Date: 1.30.2001
From: Mathew Kabatoff (mathew@rhizome.org)
Subject: interview with Germaine Koh
Keywords: radio, public space
Mathew Kabatoff: Can you talk about the use of mediated devices in your
work? How did you decide to use only popular mass media formats?
Germaine Koh: I have great faith in the power of commonplace things to
tell us about ourselves, how we live and how we relate to each other. I
think that the minor things that mediate our everyday lives inevitably
bear a residual meaningfulness, and much of my work has been an effort
to allow these things to speak quietly back to us. I would characterize
my work as a whole as an attempt to be attentive to the poetics of daily
life by focusing on those phenomena that shape everyday experience,
often slightly below the threshold of notice (and, yes, value). I would
like to create moments in which the commonplace, the mundane and the
ubiquitous are rendered remarkable again. To this end, ambiguity is
indeed a strategy I employ consciously. I am interested in points of
ambiguity as junctures at which viewers/receivers/interlocutors are
required to weigh for themselves not only various potential meanings but
also their own predilections, and thus are points at which the processes
of communicating, of making sense and of reckoning with things, are
drawn out (extenuated?).
Since my earliest projects I have been committed to working with already-
existing phenomena. Part of this was a simple utopian principle of not
adding new objects to an already-saturated world, but it also arose from
a more general interest on my part in observing the world as it already
exists around us. The self-effacing nature of my work and the fact that
it is often phrased in the form of experiments, are related to an
attempt to step back in order to observe the world unfolding, if that
doesn't sound too corny.
MK: Your most recent project entitled "by the way," part of Arte in
Sita/La Torre de los Vientos, was installed inside the Le Torre de Los
Vientos--tower of the winds. How has the space been appropriated by
artists, and what is its signification to Mexico City?
GK: La Torre de los Vientos, by the Uruguayan sculptor Gonzalo Fonseca,
is one of a series of monumental concrete sculptures erected alongside
the peripheral highway in Mexico City at the time of the 1968 Olympiad.
Specifically, it is a 15-metre-high, more-or-less conical structure
which, unlike the other sculptures that make up this "Ruta de la
Amistad" (Route of Friendship), is also an inhabitable building. About
five years ago a young curator-artist, Pedro Reyes, began to invite
local and international artists to use this very idiosyncratic building
for site-specific interventions, and the resulting series of projects
have included some thoroughly remarkable pieces (see documentation on
their website at http://www.arteinsitu.org.mx). The structure and site
present a number of challenges. Bounded by the Periferico and on- and
off-ramps, its site is marked by the rumble of passing traffic. Within
the structure, which is enclosed but for small apertures in its walls
and an overhead oculus, there is a certain sensory disorientation due to
its blindness to the outside and its prominent echo. Inside there are
also five fixed concrete elements that suggest some kind of a
spectatorial situation.
Following on my first working trip to Mexico, for which I had produced
the site-specific piece "En busca del nivel del lago" at Ex Teresa Arte
Actual, Pedro and Antonio OutÛn, another curator-artist, invited me to
develop a new project for La Torre. The resulting piece, "by the way,"
recognizes that the commuters passing by the building are the most
regular users of the site. Within the structure a live audio-video feed
monitors the passing traffic. The audio feed is processed by an effects
unit to resemble gusts of wind that correspond to each passing car. This
transformed sound is retransmitted, in real time, as a localized FM
radio broadcast borrowing the frequency of an existing radio station
known for its frequent traffic reports, so that the commuters passing by
can listen to their own passage, transformed into wind. The character of
the transmission varies throughout the day, as a real-time measure of
the flow of vehicles. It is a kind of alternative traffic report, one
which tends to become the weather report at the same time. I was hoping
that in that city infamous for its congestion and pollution, the project
might provide a quiet opportunity to imagine a more open space and
condition for passage.
MK: "by the way" was your first use of low-power FM radio. If you think
about radio as somewhat paradoxical (it's free, it's always on, it
appears to have no commercial value, it informs citizens about current
events, and steers them according to certain ideological underpinnings),
it seems to fit right into your work.
GK: Radio is certainly a medium to which I feel a kinship. I have been
drawn to it precisely for this omnipresent-yet-elusive quality, the fact
that physically it exists everywhere around us and is related (separated
only by degrees) to so many other electro-magnetic phenomena that make
the world go 'round, and that socially it is, and has historically been,
a means to make connections, to incite and to arouse. Really, it's an
ideal conceptualist medium (this is basically the practical message I
distilled from McLuhan). There's something about the medium that is
paralleled in the structure of my work: it is a matter of focusing
thought by means of fine-tuning phenomena already existing in the
surroundings.
MK: Could you talk about your "Teams" buttons piece in which visitors at
both YYZ in Toronto and at the Sydney Biennial were given buttons that
designated which "team" they were on? How do you feel this piece
addressed the concept of "transmission"?
GK: Actually, the buttons were available for the taking, rather than
given to people. This is important, because it was a matter of setting
up a situation that seemed like it could be significant. This is one of
the pieces that function as experiments. There were quantities of blank
publicity buttons, in two different colors, which visitors could take,
or not. I imagined that as participants walked away wearing or carrying
a button, they would become points in a tenuous network of chance and
association held together only by the innocuous circumstance of having
made the same choice in the same place. The people wearing the buttons
became beacons marking a shifting set of relations spreading and
dispersing across the city. The piece innocently mimics some of the ways
in which communities define themselves and individuals stake
allegiances, by adopting signs of difference and identity. There is also
suggestion of gamesmanship, in which one establishes one's position in
response and relation to others'. Yet, at the same time, it is a
deliberately light proposition: while seeming to translate a simple
choice into a potentially meaningful gesture, it really draws no
conclusions. I imagine that there may have been passing moments of
recognition and even absurd but inevitable comradeship when one spotted
others wearing a similar button. Two years later, I still very
occasionally see people wearing the buttons.
There is another project related to the radio piece which is worth
talking about in terms of transmission and dispersal. The piece
"Prayers" (1999) was an intervention into an office computer network. I
installed a computer which essentially spied on a standard office
computer, capturing all the keystrokes entered on this other computer.
This data was translated into Morse code, in real time, and re-
transmitted - broadcast - as Morse-encoded smoke signals to the outside
of the building, to disperse into the surrounding atmosphere. It was a
way of giving an appropriately-ephemeral physical form to the minor
hopes and mundane expectations embedded within the daily industry of an
office, and channeled through its apparatus. I was thinking of people
sitting at their computers sending e-mail messages out on "the wing of a
prayer." I imagined this intervention as a sort of exhaust system for
the daily activity occurring within the building, showing increasing
activity during certain times of the day and becoming quiet at others.
The piece also recalled the links between our current technologies for
communicating and connecting across distances, and previous
communications revolutions, associated variously with Morse code (that
initial binary language), steam power, and smoke signals.
For many of the pieces that unfold in the real world (as opposed to
gallery space, which I'm still committed to as an apparatus for focusing
attention), I privilege the unexpected encounter. For example, the
classified ad project (my usually-quite-banal personal journal that
appears in the section of the classified ads used to seek long-lost
relatives) is completely anonymous, and to me the primary audience for
the piece are the people who might encounter it by chance, as they carry
and read their newspapers around with them in the course of the day.
These people are the ones who might wonder about the monumentalization
of mundane activities, who might recognize the situations I describe as
ones also lived by themselves or others they know, and who might be
compelled to become regular readers. That is, they are the audience who
will find themselves reckoning with an unexpected and lightly-altered
familiar situation in a way that the already-informed audience might
not. Likewise, for the piece "Poll," which is a simple metal fence post
planted in the middle of a well-worn walking path, the real community
for the piece is not the people who go to look at the post as a piece of
art (though I love the absurdity of that as well), but rather the
regular users of the site, who are the ones who, through their daily
passage through the space, eventually shift the path around the pole.
The pole is not the object; rather, it points out processes around it--
in this case observing the quiet force of pedestrian flow.
For "by the way," the actual building housed the electronic equipment,
openly arranged with visible wires, including the cable running from the
transmitter up through the skylight to the transmitting antenna. There
was a monitor with a live video feed of the passing traffic, with the
transformed wind-like audio playing simultaneously on several radios and
through the video-monitor speakers. These were dispersed around the
space on the various concrete blocks (which are already seat-like),
creating listening stations. The acoustics of the space somehow
amplified the sound.
MK: Has your thinking been affected by the Internet? Do you see yourself
addressing that medium more so in the future?
GK: I'm mildly interested in the Internet as a relatively free medium,
although it is too mediated--not direct enough--for my liking. The one
piece I have done for Internet, "for you," dealt with the medium in the
only way I could think of at the time, by addressing that very aspect of
mediated, over-determined interaction with others. It was another social
experiment, in which visitors to the site
(http://www.artengine.ca/germaine_koh/for_you/) are asked to write an
anonymous fortune which a future visitor to the site will receive. After
doing so, he or she is invited to click on a fortune-cookie icon which
will generate a fortune for him/her from those previously submitted. The
project poses a simple question about how people will react when given
the freedom to interact anonymously with other strangers, and the
submissions are quite telling. As one might expect, most are rather good-
natured, but some are quite vicious.
MK: Can you talk about your choice of transforming the ubiquitous sound
of traffic, in "by the way," into the equally common sound of wind?
GK: Another recurring feature of my work is a desire to propose, in very
modest ways, some kind of connection of individuals to larger forces,
whether social or natural. This arises not out of wacky new-age
sentimentality (trust me on this), but rather a search for the street-
level poetics of everyday life. Thus there is a business card piece
("Exchange," 1996) that suggests a possible relation between the mundane
exchange of contact information with the vagaries of fate and fortune.
The bronze "Token" project translates natural forces of erosion into the
minor friction and fretting of objects carried in one's pocket.
Similarly, installations such as "by the way," "Prayers" and "En busca
del nivel del lago" somehow relate social activity with things more
elemental or intangible. I think that the escape from language that you
mention is important. One of the reasons I make visual art is that I
think that ideas often have to be experienced physically, and although
some people think that my work is strictly conceptual, in fact it is
always rooted in a physical encounter with the material of the world.
MK: How did you get a radio station to let you use their frequency? Was
there any feedback from the drivers who passed the Tower and experienced
the sound of their own car as wind?
GK: I did not ask permission to use the existing frequency, but rather
transmitted over top of it, so that in the rather localized area of my
transmission, the commercial station's transmission would give way to
mine, without explanation. I didn't get any feedback from unknown
drivers. However, I should say that part of the emotional charge of
pieces like this and the classified ad piece is the process of imagining
how it they are received unexpectedly. An important aspect of both
pieces is the fact that they are anonymous and non-commercial. Both
reclaim rather frenetic commercial space in order to insert gentle
reminders into other spheres and speeds of activity.
I have generally at least superficially "played by the rules" when I
have used existing modes of dissemination. That is, I pay for ad space
in the newspapers, I negotiate the placement of my postcards, and I
distribute objects through existing channels, while drawing attention to
aspects of these distribution systems. The strategy of doing work while
passing unnoticed is one that is quite dear to me, and I'm convinced it
can be an effective political operation.
However, I am beginning to talk with some other people specifically
about doing more "public" radio work (i.e. regularly-scheduled
programming that would be more likely to interfere in an ongoing way
with the programs of existing stations), and I suppose at some point we
will need to make clear decisions about how to position our
transmissions. In terms of radio, there is a great tradition of activist
low-power and community broadcasting that I'm quite willing to learn
from.
http://www.arteinsitu.org.mx http://www.artengine.ca/germaine_koh/for_you/
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