interview pieces by Holly Pester is licensed under a Creative Commons License

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No one wants to see a bashed berry yogurt in the morning. On occasion it’s forgivable to tone two neutrals together. Soap and sack, rough water holidays. This fest is an ideal time to try some new samples – plucked skin is hot but to be daring is to risk a sterile ruby. Minus a shade or two for a proper century carpet, and now you’re really staining! A good fantasy fetcher is ¾ pig ink, a must-have for this corner space.
Feather the brick wash. You won’t regret putting blush before you’re 40. Make space, make time, the cherries are groaning. The crack of a new month is the perfect excuse for some fresh acid thinking. Why not update your alcoves with something musty. Your home is a mood-farm and worth every lick. If the dappled long coats get you down, sprinkle some fizz and relive the era of the mantle-piece. Something for sitting and driving: it should always make you roomy, a bit like a garden.

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People of the watermelon, listen to the new sound coming from the angry red planet. Peach-wash or milk crust? This is contemporary California style. The new motors have a wonderful aroma and a mildness that agrees with your red-eye. Liner. So do yourselves a flavour and complete the decking in meat planks. Do it for your family, or just for the sheer fat of it. Life is certainly pleasurable now. It’s made of pure foam – Don’t ever forget that. Fact.

In the olden days a wife was a spread of bacteria. She knew the smack of pink wafer biscuit. Spray, spray, spray away the crinkles. Lip is the stick smart women should wear – says Andy McDowell, the glut agent. Today the trend in telephones is certainly to colour – in both home and the office. So why not update your talking shades? You’re a smoker, so American. Not a baby washer after all.
This bathroom is synonymous with the gracious living of Beverly Hills. It’s mulberry blush, it’s sandalwood and it won’t harm your pets. Want to know Paris’s secret to beauty in the morning? Cry a little. And there’s no need to plug it in, or even shake. To keep your decor in trend, you must follow the Johnson Plan. Step one is a Barbarella diet with two-tone salmon trays. Step two to three becomes available on Boxing Day. The most recent devotee has inched herself into 3 flesh sizes her previous. It could be you, so why not update your talking shades?

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Feeling low? Blow away the brown air with a new internal wall. You’ve seen them in the showrooms; they leak real-life hormones. Halleluiah Jimmy. Now award yourself a twin-pack and really begin the neo year. It really really really will make your mornings bigger. It’s what every contempo doll is looking for. What is? This is! And you thought the bag-hogs had the last sample stitch. We all care about your lounge, Ronda. Believe it.
R-O-T spells luxury rug.

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Monroes welcomes Baglics, the most recent member of the Vanity family. They insist on surfaces being bright and clear. Keeping up bright and across clear, ensuring a bright and clear sphere that’s bright and clear. The portals are bright and clear. The bays are bright and clear. They’ve customized bright to enhance clear, really bringing out the shine in the furnishings. The focus is on bringing out the bright, it’s clear. The design shanks are aren’t just clear, they’re brighter than clear, they’re bright and clear. And the rest. Bag-a-lics say, Come Alive! You’re in the coochie purse generation. That’s bright; that’s clearer than clear. Pimp your basement room ready for some grade A action. Hang up the stuff! Match faux fur with jaundice stones. And always make sure there’s plenty of peach on the blankets.

Programme notes:

At the conception of this project Kaye and Pester created a system of exchange and translation, developing shared concerns for chance operations, periphery speech sounds and the thrill of live performance. By trading sound, text and image material, they allowed the piece to workshop itself out of their (re)interpretation and (mis)translation. Kaye and Pester have engendered not only a musical score, but a hypertextual network of graphic notation, sound poetics and a prolific collaborative partnership.

The piece works as a triptych, with each instant both setting Pester’s text and also conceptually representing each visual poem. The piece is also interspersed with rhythmic interludes.

Baritone – Alex Garziglia

Percussion 1 – Catherine Ring

Percussion 2 – Louise Morgan

To begin our collaboration Josh and I exchanged compilation CDs with recordings that we felt represented or at least indicated the direction of our practices/interests. My CD for Josh was a mix of sound poetry excerpts from Henri Chopin and Bob Cobbing, some experimental vocal tracks by heavy metal musician Mike Patton, a few songs from Bjork’s ‘Medulla’ album and some Mongolian throat singing. (And some pretty incredible Michael Jackson acapella!) Things that I like, listen to, make me think about the voice and the concept of singing.

Josh passed on to me an alien world of contemporary opera, some of his own piano pieces and pieces for many voices, plus a welcome reminder of The Velvet Underground’s ‘The Murder Mystery’. What did they tell me about Josh? That he likes inter-sections of voice and percussion; rhythmic, polyphonic vocal sounds.

After this we talked over our listening experiences and went to see as many exhibition, event and performances as we could, trying to build or uncover a common language. It became clear that neither of us were interested in the conventional poet-composer partnership, i.e. having me compose a text, hand it over to Josh and then have him set it to music. We wanted a collaboration that involved a continuous workshop and thought laboratory, that pushed both our practices forward, and gave away our personal artistic temperaments.

More than this, we wanted the piece to perform the exciting collision of text and music that was occurring in our dialogue.

We started by making a small collection of vocal noise. I recorded some ‘para-speech’ noises (erming, ahring, coughing, spluttering, laughing etc.) and Josh produced some piano bits and some of his own throat singing. Josh set this using some sound editing software and passed it back to me. I took this newly constructed sound piece and visually translated it into a sequence of typewriter poems. I passed these back to Josh who translated these as graphic notation, unpicking the flat plane of paper and creating a dimensionality that I found very exciting.

And this was how the process continued, passing back and forth sound, to image to composition.

Eventually I narrowed down the sources for my noise-making to YouTube footage of Barack Obama interviews, extracting those wonderful, distinctively pitched, vocal controllers he makes when pausing between words. I collected these, mimicked them and recorded them. I then juxtaposed this recording with impressions of talking pet birds (also sourced from YouTube). These sounds were arranged into the sound piece ‘bird interview’ which informed the body of much of the final piece:

Download audio file (bird-interview.mp3)

This suited our mutual creative interests in interviews, periphery speech expenditure and procedure-led art-making. It was also inevitable given my current fixation with the phenomenal sound of Obama’s voice.

While much of the material was still in fragments; typewriter poems, sound texts and annotated scores, we met with our singer, Alex and began testing some of the vocal sequences Josh had devised. During one of these rehearsal sessions I transcribed some conversations between Josh and Alex, discussing the technicalities of singing the score. These transcriptions were worked into another poem that was spliced into the interventional sections before each miniature.

I was continually excited by the way Josh interpreted the material we had workshopped out between us. One of the typewriter poems I gave him had solid squares of letters, which Josh – through the indetermination of  graphic notation – devised into a game for percussionists. This is ‘played’ in the final miniature where Louise and Catherine race to get to a certain note in the grid. Because of this each performance, although structurally identical, has an inbuilt facilitator for different versions. Both Josh and I place a great deal of value on the alchemic moment of live performance and were eager to make sure that there was something deliberate that ensured each time would be different.

The female percussionists work together regularly as a duo and had a wonderful energy between them. Josh’s vision for Alex’s vocals to be constantly struggling to break through the drumming was almost too successful. They embraced the vocal interjections Josh had written for them with a thrilling vivacity. Overall the performic dynamic between the trio for the final performance made it something of a visual and sonic spectacle.

Photos by Marsha Bradfield

Alison Knowles Workshop Report: Intermedia and the Archive

Talk given at Translated Acts 2, Southampton University, 08.06.09

On April 3rd and 4th I was one of 10(ish) artists and researchers invited to take part in a practice-based workshop with the ‘exemplar’ artist Alison Knowles. It was an opportunity that promised a healthy shot of dynamism into my working as a poet and text artist; granting the freedom to experiment away from didactics. Knowles’ diverse practice is a great influence to me through its commitment to the Fluxus experience and its occupying of modalities between sculpture, performance, poetry and music. She is currently exploring sound making and sculpture with performance, continuing to develop the potential of Intermedia.

The workshop took place over two days in the October Gallery, London in two different spaces. On the Friday we were in a grand conference room, discussing and sharing ideas, and on Saturday we took over the next door theatre space for our Fluxus concert (with multiple interventions outside in the park). Day one opened with a tutorial of sorts on the concerns of Alison Knowles’ practice, and the continuing Fluxus project. These were introduced to us via a list of meditative questions of of which I can remember were,
“is the work exemplative or definitive?”
“is there something of the artist’s temperament in the work?”
“do you agree with what the work, successful or not, is ultimately saying/doing?”

We were taken on a tour of the history of ‘Event Score’, looking at footage of their premières at the 1963 Fluxus Festival at Staatliche Kunstakademie, Dusseldorf, and of recent re-stagings like the Tate Modern’s Long Weekend May 2008, where Knowles’ exemplary piece Make a Salad (a score consisting of that single proposition) was performed for an audience of 3000.

On day 2 we held our own Fluxus concert with every member of the group (including Alison) being both performer and audience. The concert was prepared and executed in the prescribed Fluxus style with a detailed order of proceedings, black n’ white clothing etc. and featured both re-stagings of original Alison Knowles Event Scores; ‘Shoes of your choice’; ‘Song of your choice’; ‘The Colour Red’, and short (capsule) performance pieces that some of us devised especially as homage or adaptations of Fluxus works; ‘Reading Gertrude Stein’ and ‘Photo of Your Choice’.

It was clear that every work shown during our concert was considered (by Alison) as much an extension of, a supplement to or as much a realisation of the scores as every enactment of them that has ever taken place. The vast index of scores devised and published by the Fluxus group is just one fragment of the living archive of their performances and re-performances; the printed ephemera can be considered the index while the continuing activations of the scores through their performances world-wide, is the expanding archive.It’s the Event Score; its functionality as works of art and as an archive that every artist is granted access to, that I want to focus on in relation to my work and contemporary poetic practice.

In terms of the artist’s temperament, every Knowles Event Score has an assured focus. Each one is an instruction for the process of researching an act, an object, or a concept from everyday reality. It removes the functionality of this act and reveals a poiesis. ‘Make a Salad’ takes a commonplace activity and reveals an aesthetic in the physical movements, sounds and colours of the production. ‘Shoes of Your Choice’ (in my reading) reveals the phenomenology in impromptu speech and description.

Alison Knowles stressed how important it is, when transposing everyday reality into artwork, to have and maintain focus. She said ‘know your ingredients’. You must have clearly defined parameters of investigation and let the results be guided by chance. Be aware of the act, revel in it, and notice what it is doing outside reality. Notice how it feeds back into reality and in what ways the transmission continues beyond the performance.

The Event Score de-familiarises an activity; it is an algorithm on making a salad, walking in the street, talking about your shoes, reading a book; in it’s reframing it weirds it. The algorithm, the affecting code, is to estrange the act from our understanding and re-codify it.

There is no artefact, only an act. It’s the identity of the act that is the focus for viewing, reading, and it is an unbreakable self-same product over 30 years later. It activates the ideal of making a salad and locates a point of Intermedia between everyday reality and art.

This original Fluxus notion of Intermedia and the resistance of artefact is what drives my work in speech and sound poetry. Intermedia is the Fluxus legacy of the interchange between multiple modes of production, often with the affect of relieving the authority from an ‘established’ media by internally and conceptually transposing it through another, thus engendering new practices. In the 1960s the Fluxus project de-stabilised the authority of painting and sculpture through a conceptual interchange with performance; the authority of classical music composition through an encounter with visual poetry and performance.

In my work I am trying to think about Intermedia from this starting point and apart from the institutionalised term. I would like my poetics to occupy sites of medium counterchange as a poetic act. And so in my research I ask the question;

How is Intermedia useful when thinking about the reveling-in-the-act-ness of an event score, and the revelling in the cross-over between functionality and de-familiarisation?

Is my voice-driven poetics a revelling in the cross-over between language and speech-sound? When I store and exchange sound or image texts through digital networks am I revelling in the cross-over between databasing and exposition?
In Benjamin’s terms Intermedia signals a functional transformation in the production of writing or art making. Mediums are re-functioned to channel artistic production - rather than save or package them. In my sound-poetry practice, an digital archive that’s intended to store sound files, or snippets of text - can becomes the facilitator of the creative act. The interface which is designed to interrogate the archive, is used to create an index-composition (howzat for an intermedia?) of texts and recordings, documentation and discourse. For the practitioner the processing, exhibiting, exchanging and archiving of works is all as much a part of the artistic production. The space of the archive internally and conceptually relates the practice and the criticism; the writer and reader; the data and the database.

I’m not an expert in New Media but I am interested in how this new relationship to the database feeds my poetics and also my reading of artists who have a history of creative archive practices. Sound artist Henri Chopin’s publishing enterprise was precisely this. His magazines Cinquième Saison and OU creatively indexed new and old works into an original system of poetics. And I have already mentioned the Fluxus ephemera and the compedium of Event Scores as being part of an creative archive.

The archive is not static nor permanent. Poetics can move through an internal or external system. In my work I engage in found, sourced or generated speech material by breaking it down into sound elements and de-familiarising myself to it. It follows Alison Knowles’ code for ‘sampling’ every-day life, and re-coding it as something alien. With outlined algorithmic parameters the poetry-object is an ideal model for re-enactments and re-versions to occur. The medium workshops the text into being just as the medium of a workshop (the Alison Knowles workshop!) both archives and generates texts.

An intermedia artist is active through technique not style – they are operating not informing, creating new apparatus for different kinds of production. The task, my task, is to re-function spaces and mediums for new artistic production. Perhaps the intermedia between art and everyday reality of Alison Knowles’s Event Scores is a way of protecting the act of intervening on the world as an artist; interventions like taking pictures of public buildings, and refusing imposed ‘speech-acts’ to qualify being present in the street or park. Liberties are more and more compromised.

My poetry is in the act, the saying doing and sound making; and then the storing, exchanging and showing. My ingredients are the sounds and the shape of everyday language; the toungue and the mouth, as is the translation and the workshopping between them.

successsfully I made new friends

friends press ahead

A head a tail a hairy man

Man down!

“I always felt the need to bring a new objectivity to” ladders.

Who’s speaking? Every interview is a junkyard of voices; you believe, I insist, we all think. Allow me to explain. I am the partial interviewer, veiled in script. I am the interviewee that spoke and the one that was written later in my absence. We are all various understandings of the Work, and the work’s value. But which one of us is interested in forklift trucks?

What do you want to say about interviews? That we’re too in love with them? That they fill in narratives of how and why art works? How and why does your art work. I can’t tell you now that you’ve asked me. How do you understand it? If you enjoy it you must understand it. There’s no need to say ‘What about your lines? What about your materials? “Being intelligible is not what it seems.” What’s interesting about this interview is the rhetorical skill, it’s so dependent on an unambiguous persona. Only he could answer a question like that. Somebody said something impulsive at a point in time, somebody wrote something rational and that moment is now a monument. Ask her about her plan. The question is always the answer is always a statement about your current project. That’s not a question. But do you agree or disagree. With what? With whether the question or answer is the making of criticism.

It’s probably more like an exercise in understanding a journalist. The golden egg is a recording of someone’s meltdown. The best way to achieve this is to cause someone to have a meltdown. Tell us about the moment of your public failure and if you can’t please be silent. You mustn’t insult me by understanding me. My way of being critical is my way of showing you that I care. I care enough to ask what you think about how logos have changed? And how did the move to go all white come about? It was my brief. People must be so bored of decision making. Explain your strategies for escaping phallocentricism? Silence. I had my first exhibition in Warsaw, with photographs of my actions. Untitled (November 1976) was in it, as was Untitled (18 November 1976) and other things I had done.

Is an apologia even necessary, and what’s the difference between what you decided and what you can’t decide? Decision making. I am interested in the initial impulse that led to your ‘actions’, what did you do before this? I was doing drawings in a notepad then I did collage. What have you heard others say about your work? What they say is true. How did you end up in Poland? It was for my second exhibition. Could you explain the train journey in detail, including the coffee and the sandwich and the book you read. Maybe that’s when I had the idea. What have you heard others say about your work? What they say is wrong.

It’s a shame this interview is too circumscribed for you to say anything surprising. Was that your intention? If you enjoy it you understand it. Everyone talks about what a wonderful structure Number 32 has. (What I mean is) if they only knew how arbitrary that decision was. Now the biographers are calling and I can’t remember what is true and what isn’t. Why are you using forklift trucks? I’m fascinated by them. You are not fascinated by them. I can’t talk about intention, everything I do is a surprise.

(This article can be found in next month’s Vacuum magazine)

projection text