Another reason why I’m called People Like Us is to take away such things as gender from the equation, and also to be approached and evaluated by the content of the work, not who or what
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VICKI BENNETT
Do you use a consistent way of working
or do you regard each successive work
as demanding something different
every time?
I make all my work on an Apple
PowerBook The sound is currently
composed using Digidesign® ProTools®,
and the video is made on Adobe After
Effects with final editing in Final Cut Pro
(see pp.92–93) This is also used in
conjunction with Adobe Photoshop and
Image Ready My work is partly defined
by the systems that I use For instance I
use plugins The availability of these
plugins makes a difference to what it
looks and sounds like
I ought to decide what I want to do, then
find a way to do it but more often than
not, I find what I have and then work with
that My editing techniques follow a
certain course but each new project is
approached as if I’d never done it before
The nature of found sound and visual
collage is you can’t tell it what to do
because it already happened You are part
director and part follower It is sometimes
a very rewarding and magical process,
watching for instance the way that two
sources dance together, and sometimes it
is annoying not being able to get them to talk to one another
I tend to choose two sources to start with that I can somehow get to communicate with, or jar with one another That is the starting point, and then I start to ‘hang things on it’ Sometimes the source material may be very specific, like the albumStifled Love, where lots of people were cut off vocally from being able to express themselves in love songs, or sometimes it is very nonsensical and thrives on chaos or disobedience which leads to it being humorous
Do you aim your work at a particular
‘market’ or target audience? If so, to what extent do you tailor the work to their ‘expectations’?
I tend to aim it at people like myself (hence People Like Us) The aim is to elevate the mind through the various methods used in making humorous work,
or by other means – using more conventional methods like emotional content I only tailor to my own expectations, which, I guess, would be
like other people’s The aim is to pick up from one point, and land somewhere else
Or at least go on a journey somewhere, and be invited to a different world
I’m interested in the work of female artists in what is predominantly a male genre Does this concern you and, if so,
do you have any thoughts on how some sort of rebalancing might be achieved?
I don’t think it’s necessary to rebalance males and females in any profession I only believe that people need to be rebalanced when people are suffering as a result Females have as much access to this genre as males, at least in the world that I live in I’ve never had a problem, so
I would put a lot of the imbalance down
to males naturally being drawn to making this kind of art, just as females naturally
do other kinds I don’t believe in any kind
of discrimination Another reason why I’m called People Like Us is to take away such things as gender from the equation, and also to be approached and evaluated
by the content of the work, not who or what I am
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Trang 2Left: ‘We Edit Life’
‘Experimenters in visual perception are using computers to create weird and random patterns that never occur in real life to find out what and how people see when these patterns are shown to them.’
Image courtesy of People Like Us.
Left: People Like Us performing live
Using samples of audio and visual footage, Vicki Bennett’s work is renowned for its witty and ironic take
on life.
Image courtesy of People Like Us.
ARTISTS AND THEIR WORK
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As a collage, this work can be
interpreted and entered at many levels
and uses narrative from a public
domain film from 1950, a story that
still remains relevant 57 years later:
‘In amongst change there are always
the very basic fundamental things that
make up what it is to be human, the
hope to be less isolated and to feel and
do more However, the more we
surround ourselves with objects that
plug us in, the more we can become
disconnected.’
Image courtesy of People Like Us.
Right: ‘Story Without End’
This sound and video piece samples
sonic and visual footage to historically
explore ‘the subject of experimentation
in the human body and machine
interfaces – its successes and pitfalls –
in the twentieth century.’
Image courtesy of People Like Us.
VICKI BENNETT
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Biography
ternationally Max Eastley is an int
ose work combines recognised artist who
ures and music kinetic sound sculptu
m In 2000 he into a unique art form
exhibited six installations at Sonic Boom in London and travelled to Japan to exhibit and perform with David Toop at ICC Tokyo He was also a research fellow at Liverpool John Moores University The previous year a permanent sculpture was installed at the Devil’s Glen, Co Wicklow, Ireland.
In 2002 he exhibited at the Festival de Arte Sonoro, Mexico City, and was commissioned by the Siobahn Davies Dance Company to write music for the
dance piece Plants and Ghosts, which s
toured the UK His latest collaboration
with David Toop, Doll Creature, was e
released in 2004 Also in that year he exhibited an installation at Cologne, Germany In 2005 he created two installations in Ireland and an interior work in Riga, Latvia In 2006 he performed with the instrument maker and musician Victor Gama, for Radio
3’s Mixing It and will be performing
with him, Thomas Köner and Asmus Tietchens at the London Atlantic Waves Festival He is also involved in the Cape Farewell project, which brings together science and the arts to bring awareness of the effect of global warming on the Arctic environment
<www.capefarewell.com>.
Interview
Could you give a description of your work?
I’ve always been interested in visual things and in sound, painting, drawing and music It started out as quite a narrow sense but the third thing I’ve been absorbed with is movement, which is a kind of ghost, which unites them The work I do uses movement and time as music does but it’s also visual and sculptural: it uses colour and shape So you could call me a sound artist but then that would be leaving out the visual because I do use sound in an art context: there are different contexts in which you use the same techniques and whatever context that is tends to form the subject
of the work
How would you describe your working methods?
I use the techniques of an architect sometimes – of making a mental interior model that I keep referring to, which is quite interesting Quite a lot of composers work in that way – they see it as a kind of four-dimensional structure I find myself thinking as a composer and a graphic artist – using drawing to formulate ideas very quickly But really all these things need to be practised so if I’m working with music I find that I have to do a lot
of music practice When I’m working with
Max Eastley
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MAX EASTLEY
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installations, that’s quite a different way
of working but each one informs the
other: I couldn’t do my kinetic
installations if I didn’t play music
If it’s an installation, you have to absorb
architectural things: you make a model or
a drawing so you know that the space is
five metres by seven and the ceiling is this
height and you assemble your tools for a
particular kind of work; it’s like a
computer – you have a particular desktop
for each activity
Is there a structure or an approach to
your work that’s common across all
these media?
I think I’m quite unusual in that I’ve
managed to keep all these things working
without concentrating on one particular
area I see what I do as an expanding
horizon: with each work, I get more
height and more horizon appears which
is frightening because the subject is
enormous: it covers musical instruments,
composition, musical forms, architecture
I don’t see any edge to that horizon
I did a work in Oxford that used a block
of ice that was manufactured – it was
done in layers so there was a layer of
water that froze into ice and then a layer
of gravel, then another layer of ice, then
another layer of gravel This was
suspended above metal plates and as the ice melted, the stones fell – you could see them hanging on so there was a tension It was about climate change and melting glaciers
What leads you to use technology in your work and do you sometimes find it intrusive?
I don’t use it all the time but if it’s necessary I do use it and you find that after you’ve used it, it’s added another dimension In the piece with the ice, the metal plate was amplified – it had its own speakers attached so that was a necessary part of an open-air sculpture I find that using amplification is great if it has a degree where it goes to zero – acoustic sound – and then up to amplification so the space is gradually filled You don’t need to see what a computer is doing: it’s like with architecture To see a really good piece of architecture you don’t need to see all the engineering that went into the roof before you can understand what it’s doing
In the Cape Farewell TV programme, you were working with quite organic materials but your music track sounded very electronic
Some of the sounds were produced by a monochord – an electroacoustic instrument – but some of the sounds, the
bearded seal for instance, recorded underwater could be mis-interpreted as electronic sound The Aolian harp sounds
to us like feedback, but to a listener in the eighteenth century it could seem like the voices of angels Music is defined in a technological way by recording This is something that I found when I first started to use recordings of the work I do
If it’s on a CD, it will be heard as music whereas if you hear them out in the environment, there’s something else going
on – it’s organic, not fixed or edited This was a huge dilemma for me when I first started recording things because I thought, ‘this is not the actual work’ but
in a sense, it’s like a photograph of the work The definition of music in that way
is ‘if it’s recorded and it has a duration, it could be called music’ Another definition
is that it comes from inside human beings
or that it comes from something observed outside I use that as a working tool because I can relate to the emotion of music but I’m also drawn to the external, the non-human, the inanimate
Maybe music is the personal touch and maybe the other things I do are very impersonal: with the kinetic things, you can’t look at them and say that you know [anything about] the personality that made them but, with the music, you can sense me as an emotional, feeling person
So one is animate and the other is
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