Audio Poverty

Ekkehard Ehlers: Which is your favorite law of nature?

Serge Baghdassarians: There was a time when just about all self-respecting
artists talked about the second thermodynamic law.
Entropy was the buzzword of the day, even though few actually
knew much about it. Others flirted with metaphysics all their
lives, for example, Simone Weil’s use of gravity as a metaphor
in her Christian interpretations.
I use the laws of physics to place cheap, mass-produced objects
into a “state of emergency” in my work. Whether it’s gravity,
tension, air pressure or whatever, the determining factor isn’t
which law of nature I use but the choice of materials.

Why do you employ “povera” materials?

Generally the object has to be useful. However, in my work, objects become eccentric.
By that I mean I make them deviate from their actual function
to temporarily define a spectrum of possibilities or, more
precisely, outcomes. For example, a foot pump. Everyone knows
the exertive pleasure of pumping up a paddleboat in searing
heat or an air mattress while half-asleep. In downbeat, however,
the foot pump is pressed together instead of trodden on and
“conserved” with adhesive tape until this state is abruptly terminated
by the pressure of the steel springs inside the bellows.
It’s also interesting to note how differently mass-produced objects
behave under the same conditions. In the installation, the
time point of “de-compression”, that is, when the tape tears,
varies between 10 minutes and many hours. That’s one reason
for why I work in series.

Is there a sexual connotation to your work?

You’re probably alluding the off-the-cuff remark I made last time we met, that
downbeat was my first SM work. Well, in that work I seal the
foot pump’s air inlet with rubber ball. I wanted to slow down the
process of decompression, stretch it out, to see the bellows expand
in slow motion. The rubber ball may seem like a ball-gag,
however, my first priority is always to work with a material’s or
object’s inherent characteristics. For instance, the foot pump
is a potential power source. In the moment of decompression
built-up energy is released. The polystyrene hemispheres attached
to the sides increase the resulting friction and generate
two superposed pulse strings. The result is an interplay of
forces and materials. That’s enough for me. However, the objects
I use are all so loaded that it doesn’t matter how abstract,
geometric or stylized the assembly I use is. So the fact that my
work can inspire extremely diverging associations doesn’t really
surprise me. The spontaneous response of the Israeli composer
Dror Feiler to tertium comparationis, an installation using
PVC rulers and rubber bands, was that they were all “suicide
bombers”. Or, an audience member, whose name unfortunately
escapes me, associated aerobic exercise, which uses air balloons,
droppers and rubber bands, with a junkie discarding their
tourniquet after a shot. They’re good examples of how people
can’t help but constantly generate images. However, in the final
instance, they’re just interpretations. Via extremely simple,
irreducible means, I try to provide the viewer with as direct an
access to the work as possible, which causes past experience
and the present perception to merge.

Why don’t you work with computers or other conventional
sound-art tools?

Apart from mixing and mastering recordings,
I’ve never used a computer for either my electronic music excursions
or my installations. During a tour of the USA with my
long-term collaborative partner Boris Baltschun, we were surprised
by the sub-standard power supply in some places, especially
California. Until that point I had concentrated on music
using loud speakers. But from then on I started to enjoy developing
installations that bore some relation to electronic music
but didn’t rely on electricity – unplugged. The first such work,
called brownout and formed from air balloons and disposable
syringes, was the result of a collaboration with Boris at the beginning
of 2005. In the meantime the sound aspect has become
one of many, it’s not as prominent anymore. That’s why
I avoid using the term ‘sound art’.

Almost all your work deals with time as duration; the negation
of a final state.

Because I mostly don’t use electricity, my installations
have a limited time span. Usually they only last a few
hours, more infrequently a few days. For instance,
building the installation kritische masse takes longer than the actual
“show“. Work and latency are the key terms here. I work to set
a process in motion. However, the work doesn’t become manifest
in a product, but instead dissipates over a period of time
like air from a balloon. It’s extremely economically inefficient,
particularly because photos can’t replicate the action either,
they simply document it. While the preparatory measures required
to create the installation remain hidden from the audience,
the consequences reveal themselves by means of the
objects’ – sometimes considerably delayed – visual and audible
reactions. In downbeat the latency is so extended that the
consequences cause the initial actions to be almost forgotten,
or that is, cast me, like the audience, as spectators of an interplay
of material, time and energy.
But to return to the question of economics, there’s an absurd
story about this in relation to kritische masse. A few months ago
I tried to buy a large number of table-tennis balls. Not really a
big deal, except that I couldn’t find any in my neighborhood. I
thought to myself, OK, the outdoor season is over, I have to approach
this more systematically, and I finally did manage to get
hold of the balls. Except then it turned out that the balls had a
diameter of 4 cm instead of the 3.8 cm of the balls I had bought
a few months earlier. So I looked into this and came across the
following story. In 2000, the international table-tennis federation
had decided to increase the diameter of table-tennis balls
by 2 mm to make the sport more viable for television. The idea
was that the rallies would be slower and longer and therefore
more enjoyable for viewers at home. Only, since then, coatings
that increase speed, have also kept being developed and
released on the market, such that the desired effect was never
achieved. Isn’t that great? I can only say: take up playing the
game yourself, instead of just sitting in front of the TV, and to
the game officials, why not try balloons…

Clearly delay is also a theme in tape delay?

Acousticians speak of an echo when a soundwave’s reflection is so delayed
that it’s heard as a separate sound. Cliffs are an example of a
perfect reflective surface in nature. In tape delay there’s neither
an incoming signal nor a reflective wall or a tape delay
machine. Instead, rolls of masking tape unfurl themselves to
continually kick off a simple mechanism – the pulling apart
and pushing together of bellows extracted from “moo” noisemakers.
Once on the ground, the closely adjacent strips form
one surface but there’s no sound anymore. During a test run,
I thought of a passage from Alphaville, in the sense in which
Lemmy Caution says to Alpha 60: “The past represents its future.
It advances in a straight line, yet it ends by coming full
circle.” He could have been talking about my work. In any case,
I have a small anecdote about this, too. While preparing for this
festival I tried to determine the “tape speed” required for the
masking tape to travel the 6.8 meters from ceiling to floor within
three days. One of my favorite topics: viscosity. The more masking tape on the roll,
the more quickly it unfurls. That’s probably
because the glue adheres better on the inner lanes than
the outer ones, while the reduction in weight is marginal. The
distance per revolution decreases by about 1 mm with each
turn. By measuring the tape, I found out that a roll has 56 revolutions
of approximately 28 cm each, which equals 15.68 m
masking tape. But the package label promises 20 m. Luckily
Haus der Kulturen doesn’t have 20 m high ceilings. It doesn’t
bear thinking about! Once the festival is over I’m going to go
to the store and call their attention to this. I’m already looking
forward to their reaction. However, no other masking tape unwinds
as well as this one…

Would you use more expensive materials or create larger installations
if you had more money?

Good question. My only answer at this time is, give me the money and you’ll find out
after the fact; I’ve got quite a few ideas queued up.