Aura Satz is talking to our correspondent Ida Hadjari about what inspires her work, her fascination with technology and her upcoming Sound Seam show that premieres this coming Friday at the Great North Museum in Newcastle.Ida Hajdari. You seem to be very interested in the uncanny aspect of technologies of mechanical reproduction, especially of the mechanical reproduction of sound. In your recent work, this technological uncanny has been addressed and even invoked in a number of ways, such as through the juxtaposition of musical automata and floating musical instruments played by invisible hands in Automamusic. My question is two-fold: firstly, why this fascination? And, secondly, is this an interest that you can trace back to the early days of your artistic production, or even to your days as an art student?
I.H. What I find particularly interesting is your 'preference', so to speak, for 'outdated' technologies of mechanical reproduction, i.e. the gramophone. I understand your predilection for these early technologies of mechanical reproduction in terms of their being representative of a time in history when 'our' senses had yet to adjust to them, thus allowing the uncanny elements in them to come to the forefront, elements to which we are putatively immune today given the abundance of such technologies. However, for your latest project, Sound Seam, you have used both very old technological equipment as well as very modern technological equipment. Obviously, I have yet to see the work, but there does seem to be a tension between these technologies. My question is then, how does this tension play out in terms of the element of the uncanny?
A.S. There are many reasons I have found myself drawn to obsolete technology, in particular those related to the reproduction of sound. I suppose one of my ongoing fascinations is with the manner in which things fit our body, or are interacted with choreographically, so to speak, how we are made to move in relation to an object. Obsolete technology doesn’t quite fit anymore. When we engage with an old apparatus we suddenly become aware of the historical shift in the way it interacts with our bodies. We now perceive it to be heavy, cumbersome, clunky and loud, or flimsy, light, toy-like. We outgrow it and in doing so pay attention to the sculptural and choreographic qualities of the machinery, in a nostalgic but also acutely physical way which I think is rather different to how we enthuse over new technology. The typewriter is one such example, you suddenly are very mindful of the way the heavy keys stab at the page. Likewise with old sound recordings we hear differently, having become extremely sensitive to all the glitches and surface noises that are rendered invisible with the technologies available to us today. I am also attracted to the gramophone’s evocation of human anatomy - a nail or tooth scraping a groove, the orifice of the horn recalling a recording ear or a speaking mouth. My film Sound Seam is essentially a close look at the body of sound, and the way that sound technology enabled a different understanding of the body and its functions. The technology of this sound-writer (phono-graph) also enabled a new understanding of writing, of shorthand, and of readability in that the sound script can only be read back by the needle on the groove – to the human eye it remains indecipherable. What I like about this obsolete technology is that it opens up to a discourse on writing, surface, memory, presence, absence, haunting and mourning which is very tangibly and physically embodied in the visible materiality of the machine.
In terms of the new technologies I have used, I was fortunate enough to be artist-in-residence at the Ear Institute, which gave me access to surgical microscopes and the extreme magnification of Scanning Electron Microscopy. I also made recordings in an anechoic chamber and filmed samples of auditory anatomy, including stereocilia and a gold-plated human cochlea (it is coated gold so as to preserve and stabilize its organic structure, and make it both resilient to and conductive of the machine’s electrical charge). To me a lot of this was like science-fiction and I must admit I was more fascinated by the potential to create unexpected hypnotic imagery than by its technological significance. And perhaps this is precisely the difference between old and new technology. The latter is somehow transparent; a successful conduit which enables you to see or hear through it and onto the object it is demonstrating or transmitting. Old technology on the other hand becomes opaque and visible; it loses this transparency and doesn’t communicate its object as successfully. We become distracted by the patina of its materiality. In a similar sense, old technology seems clogged up, rusted and weighed down by all those past messages, the objects it once contained and transmitted, haunted by the voices that once spoke through it. This has certainly been my feeling in working with phonographs and gramophones. In making new recordings of my voice I felt completely detached, as though it was a me from another time speaking back to me, or perhaps I was being spoken through all along.
I.H. The performative dimension of your work is extremely important. However, both Automamusic and Sound Seam also exist as films as well, and the films are not recordings of the performances of these pieces. My question is, again, two-fold; firstly, do you see the performances of Automamusic and Sound Seam and the respective films as two different sets of works or as different incarnations of the same work? And, secondly, in terms of their relation to the spectator, performance and film are what one could call polar opposites. How do you reconcile this dichotomy?
A.S. As I said earlier, I am interested in exploring ideas around presence, and therefore performance is always crucial to my thinking. But equally my performances have often implied phantoms of sorts, a haunting of the stage prop or sculptural element. Both Automamusic and Sound Seam are films about sounds left by presence, which is why it was important to me that they exist primarily as films that imply a performance, evoke a sense of presence, without literally presenting a body on stage or on camera. Both these films explore disembodiment. Automamusic looked at the way mechanical musical instruments seem animated by invisible fingers, and thus transform the way in which we understand musical performance and liveness. I wanted to explore those machines as choreographic sculptures which still implied the bodies that played them. This rapport would be slowly re-configured by the phonograph which no longer looked like it sounded (the musical instrument or singing body no longer serving as a visual marker). At the same time the machines themselves looked like a body, like a strange mechanical version of human anatomy, complete with viscera and lung-like bellows, finger-like contraptions. This inspired me to film it close-up, as if trying to get inside the machine, whilst also creating a sense of unease as to how exactly these things were being animated, whether in fact there might have been a performing hand hidden somewhere. I wanted to focus on the choreographic quality of movement, how smooth or jerky it is, and whether this indicated agency or lack of agency, human performance or mechanical movement. I have never actually performed Automamusic but I did set up an Automatic Ensemble together with Aleks Kolkowski (who I am currently working with for Sound Seam), where we played a series of mechanical instruments. I was drawn to the strange performative mode of playing a self-operating mechanism, which subverts familiar musical gestures into a cranking, pedaling, winding-up motion. At the same time, as the pianolist Rex Lawson once told me, the performer of the pianola is both a visible anchor for the audience to focus upon, as well as a conductor of sorts. In playing these instruments you lend them tempo, pace, emphasis; you feel the music while you are listening to it, and so you must be both synchronised with it and outside of it, connected and detached. Sound Seam has an intricate narrative structure with overlapping voiceovers pre-empting, overwriting and echoing each other. This is a new aspect of my practice which I’m sure will find its way into a performance of sorts. I have plans to make some talking book ventriloquist acts using a finger-operated record.. Sound Seam has yet to have a live element, but as it is mostly around the way sound-grooves look as well as the physical localisation of sound through the multi-channel horn installation, the initial thoughts I have had with Aleks are towards a live voice-over, as well as live music and phonograph recordings being cut and replayed live. In answer to your question, the performances are mostly expanded versions of the same set of interests, a different incarnation of the same piece.
Aura Satz. Yes, I have always been interested in the inanimate appearing animate, and ways in which objects appear imbued with presence. I like the idea of mediated agency, of a porosity between states of animation and de-animation. In my early days as a student I did a lot of research into icons and relics, which led to an interest in articulated puppets, ventriloquism and prosthesis. That led to a fascination with automata, and more recently, mechanical music. One of the things that I was exploring was the displacement of authorship, the way in which movement and agency trickle down into and through the object. In the puppet the connection remains attached, a dilution of energy, whereas in the automata it is wound up, folded into the machine, and then a button is pressed and it unfolds, moving autonomously of its own accord. I love the idea of secondary bodies we can project into, or be inhabited by, almost like some kind of possession. For the same reason I am intrigued by costumes and bodily sculptures that alter anatomy, forming an alienating second skin of sorts (much like certain acting techniques), connected yet separate to its wearer. Spiritualism provided a rich source of inspiration in the way it manifested presence as inanimate objects moving by themselves, in its proliferation of disembodied voices, its diffusion of authorship, and its use of a rhetoric of proof which relied so heavily on material evidence. This is when I started to focus more on sound, not just movement, as an indication of presence. I wanted to explore the way sound looks. I was trying to inhabit the tension of sounds that are pried apart from their source through reproduction, but somehow remain latched onto a material body of sorts. After honing in on mechanical music in Automamusic, I started to think about ways of scoring, notating, writing and reading music. Inevitably I felt drawn to make a piece about the phonograph, which opened up to the idea of sound writing, parallel to automatic writing. That has formed the basis for Sound Seam.
I.H. What I find particularly interesting is your 'preference', so to speak, for 'outdated' technologies of mechanical reproduction, i.e. the gramophone. I understand your predilection for these early technologies of mechanical reproduction in terms of their being representative of a time in history when 'our' senses had yet to adjust to them, thus allowing the uncanny elements in them to come to the forefront, elements to which we are putatively immune today given the abundance of such technologies. However, for your latest project, Sound Seam, you have used both very old technological equipment as well as very modern technological equipment. Obviously, I have yet to see the work, but there does seem to be a tension between these technologies. My question is then, how does this tension play out in terms of the element of the uncanny?
A.S. There are many reasons I have found myself drawn to obsolete technology, in particular those related to the reproduction of sound. I suppose one of my ongoing fascinations is with the manner in which things fit our body, or are interacted with choreographically, so to speak, how we are made to move in relation to an object. Obsolete technology doesn’t quite fit anymore. When we engage with an old apparatus we suddenly become aware of the historical shift in the way it interacts with our bodies. We now perceive it to be heavy, cumbersome, clunky and loud, or flimsy, light, toy-like. We outgrow it and in doing so pay attention to the sculptural and choreographic qualities of the machinery, in a nostalgic but also acutely physical way which I think is rather different to how we enthuse over new technology. The typewriter is one such example, you suddenly are very mindful of the way the heavy keys stab at the page. Likewise with old sound recordings we hear differently, having become extremely sensitive to all the glitches and surface noises that are rendered invisible with the technologies available to us today. I am also attracted to the gramophone’s evocation of human anatomy - a nail or tooth scraping a groove, the orifice of the horn recalling a recording ear or a speaking mouth. My film Sound Seam is essentially a close look at the body of sound, and the way that sound technology enabled a different understanding of the body and its functions. The technology of this sound-writer (phono-graph) also enabled a new understanding of writing, of shorthand, and of readability in that the sound script can only be read back by the needle on the groove – to the human eye it remains indecipherable. What I like about this obsolete technology is that it opens up to a discourse on writing, surface, memory, presence, absence, haunting and mourning which is very tangibly and physically embodied in the visible materiality of the machine.
In terms of the new technologies I have used, I was fortunate enough to be artist-in-residence at the Ear Institute, which gave me access to surgical microscopes and the extreme magnification of Scanning Electron Microscopy. I also made recordings in an anechoic chamber and filmed samples of auditory anatomy, including stereocilia and a gold-plated human cochlea (it is coated gold so as to preserve and stabilize its organic structure, and make it both resilient to and conductive of the machine’s electrical charge). To me a lot of this was like science-fiction and I must admit I was more fascinated by the potential to create unexpected hypnotic imagery than by its technological significance. And perhaps this is precisely the difference between old and new technology. The latter is somehow transparent; a successful conduit which enables you to see or hear through it and onto the object it is demonstrating or transmitting. Old technology on the other hand becomes opaque and visible; it loses this transparency and doesn’t communicate its object as successfully. We become distracted by the patina of its materiality. In a similar sense, old technology seems clogged up, rusted and weighed down by all those past messages, the objects it once contained and transmitted, haunted by the voices that once spoke through it. This has certainly been my feeling in working with phonographs and gramophones. In making new recordings of my voice I felt completely detached, as though it was a me from another time speaking back to me, or perhaps I was being spoken through all along.
I.H. The performative dimension of your work is extremely important. However, both Automamusic and Sound Seam also exist as films as well, and the films are not recordings of the performances of these pieces. My question is, again, two-fold; firstly, do you see the performances of Automamusic and Sound Seam and the respective films as two different sets of works or as different incarnations of the same work? And, secondly, in terms of their relation to the spectator, performance and film are what one could call polar opposites. How do you reconcile this dichotomy?
A.S. As I said earlier, I am interested in exploring ideas around presence, and therefore performance is always crucial to my thinking. But equally my performances have often implied phantoms of sorts, a haunting of the stage prop or sculptural element. Both Automamusic and Sound Seam are films about sounds left by presence, which is why it was important to me that they exist primarily as films that imply a performance, evoke a sense of presence, without literally presenting a body on stage or on camera. Both these films explore disembodiment. Automamusic looked at the way mechanical musical instruments seem animated by invisible fingers, and thus transform the way in which we understand musical performance and liveness. I wanted to explore those machines as choreographic sculptures which still implied the bodies that played them. This rapport would be slowly re-configured by the phonograph which no longer looked like it sounded (the musical instrument or singing body no longer serving as a visual marker). At the same time the machines themselves looked like a body, like a strange mechanical version of human anatomy, complete with viscera and lung-like bellows, finger-like contraptions. This inspired me to film it close-up, as if trying to get inside the machine, whilst also creating a sense of unease as to how exactly these things were being animated, whether in fact there might have been a performing hand hidden somewhere. I wanted to focus on the choreographic quality of movement, how smooth or jerky it is, and whether this indicated agency or lack of agency, human performance or mechanical movement. I have never actually performed Automamusic but I did set up an Automatic Ensemble together with Aleks Kolkowski (who I am currently working with for Sound Seam), where we played a series of mechanical instruments. I was drawn to the strange performative mode of playing a self-operating mechanism, which subverts familiar musical gestures into a cranking, pedaling, winding-up motion. At the same time, as the pianolist Rex Lawson once told me, the performer of the pianola is both a visible anchor for the audience to focus upon, as well as a conductor of sorts. In playing these instruments you lend them tempo, pace, emphasis; you feel the music while you are listening to it, and so you must be both synchronised with it and outside of it, connected and detached. Sound Seam has an intricate narrative structure with overlapping voiceovers pre-empting, overwriting and echoing each other. This is a new aspect of my practice which I’m sure will find its way into a performance of sorts. I have plans to make some talking book ventriloquist acts using a finger-operated record.. Sound Seam has yet to have a live element, but as it is mostly around the way sound-grooves look as well as the physical localisation of sound through the multi-channel horn installation, the initial thoughts I have had with Aleks are towards a live voice-over, as well as live music and phonograph recordings being cut and replayed live. In answer to your question, the performances are mostly expanded versions of the same set of interests, a different incarnation of the same piece.
For more information on Aura Satz's Automamusic please follow this link:http://www.iamanagram.com/Automamusic.html
For more information on Aura Satz's Sound Seam please follow this link:http://www.iamanagram.com/SoundSeam.html
To watch Aura speak about similar themes to those discussed in this interview, please follow this link: http://www.apengine.org/2009/11/aura-satz/Aura's Sound Seam premieres this coming Friday at the Great North Museum in Newcastle. Make sure to check it out if you can!SOUND SEAMa film by Aura Satz with music and sound design by Aleks KolkowskiGreat North Museum: Hancock, NewcastlePreview: Fri 5th March from 7:00pm until 9:00pmFriday 5 – Sunday 14 MarchMon-Sat 10am-5pm, Sun 2-5pmFree
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