Botch: Blog

An interview with Pete McCabe about my showing of BOTCH (Stereo Version) at HERE's CultureMart 2011...

http://artonair.org/show/culturemart-2011-joe-diebes-botch

Over the summer I spent two weeks at STEIM developing some early concepts for BOTCH. STEIM is a research and development institution based in Amsterdam that focuses on human interfaces with music making machines, and so given the ideas behind BOTCH, this seemed like a good place to experiment.

Christina Campanella joined me for the second week and we explored a number of ways to use STEIM's software, LiSA and JunXion. Generally speaking we were not trying to do anything fancy. In fact, we were trying to find the simplest ways to demonstrate a theatrical relationship between voice and machine. For example, we spent a few days building a basic sampler that would record Christina’s voice and allow her, using a wireless remote, to scan forward and backwards through the recording, and then punch in a new recording at various points. I was interested in what happens when the sound recorded is verbal information, and the manipulations that follow are aimed at the semantics of altering sequence etc… I was thinking mostly of Beckett’s “Krapp’s Last Tape” in this regard. Creating a solipsistic world where a single performer on stage is accompanied by her recordings. The recorded voice was output to a small speaker, which made it almost come alive. Like a weird little pet droid.

In BOTCH each vignette or section operates as a self contained module, and the directions for what the performers do is notated as an algorithm, rather than a conventional score or script. And so the performance directions for this work are written in a kind of pseudo computer code with if/then statements, loops, and random numbers generated by coin tosses. By having the humans on stage operating according to the logic of a computer brings out a nice tension between what is human and what is machinic.

Another experiment we tried involved Christina and myself on opposite ends of the room, listening to a small speaker. The speaker would play back the voice of the other performer on a time delay, and each of us had to try to mimic what we heard in real-time. This quickly devolved as it’s an impossible task, though an abstract musicality emerged. After the actual verbal information is lost, the melodic and rhythmic aspects of the voice become the focus. 

On the last day of the residency we had an open studio presentation, where we showed about 20 minutes to an audience. These were really just the initial sketches for four different sections – each one investigating a different relation between voice and the electronics. Afterwards we had a good question / answer session and a good discussion came out of it.

In July I'll be travelling to STEIM (the studio for electro-instrumental music) in Amsterdam with performer Okwui Okpokwasili to begin exploring possibilities of human-machine interaction. This is the first research phase for this project.

http://steim.org

I've been spending a lot of time reading the collected critical writings of the founder of Italian futurism F.T. Marinetti.  By most accounts the man was a psychopath, war-mongerer, misogynist, and bad poet.  He was also a major catalyst in the whole idea of an artistic avant-garde.  Above all he glorified technology.  Again and again he writes about how machines, speed, and war will purify the human spirit from a murky romantic past and hurl us headlong into a weightless, well lit, and glorious future.  As far as I can tell this general faith in technology as the bringer of speed, power, and all-over-brightness is still going strong - just look at the Apple ad campaigns.  I'd like dig out some of the violence which no doubt festers under the surface of our present day seemingly serene techno-complacency.