Thoughtware vs Shareware
Shirin Neshat's Video Art

An Interview with FAQT Magazine

What was the goal of the Elementz series. The one-sheet suggests that the releases are DJ tools, so does Elementz equal musical building blocks? Where did the idea come from?

Response:
the idea for the Toolz series is based on the premise that we all create using elements of found objects and codes. Duchamp meets David Hammons meets Joesph Beuys (Social Sculpture) while Adrian Piper gives funk lessons in the background... and various other zones of conceptual art. For me, I wanted to show that the creative act is a kind of network - elements migrate through the situation, and each record is a piece of the whole - it's all about art as process. There's the tradition in oral culture that theorists like the Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin who described the sitaution as "dialogic" reality made up of many threads of narrative (heterotopian) and the African American philosopher Alain Locke who created a style of writing to parallel the jazz of his 1920's era of total flow. Just like jazz musicians talk about "call and response" the Toolz series is about how people reflect off of the sounds on each side and create their own flow - memory and reflexivity are the core aspects of their theories that I engage - it's all about art as a collective conversation, sound as dematerialized sculpture, sound as memetic shareware, call it thoughtware, or something like that. So yeah, it's like playing Leggo Blocks on acid.... Like I always say, it's all sculpture. I'd like to take more into the on-line realm, rhizomatic style, and create the mixes as MP3 files that can be sent (like the Absolut Vodka campaign I did a while ago, but more edgy....) A musical equivalent of the World Wide Web... a message system, an encoded structure for musical interaction, just playing the frameworks, making the mental images connect like "connect the dots"... As always, it's an open system of cybernetic free jazz.


Aside from your involvement in each, what links each record together? Or is it more a question of what links side A to side B? Or is any of that important, it being an artifactual document?

Response:
Most of the people in the series are into the more conceptual aspects of sound and environment. I'm going to expand the series in a while. There's more to dj culture than just beats - it's all about the context of how you create the structure that your sounds reflect. I relate this more to John Cage and Olly Wilson (the first African American composer to use tape loops and electronics back in the 1950's...), but when you look at composers like Steve Reich and Phillip Glass or John Adams and the way they play with sound and presence - repetition is kind of like a digital mantra, and I like to break things up so that other people can add their elements to the mix. It's kind of like an open invitation to play... Public Enemy had a track a while back called "B-Side Wins Again" on "Fear of a Black Planet." The lyrics on that track always just blew me away. Face front - A die B Side - it reminds me of the Roman Goddess Janus who had several faces - the records are linked by the fact that each musician is open to flux in their own creative process - no one knows where one person ends and another begins. Call it an "un-locked groove" or something like that. I like the word "artifactual document" you use 'cause yeah, it's layers and layers. An archeaology of the mind unfolding image and image, the dance of a mime... something like that. Some sort of neo-pagan, post everything type thing. Polyphrenia 2000.


Some releases are limited to 1999 copies. Is there a millenial conotation to this series? - If so, is it fair to draw a parallel between "Elementz" and a series like 20' to 2000?

Response:
Nah, there's no millenial conotation to the flow. Just a sense of humor. Elementz is more dynamic, multi-cultural, and inclusive of other forms of digital media and other compositional forms that the 20' to 2000 series, not to mention they were CD only, yeah? But I respect what they do.


The participants in this series are most impressive.

Response:
thanks


How was each artist approached regarding Elementz? What did you ask from each artist?

Response:
I just called 'em up and said, hey do you want to do this project. We'd have a quick rap about all the different flow zones, and then a couple of weeks later I'd get a DAT or mini disc in the mail or something. Very "low-stress" really.


How did they respond, and what were your thoughts on both their reaction (emotional/philosophical) to the project and their contribution?

Response:
Everything was mellow, and people were open to the zone, ya know? I think alot of musicians are really far more progressive than their audiences, and that's what drives the series. It's only framework was the sense that people were making "unfinished" music that could only be done with this process in mind. Post serial total flux, like some Yoko Ono meets Alice Coltrane with Grandmaster Flash dj'ing in the background type meta flow.


At this point, who are all of the confirmed artsts for the series and how many total releases will there be?

Reponse:
I'm not sure how many releases there'll be. But confirmed artists are: Merzbow, Aube, Arto Lindsay, Nobukazu Takemura, Scanner, Ryoji Ikeda, Alan Licht, Bill Laswell, Butch Morris, Matthew Shipp, Sound Secretion, Sussan Deyhim, Talvin Singh, Anti-Pop Consortium, Twilight Circus, The Freight Elevator Quartet, and a host of other people I can't remember off the top of my dome....


Do you have any words on the outcome of your collaboration with Scanner? (satisfaction with the result, with working with Rimbaud, etc.)

Repsonse:
yeah, Robin, is a cool, chill, mellow fellow with a very wry sense of humor. I call this kind of stuff Neo-Geo after the Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto (I think he's going to do one as well...). It's like what computer headz call "open source" and what hip-hop headz simply say, like Master P, "No Limit."

peace,
Paul a.k.a. Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid