Paul Demarinis is an American electronic artist who has been creating sound, computer, performance and interactive work since 1971. Much of his recent work involves computer synthesised and processed speech.
SYDNEY, NOVEMBER 15, 1992
SD: I am interested in the performance that you did at the Museum of Contemporary Art the other night with the glove.1 I was reading about what Merleau-Ponty had to say about gesture being a nascent form of language ... that these sorts of move ments, while they don't contain any semantic content, as it were, were the very things which were the precursors to spoken language. I was curious as to any ideas you may have about that...
PD: Well, yeah, an interesting thing is when I started hacking the glove together and started playing with it, I realised that with my finger controlling the pitch of the voice with the finger gesture, I could do all different accents, it just cam e so easily - I could make them sound really fruity, or sound really commanding. I was talking with Edward T. Hall, the anthropologist, who's very interested in body language and gesture; he's the guy who did the original research on proxemics, body dist ancing, and he said that it's the same area of the brain that controls the vocal chords and so there's a natural translation of these things, whereas if you were to try to do it with your eye - blinking your eye - you couldn't create quite that analogue. The idea is that these more sensory modalities - or motor modalities, I guess you'd call them - the ones that have common evolutionary or physiological origins, almost create the analogue. Certainly the work with the pitch of the voice is less about the s imilarity of perception than the similarity of production, of speech, of language, and of music. I mean, people have speculated from way back ... Nietzsche wrote an extensive piece about this 'primordial language' that was somewhere between music and spee ch ...
AMJ: 'Ur' language, Heideggerian 'Ur' language ... the originary tongue ...?
PD: There's a researcher, Lieberman, at Brown University, a physiologist who's studied the evolution of the vocal tract in humans by examining skulls of Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons, estimating how long their vocal tracts must have been, and how m any different sounds with such a vocal tract you could have made. And his conclusion is that the real advantage that Homo Sapiens had over Neanderthals wasn't brain power, but verbal communication. He challenges Chomsky in, I think, a very interesting way , when you look at it physiologically. Chomsky would have us think that language was born out of Adam's rib or something, as a 'whole thing': production, perception ... but physiological evidence would have that perhaps the parts of the brain that are res ponsible for understanding speech may have existed very early, may exist in birds or lizards... they're already there... to be able to take a symbol stream of that variety, and that density, thirty symbols a second and put it together into a meaningful pa ttern. What Lieberman says is what was slow to come was the actual physiology for producing that variety of symbols at that rate. The brain areas, to produce a symbolic communication existed, maybe, as part of something else, but the length of the vocal t ract became very important. And one of his little asides that I thought was so compelling, is that in evolutionary development, the same parts of the body are used over and over again. I mean, there's no reason, as pointed out years ago, we don't fart to communicate. It evolved with this vocal tract, being the same place where we eat, and later, where animals breathe; we do three things with it now, you see, it must have had some great evolutionary advantage... if we're doing three things through this nar row passage. I was in a restaurant the next day and I saw a poster for the Heimlich manoeuvre, and I realised, God, Lieberman's right. A million years later, you're in a restaurant and you're breathing, eating and talking. All through this one little narr ow passageway. The fact that people are still choking to death (laughter) a million years after the evolution of speech, means that speech must be very, very important. If you buy Lieberman's thesis about the evolution of language, it looks like th e brain's area for understanding speech developed, and the brain's area for producing symbols and some kind of vocalisation developed later. Then the real development, the latest development a million years ago was the development of a very mechanically v ariable vocal tract for actually making these symbols. Then it's possible that what must have been before that, what these Neanderthals must have had, with a limited ability to produce different, distinctive symbols, was something like song, something mel ismatic, where the melody, and expression of the speech would be there, but with no semantic precision. Then you would have this kind of aural language, this kind of... something that pre-dated linguistic precision.
AMJ: I'm interested in this in relation to the Foucault quote2 that we talked about earlier, the one you used in relation to some of your earlier voice work. Why the invocation of the theological in relation to speech?
PD: If 'divine' is never something that we see and yet it's something that we know... Divinity being somehow associated, I think, with something transcendental, primordial... It's something that's not around us. Yet... We talk about it all the tim e.
SD: It's proximal, but out of sight.
PD: It's out of sight, but it's in the saying; it... happens. We talk about it all the time. So, this other thing that you could call divinity or something, the other quality that we're never sure of, I think we find in music a lot. The experienci ng, the belonging that you feel in music... some kind of 'big belonging'... when somebody plays their blaster-box, they're feeling like they're belonging...
SD: There was a fellow I was with recently... he'd had this experience of singing in a choir and wanted me to explain to him why he felt so good afterwards. And I found it a really challenging question and a really difficult one to answer. I do n't know whether it's a release of endorphins in the brain from breathing very hard or something like that. But I think I know what it is he was talking about. It's a sort of accommodation of that which, like you say, is beyond... grasp; there's a sense o f controlling something that's, at the same time, uncontrollable....
AMJ: The voice and sound are often used as primary exemplars of the transcendental...
PD: Mmm... yeah, I think so, and so that quote's an anomalous quote for Foucault who doesn't deal with the notion of divinity very much. I liked that. I did an interactive installation piece with two telephone booths at the Exploratorium - which i s a science museum that has artists come in and do projects - where people could talk to each other and perform computer operations on their voices to explore that region between language and music. I used that quote at the top of it.
SD: There's something about that intermediary space with telephones, between the said and the hearing, where this 'third term' comes into it. It's like a... deus ex machina. I wonder if you've got any thoughts on this... technical interm ediary space?
PD: There are so many thoughts to have, there are so many things that have been said well. I was just re-reading Edmund Carpenter, "Oh what a blow that phantom gave me!" He's an anthropologist who spent a lot of time in New Guinea in the sixties w ith film and radio, dealing with the government there... (opens book)...
SD: It seems to me to be a large part of the TISEA3 project, this technological 'other space' as it were...
PD: ...this was published in 1972. It's post-McLuhan... dealing with how the government was approaching media, and the cultural implications of this, and he starts his book with a little chapter - 'Angelisation': "Electricity has made angels of al l of us. Not angels in the Sunday-school sense of being good or having wings, but spirit freed from flesh, capable of instant transportation, anywhere. The moment we pick up a phone we're nowhere in space, everywhere in spirit. Nixon on TV is everywhere a t once. That is Saint Augustine's definition of God, a being whose centre is everywhere, whose borders are nowhere". There's so much that's been written and said about that issue. I'd have to say it's almost like my 'grounding' rather than anything I'd li ke to try to expound or extend in any way.
PD: It's a 'Mattel Power Glove'. It's a controller for the 'Nintendo' video game. It has these finger-flex controllers which is all I use, and then it has some ultra-sound things for spatial location. You're supposed to be able to play video games by using the fingers to fire the missiles or something. The design of it makes it look very cyber-prosthetic. There wasn't much use for it except for these finger-flexers, 'flex sensors', so I threw away the rest of it and made a 'hack' to get it talking to the computer directly instead of through its software. Those things are not too interesting to me as general-purpose musical controllers. They're not as interesting as, for example, a keyboard, because you can't do something very precise and repeatabl e. I mean, on a keyboard you can do things that are extremely precise and repeatable, and you can also do very expressive things that have a large degree of indeterminacy. So the glove doesn't afford that kind of repeatability. I mean, gestures transpose well in space. You take this gesture and add it to this gesture, and you make another gesture. You can put gestures together and create a language. The glove controller as it exists doesn't allow that kind of fluidity and it doesn't... computer software d oesn't allow any way to parse combinations, and put them together. Such a language is probably technically possible, but it hasn't been developed yet...
... I thinks it's one of the most interesting things... machine translation of human communication. I have to say, with computers, I don't deal with the idea of artificial intelligence. To my thought, the computer is an artificial memory device. It's some thing that stores or transmits, over time and place, inferences, signs and symbols: signs that are meaningful to the various users. The arbitrariness of computer symbols is certainly a part of their power, I mean, a certain computer number can either be a n instruction that tells the central processing unit to do something, to fetch data; it could be data itself; it could be the character of a letter of a text; it could be a musical note; it can be all of these different things, and it's completely context ual. These symbols are very, very arbitrary. The computer cannot look at patterns of information, it can't re-synchronise itself with anything other than physics. That is, a hard reset: you pull this line low - all these transistors are drained of the sto red charge in them, you start with a blank slate. I'm not too interested in the idea that I'm communicating with someone in the computer, some 'cyber-being'. I think I'm communicating with myself, and you have a marvellous storage device... the double is your own memory that you forgot about. Which it always is in our dreams. The double is always the things we forgot about. The wonder of dreams, the stories that we can experience - and they're still a surprise to us even though we're supposedly scripting them along - is really that we have such a vast memory, and these halls, these chambers of memory are there and we put things there and forget them and we go back and they're part of us again. I think the computer at it best is that, or it's communicating with somebody else.
PD: Oh, let's see... Gee, I could go about it so many different ways... How do you get good at playing the piano? How do you get to Heaven? How do you do any of these things? You say you prayers, and you say them better and better, or you practice the violin, or you... make love, you know, these are all practices...
AMJ: Or you create capitalism as a 'production line'. There are obviously utopian and negative effects of repetition depending on context and reading...
SD: ...the idea that the more something is repeated, the less kind of_'wholesome' the product is...
PD: Well that only came about in the nineteenth century. In Siegfried Gideon's book Mechanisation Takes Command, he talks about the beginning of machine reproduction and how at first it was making better products than artisans could make, because it could repeat them so precisely, and then after a while that became kind of a negative quality.
SD: There's something about the weight of the number of repeated forms that causes them to collapse in on themselves. I was thinking that what I found interesting about your performance was that because what you were doing was not, in a sense, able to be repeated in the same way as you might perform something on the keyboard, it threw something over to the audience that had to be dealt with there and then. You couldn't take it away and listen to it again, and again, like an LP record. Adorno ta lks about that sort of thing as well...
PD: Yeah, absolutely, otherwise I wouldn't perform... I mean it is like playing music and, say, performing it at the keyboard. You can't ever perform something in the same way at a keyboard. If there's nobody listening, even your ears change. If t here's somebody, even one other person listening, you can't say it the same way. That's just so basic to music; music as a kind of... belonging, engaging... I dealt a lot with that in the Edison Effect piece4, i've dealt a lot with the idea of the mechani cal repetition and the music, you know, where music is.
AMJ: So what do you think of, for example, theories like those of Walter Ong's and mcluhan's, that the communality, the 'belonging' that is produced by sound, by virtue of what it is, experientially, phenomenologically, was destroyed once visua l culture gained primacy, for example with the book, mechanisation of printing and so on... you got a kind of individuation of consciousness - on vision - that wasn't possible in oral cultures? Of course the situation has now become massively complex with the proliferation of 'sensory' technologies...
PD: I mean, I have to say about oral cultures, I don't know... Who was it the other day that pointed out that none of us has an experience of an oral culture... or all of us do. (long pause). I don't think it goes away, very much, really. Discours e is always about discourse, talking is always about talking - as Deleuze and Guattari say, it's always about hearsay, it's never about seeing, we don't say what we've seen. They quotes somebody who denies that bees have a language, because bees can only repeat 'linguistically' what they have seen: "there are flowers at this place". A bee can't go and eavesdrop on another hive and hear this information and then go back and tell its hive about that. Deleuze and Guattari seem to hint at that as being one of the crucial qualities of language, that it's always hearsay, it's always based on what has been heard. Then how are things heard visually? Well, you have text. Carpenter says "you can't say 'no' with images". That's a problem with pictorial images. In Ne w Guinea, they were putting posters up, trying to get people not to steal, not to drink beer, etc., And this only promoted more because, he said, denial, negativity, in an image, is always a sub-text, a subtitle to it. 'Don't do this!' assumes that you're not living in a visual world, but within a textual world. Now text is also, as is well known, an auditory modality, this is well established in brain physiology. In the brain, it goes from the visual cortex to the auditory cortex before processing as mea ning. This has been really well established.
Text is sound... how about network computers? That's text... and it's completely communal, it is very communal. The people who are into it are like a bunch of hippies, who are into a kind of communal living thing. I'm not into this electronic mail stuff. People who are, are just as 'hippy-communy' as the 'touchy-feely' people were, and it's purely textual. It may be that the auditory modality that's inherent in text keeps that happening again and again. It isn't like the distant, voyeuristic scrutiny that multiple viewings of a pictorial image offer. They're always mute. That's the idea. The picture is always mute.
AMJ: So, what do you make of what are said to be the phenomenological differences between, say, visual modalities and aural modalities?
PD: I haven't thought enough about visual modalities... I think about sound and auditory phenomena in distinction to something else, but I don't quite know what that is. I've noticed that in learning computers and other things that there are peopl e - and this is kind of folklore - who are visual, they don't have too much of a problem with computers; people who are auditory, they are excellent at computers, and people who are spatial - sculptors, architects and mathematicians who have brilliant enc ompassing minds - can be horrid at dealing with computers...they don't get that kind of reasoning. So there might be something other than this visual-auditory axis. It doesn't just have to do with just the eyes. A good friend of mine, a sculptor, can do t hese great 3D models but he couldn't write a computer programme. I could write a computer programme to do those but I couldn't make a picture of Mickey Mouse in 3D - I wouldn't know where to start. So again, this textual thing comes down to an auditory th ing, but the spatial thing seems the thing apart. When I talk to phd mathematicians they are always waving their hands in the air, trying to elucidate what they're saying and I guess it 'does it' for them but it doesn't 'do it' for me: I don't 'get' what they're saying. They're actually locating points in space, in the multi-dimensionality inside their heads.
SD: You raised an interesting point before... about what you do with computers, about how you understand this to be a way of communicating with yourself, rather than a more communal sense of communicating. I'm interested in extending that idea a little bit, in terms of the way that use of language and sound are considered the guarantors of self-presence in western philosophy. If you view the computer as a prosthesis of your own 'internal time consciousness', I wonder if the computer might not a ct as a kind or means of deferral_
AMJ: ...or you seem to suggest some kind of 'externalisation'?
SD: ...externalisation of consciousness... It raises all sorts of issues.
PD: I don't know. You may be dealing with your own memory, with other people's memory, in some way, for example, the programmer who wrote Microsoft Word you're communicating with. I think that as far as the being or the 'identity', the 'stamp' or the 'mark' or whatever that moment of being is, mechanical reproduction and recording erased forever the certainty of authorship. You could take everything else away about the machine age and art, but you'd be left with an uncertain authorship.
SD: You spoke earlier also about the advent of electricity... About, for example, the phone making us nowhere in space and everywhere in spirit...
AMJ: ...like God, the ultimate author...
PD: We put our mythology of life force onto electricity. Electricity is the most lucid medium. It's more lucid than coal, it's more lucid than authority, because authority is always contextual whereas electricity can always be changed into heat, or information. It's like an ideal currency. You can turn it on and turn it off, instantly. We like to turn things on and off, we get this great feeling of satisfaction... Switches - there's no reason to construct a switch in a particular way. These things are mechanical encodings of some kind of mythology.
AMJ: It's fairly appropriate in terms of a cultural tradition of knowledge being associated with light. To be 'lucid' is literally to do with brightness or shine, reflected light. It has to do with intelligibility, and metaphors of light have t o do with the ability to construct and control a space of knowing. But what of sound?
PD: Well here's the thing: light casts shadows. From Plato on we are aware that all that we see are the shadows. I don't see you, I only see the reflected light. I talked about this in my work The Edison Effect. This is the effect that recording h ad on our way of remembering and belonging. Another aspect is the idea of uncertain authorship because Edison was such a charlatan. And another is a reference to the actual phenomenon which is the boiling off of the filament which would deposit on the lig ht globes causing them to cast shadows instead of light. The idea is that every technology, if it's a mythical encoding, also has these shadows. And what are the shadows of mechanical recording? Indeed, they are the tune running through the head. You don' t just experience the record when you are listening to the record, in fact you experience the record with such joy and delight because of the anticipation wrought by this shadow in the brain, this memory. The first time you hear a record it's no big thing , the second time it may have something that reminds you of something else, but it gets to the point where you can only enjoy a certain performance of Brahm's fourth symphony or something, maybe only the one that has the scratch in the certain place. Thes e are the shadows that the medium casts and we 'make' those, we 'carry' them. This tune running through the head is the shadow of the medium... so it's temporal but it's not only deferred to the moment when it happens, the moment of mechanical reproductio n. It's about the anticipation, you can listen to it inside your head and this can create a desire to want to hear it.
SD: It's almost as if the record needle cuts a groove in the brain.
PD: Interestingly enough there are no references to a tune running through the head before mechanical recording was invented, with the exception of Emily Dickinson talking of obsessive thoughts about her distant lover as "my mind running in its gro ove". This medium, like the light globe, is very much part and parcel of the experience. And to speak of it as a deferral...
SD: This quote from the SoundCulture catalogue says it all: "The needle in the groove, no less than the needle in the vein, is one symbolic emblem on the quixotic quest for a perfect moment of fulfilment." This is the same sort of thing that yo u're talking about?
PD: Yes, I wrote that, so...
SD: That came up in Yuji Sone's piece at the ABC5, where the audience was asked to imagine, for example, a piece of Bart>k's, and if you knew the piece, the tune ran through the head. And yet, there was no sound at all. There was already that s hadow, the groove was already cut in the brain, so to speak, the rest of it just had to be filled in. But I'm wondering if the shadows are not 'long' in the sense that if there is the capacity in the brain for the recognition of certain sounds, that these grooves are not 'vestigial'. You talked earlier about the idea that a comparison, historically or archaeologically speaking, can be drawn between language and music. One's ability to recognise language must mean, therefore, that before mechanical reprodu ction, we must have already had something for 'scoring' 'grooves'. For example, folk music...
PD: Yes, some forms have a lot mnemonic devices such as rhythm and rhyme built in to them. A-B-A is one of the few universals in music.
SD: Just back to your performance the other night, I was interested in the way you set yourself up as a conjurer. In a sense you were punning a musical performance. There was a real sense of tongue-in-cheek, as it were, going on throughout your performances.
AMJ: This idea seems to be strong thematically in your work. You say in your piece of writing for the TISEA performance that you are interested in the voices of "evangelists, hypnotists and salesman": shonksters, tricksters manipulators, and fo r the phonograph piece in SoundCulture last year you wrote that it was about 'ancient' phonograph records which was clearly...
PD: Phoney..
AMJ: Yes, phoney
SD: Interesting pun...
PD: Well, it's not a pun. The Oxford English Dictionary says the word 'phoney' didn't show up until 1900 - phoney: false, the false voice - whereas Carpenter seems to think that it comes from telephone but that doesn't make sense because there is an inherent truthfulness_there is somebody there on the other end of the line in 1900.
AMJ: This interests me in relation to different modalities of sound and voice, their purported 'truth' or otherwise.
PD: Well, interestingly, when I started talking to people about this 'melody' of voice and musical content and its importance, I found that people (with the exception of George Lakoff, who seems to 'get' a lot of the ideas about sound, and living linguists) just think about texts which can be written or spoken as if it doesn't really matter. But anthropologists, particularly Edward T. Hall, understood the difference, and the other people who understood this are salesman, 'sales engineers', who go out and sell. A lot of them have humble backgrounds doing door-to-door and they understood, they knew exactly what I was talking about. In fact several of them from different companies said: "can you make a machine that will train salesman how to sing?" T here's apparently a series of books that's part of a training course that teaches salesman how to 'sing', how to say things in a convincing way. And I think a lot of people come by it honestly, that is, they come out of evangelical backgrounds in the sout h and become soap salesman or politicians_they come out of this school of rhetoric that's very predictable. But these are traditional encodings of the convincing voice, and these are the people who make their living by 'singing'. A lot of my material come s from tapes that I find discarded in opportunity shops from companies such as Amway. There is this one of four Amway cassettes with a 'high up' Amway salesman teaching the philosophy and methods of sales to other people, and interviews with successful sa lespeople from Arkansas - we just elected one of them - and you know, these voices are just marvellous. At one point this guy who must have had a high school education from Illinois or somewhere says: "It's not the words that you say, it's the music that sells the product ". These voices that have to convince have a great deal of musicality in them and if you listen to a marketplace, in a place where markets are still central to the economy of a country, you'll hear a whole interplay of the rhythm of the marketplace, of the people chopping meat, the hawkers, all at once. Hall has observed with children in the playground this 'entrainment' that goes on. That marketing, that selling, that commerce and exchange are all a kind of 'symphony'. This summer I hea rd of a performance that Anne Carlson did. She had been studying auctioneering and did this piece standing in her bridal gown auctioning herself off and then she went into 'the evangelist' routine... very good voice characterisations. Speaking of this 'de ferral', I was staying in a YMCA in Taipei in 1971 and there were these two Baptists from Alabama, these two big fat porky guys in white suits doing faith-healing. They had an assembly hall and were doing the laying on of the hands and praying to God for the blind person or the crippled person, and then they had a translator who would translate their English to Chinese, and that's when the person would be healed... only when the translation was accomplished. (laughter)
Référence: http://autonomous.org/soundsite/main.html