Interview with London-based ambientTV.NET ('active members' Manu, Mukul, Mariko, Mo-Ling, Michael, Chris, Bill, Kertal)- a crucible for independent, interdisciplinary practice ranging from installation and performance, through documentary, dance, and gastronomy, to sound and video composition and real-time manipulation. Conducted by Nadeem for decode magazine end of last year, but it was transcribed only now. enjoy! Ann
B: You describe your work as interdisciplinary, ranging from installation and performance through documentary, dance, live audio-video manipulation and music composition, to gastronomy. . . can you really combine these disciplines? Mariko: For sure. Food is so undervalued in Britain. But we love it! And in AV DINNERS, we show our love for it by developing themed menus, caressing the ingredients with cameras and microphones, writing odes to the courses . . . and feeding guests! Mo-Ling: In AV DINNERS 1: EPIC EROS, the theme was the erotic potential of food, and we prepared and served an ambrosial succession of dishes to our guests (who had won a tough online gastronomy quiz to get here), accompanied by the digitally manipulated sights and sounds of the preparation, and with a poem for each course by Shane Solanki. Online particiants were treated to one video stream and three audio streams, including Shanes poetry which translated smells and flavours into words and sounds. And remote partipant groups as far afield as Helsinki and Baghdad projected our images, or listened to our audio, while cooking and eating along with us and conversing with our dinner guests via an online chat channel. B: You all have such different art-related and technological backgrounds, how do you make sure this integrate harmoniously? Michael: What helps is that each of us has a mixed background, combining painting and net.art, or science and music, or dance and film theory . . . so we're pretty well integrated intra-personally, which makes interpersonal integration fairly easy. Manu: Various disciplines, but common approaches. Each of us looks hard at the conditions of possibility of our disciplines. Though we have varied backgrounds and skills, we share a critical approach, curiosity, passion. Mukul: It's important that we're a close and informal group, and though we recognize particular specializations or talents, everyone pitches in at all levels - from embarking on the most abstract flights of fancy to project execution, PR, admin, fixing the lights . . . B: ambient TV.NET is a cosmopolitan mix of artists. Are your differing cultural backgrounds important, or indeed integral, to the work you produce? Mukul: How could a group not be cosmopolitan in a metropolis? You'd have to make a committed effort not to be. I was part of the so-called "Asian Underground" scene in the 1990s and that was populated by Germans, Jamaicans, Icelanders, Chelmsfordians, black British . . . Mo-Ling: Isn't such cosmopolitanism the main - perhaps only - reason for putting up with the expense and noise and filth of this city? Michael: There are markers of identity other than ethnicity, language group, gender etc., that might be more pertinent to the creation of work. . . eg., being capoeiristas, or critics of unfettered capitalism, or filesharers, or lovers of odd time signatures, or subscribers to certain mailing lists . . . Are all your projects very focused around digital technologies? Under one description of the work you produce, you use the term 'social technologies'. What do you mean by this? Michael: Technology doesn't fall through a social vacuum; it is both structured by, and structures, our cultural horizons. Technological development is informed by all manner of political, commercial, aesthetic, and ideological imperatives. Much domestic technology spins off from military research. What might seem like technical details create new freedoms and new constraints in the ways we imagine and materially sustain ourselves. All technology is social technology . . . the epitome being information and communications technologies. We want to offer different cultural imperatives, models based on other than profit or territoriality, concentrating on social networks, lines of communication, friendships and encounters . . . sitting down to eat together, orchestrating a group of musicians on several different continents, . . Chris: My photography might be digital now, but its an evolution of using film. Its just easier to work with digital cameras. I still remember trying to develop negative film in the old days in Bosnia, in the middle of winter, using melted snow to make developing fluid. With digital cameras everything is so immediate, you can see the results right away. But the image is still made with my eyes and my hands. Mukul: We're not uncritical fans of digital - we can't afford better. A digital sound studio is smaller, lighter, neater, and much cheaper than a similarly capable but better sounding analogue studio. A camera, editing suite, and consumables required to make a feature length movie on digital video cost £3000. That's 3000 bags of popcorn . . . or 400 cinema tickets . . . Then there are questions of appropriateness and potential for exploitation. Some "outdated" technologies, such as shortwave radio, are more open and robust than their successors. We're big fans of radio. It's a medium that has had immense political significance - still has, not least through wireless networking. And paper is a better archival medium than CD. But digital media are more amenable to encryption and "rights management" - better for the paranoid, the secretive, and the greedy. But there is a "Need To Know" - even Downing Street was unaware that Microsoft Word documents have header files that list the last few edits performed . . . B: "We continue to develop social and technical infrastructure and promote network architectures that facilitate alternatives to current socio-political and economic formations." Can you explain in more detail how this unfolds, with examples? Manu: Computers put immense power in the hands of individuals, but even many of those who push the creative potential of the tool in say, multimedia, are unaware of the possibilities for building independent infrastructure and media distribution channels. One way in which we try to promote independence from broadcast and distribution networks and information channels is through the London wireless broadband network (which allows data transmission over an unlicensed part of the radio spectrum). Together with groups such as consume.net and free2air.org, we conduct workshops that help people to build own networks, independent of telecoms providers. Mukul: Recycling, exchange, repurposing . . .We don't throw things out. Institutions donate "outdated" PCs (which they'd otherwise have to pay for to dispose) and we make them available to the wireless community to be repurposed as network routers (to direct data traffic). And if someone supplies us bandwidth to the internet, for example we might pay them, but we might also exchange some equipment or services. Parallel channels, parallel economies. B: Your "Spy School" project is obviously about technology and society. Tell us more. Manu: Spy School is a series of exercises in which we watch those who watch us. Each exercise scrutinises public-private borders of post-9/11 daily life. The latest exercise is Faceless, a CCTV thriller that dramatizes, with some irony, the system of CCTV surveillance in the UK. The entire movie is shot in London using existing CCTV cameras. The coverage is great, all the angles you could want. We weave the narrative across the city. The work is in two parts: the film itself, and a record of the process of acquiring the footage. Under the terms of the Data Protection Act (DPA), any person caught on camera has a right to a copy of the footage upon submission of a data subject request and payment of a fee (£10). To protect the rights of any other people that happen to be in the frame, the data controllers must render them anonymous they are made, literally, faceless. All the communication with the data controllers will be documented and presented alongside the movie. And there will be an online toolbox to provide basic information on the rights conferred by the DPA, downloadable templates for letters to request CCTV footage, etc. Michael: One of the things that's been most fun is the writing of the data subject request letters. We got one back from the Human Resources manager of a leisure centre, and she was very eager to please, but pointed out that she had to preserve the privacy of all the other bathers and that would mean blacking them all out on the CCTV tape, and that that would be expensive. We wrote back a very dry legalistic letter informing her that while she was obliged to preserve the privacy of all other subjects who had not consented to disclosure, she was also obliged to absorb the costs for doing so. We then suggested that she seek the services of ambientTV.NET who are experts at this kind of work . . . I have this dream: submitting subject searches left right and centre, then post producing all the surveillance footage at extortionate rates, and perhaps suing them afterwards too, just for good measure . . . B: "Ambient space", in an ex-industrial building in Hackney, "plays host to events, webcasts, workshops, screenings, performances and workshops". Do you find this space integral to enabling you to produce the work you do? Is all your work site-specific? We can expect to see a 'roaming' project in November, Telejam: Tryptichon. How will this work? Manu: Ambient space is a crucial module in our toolbox (which also includes infrastructure such as networks, the limited company). The space allows us to rehearse, to operate as streaming studio, to put on events, to host visiting artists. If someone has an idea - which happens with alarming frequency - we are in a position to immediately realize a version at ambient space without any bureaucracy, or too many scheduling problems. Mukul: Our work is always site-specific insofar as particular instantiations are specific to particular sites but we can always pick up the work and move it elswhere, modifying it appropriately. And for offline work, there is often an online component or stream or archive so there's a web-specific but site-general version. Generally we try to cultivate a local flavour, and locale is actually a theme of some pieces, such as Tryptichon, which is in development.In this piece we'll will use mapping technologies location-aware devices (GPS satelllite navigation). The performers will make small and large movements: graffiti writ large on the city. B: How do you relate to your audience? Michael: Sounds like a question from a funding application form! There's a crisis, an uncertainty at least, about cultural value, and it's often 'the audience' that's used as justification . . . "What is your target audience?", "how will you reach new audiences?" In the current cultural climate, where ratings seem to rule everything, the audience is often viewed demographically. There's definitely an 'ethic of access', which, while worthy in itself, in certain circumstances can make for absolute banality . . . imagine a New Labour directive demanding that Joyce's Finnegan's Wake be rewritten to be made more accessible, so that it can reach 'new audiences.' Joyce said he wrote for the ideal reader, one who would dedicate a lifetime to reading a single work. Imagine writing that on a funding form, you wouldn't get a bean . . . Manu: There are other ways of casting the audience - as a creative resource, as one of the ingredients of the work. I'm interested in audience expectations and behaviour . . . this is especially important with some of our network and workshop projects, because in those, the audience is so directly woven into the fabric of the work. Mukul: One of the richest experiences for artist and audience member alike is in a classical setting where there are shared norms, notions of correctness . . . I'm thinking specifically of Indian classical music. How to approach this sedimented richness of meaning and experience in new, hybrid media, electronic, exploratory works . . . this is something that I'm beginning to explore. Manu: The question is not so much how to control or manipulate an audience (as Hitchcock does), but more of how to open a structured space that will register and transform the desires, expectations, and responses of an audience. B: One of your recent projects, Suvara, was about "nurturing meetings between traditional musicians of recent Afghani immigrants and the contemporary electronic music scene". How did this come about? Mukul: The project was initiated in collaboration with Radio FRO 105, an independent FM station in Linz, Austria. Radio FRO is a platform for many immigrant communities as well as for new music. Inspired by movements in London in the 1990s, they had been trying to kick start a meeting between recent immigrants (and their traditional music) and those (mainly young Austrians) in the quite separate electronic music scene. We'd been giving DJ/VJ workshops at the invitation of Radio FRO. One of the workshop participants, recently displaced from Afghanistan, wanted to try DJing together with a live musician (his brother). What followed: a stage invasion by three generations of Afghans, who forced us at drumpoint to record an impromptu session. The recording of Rafi Hanif & Party turned out to be remarkable, and all agreed to making the session available online. We invited reinterpretations of the material, and offered some prizes. I gave a short music production workshop, and the pieces flowed in - by newcomers and established artists, ranging in style from introverted and string-laden to angry breakbeats. Radio FRO produced compilation CDs, and a vinyl edition just been pressed. B:Whats on the horizon for ambientTV.NET? Mariko: Tryptichon in November at DMZ. Next year, we publish 2 DVDs: VIDEOWORKS 1.0, a compilation of short videos capturing some moments of our data transmission activities in the last two years, and VIRTUAL BORDERS a documentary film about a unique gathering of the Akha people, who are scattered around five countries in the Mekong Quadrangle. AmbientTV.NET streamed audio from the cultural conference in China to a radio station in Thailand, from where it was broadcast to mountain villages. Manu: Completion of Faceless, planning the next installment of Tryptichon in Helsinki, music releases, ... http://www.ambientTV.NET __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Win a $20,000 Career Makeover at Yahoo! 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