond our reach. Sharing a line of focus with American consumer pla- INTERCEPTING THE DATA STREAM giarists Negativland, who had initiated a line of almost absurdist exploration of similar territory several years before Around a decade ago the first Scanner recordings (Scanner on recordings such as Helter Stupid (1989) and Escape from 1 [1992] and Scanner 2 [1993]) featured the intercepted cel- Noise (1987), I twisted state-of-the-art technology in uncon- lular phone conversations of unsuspecting talkers, which I ventional ways to intercept highly personalized and voyeuris- edited into minimalist musical settings as if they were instru- tic forms of info food: sound recordings, phone scans, mo- ments, bringing into focus issues of privacy and the di- dem and Net intercepts, all of which became material for my chotomy between the public and the private spectrum. multi-layered soundscapes. Every live performance, record- Sometimes the high frequency of cellular noise would per- ing or mix that has followed is still in its way a “true” represen- vade the atmosphere, at other junctures it would erupt into tation of that moment in time and in that way relates to per- words and melt down to radio hiss. Intercepted in the data formance art in the temporality of its data—a “Sound stream, transmissions would blend, blurring the voices and Polaroid”—a way of capturing the moment in sound similar rupturing the light, creating audio transparencies of to that of a Polaroid camera, which seizes an image and im- dreamy, cool ambience. I had been using voices in my work mediately exposes it to the permanence of interception. for some time previously, inspired initially by hearing re- cordings by English industrial artists Throbbing Gristle (on Heathen Earth [1980]) John Cage (Variations IV [1965]), HOW DO WE LISTEN TO THE SPACES Brian Eno and David Byrne (My Life in the Bush of Ghosts IN BETWEEN? [1981]), with their use of randomly mixed voices in the live environment, and eccentric English guitarist Robert Fripp’s Zooming in on these spaces in between—between language use of found voices in his Exposure recordings (1979). A and understanding, between the digital fallout of ones and chance encounter with a neighbor’s ham radio, an early zeros, between the redundant and undesired flotsam and form of radio communication favored by truckers on the jetsam of environmental acoustic space, led to a focus to- road long before cellular telephones, meant that often wards the cityscape. If an accent suggested a certain class, when I listened to records or the radio at home, their voices would be featured as uninvited guests, with my amplifier act- Scanner a.k.a. Robin Rimbaud (composer, artist), 40 Sunlight Square, London, U.K. E2 ing as a receiver for their banal communications. 6LD. E-mail:
© 2001 ISAST LEONARDO MUSIC JOURNAL, Vol. 11, pp. 65–69, 2001 65
Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/09611210152780700 by guest on 02 October 2021 Fig. 1. Surface Noise project, 1998. Performances took place along a bus route in London for 3 nights, each reassembling fragments of the city in sound and image. Digital images of London were captured and translated into sound through software. (© Robin Rimbaud)
age or attitude, then how suggestive what is an intimate yet global expres- dom questions in interviewing local was the raw sound around these con- sion of space, a simple translation of people, partly out of self-interest. From versations, how influential was the loca- the social transformations wrought by these I mapped out a walk that took tion where each conversation was held? new technologies. me from one point to another, Sound is ever present, sometimes as a minidisc in hand, recording the acous- constantly shifting whir, as a damp tic data in that place. I wanted to cre- CHARTING NEW grain of footsteps, as the drone-like ate in a sense a sound work rather like spangle of distant traffic, or as the PERFORMANCE SPACES the opening scene in Robert Altman’s seemingly motionless air that ripples Constantly shape-shifting with my movie Short Cuts (1993), in which a he- past our ears, as the elegant stuttering projects, my scavenging of the electronic licopter hovers gently over the densely trill of a bird overhead. How influential communications highways has led to a packed city landscape and the film fo- was this common envelope of space, multitude of collaborations. cuses or scans into moments in the the environment in which we consume daily lives of its inhabitants. It is a mo- sound and music? How does one de- Listening to the Sound tion across a city, an architectural elec- fine the spaces between music and of the City tronic scanning of an almost invisible sound? When we listen to a Walkman, In 1998 I became a visiting Fellow to sound wave. Liverpool, like most cities, how do we distinguish between that John Moore’s University in Liverpool, has its very own sound dialect. Histori- which is intended—the sound car- where as “Professor Scanner” I created cally one can recall the sound of the rier—and that which is incidental: pass- a CD, Stopstarting, which explored the docks, the railway station, the Cavern ing traffic, the roar of a plane, the acoustic debris of the city, premiering Club where the Beatles played their screech of a train door, your own foot- at the International Symposia on Elec- earliest live shows, their brittle tunes steps? Whether active (creator) or pas- tronic Art (ISEA) conference in Sep- floating through the air. Voices, traffic sive (listener) we set up a virtual space tember of that year. For this project I lights, announcement speakers, buses, in which we are each free to explore chose significant points of sound lo- building work, footsteps, telephones the sonorous and acoustic strata of cated in the city, partly based on ran- and cash machines were manipulated
66 Scanner, Remembering How to Forget
Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/09611210152780700 by guest on 02 October 2021 and transformed into a composition tective fiction, and use a more narra- boundaries and exploring connections that captured this Sound Polaroid of tively driven but amazingly emotive form within his work. Liverpool in 1998. of explication. Sound Polaroids Surface Noise Alphaville This issue of collecting memories of The Surface Noise project, with producers In 1999 I was invited to re-soundtrack sound has continued to exert overt pres- Artangel in London, followed shortly af- Jean-Luc Godard’s seminal 1965 film sure on my working methods. In 1999, I terwards in October 1998. It explored Alphaville. A cult classic and a film that began working with U.K. graphic artist the wow and flutter of my own city (Fig. pushed the very medium itself beyond Paul Farrington, a.k.a. Tonne, focusing 1), taking people on a red Routemaster its limits, Alphaville has intrigued me on the richest of junk heaps, London, for bus journey across the city from Big Ben since I was a student. Its unforgettable the Sound Polaroids project (Fig. 2) at the to St. Paul’s Cathedral, where the sheet dirty grinding vocalizations of the com- Institute of Contemporary Arts. Our no- music of “London Bridge Is Falling puter voice haunt electronic music to- tion of what an archive, a museum or Down” became the score and A–Z for day, and the fusing of film noir and sci- even an “art collection” is has altered with both musical and geographical direc- ence fiction inspired a generation of the power of the computer to scan and tion following a Cageian use of indeter- filmmakers. Alphaville is a place where store data. So much so, that using a post- minacy. Where each note fell onto the emotion is forbidden and poetry is for- card and digital Web page questionnaire, map of the city between these two points gotten, ruled by logic, a supercomputer. we invited people to recall a point of not only suggested a location at which to In its abstract, political and intellectual sound significance for them in their own record but also a route that the bus space-chase across the glass and metal city: the “heaves” and “surges” of a Lon- would later follow with public aboard. landscape of futuristic Paris, we are don taxi or a busker in Leicester Square Performances followed this routing ev- caught within a film that dissolves late at night, for example. Hundreds of ery night for 3 nights, at intervals boundaries between fiction and docu- these suggestions were collated, the sites through the evening, each re-assem- mentary, between actors and the char- visited, then digitally photographed and bling fragments of the city in terms of acters they play, a situation analogous sonically recorded onto digital tape. Part sound and image, suggesting the slight to prevailing musical trends regarding database, part fantasia, the project ex- shifts in tone and shape in similar places the divide between what is “real” and plored what psychologists call “synesthe- but at very different hours, so that a busy “not real” within music. Electronica sia”—seeing sound, hearing colors—by West End street at 18:00 would trans- shares the spirit of Alphaville, using a adapting computer software to allow us to form into a ghostly emptiness at 21:00. low-budget style of creativity that cap- paint with sound and compose with light. Surface Noise would become a form of al- tures the spirit of the time, often charac- The subsequent installation melded im- ternative film soundtrack, where the terized by a cold, dystopian futuristic age with sound on screens and speakers, film was simply the view through the consciousness. Godard’s use of sound in extending this new digital language of dusty window of a double-decker bus. this and subsequent movies is extraordi- the city into a visual display allowing the Janet Cardiff, a Canadian sound artist, nary, and my live improvisation within audience to experience the diction of the in works such as The Missing Voice the frame of this work, using both the city image through sound in a unified, (1999), continues this form of audio original soundtrack and an English dub sensuous encounter. tour in the form of solitary urban guides of the film in sync with the original In working lately with Tonne on that are part urban geography, part de- French, was a way of crossing time projects that unite image and sound, I
Fig. 2. Sound Polaroids project, 1999. Using a questionnaire, the au- thor asked people to recall a point of sound significance for them in their own city. (below) Hundreds of these suggestions were col- lated, the sites visited, then digitally photographed and sonically recorded onto digital tape. (right) Installation view at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. (© Robin Rimbaud)
Scanner, Remembering How to Forget 67
Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/09611210152780700 by guest on 02 October 2021 The Collector Considering how we consume and dis- play sound in live performance led me to explore more time-based work. Working with Austrian artist Katarina Matiasek on The Collector (1999–2000) allowed us to explore the very idea of collectability. Commissioned for the ex- hibition Sonic Boom, which took place at the Hayward Gallery London in spring 2000 and was curated by David Toop, the installation we conceived dis- Fig. 3. Screenshot of a Soundtoys page from the Audible Communities CD, 1999. Screen cap- entangled the usual comprehensive ture of one of five Soundtoys on Audible Communities CD-ROM release. This screen-based unity of sound and image as is dis- work allows the user to manipulate sounds and compose music using a computer cursor. played and almost standardized within This work displays the author’s interest in creating a new synthesis between a sound and an a seamless stream of multimedia spec- associated image. (© Robin Rimbaud) tacle. Inspired by John Fowles’s famous novel of the same name, The Collector have attempted to bring together a fresh to very rapidly comprehend how their was an audio/video environment cre- relationship to the creation of music actions can “play” and affect this work ated within an oblong and rounded and musical instruments, the enjoyment and in so doing reflect the shift that new room reminiscent of an orangery. Dis- and participation of music and audience technologies have caused in our concep- played upon the two opposing, slightly and the relationship between music and tions of live art. bent ends of the space, the work fea- image (usually formatted as packaged More absurdly, in 1999, a growing frus- tured two synchronous 16-mm-to-video music/sound). A work like Soundtoys on tration with the physicality and limita- projections of numerous butterflies in our Audible Communities CD (1999) (Fig. tions of performance and the impossibil- swift succession. Projecting these still 3)—a screen-based work in which the ity of performing live electronics led me images in extremely rapid succession user can manipulate sounds and com- to consider a playful response. Employ- made the butterflies seem to start to pose music using the cursor—displays ing 16 look-alikes all around the globe, flap their wings. But as the musical nar- our interest in creating a new synthesis from as far afield as New York, rative unfolded, with highly amplified between the sound and the associated Amsterdam and Vienna, I promoted 16 and processed recordings of butterfly image. Played live as sound and image shows in one evening, all beginning at a wings, the seemingly innocent sound instruments, music is controlled and similar time with identical material on specimens began to shift, to scientific constructed by various sound units. By customized CD-ROMs under the banner recordings of subtly rustling wings and shifting bars and objects visually on the of a “Scanner Promotional Show.” Each the blunt noise of the collector’s ham- screen with the computer mouse, one of the look-alikes became “Scanner” for mer transformed through nailing down can adjust rhythms, pulses and struc- the evening and played the material back his objects of desire. tures. Sound, and its corresponding im- to the apparently very receptive audience A more recent performance highlight age and performance, is dependent who had attended this free event. To add has been a performance in 2000 for RAI upon acoustic phenomena. An audience confusion to the situation, a girl became Radio in Italy, when I was commissioned responds to and with it. Understanding “me” in Austria, and one show was re- to play a live show over the public “how” the technology works is less im- viewed favorably in Germany without the Phono system, commonly used to an- portant for an audience than being able realization that I was not in fact present. nounce news of a lost child or danger-
Fig. 4. The Spirit of Speech/El espíritu de la palabra, multiple-screen projection and sound installation, Venice Biennale, 2001. This work ex- plored through sound and image the hidden resonances and meanings within memory. (© Robin Rimbaud)
68 Scanner, Remembering How to Forget
Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/09611210152780700 by guest on 02 October 2021 ous waters at sea. Broadcast over 20 km were present as long as my eyes were Toop, David. “Scanning: Aether Talk,” in Ocean of Sound (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1995) pp. 33–36. of the beach on the Rimini seafront to closed. If I blinked, the images would lit- many unsuspecting listeners, including erally flash across the screen. If I rested sun-worshippers and Baywatch-style my eyes for much longer, then the im- Discography guards, the concert featured a live Mass ages could “breathe” in their own space Rimbaud, Robin. The Garden Is Full of Metal, Sub transmitted on the radio mixed into my and be seen for a longer time. Sound Rosa CD (1998). arsenal of sounds (see
Scanner, Remembering How to Forget 69
Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/09611210152780700 by guest on 02 October 2021