decentred | info | interview
Tom
Simmons and Liam Wells in conversation with Simon Waters at
UEA Music Centre, February 2004
Simon Waters Could
you clarify the relationship between the original WebJam idea
and how it developed into decentred? Tom
Simmons We used WebJam to start to organise
a performance space and build a community to look at what we
could do in that space. We created a streaming service and
our role grew to be quite curatorial. SW Was
it just circumstantial who was involved? Or did you plan that
to some extent or has it changed? TS It’s
changed as we’ve got going. It was circumstantial, but
as WebJam grew we became more selective. We started building
a structure to match our research. Liam
Wells The network side of WebJam has developed
from feeds of audio-visual information to a more open network,
bringing different spaces together and sending streams amongst
different partners. At the moment we’re working with
a chain like network design with performers placed at different
intervals. SW A
signal chain? LW Very
much a signal chain. TS Material
created in one place is sent to another, worked on and in turn
sent to another place where something else happens. Other material
and processes come into the network at different points. The
results of these processes come back into one space at the
end. SW So there
are two angles. Technical provision, which has become more
sophisticated, and content design. Is decentred you bringing
the enhanced technical possibility and your own aesthetic vision
to the same thing? TS Yes,
this meets in these six weeks at Norwich Gallery. SW Looking
at the conceptual organisation, there’s a conflict between
the idea of a networked performance and between having a single
artist involved. You’ve structured part of what you’re
going to do at least around these performances? TS Yes,
in four events. SW What’s
the thinking behind that? TS We
programmed four ‘One Night Stands’ to open up the
installation for individual curatorial control for one-evening
periods. It will be up to individuals to decide what they put
into the gallery that evening and what they get out of it.
We’ve been thinking about the apparatus as being non-media
specific or not related to an isolated discipline, practice
or performance. So we have two relationships with other people.
Not just a technical thing of opening out that apparatus, but
also a concern with space, atmosphere and environment. SW It
wasn’t the technical side of things that I was getting
at really, it was the idea of a network implying some sort
of shared aesthetic and the idea of an individual residency
being about an imposed curatorial vision. I understand the
rationale behind it, because it may partly be a response to
the original WebJams and a response to the dissatisfactions
that you felt with previous working practices. SW There
are problems with negotiated aesthetic output because it’s
not something that people have a lot of practice at. One rapid
way of dealing with that might be to allow somebody to impose
a temporally formal shaping to what goes on. TS We
see the project existing in two states, firstly in a kind of
automated state with a system existing in the background, which
we set the parameters for in advance. Between us we collectively
define the limits of the system, purposely making them frayed.
We envisage moments when that system will be pulled in particular
dirssections towards a discipline or practice before moving
back into an automated state. SW I
was just thinking about the extent to which academic institutions
have to redefine what they’re offering people and in
a way what you’re doing is enabling certain things because
of an institutional background that probably wouldn’t
be available to individuals or groups of individuals. Is that
a conscious decision, and how do you see your relationship
with the art school? With the institution, there’s a
sense in which your moving away from it, but there’s
also a sense in which you’re redefining a role for it. TS I
think both of those are happening consciously. We’ve
been oscillating over this, thinking ‘Could we do this
independently?’ ‘Can we afford to do it?’ ‘Can
we support creative communities if we do that?’ I think
we came to the conclusion that we couldn’t, at least
in the first case. SW But
is that oscillation between being tied to an institution and
having a larger degree of aesthetic freedom creatively uncomfortable? TS We
respond to political or institutional models and practices
all the time. The other institutions who’ve been involved
with WebJam have pulled the space around in different directions.
It’s a negotiable space, there’s nothing concrete
about it. We never programme anything. We go with structures
people want to work with when they come along, so part of this
oscillation is a very conscious way of using an art school
to get around certain kinds of performance practices. SW You
mentioned working in a post-medium condition, and you’ve
used the term ‘in-betweens’ or ‘in-betweening’ for
some of what you’re doing, is that something that you
both have a shared take on? LW I
think the ‘in-betweenness’ is the point that we
met in. Both of our individual practices evolved around notions
of being between two states or being between media. SW Is
your formal training in visual practice? LW Yes SW And
yours is in music. TS Yes.
I suppose our relationship has grown alongside our engagement
with the art school. There’s a demand for interdisciplinary
work there and a pressure on that practice from the institution. SW The
people who are involved are from increasingly hybrid backgrounds.
In a sense you’re symptomatic of a particular generation
of people. You have this aim to work in a post medium condition
or an ‘in-between’ situation, but you’re
determined to very strong extents by your formal backgrounds
and training. Increasingly, there’s a generation of people
who are more genuinely hybrid than you, how do you go about
evaluating what it is that they do? LW Hmm,
quality control, SW Well,
its not really control. I’m interested in the evaluative
mechanisms you have, it might be that they’re instinctive
ones. I think that’s perfectly legitimate. LW I
think you’ve hit it on the head really, it’s intuitive
in the way everything is selected at some point. Whether we’re
selecting the performers or putting together an apparatus.
Ultimately everything is selected when it goes out to the public
interface. We have other levels of control, negotiating different
access points to the same project. It’s a situation where
something that’s happening at one end of the performance
in one venue is very different to what’s actually happening
in the other venues or in what the audience is experiencing. SW Yes,
but that’s part of the point … TS Part
of this process is concerned with giving up control … the
idea of decentering something is about moving it outside of
your jurisdiction, about seeing what happens when you have
to negotiate events which emerge in that context. SW You’ve
redesigned the public interface to the WebJam. Some of that
redesign must have come from a decision on your part that something
wasn’t working. What drove the redesign? TS We
wanted to offer something of the atmosphere or what was going
on in the physical spaces in the user interface, so that people
who were connected would be able to identify with what we’re
doing. It’s become a role of somebody on the night to
document and evaluate as the event goes on and to put the textual
information up there so that people know what’s going
on. LW I think
the difficulty we had with the older WebJam interface was that
there were certain levels of significance that weren’t
coming across in a purely audio-visual output. We’ve
been using the web interface as a performance tool and we felt
that there was a lot more happening than an isolated audio-video
stream. SW So
textual criticism, textual intervention? TS And
still images … LW We’re
starting to work with ftp and other protocols. TS Our
role is changing, we’re becoming editorial, shaping and
designing the output. We’re working with environmental
scientists who are creating large data arrays and with MIDI
networks using abstracted performance data or histories in
that part of the performance space. SW That
may mean eventually readmitting the bodily gesture in some
way? LW It may
well do. We want to use the next WebJam to start bringing some
of that physicality into the project. SW The
idea of using movement or image analysis sensors in one site
to control or edit material being produced in another site,
for example. TS That’s
exactly the network that we’re creating at the moment,
sending audio-video streams with another data structure layered
underneath. We needed to work with a network that has multiple
layers, which we can move in and out of and work between to
facilitate connectivity. SW Can
you elaborate a little about what you mean by decentred improvisation?
I mean you’re obviously talking about decentred improvisation
in the senses of distributed activity, but is there something
else behind it? TS There’s
something ideological or political underneath, moving … SW Away
from medium centers? TS Yes. SW And
established bodies of knowledge … TS Trying
to move into this cooperative space where the meeting points,
the collisions and the attachments of one thing to another,
are not restricted by fixed ideas of what an improvisation
might be. LW I
think it’s key that this is angled towards a very public
space. I think that starts to create a distance from the closed
doors of the institution or the specific media. TS Part
of the organic growth of the project can be attributed to this
cooperative mechanism; on any level of organisation I think
decentred is cooperative and negotiable. LW Part
of the potential of redesigning the interface as we have done
is to feed back responses between ourselves during the project. TS We’re
keen to experiment with a non-governed network. We’ve
been discussing rejecting a permanent site of storage. Temporally
buffering data to be continuously directed towards, rejected
from and re-directed to any number of servers, so data is never
consciously organised by us at any point in a performance.
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