Daniel Cole is a member of the Peel sound performance group, and a sound producer based in Sydney
"Sound is an unanalytical model of sense. It is a collaborator with no loyalties, no implications. Sound is true imperialism. Composers push it around as if their careers depend on it. When I grow up I wanna be a fact of life.- Chris Mann, Changing The Subject, Machine for Making Sense
Chris Mann is a writer of conceptually-based, polemical, semi-Dadaist fiction, as well as a visual artist oriented toward a text-based format. He has worked on a number of telematic art projects, and is a member of Machine for Making Sense, a collaborativ e sound and performance group.
SYDNEY, MAY 3, 1992
DC: In recent years your work has involved a community-based notion of telematics. The notion of telematics - can you elaborate?
CM: ...There are several forms of telematics. On the one hand, there is a form of telematics which is informed by cybernetics, which is in turn informed by expert systems...
DC: ...what would be an example of an expert system? A basic programme, perhaps... a digital delay?
CM: An expert system is a factory, where the first thing that the worker on a factory floor does is produce themselves... after that, reproduce themselves... so that's what an expert system is; a system that merely reproduces itself... and the mark eting arm of expert systems is called 'virtual reality'... which from my understanding is basically an American boy's game for a very labour-intensive way of generating metaphors... it's a high-tech metaphor...
DC: From what I've heard that seems to be so... from NASA... the boys from NASA...
CM: NASA is actually doing more interesting work than anybody else... where they're actually going is directly into the eyeball now... they have given away all the monitors, the head-gear stuff and all that crap and they're putting lasers directly through the eyeball... they're somewhat embarrassed by the manual override system that humans employ... which is called 'blinking'.
DC: It's like A Clockwork Orange... that scene where the eyes are...
CM: I'm afraid I haven't seen that... not only have I not seen The Sound Of Music I haven't seen A Clockwork Orange.
DC: It is frightening though... that it's all just a metaphor... for what reality?
CM: Well... or for being something else... but the Americans have never been very good at metaphors because the Americans are into Nominalisation... American English is superficially and structurally German, so they turn everything into nouns - wh ich is that whole thing about 'commodification'.
DC: You link the noun to 'commodity'?
CM: It's that old 'born again' notion that if you can name it you have power. Power consists of various things; one aspect is that you can price something... and the other aspect is that you can tell someone with power because they don't have to de cide anything... they're actually immune to decisions and employ other people to make decisions for them and are immune to which way decision-making folds out... So a bureaucracy is mapped negatively; one assumes that most people are employed to sa y no... but the demarcation is a negative portrait in which they have no power... so, that's the cybernetic version of telematics...
DC: ...and the telematics which interests you...?
CM: I'm interested in cybernetics and the form of linguistics which is now consistently referred to as compositional linguistics... which tends to be informed by cybernetics and second-order cybernetics. So it's about constructing systems... how y ou would set up a system to construct.
DC: Do you mean 'compositional' as composing within a musical framework?
CM: That which would not have happened otherwise... a composer is that which is required for something to happen...
DC: This comes back to the question...
CM: Well, yes... the question is whether the question has manners... and then the question is to ask why and how... but, I produced a piece for radio called the Blue Moon Project - basically a musical progression, and the chord structure fo r Blue Moon is basically the model chord structure for 70 percent of all subsequent popular musics... it's the classic. I was very interested in the fact that many art composers - serious, academic, avant-garde art composers - were at one stage or other, cocktail pianists... Stockhausen, Kenneth Gaburo, Don Banks, Milton Abbot, Keith Humble - so the idea was at the same time, in Melbourne at five-to-eight, we would have a rendition of Blue Moon. So we learn more about the way a composer dea ls with anything by having something to throw it against. On Monday we had Elvis doing it, on Tuesday, Col Chaterby and so-on and so-forth. It was a conceptual drone, and it was a contradictory necrophilia, during a breakfast programme... so it was a cons istent loop, and we had a hundred versions of it. Except that it became a cult number where the people would go into a jazz club and request Blue Moon. All the musicians in Melbourne hated me - portable moments of time - so that's what I think we d o with radio.
CM: I've been interested for a number of years in the relationship, of what the job description of the arts is - in my case most specifically music - what the job description of music is in the economy as a whole. Fifteen years ago music was the s econd-largest industry in the world, now it's ranked about eighth or tenth and going down - the economic clout which used to be reversed for music is now occupied by drugs. The question then arises: 'what's the difference?' So what is the traditional role of music? What is music supposed to do... what has been its job description... music is a modelling environment...
DC: As a framework?
CM: I'm stuck on the orchestra; this is the model, the model factory.
DC: Yes, you have 'slave violinists'...
CM: ...but this is what is; historically this is the case, this is not a metaphor, this is a description.
DC: We have the pictures to prove it.
CM: I know - I was there! In the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, if you wanted to find out what your inter-continental ballistic missile systems were capable of, you would be put into a music school - not in an airborne fashion into a music school (!) - the c omputer was taken out and delivered to a music school and the students and composers used these programmes to generate pieces... so you find out what the computational capacity of that computer is... what systems it will allow... where its dysfunctions ar e... what structures and strategies it's capable of complementing.
DC: All this through the application to a musical framework...
CM: ...there are whole areas of pyscho-acoustics which have been legislated about, there are whole groups of frequencies which you are not allowed to use.
DC: Such as sub-sonics?
CM: Yes, and within audible range - for example, if you use 76 cycles per second for any period of time. There was a lot of modelling done in music schools in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s for music synthesis, music scheduling events in time... this is now used by Ford and Toyota, in a manufacturing process called 'Just In Time'; it is the standard manufacturing ethos in most factories these days. It was around in the 1970s.
DC: So, certain structures and motifs have been used in music to increase productivity, outputs?
CM: Yes, but this is what the job description of what music is... to investigate structures, to model structures and then extrapolate and employ wherever... this is not a peculiar argument. Jacques Attali has exactly the same argument. Music is a modelling environment, a harmless modelling environment.
DC: You speak of music as a totality, as a particular structure - what sort of music is it; are there examples of that 'cold-war' music you describe - produced from the defence computer models? There was a lot of that type of work being done. I t's not my favourite time - go through any American computer composer list from the 1950s.
DC: Nevertheless it still comes under the ambit of Music.
CM: That's the relationship between music and cybernetics.
DC: Is that when it first started?
CM: No, I would not agree with that, because there are series of sacred musics, such as Balinese and Gamalan, that are all mathematically-based and incredibly precise; they are modelled on the movement of the heavens, all sorts of metaphysical and physical correspondents are there.
DC: Are you working within a model of cybernetics which is not the NASA model but a concept that goes back further?
CM: Traditionally, the military have modelled their developments for industry...
DC: Where would we be without them?
CM: That's their job description, they're the research arm of industry, they model all sorts of things. Safeways is designed the way it is because of the work that the military did in Vietnam_it's a real connection. The aisles are the width they a re, shelves are the height they are, the amount of information that you take in is what is, the check-out is what it is. All of this was modelled in Vietnam...
DC: So does it come down to an efficiency as a general aim?
CM: This is what you can get humans to do, how efficiently you can get them to exploit themselves. It's just a modelling, that has really been its job description. So I've been interested in cultural expressions like music. The big crisis in the e conomy at the moment is in management. Certain sectors of the economy have increased their productivity tenfold... the only sector not to increase its productivity in Australia since the 1950s is management_and management is in deep shit.
DC: But there are schools which encourage and teach management as a process.
CM: Yes, so the point of this is that managers now have computers on their desks - but they have not increased their productivity because most managers of course can't type!
DC: Survival is perhaps something you hope to bring to these managers.
CM: Yes, I've been spending a bit of time with the Graduate School of Management at Monash University talking about these issues - how you can use music in relation to the organisation/corporation/school - as a medium - in the sense of media; a me dium like radio, television, the print media, or the voice...
DC: How can the orchestra or music help business achieve their aims and productivity?
CM: Peter Drucker, the manager guru, constantly talks about conductors and orchestras... Attali is more interesting, he wrote a book called 'Noise'1; he was Mitterand's economic adviser, and is now head of the 'Bank of Europe'.
CM: The first requirement of the map is that it is more portable than the terrain. The American military used 300 different computer languages, which was embarrassing. So they developed a single language called AIDA. It is such an incredible langu age that it could not be modelled - only implemented. So there was no way to test run it.
DC: Sounds rather dangerous...
CM: Well, there was a period of a couple of weeks where the world could have blown up. It still may happen - possibly - it has already happened - we may indeed be parenthetic. So the idea of a modelling is in fact an implementation. In the Mach ine for Making Sense, I was talking about when a model is its own experiment - I use modelling in preference to mapping because I'm interested in what hasn't happened.
DC: The example I had in mind was that - page 26 from my street directory was missing, and it was essential to get here...
CM: That's an argument for narrative... 1953 was a more or less interesting place to visit but I would not like to live there. If I wanted to live there I would listen to the radio_the radio is, by and large, a consistent portrait of 1953.
DC: You are specific about the year... before or after?
CM: We can as meaningfully talk about the nineteenth century and the most attractive thing about the nineteenth century is that it has finished... we don't need to do it again.
DC: A lot of people would disagree with you there! But perhaps via maps we can find our way back there.
CM: Yes, there is a lot of that. Maybe the distinction we're establishing here is that models are preoccupied with 'not yets'. Maps are invariably nostalgic - which really makes them a job description for Romanticism.
DC: And telematics - how would this connect to your model?
CM: 'Telematic' automatically means that it is not space sensitive, it's not sensitive to geography, and it may in fact be something that you can exploit...
DC: Exploit?
CM: You can farm space... people talk to one another over the phone differently than they do face to face; people are much more likely to agree over the phone. If you are going to have a telematic office for example, people don't fight about 'no s moking in here' or, 'I can't see the window' - office politics takes on a completely different nature.
DC: 'Don't look at me in that tone of voice'...
CM: Which is why video conferencing will never work or why video phones will never work.
DC: And back to the original concept of the phone...
CM: I'm convinced that they will try again and they will fail again. As part of the PABX network, we will actually get an increase in voice quality because on telephones, there is an incredible compression - voice is a much more efficient way of c ommunicating information than sight, and you learn much more by listening to intonation than you do by looking at somebody - and this is getting back to lying; they found out that people - specifically in business - object to video-phones because its very hard to lie...
DC: ...listening to the voice...
CM: ...listening is farming data; listening is a cultural expression of how you determine information - this side of town and that side of town have got different acoustics - you listen for different things, you hear different things. Meaning has no consistency. This is one of the strengths of Australia - Sydney less so than Melbourne. Melbourne is more cosmopolitan which means the acoustic environment is more sophisticated - much, much more sophisticated than Manhattan for example. In Manhattan y ou don't get Lebanese talking to Vietnamese; it's a series of villages and ghettos. Merely for this reason Melbourne is more cosmopolitan. So there are sounds that will only enter the language when you get Lebanese and Vietnamese talking together... there are logics that can only enter language if you have that intersection; grammars, structures only enter language that way - there are well formed compositions that can only enter that way - there are whole series of 'not yets'.
DC: Perhaps now to an idea of maps and telematics... transcending gaps; what you are essentially talking about are gaps...
CM: ...and how we can amplify gaps. Gaps are traditionally about disability - a moment of time - but gaps are things to be amplified. A gap is an access to structure, not a simple negation or simple absence. It is an access - something to be explo red.
DC: A side effect or residual?
CM: Of course, if it's not doing double duty, it has no potential for feedback and if it has no potential for feedback, it starts to smudge into what I call 'pornography'. That is, without any redeeming social importance. It has structural signifi cance in that it is redundant, in other words, it has an in-built obsolescence.
DC: It sounds rather dangerous that all these gaps are going to be heard all of a sudden.
CM: But they always have been...
Référence: http://autonomous.org/soundsite/main.html