Edge of Vision: An Exchange with John Duncan -- M Kitchell John Duncan is an artist that has been working in the realm of art-as-experience since the mid-1970s when he lived in LA. His work has gone through many different forms and mediums as time has progressed, moving from direct actions at the start of his career to carefully articulated audio work as a primary outlet currently. Early on in his career Duncan found himself exiled from LA after performing a specifically transgressive performance piece, BLIND DATE. I find Duncan interesting due specifically to his insistence on art being affective, and how he has moved through and explored this idea throughout his career. The idea of affect is a powerful force no matter what medium it's applied to, and Duncan is a master of transcendence, of reaching new feelings. A couple weeks ago I emailed John Duncan with the request to ask him a few questions, and he was kind enough to comply and provide fantastic answers: M. Kitchell:I have an interest in the consideration of "the artist" as a shaman, or the artistic practice as a shamanistic practice. What I specifically mean by this refers to "the belief that shamans are intermediaries or messengers between the human world and the spirit worlds," and the idea that "the shaman also enters supernatural realms or dimensions to obtain solutions to problems afflicting the community" (wikipedia). You have specifically expressed the idea that much of your praxis is geared towards learning, in a sense a self-education. It seems that an extension of this, in the presentation of the work itself, is the interest in a mode of communication, a way to share the experience and the knowledge learned. In some of your performance & installation work, it could be said that you are subjecting the audience to as much stress, or, perhaps, negativity, as you have submitted yourself to. There seems to be the intent of arriving at, say, a new consciousness, a discovery, an advancement. I think there's generally an expectation of a distance between the audience and the work of art, but much of your work seems to deny that distance, it seems to specifically violate it. This denial of distance is not specifically something unique to your work, but much of your early work (SCARE, MOVE FORWARD, MAZE) seems to aggressively challenge this distance. Can you talk a little about this, how important the communication of an experience is to your work? John Duncan:The essence, especially now, is not so much the communication of an experience as it is the experience itself. In all the works you mention, the point is to somehow get spectators to at least meet me halfway as participants. To make it clear that the extent the work reveals itself to a participant depends on whether or not the participant allows it to do so, on each person's attitudes and character. The difference between my earlier and more recent events is that in the past participants were usually trapped and forced to deal with a unique situation that they weren't at all prepared for, which was essential to the event. Once trapped, it was up to the individual to interpret the situation as a threat or as a chance. Now, participants are free to leave at any time. They are given a condition to accept or not. For the person who does accept, decides to follow their curiosity, the work continues to open and develop. If the person refuses, everything stops there for them, the knowledge that they couldn't let go is what they take home. Throughout your oeuvre one can find what seems to be a repeated resistance to language, or at least an insistence that preferences experience over language. Even on your website, the descriptions of each event, performance, installation, etc., are remarkably brief, even vague at times. Though at the same time, language does specifically play a role in certain pieces. More recently I know that CD booklets included in some of your audio releases have included texts which read almost as poetry. I wonder if you'd talk about your relationship with language, how it affects your work and what role it plays within your work, even now. The work is always about insights, hoping to invoke or describe them. Sometimes they come solely through language, sometimes solely by avoiding it. The work determines an approach that's appropriate, whether or not words expedite or block the experience. Especially when describing an event or installation, I tend to prefer to avoid writing down too many, hoping that the ones that are used help the reader imagine what it was to be there than to be a journalistic report. You're not the first to say they're sometimes vague, so we see how well it works… In a 2007 interview with Steve Peralta, you mentioned limited edition books you made while you were in LA. What was going on in these books, could you talk about them? The first was under 10 pages, covers included, with photo paper exposed to a specific shade of gray on the left and a phrase that seemed appropriate on the right. On the left, light gray; on the right 'A SAD SONG'. On the left, dark gray; on the right 'TRUST ABUSED'. On the left, black; on the right 'A BITTER STORY'. I made maybe 10 copies of it, don't remember if it had a title. AGAIN was a photo-narrative, in part a performance for still camera: in the process of getting drunk, I get into an intimate love-hate struggle that ends with shooting myself in the head, then waking from it. One copy was made, which I still have. PHALLUS was a 20-page series of collages made with images from science magazines, maps, texts of dreams, interviews from American soldiers talking about Vietnam. I made 50 black + white photocopies of it, all given to friends. To continue with the idea of the book, I've read the digital version of your "on-going book" THE ERROR probably a hundred times, and my response to it is repeatedly a realm of affect that I can't assign to any other work of art (text or otherwise) that I've specifically encountered elsewhere. It's one of the most fantastic combinatory efforts I've ever seen. Is it still an on-going project? It's evolved, I guess. At this point it's The PLASMA MISSIVES, dreams written in my blood on heavy sheets of thick paper. What are you after with THE ERROR? To make a book that invokes a logic unique to each reader, that to seek a universally applicable rationality always fails to account for some level of consciousness. To render the steps for getting there hidden and secret, by printing the entire text in black on heavy black paper, that have to be read by moving the page until the letters are reflected enough to recognize them. One of the thing that fascinates me about your work is your obsession, or at least insistence, upon the hidden. In consideration of your work with pornography, you've stated that "Pornography shows aspects of a culture that the culture wants to deny, to keep hidden." An early work of yours that I find particularly incredible via the inscription alone is SECRET FILM. Even more recently, with your video THE TAILING, you seem to keep on the edge of vision, refusing anything fully identifiable or representational to appear. It seems like there is a thematic insistence within your oeuvre to touch the inaccessible, to access the hidden. Is this true? Yes, absolutely. A number of interviews that I have read with you begin by asking about your past. The biographic picture you paint includes a Calvinist upbringing, a life of relative isolation (in the sense that you spent more time with books than other children), and frustration, despair. You then left the relative expanse of the Midwest and attended CalArts. You've expressed that your work was thematically, perhaps, affected by this upbringing. Some of your earlier works (I'm thinking here specifically of EVERY WOMAN, FOR WOMEN ONLY, and BLIND DATE) address misogyny and, for lack of a better term, "male guilt." I'm always hesitant to assign a psycho-analytical/historical reading to a work of art, but I'm wondering specifically what your intentions were, if they were a response to the environment you found yourself in in LA, or if the work is especially reactionary to your upbringing, or, rather, if the work was exclusively made towards your idea of revealing a truth via experience? The short answer is 'yes'. Imagine a mix of all of these elements competing for focus in the mind of a man in his early 20?s, trying to sort out who he is. Who was the audience for your more specifically (physically, perhaps) transgressive works? You've noted that the audience of SCARE was two of your friends. When you began working, was your audience primarily other artists? What about when you were in Japan? For the first several events in LA, audiences were mainly friends and people we knew in common. BUS RIDE was held on LA city buses in operation with me driving, NO and HAPPY HOMES were both live radio broadcasts. Japanese audiences paid at the door, tuned in to RADIO CODE pirate FM broadcasts or accidentally discovered TVC 1. Who is your audience now? Do you have anything invested in who your audience is, or is your concern still the affective conduit the work offers, regardless of who it is that is experiences it? This latter is an eloquent answer to your question. The short answer is: people who are curious. After WET magazine ran some information on BLIND DATE in their March/April 1981 issue, a man wrote a letter into the magazine regarding the piece. What I find interesting about this letter is that it demonstrates that a man has had to a similar experience as the experience you undertook with BLIND DATE (albeit the entire process involved in your execution seems more articulated & specific), though his reaction, tainted perhaps by LSD, seems to diverge from yours. You've mentioned that you've more or less come to terms with the event. I think this is at least partially a demonstration of the difference between the experience of the the piece itself & the reaction to the piece itself, mainly in the fact that there's a ritual catharsis involved in the act, whereas (as opposed to much of your other work), the only direct experience the audience had with the piece was in the documentation & the experience of the audio. Whereas this man, at least ostensibly, has actually experienced the act which your work carries the message of. Do you think this man would be in a privileged position of response to your work? Is anyone? I have a series of questions relating your work to other artists & filmmakers. I'd like to talk, briefly, about some connections I see between your work and the work of others. The first artist that I find somewhat parallel to you is Terry Fox. He began as a painter, attained some notoriety in the Bay Area performance art scene due to the provocative nature of his performances (many of which, in a mode I feel similar to your own work, seemed to be after a sort of impossible transcendence), and then he left the US, and began focusing on works primarily involved with audio. The other artist I think of when I think of your work is Gregor Schneider, who of course is also more insistent upon the experience or the encounter with the 'art' than the art object itself– Schneider specifically with his interest in abject spaces, the aura of a room, the uncanny. Do you feel a kinship with either of these artists? My comments here are in fact reductive, and I'm also not specifically offering any direct connection, I'm more probing the possibility of your consideration. I like their work, and was fortunate enough to meet Terry Fox several weeks before he died. Kinship is a different issue. Terry Fox's work shows that he was a genuinely gentle soul, which for better or worse I cannot imagine ever being able to say about myself. Similarly, I know that you've mentioned that you no longer consider yourself influenced by the Viennese Aktionists as you were when you began your career, but I'm curious as to the nature of your interest specifically in Rudolf Schwarzkogler. I ask because, out of all the artists who gathered under the heading of the Aktionists, it was Schwarzkogler whose actions were, arguably, the most "artificial." They were staged only for still cameras, and rarely performed publicly. It seems like Schwarzkogler's work was more symbolic (though his writings do seem to be the most in tune with the ideas of a shamanism I've outlined above, opposed to a Reichian catharsis). Your work certainly seems more affective of the physical (especially BLIND DATE) than Schwarzkogler's potentialities. Schwarzkogler also seems, at least to me, to have been the most sincere among the Aktionismus group — maybe because he died young… The tableaux he created were for intimate audiences, each participant among them left to absorb the work effectively alone, without the comfort of being in a larger group or crowd. Are you familiar with the pink films of Hisayasu Sato? He probes ideas that some of your work explores, and things you've said about your JOHN SEE/TVC 1 videos strike me as similar. Is there a way for Western audiences to see the John See videos? It seems there was a PAL release of TVC 1 that's no longer available; will it ever be available again? It would be great to see authorized re-releases of these videos. As far as I know, there are no plans for that for any of them. Anyone who's interested is welcome to get in contact… Sato and I haven't met; just found out recently about him. Tokyo film school graduates in the 80?s were often keen on producing special effects for splatter films, on making splatter films to produce special effects. With emphasis on the sensational, which I've never really cared about.

John Duncan, MAZE, 1996

Melissa Pasut e John Duncan, An Open Area Inside the Mountain, 2010

The necessity of art Catterina Seia and Chiara Tinonin John Duncan and Melissa Pasut, both American living in Bologna, Italy, have recently started to collaborate together on the integration of music, dance and art performance. The work of John Duncan, performer and composer, has been exhibited all over the world, as at the Getty Center and MOCA in Los Angeles, MAK in Vienna, MACBA in Barcelona and MOT in Tokyo. He took part and directed the Ensemble Phoenix in Basel and Bern, the Ensemble Musica Nova in Tel Aviv and Zeitkratzer in Berlin; his music (The Crackling, Tap Internal, Palace of Mind, Fresch, Nine Suggestions) is considered as a milestone in experimenting. In his projects Duncan never offers a unique point of view but works on the complexity of limitations and opportunities, on existence and the process of change, constructing new balances. The project he’s currently working on, Cross Radio ­ a global radio based on users interaction ­ is going to be launched next spring. With Melissa Pasut, dancer, choreographer and performer who founded Anoikis, they recently produced The Seed at Zero, a music, dance and artistic performance that started from exploring a dream they had. The performance, composed by two different acts (Transfiguration of a shattered mass and An open area inside the mountain), is an oneiric representation deeply lucid and aware, that makes the movement a metaphor of the growing process, the sound the rhythm of the world. Conversing with Duncan and Pasut means to discuss about the comprehension of the message, the relationship between the work and the spectator, the distortions of the art market. The necessity of art is a dialogue that reminds us how much art can be a resource of learning, growing, sharing meanings. And a free space for a critique that the contemporary world is cutting off. How did you create the performance, what’s the source for it? MELISSA PASUT Mostly we wanted to work together, so from him studying with me and working with movement, we decided to try creating a piece together. Going from his work and my work, he came up with instruments and from there we worked on how to incorporate the sound and the music with the movement. It was really merging the disciplines together. JOHN DUNCAN There’s this tendency that we had to work without language, to understand the conflict with language. The choreography was based on dreams that we had, trying to find ways to interpret them without spelling them out with language, to take them as a point of reference, a point of departure. To build the choreography around these experiences. Trying to make it unnecessary to talk, or use language. With the first performance you expressed the feeling of being a fragment. In this globalized world anybody has this life-cycle. I found that we need now a lot to get in touch with space, because no place is a real place. MP I was working with a universal idea without having a detachment from the body in mind, so much as the exploration of the body and how it moves and how it changes, as applied to any aspect of life. JD One of the things that is really attractive to me about working together is that this kind of work allows me to start doing things that I understand I "shouldn’t do". Now, the conventional wisdom is that it's too late for someone my age to start moving, to start using the body, that at 57 years old the body starts to decay, starts to fall apart, doesn’t work anymore, muscles don’t respond the way they used to. So dance is something for dancers, a youthful enterprise that when you reach 30 or 40 years old suddenly you are no longer able to do, that it's time to focus on choreography instead of moving itself. I like to thumb my nose at that, to say: “this is crap”. It is true that my body doesn’t do the things that it did at 19 years old. It is also true that with my body, and with every other form of creativity that I have available, I can say things that were not possible when I was 20 or 30 years old. I didn’t have the experiences, I didn’t have the insights that time has given to me and to everybody else who has lived this long. So, dance is just one more way to give out, to give back what I’ve been absorbing in this time. And in a way that is… I want to say secret, but it’s not really secret, it’s more something that is unexpected. It’s something that I did not expect to do, at all. And I am delighted to perform, whether or not I'm interesting to look at as a dancer, I don’t care about that. Being included in this means that someone who is almost 60 years old who is moving, interacting with somebody who is half of his age and the things that she can do… this says something, this has some truth in it and that truth is something that I’m very excited to be part of. Your performance together was talking about human exchange, how much people can know about themselves thanks to meeting others. You were projecting actions off the body and that was well represented by sound waves you played by John’s string and carillon. MP It’s finding ourselves and learning how to relate with the outside world. I’m interested in people who are not dancers, him or whoever works with me, interested in seeing what they can explore and find within themselves and how they can related to the outside and inside world. That’s what I work on, interested in seeing. So in working with John in that realm, that’s what I feel we were doing or trying to do, learning the body, exploring, discovering capabilities of the body and how it can be projected outward. JD I wanted to make a contribution to the choreography that came from an area I was comfortable working in. These sounds were as much opposite each other as I could find, as I could think of. One of them is very noisy, dynamic. It’s metallic, very bulky and clumsy and clunky. The other is just the opposite, very refined; it makes very small sounds that have to be amplified to be heard at all. And it is played in a very delicate way; it is caressed, rather than churned. So they call for completely opposite approaches. That kind of contrast is something that I saw between the two of us, bringing into the work. One of them needed strength to be played, the other one was more female in a way. MP It came up afterward. When we thought about the instruments themselves and which one is unique, I don’t think that was the intention, when he went to construct them and design them. It came afterwards when we played them and realised that the string was much more my way of being and the carillon was much more his way of being. So then we really tried to accentuate that idea. It just happened that way. JD And at the same time to refute that idea, to sort of deny that. And say that it is not…that each of us has our own way to approach each instrument and the sound of it, so the one is not preferable to the other. How do you consider your public during the performance? MP This is something that we have spoken about in the past, how to make spectators as much a part of what we are doing as everything else, to allow them some sort of entrance to this world that we’ve created, to this idea, even if it is only a simple gesture. JD Making contact with them. To an extent, for me at least, this comes from performance because the attraction that performance had was that it was a situation where there was no separation between the spectator and a performer. Everybody was a part of the process. And there was no real hierarchy; it’s not possible to eliminate any role. With dance, even with the stage, even with physical separation between us, the audience is not in a passive role… individuals are working, to an extent, as much as we are. MP The work is also complete with the audience, otherwise there’s no reason to do it. It’s not just for ourselves; it’s finished, it’s completed when somebody else has experienced it. I think that art should be accessible to everyone which it's not; the environment we worked in is less accessible because it’s not open. For example, an art gallery is open but people can choose not to go… I believe that people should experience art, it’s a necessary part of life, because artists help everybody by creating something for people who don’t do the work, who can’t do the work, who maybe can’t approach something in a certain way. So you have this other exploration that somebody is doing and is giving but people don’t… I can’t say the majority of the people, but many people are not interested in art, don’t find it necessary. But then you have these moments where people who see those things… they have an experience, with music, dance, movies, whatever, that changes their lives, affects them in some way. So that begins the discussion of the necessity of art. The place where you performed, Spazio Sì, in Bologna, is managed by Teatrino Clandestino, it’s accessible but at the same time an hidden place that doesn’t promote its cultural offer the way we are used to, and measuring the success by the number of visitors. JD I think that there are several situations like this here in Bologna. The one element that makes Bologna interesting is something that seems to frustrate Bolognese and that is the students, the people who are coming to Bologna from all over the world, charged with energy to do things. In fact that was the one thing that attracted me to come here. There was this energy here, from people who come here largely to study and find connections with other students who then become friends and form groups. I see this over and over again, that in this city, for some reason, there is this energy and that means there are all these small groups of people that are themselves hubs, who are doing things on their own initiative because they are frustrated by the lack of interest from the established support organisations and network structures around them. The frustrating thing about that is that they remain isolated. I think the thing that would make this city very interesting would be for these groups of people to join forces. How can contemporary art museums work with this? JD Contemporary art museums have a really great opportunity. They have the support that all of these other groups lack and need in order to survive. They have the possibility to attract and encourage all of these groups, but very often they do the opposite, they push them away. There is a tendency here to feel that the support organisations for art are actually doing art a favour by deigning to give some kind of funding or organisational support to art events, rather then understanding that the art events are the key to their existence. That makes it really frustrating to work in Italy. In fact it’s a great place to live, but for making art I no longer expect to work here; I work abroad and travel a lot because of that. What do you think about companies that are investing in contemporary art and art projects? Are they possible ways to explore for cultural partnership? JD I would like to say yes. There are two reasons why I think that that is very difficult, at least at this time. One of them is that private funding organisations are reluctant to support contemporary art, unless it is so banal that it is safe for children and families. That cuts out ninety-five percent of contemporary art, because that is not what contemporary art is about. It has nothing to do with appeasing people with families; that is what Disney and Pixar are for. Contemporary art is about saying something that has a kind of truth that is difficult to see. You can not make contemporary art, at this time or any other, and still feel compelled to limit yourself to what "the masses" are willing to see, to people with children are willing to see. It doesn’t work like that. It didn’t work like that for me in Kansas, it didn’t work in my generation, in the generation before me, it didn’t work in any generation. This simply doesn’t fly, so that is one thing. The other thing is that people in these small experimental groups that I was talking about, who have this creative energy, feel that they would be rejected by such support institutions even before they approached them. So unless that changes, unless these funding organisations realise that the sources of breaking energy, and the kind of things that at least they say they want to support, is in these small groups -- until they come to terms with that, these two necessary partners will always be very separate and antagonistic to each other, see each other as a trap. Do you think this is a way for them to give identity to themselves? Building the identity defining what you are not. JD There are people who feel that way and I used to feel that way, for quite a long time in fact; I avoided art support organisations for decades. I don’t agree with that anymore, because I’ve seen that there are people who are in a position to support the arts, who look to the arts to tell them something about their lives that they cannot see on their own. Who value what we have to say, especially when it's confrontational or difficult to hear. I assumed for decades that they were gone, that such people didn’t exist, that art support organisations and especially private collectors were interested in art only as an investment. Later I learned that this was a very limiting way to seeing. I learned that this is not always the case; there are people who really want to support art, to give money to encourage art, and in this way to be a part of the process of making art. They are essential, as the art that they want to support is essential for them. So there is this give-and-take that happens and when it does it is magic. It is. Managing cultural institutions is not just strategy and management but is more about how much art and culture can affect the social growing process. Economists say that we are living in the knowledge era, a time when what is important is not just exchanging information but knowledge. And innovation comes from creativity and how much you are able to work, think and innovate a complex context. I really and strongly think that the arts can really be the space where you train your brain, not just because you consume them in your free time. JD It is not a relaxing thing. But if you do that you get used to it. The curve for cultural utility consumption is crescent, the contrary of any other good or product. Artists have a key role in our society. JD Can you imagine where we would be if Galileo, for example, had not had such life-threatening resistance from the Church to continue his research? We have the telescope; we have support for the heliocentric model. All of these things have revolutionized the way that we see ourselves and our position in the cosmos. Can you imagine where we would be if the Church, which is such a political organisation even now, supported his research instead of threatening him? This is the kind of thing that we see still happening now. There are artists and scientists who are going against a standard model and are seen as a threat. These people, who are genuinely interested in finding out about their own existence and the existence of everyone, are blocked by people who see and treat them as a threat. That hurts everybody, blocks us all. JOHN DUNCAN -- Steve Peralta, Neoaztlan May 2007 In 2001, the International Artists Studio Program In Sweden (IASPIS), on the recommendation of Swedish sound experimentalist, musician and curator Carl Michael von Hausswolff, awarded artist John Duncan a sought-after IASPIS residency. Two months after beginning his residency, the IASPIS revoked it citing the “problematic nature” of Duncan’s 1980 piece BLIND DATE. Duncan’s friends and colleagues rallied and with the pro bono help of Greenpeace lawyer Jan Palmblad, Duncan was allowed to complete his residency. The issue was “about much more essential issues than my art, or me personally,” Duncan wrote. “It’s about refusing to accept being dictated to, by anyone, over what can be done and said. It’s about verifying the fact that an atmosphere of so-called ‘political correctness’ in fact stifles the ideals it promotes ­ that this atmosphere is counter-productive to creative acts of any kind, anywhere, as well as to the people who perform them.” “Political correctness” carried a particularly blistering resonance at the time. The rubble of the World Trade Center smoldered. Normally passive countries stared blankly at the wrath of the United States government hoping they wouldn’t be picked, but once they were, there were memories of Nuremberg. Duncan would perhaps find himself an unwitting victim of the IASPIS diluted “war on terror.” Political correctness aside, there remained experimental art and the dialogue it created. Duncan’s work, along with that of other experimental artists, was tinged with a guerilla empiricism with which not even an unsuspecting audience would be safe. Duncan’s 1984 event piece titled MOVE FORWARD at Plan B in Tokyo (excerpt taken from Duncan’s Web site): “High-volume sound in a completely dark concrete room for 20 minutes. After 10 minutes, a film collage that includes animated diagrams nuclear explosions, images of pornography, S-M sexual acts and Hiroshima victims, is shown in slow motion onto a paper projection screen that divides the room from wall to wall and floor to ceiling. When the film ends, Duncan sets the screen on fire and sprays the burning remains into the audience with a fire extinguisher.” Duncan’s 1995 event piece titled THREAT at the Kapelica Gallery in Ljubljana, Slovenia (excerpt taken from Duncan’s Web site): “Infrared photo images of vaginas projected several meters high on the rear wall of an open space with a single entrance, guarded at the entrance by an attack dog.” In his 1990 live installation piece RIVER IN FLAMES (1990), Duncan directed thousands of watts of white light into the faces of the audience while attacking them with intense, harsh music. “The idea was to overload the audience’s visual and audio perception simultaneously,” said Duncan in a recent interview with von Hausswolff. Despite the aggression, momentum carries Duncan’s sound work toward introspection. The outdoor installation THE KEENING TOWERS (2003) was created with the voices of a children’s choir and debuted at the Second Gothenburg Biennial. THE GARDEN (2006), an audio installation with six elements based on voice and onsite field recordings and produced with Italian experimental composer, Valerio Tricoli, was built at the Industria Piemontese dei Colori di Anilina (IPCA) in Ciriè, Italy. In the twenties, the IPCA factory polluted the environment and bodies of its workers. Many died of cancer. Today, the Province of Turin is redeveloping the IPCA Ecomuseum as a memorial to those who were lost. Duncan, a native of Kansas, doesn’t worry so much about political correctness anymore (not as if he ever did). From his home in Italy, the controversy surrounding BLIND DATE seems a distant memory. What Duncan has found, with the help of his work, is relative success and an enduring home. In this rare interview, Duncan talks about his work and life. ­ Steve Peralta Steve Peralta: Can you talk a little bit about your background? Where were you born? John Duncan: My mother came from a family of farmers living in western Kansas. My father’s parents tried to start a farm in New Mexico that failed. In desperation, my grandfather accepted a job in a smalltown Kansas post office and moved the family there. My parents met as university students. They got married and settled in Wichita, where I was born. SP: Where did you grow up? JD: In Wichita, until I was about 8 years old. Then we started moving from one city to another as my father was transferred to various cities in the midwest, staying in one place for a year or two before moving to another. SP: What were you like as a child/teenager/young man? JD: I remember playing openly with kids who lived close by, sharing experiences and things we liked. I remember learning to read at around 3-years-old, especially fascinated with an illustrated how-to book that explained how to fly an airplane. Some of my first drawings were of that plane ­ a Cessna 170. I was impatient to start school and was disappointed when classes finally began, staying home secretly on days that I knew would be especially boring. My father had already started travelling a lot then and I remember noticing that the adults in my daily life, all women, were in control but somehow preferred to defer final authority to someone else ­ someone absent. Everything that seemed secure and supporting collapsed when we started moving. Wherever we lived the kids seemed hostile and exclusive. The world itself became increasingly threatening. My parents were often frustrated and distant. I started spending a lot of time inside, deliberately isolated, mainly reading or drawing. Each time we moved all this intensified. In my teens, school had become practically insufferable, especially as a source of social life. The only people I could really talk to outside of class were the teachers at their homes. SP: What’s your educational background? Are there any events while growing up that you feel really affected your decisions later to pursue art and sound? JD: To keep the family together, my father decided to move back to Wichita. Teachers in one of the local high schools had come up with an informal experimental program that gave certain kids authorization to define and conduct their own study including credit for night and weekend classes at the university and a local art school. I focused on these outside classes and spent the required daily high school hours in the library working on projects agreed upon with the teachers to satisfy their need to prove I’d been studying… along with reading the assigned lists of books. Since I had time to read them all I often asked for new ones or made up my own from titles on the shelves I hadn’t read or didn’t recognize. There was also a records section with headphones. SP: You mentioned your Calvinist upbringing. Perhaps you can expand on that. JD: Suffering. Misery. Denial. Of physical pleasure, especially sensual. Sex taboo for inclusion even as a reference in conversation, let alone frank discussion. Questions about details in the Bible (a title on one of those lists) strictly forbidden. Humor forbidden during visits from relatives. All positive references to black people forbidden. What that left to encourage was work. Especially hard, dedicated work that others took for granted, didn’t fully recognize or failed to understand. SP: Talk about BLIND DATE. Many people are still outraged by the 1980 piece. In 2002, the International Artist’s Studio Program in Sweden (IASPIS) revoked a residency invitation over the piece. JD: Yes ­ after granting me the maximum period they offer and I sued them for this. The lawsuit was handled by Jan Palmblad, chief defense lawyer for the Swedish branch of Greenpeace. It was settled entirely in my favor out of court within 60 days. He said it was the easiest case he’s ever handled. A number of Swedish artists and institutions, especially Fylkingen, organized among themselves to defend me and make it possible to finish the full 6-month period despite IASPIS’s very determined efforts to force me to leave as soon as possible. It was a sincerely humbling and rich experience. I’ll always be grateful to them for that ­ to everyone involved ­ including those responsible at IASPIS. SP: You were reportedly horrified with what you had done. What was the compulsion? What it compulsion at all? Or was it something else? JD: The driving force behind BLIND DATE was that I was horrified at having failed to give the woman I loved the proof of how I felt for her. Remaining true to my Calvinist male upbringing, I intended to punish myself for that in the most repulsive way I could come up with. My sole focus, obsession really, was to make myself suffer as much as possible. Whether or not I survived it made no difference. The decision to make it public was intended to point out that the intense hostility I was aiming at myself was simply an extreme version of very widespread, socially supported behavior, to set an open example of where such an upbringing can lead, to encourage others to examine similar characteristics in themselves and hopefully learn to avoid causing themselves or those around them to suffer in this way. SP: What are your thoughts on it now in the context of ‘John Duncan 2007’? JD: My body of work effectively proves that my intentions are positive overall, so I believe BLIND DATE will ultimately be viewed in the light of my original intentions rather than the distortions and rumors that have continued to spring up around it so far. History is full of boisterous misunderstandings that over time prove to be embarrassing. An obscenity case brought against Constantin Brancusi’s Bird In Flight’, to give one example. Even if the sculpture actually did inspire someone to think of using it as an erotic tool, what harm would that cause? What’s the harm in seeing erotic tools as elegant, as sculpture? Harm stems from the fear of being prepared to understand in new ways, feeling threatened by the unexpected. It’s what’s in our minds that’s essential, how we perceive and how our perceptions can be changed. This is what my work has been focused on since the beginning. This is its focus today. SP: How much of the internal challenges you felt during your early period of work are present today and how much can you attribute those to your decision to move to Italy? JD: Internal situations have changed and developed over time, as they do for all of us who live long enough to witness them. My decision to move to Italy came from meeting Giuliana Stefani after living eight years in Amsterdam, which followed six years of living and working in Tokyo. SP: Was part of the decision also a rejection of the American audience? JD: No. The decision to leave the United States came from a sort of push-pull situation between ex-lovers, close friends and their associates on one side of the Pacific making a determined effort to block any and all public displays or references to my work after failing in their attempt to send me to prison, and audiences on the other side sincerely interested in listening to what I had to say on what BLIND DATE ­ as well as my work in general ­ was about. Facing unabashed hostility on one side and respect on the other, the choice was fairly easy to make. Once I’d set up space to work in Tokyo, opportunities began to open up and a momentum began to build. Of course it was a huge struggle to move my possessions there and survive without speaking Japanese or knowing anything about the culture, learning everything one detail at a time, but it was an order of magnitude better than living with open hatred from the people I cared about. SP: Can you talk about how important dissonance is to music in general and about how your work has matured over the years? Who are some of artists you feel are able to use sound effectively in their music? JD: That’s a very long list that includes but is definitely not limited to trance (calculated for and performed over multichannel audio systems in soccer stadiums); techno; gabber; early 1950’s Elvis recordings on mono equipment and microphones with vacuum-tubes; the “Madrigali” of Carlo Gesualdo performed by a chorus that’s memorized their individual parts to perform in darkness; Eliane Radigue’s “Biogenesis” composed from the recordings of her pregnant daughter’s heartbeats; Jegog performances on instruments made with bamboo that’s buried in lime for months before being tested, repeating the process until the sound is perfect; recent audio recordings of the NASA probe landing on Titan… One person who uses voice amazingly is Ghedalia Tazartes, especially on the “Diaspora” LP. Another more recent example who´s actually been an inspiration to try singing is Scott Walker’s “The Drift.” In his case, it’s more a combination of voice with lyrics and studio recording techniques. He gives the solid impression that he’s been paying attention to experimental music. SP: I’m particularly interested in your work while you lived in Japan. You entered into a more visual realm during that time it seems. JD: Or got back into it a bit more, tapping back into collage/writing experiments that were started in the first limited-edition books (20-30 copies) done in Los Angeles. SP: Talk in detail about your work as “John See.” The work seems darkly sexual ­ still with the punishment narrative present in BLIND DATE. JD: The “John See” series was a brainchild of Nakagawa Noriaki, founding head of Kuki Inc., who acted as a patron of my work in Tokyo. He offered to produce a series of commercial adult videos that I would direct and edit with state-of-the-art video equipment and editing facilities with a cast and crew that he would choose. I’d write and storyboard a basic screenplay that he and I would discuss together with the crew. Then, we’d schedule location hunting trips, 3-day shooting itineraries, block pre-editing and editing time, etc. The basic idea was to produce a product that I could then rent as a consumer and re-assemble or subvert, using my own material (rather than found TV broadcasts and film releases and ads, as I had been), into video pieces to broadcast over the TVC 1 pirate television project. Two of these were actually made and broadcast despite the abysmal quality of the VHS-edited video. In the Japanese commercial adult arena I wanted to try and introduce roles for the actors that were at least a little bit outside their standard sterotypes of cruel bastards bent on vengeance by proxy and suffering female victims. I focused especially on giving the women strong, self-assured, dominant characters to play. Getting these ideas across to the actors on the set, in Japanese, was a surreal experience for all of us. I was given a completely free hand with composing the soundtrack which I still think was a bold gesture on Nakagawa san’s part especially since I always insisted on the liberal use of shortwave and other sources hoping to encourage some sort of introspection in the viewer. I still don’t know how well they sold and to Nakagawa san’s immense credit, he repeatedly insisted that I not worry or even as much as think about the production costs. After starting to think in terms of directing a cast and crew, every detail became fascinating. I must say I never had any contact with Yakuza members there (Editor’s note: Yakuza refers to the Japanese mob.) or saw any hint whatsoever of anyone being forced to participate in these productions ­ just the opposite. The stifling hierarchy of traditional Japanese cinema created an entire generation of film school graduates brimming with talents and dreams who were effectively blocked from using what they’d studied so intently. The adult video industry greeted these same graduates ­ along with the uniquely talented outcasts from the generation before them ­ with open arms and paid everyone well. Added to this, Japanese censorship laws made actual penetration impossible to show without masking, which meant it was unnecessary for the actors to have actual sex onscreen. So it attracted a number of very interesting people who, like me, simply said, “Yes.” The women who worked on-camera made at least ten times the salaries of the men. One of my favorites was a woman who used this to support her true passion: driving a race car in competition. A three-day shoot on my project allowed her to pay her mechanics, track fees, parts and maintenence for a full year. Whether or not she actually understood anything I said, in keeping with her upbringing, she left vague. Another was a very shy man in his 50’s ­ a well-known manga artist in Japan who couldn’t get erect, even with a very sympathetic partner half his age, unless he was watching uncensored porn on a video screen… perfect example of a 20th Century male. He was very popular in Japanese adult cinema and had all the work he could fit in. Then I was fortunate enough to come in contact with two actors who could each work magic onscreen, at that moment actually together as a couple. “Magic onscreen” is an ability to create a sense of personal contact with the viewer through (and despite) a flat image and they both had it in abundance. Both were humble, approachable people who took a sincere interest in every role of the filmmaking process as well as their own focusing especially on the more obscure members of the tech crew. Nakagawa san clearly took pleasure in introducing all these people to each other. Reviews for the videos split either pro or con. Those who saw them as art films tended to be positive. Those who preferred standard hardcore porn regularly trashed them. For me the entire project was an experiment so these comments became an amusing unexpected offshoot. For Nakagawa san, it was all publicity. SP: Please talk about what you’re working on now. JD: In Stockholm, Sweden, two parallel installations: THE GAUNTLET at Fargfabriken and TEMPLE of DISTRACTION at Galleri Niklas Belenius. THE GAUNTLET is set in a renovated factory with an open floor space about 40?30 meters with a 7-meter ceiling, rendered lightless as a photographic darkroom, with seven infrared sensor controlled anti-theft alarms that become active every 10-15 minutes for a 5-minute interval. The visitors’ movements trigger them until the sound the alarms produce passes beyond the level of a warning and, for those ready to accept it as such, becomes an intriguing acoustic event ­ “music,” if you like. Whether it’s interpreted as torture or beauty is entirely up to the visitor. In contrast, TEMPLE of DISTRACTION is a series of clear plexiglas sheets with my blood sandwiched between them in Rorschach patterns, framed to stand about five centimeters from the wall. Light from outside will pass through two of these framed sheets sized to fit the gallery’s two window frames, with their blood patterns cast at angles along interior walls. A subtle ringing 4-channel drone moving at random around the space gives the subdued light the atmosphere of a sanctuary. In Prato, Italy, the opening of a group show I’m curating called “CROSS LAKE ATLANTIC” with Scott Arford, Gary Jo Gardenhire, Kim Gordon and Jutta Koether, Brandon LaBelle, Teresa Margolles and Fredrik Nilsen. In Piombino, Italy, the opening of an installation in a large open space on the grounds of an active steelmill. All opening within days of each other, between the end of August and early September. SP: What you still would like to accomplish in your work and as a person. JD: To wake up as fully as possible, in the time that’s left.

JOHN DUNCAN -- Massimo Ricci, Paris Transatlantic January 2005 After more than 35 years of various kinds of artistic research, do you still feel the same urge to discover something more or less "shocking" or do you tend to be more analytical towards of your work? I never have been interested in "shocking" myself or anyone else, really. The idea has always been to somehow find a way to tap into my inner self, and hopefully to encourage others through my work to do this. This desire, this fundamental urge hasn’t changed, in fact it’s stronger than ever. When I started making art I felt it was necessary to create confrontations, especially with myself and social conventions I’d always taken for granted, in order to learn from the conflicts and grow as a human being. At this point I can say that I’ve added "seduction" as well. When audiences stiffen their resolve expecting to be shocked or outraged, seduction can be even more powerfully disorienting and equally effective to direct attention inward again ­ which in my case is the reason behind making the art in the first place. We all know that Viennese Actionism has played a fundamental role in your work. Do you still feel the link with that movement strongly? No. I’m grateful to all of the artists involved for so fearlessly focusing on responding to the psychic and social issues they felt so stifled by, which encouraged the generation of artists that followed them to use art as a tool to wake up. For me personally, those issues have become a lot less important now. How would you define the transition from the harsher sound of many of your past releases to the current, more static, sonics characterizing your recent work with voice/shortwaves? I suppose you could (jokingly or not) call it "development"… These changes have simply evolved, not really anything I’ve deliberately chosen to do. Again, the intention of all my work including music is to use it as a tool to realize something within oneself, and I think the recent music I’ve made tends to do that more effectively. Some say they think it’s still harsh… Have you kept in touch with some of your past collaborators on record, such as Andrew McKenzie, Christoph Heemann, Bernhard Günter? And, in general, how important is the exchange of opinions and experiences with other artists of areas near to your work? Exchanges of experiences with others are essential to me, regardless of whether or not the partners consider themselves as "artists" or whether or not we work together in a deliberately creative way. The person I find most rewarding to work with now is Giuliana Stefani: difficult as it sometimes is for each of us, our relationship steadily continues to deepen. The people you mention have all gone in separate directions, from each other’s as well as from mine. It’s inevitable that we’ve all developed differently from who we were as people at the time we worked together. I still pay attention to their work and celebrate their successes; it’s just become unnecessary to be in regular contact. Should we trace a line linking your performance/installation work with your music, or do you think some people be better off enjoying them separately, because one aspect could detract from the other? I think that’s something for others to decide. For me these distinctions blur into each other. You have worked all over the world and I’d be interested to know the reaction to your work varies depending on where you are. What kind of feedback do you receive? It’s always different. When it’s genuine, response passes beyond any local cultural filters and comes from somewhere universally human. Looking back, is there any one of your records that you have a predilection for? And which one would you recommend to someone new to your ­ by now ­ “acousmatic” vision? Frankly, the next one. To both questions. Because the research will be new for me as well. And hopefully someday someone will come along who can offer a convincing explanation of what "acousmatic" actually means… Have the anguish, the sorrow and the rage you often expressed in past “actions” or “events” somehow reached the exit door? Do you feel you've finally gathered some answers to those questions needed to underline certain human mechanisms? Thankfully, yes. The horror and nihilism that observations and experiences have shown me are inherent in our existence fail utterly to explain a vast range of other essential aspects, ones that are much more profound and go a great deal further to reaching an inner understanding of ourselves as a whole, so to say. My efforts so far have just barely scratched the surface of this research. What I can say is that the developments in my work over the years tend to reflect this deepening view. Could you describe your current studio set-up, especially for on records like Tongue or The Keening Towers. How does it all start and how does the groundwork develop? Both Tongue and The Keening Towers started with voice, playing with it and seeing where it could be taken as ‘pure sound’. The same is true of the audio installation Conservatory (San Sebastian) with Paolo Parisi: turning whispered insults into sound that affects the listener in ways ranging from soothing to vaguely threatening, with all clear references to recognizable language destroyed. The Hissing takes this even further: the entire piece is based on the sound made by blowing hard through the teeth. Until last year I’d put the source recordings onto a hard disk and generate all the distortions using a Mac G3 Powerbook; now I’m doing this with a Mac G4. Mixes are done on the computer. Giuliana Stefani’s photography is a fundamental visual aspect of your releases. How do you choose the subject of a cover and how does she work on that ­ listening to the music, or independently from the sonic result? We choose images based on connections we feel they have to the music. It’s essential to us that there’s a clear connection between the two. What do you think is the worst prejudice today in the so-called avant-garde area? Fear of knowing oneself that tries to pass itself off as sophistication. The fear that fully expressing yourself is psychically, socially or economically dangerous. That if you’re making art and want to eat, compromise is inevitable. It’s not. I still find it especially saddening when artists compromise themselves and their work to avoid threatening their economic support, or the possibility of ever receiving any. That very limited way of thinking has an adverse affect on all of us. What are you listening to and reading at the moment? Listening… The things that I’m often inspired by right now come from tinnitus, pitches produced by the inner ear. That and the acoustic effects of burglar alarms. A great book I just finished is The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman, about people from the Hmong hill tribes of Laos living in the United States, which starts by describing their head-on collision with the American medical profession, veering off into detailing various ways they adapt and continue their daily customs and rituals despite living in an entirely alien society. What has the future got in store in terms of new releases and forthcoming projects? Today, 20 January 2005, was the closing day for the audio installation Conservatory (San Sebastian) with Paolo Parisi at Quarter in Firenze; the organizers are planning to produce a catalogue of that show that would include an audio CD. Right now I’m editing a 20-minute DVD video of Leif Elggren’s text “The North Is Protected” with a soundtrack that Jean-Louis Huhta and I recorded together. Leif and I are planning the limited edition printing of a book version of The Error, leather-bound with hand-printed pages. In April I’ll join Leif, Carl Michael von Hausswolff and Graham Lewis to perform our variations of the KREV anthem at Le Lieu Unique in Nantes. In March, Hausswolff and I will release a CD on 23Five in San Francisco. I’m talking with the Swiss label Sound Mirror about producing a CD of The Hissing, recorded in October 2004 at l’Arsenic in Lausanne. In November I’ll set up an installation at Experimental Intermedia in Ghent, and an acoustic labyrinth of photo-sensor triggered burglar alarms at Gallery Ninapì in Ravenna.

OUTSIDERS -- Massimo Ricci, DEEP LISTENINGS (number 9, Spring/Summer 1997) How would you describe your music and what sort of goals would you like to achieve with it? If I could describe it, I would write about it instead of making it. The thing I'm looking for in all forms of the art I make is to learn, to discover everything I can about what it is to be alive. Music is one of a number of ways I use to do this. Could you describe the processes you use for composition and recording, from both the technical and inspirational points of view? Technically I prefer to keep things simple, working on the type and positioning of the microphone for making voice and field-recordings to DAT, then editing in multitrack. The first EP's CREED and KOKKA were made on a 2-track open reel Teac. In Japan I was using equipment that was easy to pack and carry: RIOT was made with a shortwave radio and cassette players running through a portable mixer, DARK MARKET BROADCAST on a 4-track cassette machine. Now I use computers, sometimes combined with an 8-track open reel machine. The content of the work is much more important. It's a process, a cycle that starts with certain sounds that stimulate an emotional response: shortwave, the sounds of places that are unique, sounds in nature. What I feel in these sources determines choices for details or for the structure, which again become another influence. At a certain moment the music itself makes clear the compositional choices and it becomes irrelevant to separate the maker from the work itself. I'm just another part of the process, no more and no less than the other elements, rather than a 'controller'. I release the work when it has something that I haven't heard before. How did you get involved in this field? As a painter, I studied the physics and psychology of color and the geometry used in the compositional structure of 2-dimensional surfaces. Then, one day in the school library I found material on artists of the viennese 'Aktionismus' group; Nitsch, Brus and especially Rudolf Schwarzkogler. From that moment I stopped painting and starting making events in front of an audience, where each person in the audience is in some way a participant. After that, I started to apply the principle of color (understood as frequencies of light that stimulates a direct emotional response) to sound. I wanted to create sounds with something other than conventional instruments; this led me to shortwave. Do you prefer to work alone or in collaboration with others? Both. I especially like to work with artists considered to be difficult, because generally they have a clear idea of their own capabilities, of what they want from themselves. What else do you do besides composing? I make events, build installations, make video and film, write. What do you like to do when you are not working? Whatever I do, I'm somehow always aware of what is happening inside and around me and I'm looking for some creative way to use it. It is an integral part of my existence. Your comments on today's music listener/consumer; do you have a faithful following? I'm not sure what you mean by 'faithful following'. Could you support your work by the mere sales of your CD's? I continue to make art because I'm compelled to do it, simple as that. CD sales have nothing to do with it. Does your music have something to do with a mental state or do you simply experiment in order to hear the results? Both. It starts as an experiment to see how something sounds and ends in a mental state. Please list the records/artists that you prefer and, in general, what has had the most influence on you. A list of landmarks, artists, records, musicians, books and films that I like would fill this magazine. Some of them are "The Last Message" by Malcom X, "Metal Machine Music" by Lou Reed, "Triadic Memories" by Morton Feldman, Carlo Gesualdo's work, "Dancing in the Street", "Heatwave" and "Needle in a Haystack" by Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, Inuit songs, "Lightning Field" by Walter de Maria, "Towards a Poor Theatre" by Jerzy Grotowsky, the silent films of Carl Theodore Dreyer, Iceberg Slim's writing... A personal question: why do you live in Italy? Love. In all forms. Finally, can you give some suggestions to those who want to publish their music without being connected to big labels, fashion, commercial reasons and so on? How can an independent artist survive today? In the same way as independent artists have always survived: by doing what you feel, without caring about the response or consequences. By training yourself to listen only to your own heart and follow what it tells you. By refusing to be afraid of anyone's judgement, including your own.

JOHN DUNCAN -- Baz N, EST THE CRACKLING -how did this project come about,and what was the original intention when setting about the task of recording a straight line particle accelerator? One night I was watching a TV documentary of a race between SLAC at Stanford in California and CERN in Switzerland to discover a subatomic particle. Several years earlier I'd read about the building of SLAC and was already curious about the way it worked, but when I saw images of the complex in the documentary it suddenly hit me that the site could be an incredibly rich source for sounds I'd never heard before. Was there any "red tape" involved with gaining access to the facility? None that I know about. Stephen Travis Pope knew my work and was doing research at Stanford then; he was kind enough to set up a tour. I was completely straightforward about why I wanted to visit the complex, and arrived at the gate covered with recording equipment. Our guide, Mike Hildreth, was a researcher working there who also performed in a choir that specialized in 20th Century music. He answered every question I put to him about the complex, and pointed out areas crucial to the operation of the facility as well as places where he thought the sounds alone were special. He explained openly and in detail the operations of each section we visited. How did Max Springer get involved,and what was the extent of his input? Max offered his computer-editing studio when I told him about this project and said that I wanted to edit this work on an electron-based system. He was very, very generous with his time and expertise as well as his equipment, patiently explaining how the system worked and making it possible for me to perform final edits and processing on my own. When I would explain what I wanted to hear at a certain point, he and his partner Benzine suggested and tried combinations of programs to get that sound. The three of us worked on the project for a year and a half, ending in a marathon at Max's San Diego studio where I'd get up at 6 am and work until midnight, then they'd take over the computer and do processing until 6 am. We worked this way for 10 days nonstop until the final edit was made. How did you come to work with Bernhard Gunter on HOME: UNSPEAKABLE -your styles seem so different, and yet it works extremely well. Did you work closely together,or was this a "long distance" collaboration ? We worked face-to-face in Bernhard's studio, checking each section and each detail in that section until we agreed on how it sounded. We met 3 times. These sessions each lasted 3 or 4 days, over a period of about a year. Can you go into more detail about the association with Beckett ? Bernhard and I were both looking for a way to make music based roughly on what each of us knows about the experience of being conscious. We both like Beckett's writing. We liked the libretto 'Neither' that he wrote for Morton Feldman, and decided to use it as a base, a point of reference. Some of your performance and installation work takes the form of an open ritual-was this your intention? My intention is to make situations where I learn, as a participant. BUS RIDE was done to see whether or not the idea that aggression comes from repressed sexual energy was true. I was working for the Los Angeles city transit system, and decided to use the bus I was driving to put an odor similar to vaginal secretions during orgasm into the ventilation system. The bus had windows that didn't open, so it was a fairly accurate arena to subject unwitting passengers to a subliminal sexual stimulant. I did this twice: once to sedate middle-income commuters coming home from their offices downtown, then a month later to a group of kids coming home from a school that specialized in training etiquette. In both cases these passengers were normally introverted and quiet; these times they attacked each other and tore up the bus. SCARE was a response to being attacked on an L.A. street by a gang that made me believe they had a gun. One of them broke a broom handle on my neck from behind, and for a split second I thought I'd been shot. For that split second I felt a cold terror, then when I didn't see any blood and realized I was OK I felt a hot anger. Within seconds I went from one emotional extreme to the other, and when the moment was over I was fascinated by that. SCARE was done to create those extremes for unsuspecting participants. At night I approached the houses of people I knew well, dressed in a full-head mask that was partly covered by a cap and turtleneck sweater, carrying a gun loaded with blanks. When each man answered the door, I shot him point-blank in the face and disappeared. KICK is performed using a form of hyperventilation that causes complete loss of physical and psychic control. I first learned this technique from a therapist in L.A. as a treatment for violent behavior. When she conducted sessions in front of a group of other therapists, these events changed for me from a form of treatment into something completely separate, something universally human. Soon after that I started performing this exercise in front of an audience; the first time was for live radio broadcast. Every time I perform KICK now something different happens, and I learn something else about what it is to be conscious. The STRESS CHAMBER installation is a modified shipping container with three vibrators set to create the container's resonant frequency from three different directions. Outside, this vibration shakes the ground for a radius of 50 meters. Inside the container, this becomes a tangible object moving around the space at random. The participant goes in alone, strips completely and is locked inside in total darkness. With all motors running, the frequency passes around and through the participant's body. Do you see acts of this kind as a conceptual provocation, or is there perhaps something more esoteric going on? I'm not interested in provoking. I'm interested in learning, simple as that. How did you get involved in film making, particularly pornography? Pornography shows aspects of a culture that the culture wants to deny, to keep hidden. So pornography, at least for me, is a kind of mirror that shows what people in a culture are afraid of -- and aroused by -- within themselves. At first I bought 8mm films at porn shops and collaged them with other images. BRUTAL BIRTHDAY, TRIGGER, and THE IMMENSE ROOM were all made this way. In Japan, a commercial erotic video producer offered me the chance to script and direct my own commercial erotic video. I agreed to make a series. Do you see this as a natural extension (forgive the pun) of your artistic expression? Of course. I see that THE ERRORis a book in progress -how long will it be in progress,and is it likely to be published at some point -again,can you give some insights into what you hope to achieve with the project? The point of THE ERROR is to make the kind of book I want to read -- an arena where dreams, insights, and other attempts to become more self-aware are open to the reader to combine into other insights, and to scrutinize as examples of success and failure.