RES Columns: Q & A
High-Bandwidth Magic Show: Golan Levin
Words: Dayna Crozier
Photo: Pascal Maresch
Golan Levin is a magician. Sure, there are logical explanations behind his projects, but even knowledge of their inner workings can't wipe away the sense of wonderment they inspire. Whether he's working solo or collaborating with other artists, his playful, interactive performances and installations offer testament to the creative and communicative potential of technology. Levin employs deeply layered programs to explore alternative modes of interaction in projects like Scribble (with Scott Gibbons and Gregory Shakar, 2000), in which a user manipulates a mouse to create graphics that in turn produce a dynamic score; The Manual Input Sessions (with Zachary Lieberman as Tmema, 2004), which couples sounds with projected silhouettes of a user's moving hand; and the recent Scrapple (2005), in which a user creates music via materials placed on a score-like surface beneath a projector. What most interests Levin, who studied at MIT and teaches electronic art at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Mellon University, is not his work's astonishing aesthetic impact, but the possibilities it presents for new forms of nonverbal exchange. "I think that a lot of art has prioritized verbal response and verbal dialogue," he says. "I'm just really curious to explore modes of communication that go outside and around that."
Q: As an artist combining technology with sensory experience, are you trying to teach people about themselves through your work?
A: I think of the work I do, on the one hand, as being extremely apolitical -- from one perspective it's really just about circles and squares and formal use of interactive response and feedback loops. But actually, I do think there's a subtler political aspect which involves encouraging people to think about computer systems as something that can be liberating for them, to discover themselves in a new way. I'm very fond of a quote from Myron Krueger from the mid-70s -- "Response is the medium." What I've taken away from that is that I don't care how it looks, and I don't care how it sounds; I care how it responds.
Q: Much of your work seems to explore synesthesia.
A: I don't actually think of my work as synesthetic, per se. I don't believe I'm trying to investigate the mappings between sound and image; I just use these modalities that we have very rich abilities to perceive. We have ears, we have eyes, we have very developed ways of understanding what we see and what we hear. I'm using those, and I'm trying to address them simultaneously.
Q: Many of your projects deal with vocal stimuli. Do you have a particular fascination with the voice?
A: Not a particular fascination. But the voice is a high-bandwidth means of giving information to a computer. There are so many dimensions to it, even if you're just singing a single note. The richer the form of input, the richer the possible form of response. And that's why the voice formed the core of a lot of our recent projects. Nowadays we're working with hand gestures, facial gestures and eye gestures.
Q: How do you view the art establishment's attitude toward technology-based art?
A: Electronic art is definitely a ghetto. And yet, everyone deals with video art now like it's no big deal. I expect that in 20 years it'll be a very different situation. And galleries and museums outside the United States are much more open to new media in general. I think that either museum directors in the States are themselves technophobic, or they ascribe more technophobia to the American public than actually exists.
But I also think that there are problems with the bulk of new media-based art. There's a whole bunch of work motivated by the availability of some whizzy new technology, and little else. Or what I like to call "a design in search of a problem," where, let's say I've developed some system or technique, and so I make up some bullshit to explain why I made it, but really it's just because it uses high tech or conforms to some theoretical justification I want to be identified with. I think that the dialogue is not very developed in the States yet about what's good and what's bad, so it's hard for people to know.
Q: What are your hopes for the future of technology-based performance?
A: I still want to see more technology-based performance where there's really something at stake. And that's one thing I try to do in my pieces. I never know how a performance is going to turn out; it's all made live, and as a result, everything's contingent on the moment, the performers and their relationship to the instrument. Things could fuck up. The performer could mess up. The technology could mess up. To guarantee perfection in live performance is boring! I think we've sacrificed that sense of risk, and I'd like to see it come back.
Q: Do you work mostly with your own programs?
A: I write my own software, absolutely. This is another subtle political dimension of my work. I like to demonstrate to others that they can actually take back the computer from the large software companies that control the tools most artists use. And I try to encourage people to realize that software is not that hard to make. We're not going to be liberated by the computer until we can actually speak its language and direct it to do things that we want it to do.
