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Anthony Kelly: My background is originally as a visual artist. I came to collaborate with David about 6 years ago and we make audiovisual and sound works together.
David Stalling: I’m originally a musician and composer, writing music for small chamber ensembles up to full orchestra, sometimes in combination with an electroacoustic element. The use of fixed media in my work was one of the meeting points in collaborating with Anthony. Initially, he came out to my studio with some field recordings he had made - something he was very interested in for a long time - and we started making our first collaborative work with those field recordings creating a series of short sound compositions.
AK: Then a few years ago we were introduced to Seán McCrum. Seán is a curator and one of the things he has been particularly interested in is work with a sound and audiovisual element. We invited Seán along today to have a conversation with us about the work we have been doing over the last while. On the projection screen beside us you can see examples of some of the works that we have made, often in connection with Seán as the curator.
Seán McCrum: This effectively sums me up fairly well. Do you want to talk about sounds?
AK: Maybe we could start by talking about the project in Carlow IT, Unknown Point, and we could tell you about the background of this particular project. As Aileen was saying, it is part of the Visualise Carlow programme. About a year ago David and I were invited to take part in the programme, so we looked at a number of locations around Carlow and the one that interested us most was the library building in the IT. I think, partly what interested us was the challenge of making work that could go into a library environment. As you all know, in a library you have certain parameters.
DS: It’s a place to study, a quiet room, so the challenge was to try and make work that would fit into these surroundings without disturbing the people during their studies.
AK: A library environment is very different from a gallery space, so we decided to make a number of wooden cabinets that to some degree would sit in with the existing furniture…
DS: In a way we created our own little gallery spaces within the library, sort of containers, within which we could place our work.
AK: So the work became quiet and was designed in such a way so as not to dominate too much.
SMC: You don’t describe these cabinets as ‘plinths’ or ‘stands’, like in a gallery context, but as ‘containers’. That is a curious way of approaching what the work is and what it is doing.
AK: As you can see in the photographs the students have propped their bags against them, they leave their notes out around them, accepting their presence and placement and the cabinets become another furniture element of the room.
SMC: This is interesting also in connection with your other work. Would you consciously adapt how you fit your work into different places, or would you have basically the same underlying idea that anything that is put into a different place is in some way intrusive because it wasn’t there before and is changing the way people see that place?
DS: A lot of our work contains similar elements, small TV screens with abstract visuals, radios and loudspeakers, sometimes stripped to their bare bones, sort of relics of the analogue age. The way we place them is very important for us. You could say that most of our work is site-specific. Even if it is placed in a gallery context we always try and respond to the space when we place the work.
Audience Member 1: When you mention ‘site-specific’, can you explain to us why you chose that particular site or shelf?
DS: The shelf we are looking at here, the ‘Cabinet of Curiosities of Carlow’, is pre-made, like all the other cabinets; we built them beforehand and brought them into the library. The challenge was to find locations where the pieces would sit nicely without disturbing the floor, or being in the way of people walking by.
AK: If you go to the library, the first thing you notice is that the work is not as obvious as in a gallery space because the pieces are quite discreet. It takes a little while to find them, which is slightly humorous in that respect and it’s a bit like a game of hide-and-seek.
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AK: One thing we should tell you a little bit about are the raw materials we use to make our work. Often we use found objects, which can be sounds, photographs, or actual objects that we have picked up on our travels. When we were working on this project we travelled to Carlow over a period of six months and we made audio and video field recordings. Sometimes we process and transform these materials into compositions, other times we present sounds pretty much as we have recorded them.
DS: We often use binaural microphone technique, which offers a very realistic listening experience when listened back through headphones. When we were out on our field trips in Carlow we made recordings of people talking, the wildlife by the river, the interior of a pub on Saturday night, or even one Sunday morning in front of a house where a religious ceremony was held.
Audience Member 2: So what is the purpose of the work and are you trying to give an interpretation or an impression of Carlow?
AK: Yes, we were asked to make a series of works that respond in some way to the town of Carlow.
Audience Member 2: If I went to the library, how would I listen to the recordings?
DS: Some of the pieces play by themselves. They play very quiet sounds. There is one cabinet, where you have to open a door in order to hear the sound that is playing, another one has a hole on the side where you place your ear and are able to eavesdrop. The purpose of the work we do is to try and create connections between the different materials we have gathered.
AK: Not unlike the work you would do as a composer or when I am making paintings. It is a similar process.
SMC: When you are talking about found objects and found sound, would you regard the library itself as a found object?
AK & DS: Yes!
SMC: And how would you see the relationship of the people with the work that is in the library?
AK: I think the people are an important part of the work in that firstly it is for them, and secondly that they can interact with it. They might open the door of a cabinet and hopefully they are intrigued by what they might find in there.
DS: Most of them, I guess, would be Carlow people, which may discover their own voice within the recordings and thus discover themselves in the work.
SMC: If, for example, nobody came into the library, if there was nobody there, would you see the work as functioning? Or would you need people to actually ‘activate’ the pieces?
AK: There is a particular piece we have made in one of the entrance areas, which most definitely needs a person to activate, because we have a motion sensor in it that starts the sound when somebody enters the space. On that level it has to have a human interaction.
Audience Member 3: Do you consider your work relational, as in ‘relational aesthetics’?
AK: Yes, I think it definitely needs the human element to become complete.
SMC: Would you find it a problem to make a piece, which wasn’t inherently related to a particular place and the way that place is used? I am asking this in general, because all the work that I have become familiar with over the last few years always related quite definitely to specific sites.
DS: With some of our video works we make versions that can be shown as a screening only. In that case, it isn’t that important where it is being shown, it could be a cinema or elsewhere. But all of the works for this Unknown Point exhibition are very much site-specific.
SMC: If you were making something that had to be taken from place to place, then you would be making a piece of sculpture, but you’re not making it here as far as I can see?
DS: It does have a sculptural element…
AK: I think so. [To the audience:] When Seán came along this morning, he was aware of the project we had been working on over the last months but he hadn’t seen the work placed in situ. When we were bringing him around, we started to talk about how and why the space directed what the work would look like and the sound that it would make, how loud it would be etc.
Audience Member 3: You have both been brought up with traditional aesthetics and you are going through the process of collaborating with each other. How important have aesthetics been to you in this project?
DS: Aesthetics are very important to us. We would think very carefully about even how we build each one of these cabinets. About how we would not just make it a straight ‘box’. If you look at them in more detail you can see that some of them have slight asymmetries. We do think about the look of the cabinets as well as what is going inside them.
SMC: The works in the library seem to be mostly in pairs and play off each other. This relationship is an important one. Even though the pieces are not intrusive they still require you to experience both, and if you can’t see both you can’t experience them because you would be losing out on the experience as a whole.
Audience Member 3: But the play between them, how much is that affected by the quantity of people in the room? Does the tone of the piece shift between the two pieces, as people tend to move around?
DS: It is not a direct relationship as such. The shape of the two cabinets is similar but the sound is not influenced or changed by the amount of people in the room.
SMC: But at the same time, you do need to experience the one piece to reinforce the nature of the other piece.
DS: We don’t make those relationships obvious; you would have to discover it yourself. With ‘Fathom’ and ‘Swan Cabinet’, for example, the only thing that connects them, apart from having a similar shape, is that they stand facing each other on an imaginary line in different parts of the room.
AK: When we are working together in the context of these installations, there is a lot of improvisation involved in placing and setting up the pieces; room to leave things open almost until the very last moment. Improvisation is quite important to what we do. It allows us a lot of freedom in making the work.
Audience Member 3: I suppose, ‘accident’ is instrumental in any collaboration.
AK: I think so. Using the accident and being open to let it happen.
SMC: David, you said ‘what we actually do is a bit like a road movie’, can you explain that?
DS: When we work together it is like going on a journey, collecting different materials, gathering impressions, recordings, and processing them on the way. Being on that ‘way’ is almost more important than the end result, like the journey is more important than the destination.
SMC: Well, you don’t want to end up like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid… [laughter]
AK: But you don’t know, Seán, because they freeze-framed it at the end! They might have gotten away… [laughter]
SMC: In that sense you may have a road movie to get to this particular spot – would you call that a conclusion or a benchmark that you are moving on from?
DS: It’s a station…
AK: It’s a resting point. It’s where the work is at that particular time.
For example, a lot of the things that happened while we were working on ‘Two Places’ (a project that we did with Seán in 2008, which was in two locations, Belfast and Limerick) would have fed into the very next project we did.
One of the things from this Carlow project that we have started to use is solar power. That’s an area we hadn’t really investigated before. There are two pieces, which use solar power, one in the entrance area of Carlow IT, the other one outdoors in Carlow Town Park. We are working on another project at the moment called ‘Shorelines’, which is a creative exchange project between Newfoundland and Ireland. I could imagine that we might carry on the idea of solar-powered work into this project.
DS: On one hand we came to use solar power purely out of interest in renewable energy sources, which have become increasingly affordable these days. On the other hand, there was actually no power socket in which we could plug our work into, so our interest became a necessity.
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SMC: The type of technology you use in your work, computers, CD and DVD players, tape recorders, televisions etc., is a technology that everybody uses. Most of the images shown on TV nowadays are short-term visuals with very little or no content, which are not designed to last for any amount of time. Whereas what you are doing with TV images is using them for contemplative work, which is deep-seated and requires a lot of time on your part and also time and commitment from someone who looks at your work. How do you deal with getting away from self-perpetuating clichés?
AK: One example would be an early work, which David and I made called ‘Different Shine’. David used to have a little video intercom in his apartment…
DS: When someone pressed the buzzer downstairs one could see him on a little TV monitor upstairs…
AK: But the screen was broken. So when you pressed the buzzer downstairs, there was no more than a flicker of light and some visual interference on the screen. Visually this became very interesting to us. Even though on one level the object was actually broken, it was still transmitting information to the viewer, which became the raw material that we used to make a piece.
DS: Very abstract information, of course. The way we often use televisions in our work is as a source of coloured lighting. Their light is very interesting, particularly from the old cathode ray tube televisions, which are now becoming more and more obsolete and are being replaced by LCD screens.
SMC: Apart from budget constraints, you often seem to use very low cost loudspeaker systems and TVs, which you basically strip down to their bare components. Are you deliberately using these mass-produced, trashy little objects for the purpose of changing what they do into doing something that you are doing, which would be far away from what these objects usually do?
AK: I think you use things that you are attracted to. When I was a child, little radios and televisions and loudspeakers fascinated me. When I was growing up, analogue technology was what I was used to, rather than the digital technology you get nowadays - although we often use and mix digital with analogue technology in our work.
DS: I was always intrigued by the interior of something like a tape recorder or record player, and I would open it with a screwdriver to see what was inside and see all those electronic components. At that stage I wasn’t able to put it back together again properly, so it was broken afterwards. But over the years we got a bit better…
AK: … at keeping things working. [laughter]
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SMC: How did you come to call the exhibition ‘Unknown Point’?
AK: There were a number of reasons.
DS: ‘Unknown Point’ is a term from geographic surveying, where you would calculate the location of an unknown point from two known points by triangulation.
AK: When we started to travel to Carlow we initially thought to install the work in two locations, the library and the entrance area of Carlow IT. Thinking about land surveying and the triangular shape of that entrance area, we felt that it would be nice to have a third place. But at that time we did not know where that was going to be, so it became the ‘unknown point’…
DS: … which later transpired to be the outdoor location in Carlow Town Park…
AK: … and ‘Unknown Point’ then became the title of the project. We also Googled ‘Unknown Point’ [laughter] and came up with 3 pieces of text…
DS: …which we used as raw material, as a sort of ‘found objects’ for the exhibition.
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After the conversation, Anthony Kelly and David Stalling gave a
32 minute improvised sound performance.
Unknown Point
Anthony Kelly David Stalling
Visualise Carlow April – May 2009
Visualise Carlow is a series of temporary public art projects devised as an advance programme to Visual - The National Centre for Contemporary Art, Carlow.
