In conversation with Erin Jorgensen, composer/sound artist James Borchers talks about his new installation I am the shadow of the image of my person created in collaboration with composer Jérémy Jolley.
For details of the installation and performance dates visit: I am the shadow of the image of my person
Erin Jorgensen: Can you break down exactly what it is that you’re doing? [laughter]
EJ: There’s a bunch of ways we could get into it, I’m definitely interested in the philosophical aspect – about the Milan Kundera book, and I read that on your website as well.
EJ: I’m also curious about the technological aspect of it, and I’m curious about the logistics of it, because I don’t understand exactly. Maybe you can give kind of an overview.
JB: Sure. Well, I’ll tell you – I’ll give you some background, perhaps. I’ve been doing this kind of work for some time, installation and interactive music. So I come from a compositional background and studied composition in graduate school, as well as music performance. I’ve been doing more sound art the last few years. I still think of the recent work I’ve been doing as a piece, in that I’m making a musical piece often times, but it functions in sort of an algorithmic or variable process, using some game logic and other parameters. There are sets of possibilities of things that can happen when one experiences the installation.
Part of my approach stems from doing so much electroacoustic music, and taking music technology/computer music classes where the tendency was to focus on creating these fixed media pieces, or concert pieces that are typically multi-channel playback. And my experience with those pieces was that oftentimes a lot of composers are trying to create a different kind of environment. Like messing around with the space and pitch and the way we perceive sounds moving in space. But yet we sit in a concert hall and we experience that. So it seems to me – if you’re sort of recreating an environment, then why not make it like an environment that you can walk around in, and where things change and move in a more natural way? It seems strange to make something that’s re-creating an environment, but is presented as a concert piece of music, where you sit in the audience and listen to it. So part of it was my frustration with that traditional approach in electroacoustic pieces. So I still think I’m trying to create an electro-acoustic music piece, but I’m presenting it in a way that has some sort of a more natural environmental function. A few years ago I did a workshop in Toronto, and I worked with some other visual artists and designers. We were all there to program patches, work on light coding exercises – an interactive art/music workshop. And there was another artist there who was trying to get a video of a person to interact with them. Almost like a mirror – if you were going to stand in front of a mirror and have the thing move and react to you in real time. So we spent a lot of time thinking about that and talking about it and how you – if you wanted to program something like that, how would you do it? And it’s kind of similar to – I’ve done some work with video games, and that kind of stuff too. So it’s similar – because you’re creating a bunch of animations, and then depending on what the player does, those animations either play or don’t play or whatever. So there is that similarity. I’m creating a bunch of video files, and then they might play or not play, depending on what the function is – it could be the way a person is moving, or the way it’s programmed to play at certain intervals, there are multiple video frames that are fading in and out from one another to give that impression or that effect of something still, and then something that’s changing or reacting in some kind of way. So that’s where the impetus of thinking about making a piece that would do something like that came from. I have tried to create a few pieces that incorporate video but this piece at Oxbow is my first attempt to try to do a big piece where there’s interactive or processed videos. So the gallery is going to have five different videos of five different musicians. And they’re playing in different locations, which we filmed around the city.
EJ: I saw some of it – I mean, I saw Rose [Bellini, cellist] on Instagram at the beach. And she was like “6am at the beach!” or something. So that was part of your piece?
JB: Right, right. We did that, we did in the middle of the forest in Seward Park with Bonnie [Whiting, percussionist]…we did another really early morning one with a trombonist who is kind of up on a ledge looking out over the water. We wanted sort of different environmental spaces, so the same idea of a certain combining or juxtaposing these different environments on top of each other, so you’re supposed to hear part of the environmental sound, but linked with the instrumental sound. So we have the live players, in the piece that will play, (in a live concert) and then these videos that will also play around them. And then when the installation is up, it’ll be the videos playing on the outside, and then on the inside there’s sort of – the idea of an interior space. Whether you want that to be like an interior mental space, or a psychological space, or whatever, with similar videos of the musicians. But some of them, we have some where the musicians are wearing masks, or they have – they’ll be sort of changed or abstracted more so in this inner space. And there’s five screens in there, five tiny screens inside of this dodecahedron-shaped small room.
EJ: No. I mean I read about it and I was trying to picture it, but…
JB: I have a picture on my phone.
EJ: Oh wow.
EJ: How big is that?
JB: This is 6’10”. So it’s – but you have to kind of crouch down to get into it. And then there’ll be little video screens interspersed in there, and speakers –
EJ: Wow. And they’re slightly different videos inside here than the ones that are playing outside? Those are the ones that have masks…
JB: Right. So we’re still kind of playing around with what to do with this space, but – it’s pretty big. And some of the projections might be quite big.
EJ: So the projections are around the walls of the space …
JB: Yeah.
EJ: And the music – the music is in the videos as well? So you can hear that also?
JB: Well, there’s sort of snippets of people playing when we filmed them at these locations. And then there’ll be some other kinds of sampled sounds that get layered in here and there. So it will run on a – right now I’m making it 30 minutes, it’s like a 30 minute piece that’ll cycle through. And all these different things will sort of change over the course of the piece, but it’s – you know, depending on what you do in the space and where you are will depend on what you hear of that. So it’s like a game, there are sets of possibilities that happen every so often, and it’ll shift to another section over time. We’re using infrared sensors and camera sensors that will take information – maybe movement, or light sensitivity, so how much you’re saturating the light in a given space. It’ll take that data and that could affect the pitch, or the way the video looks, or where the sound plays back from, etc. So as you move around the video and the sound should be altered in some way. We still have to test that out a little bit.
EJ: But it will shift depending on who’s there, and whatever parameters you set.
JB: Yeah. We’re trying to make it so it’s really minimal, or almost nothing if you were to go in there and just stand – it would be just like, five people with environmental sound and no music or anything playing. But as you move around the piece sort of unfolds as you interact with it. And if there are more people there, you will hear more of it. If you were there by yourself, you would only hear a part of it perhaps.
EJ: And the live music? How does that relate to the – are you writing that as well?
JB: Jérémy is focusing on the concert piece. We’re probably going to – the concert piece will be more of a fixed, presented piece in terms of how the videos play. Since we have – since there’s sensors and stuff there, we can’t predict what people will do in the concert. [laughter] They could totally mess up whatever we’re trying to present. Like if somebody is standing on a sensor during the entire concert.
EJ: “Well, that was unexpected.”
JB: Right! But we’ll have it so you see the five musicians sort of interacting with their live selves.
EJ: How does the visual of the masks relate to being inside that smaller space? Does that correlate at all?
JB: Well, I guess – I mean I’m thinking of it as the most abstracted part of the individual self. Your subconscious self, or something like that. Or a subconscious human that maybe exists in some kind of animal form. But I’m also using – the mask videos are overlaid with the other video. So it kind of creates this weird aura around the people. That’s some of the flyer image that we already sent out, with the picture of Rose. It looks like there’s some weird kind of moving image around her, which is really just the video of her with the mask, that’s sort of vibrating around the unmasked video. But you can’t really see the mask, you’re just seeing sort of the vibration of that interlaced video.
EJ: Can you talk a little bit about the conceptual part of it? I read the – not the artist statement, but I read what you wrote on the website and talked a little bit to Jérémy about – what is the self? And what you think your self is, and how other people perceive you, especially in this vast social media landscape. And that other people’s perceptions of your self – like in the Milan Kundera book – it’s like, actually, that is your real self, because that’s the one that people think it is. I don’t know – you don’t have to explain that, but maybe you could just talk about why that is interesting to you?
JB: It’s hard – well – mostly, Jérémy and I have had too many conversations about it [laughter], trying to think about it. And what I kept trying to express to him was that it doesn’t have to mean anything, it’s just there to raise questions about what’s real. Or when you’re juxtaposing a real player against a sort of weird version of them, what does that mean? How does that relate to the composer/performer/audience experience. I guess there is a little bit, for me – some kind of commentary on social media, and how there’s these kinds of digital representations of ourselves. And how people – just as an example – go on Facebook or Instagram and post their vacation pictures, or pictures of them in different places, in this kind of idyllic version of themselves. Like “all I do is travel!” I mean, I probably do it just as much as anyone else.
EJ: I totally do it. No judgment!
JB: Of course! But people don’t post like “oh, I went to work today.” Well, I guess some people do. But the mundane, or perhaps the most human or universally shared aspects of their lives. You’re kind of presenting this idyllic version, as opposed to a more prosaic or unromantic version perhaps, and it depends on how one defines what that is. So we were thinking about that. Shooting the videos of people in different locations, and just the role of musicians. Musicians, you’re practicing all the time, you’re maybe not thinking about the concert space when you’re practicing, but you’re thinking about – you might be practicing in your studio, or elsewhere, and have different kinds of internal reflections or versions of what you play and how you play. I was even just interested in exploring if the same players would play differently outside at 6 o’clock in the morning, as opposed to night in a concert space.
EJ: Do you think they did?
JB: Well, yeah, I think there is something about – even asking people to wear masks, some people kind of get into it and some people might think it’s weird. Like, for the percussionist, being in the forest with an animal mask on is sort of a ritualistic kind of experience perhaps. So yeah, we were trying to capture interesting material visually, and in the audio, and juxtapose that.
EJ: Did you write material for them to play?
JB: Jérémy had some ideas about what he wanted to put in the piece, so we had some of those kinds of gestures, but we mostly just gave them direction: play these kinds of notes, play this kind of phrase, etc. I was interested in capturing some kind of unique thing. So I want to get their personality, and what they feel comfortable doing. And some people just want to get it done, or try to be really literal in what you’re asking them to do. So that was a little bit challenging, I guess. But we’re cutting up this stuff in an extreme way, so everything is just single notes or gestures and then we’re recombining those. So what they played is not what you hear exactly – we’re using it in a lot of different ways, just like you’d make an electro-acoustic piece. I’m sort of sampling them. But I’m taking that material and doing all kinds of other things with it. And then it’s – the patch is live-sampling their stuff, too. Or it’s feeding the audio from that recording, but it’s doing all kinds of other manipulations to it, like changing the pitch, or delay, etc. – all kinds of things that will run through that audio and change it in different ways in real time.
EJ: What other instruments are in it, besides percussion and cello?
JB: Percussion, cello, violin, trombone, and clarinet.
EJ: Well it looks amazing, actually. I’m excited to see what it looks like because I don’t quite understand the back end of all that stuff.
JB: And it is supposed to be a residency at Oxbow, I am working while I am there for the month so it will probably change a lot over the whole course of the residency.
EJ: Right, how long are you guys there?
JB: Till June 3rd.
EJ: When does it open?
JB: This Friday. [May 4] Hopefully it’ll be functional by Friday! And then by June 3rd –
EJ: It’ll be like, “that’s what we wanted to do.”
JB: Yeah, probably.
EJ: Do you do a lot of – is this your main focus when you’re writing music, is it electro-acoustic music, or –
JB: No – more so lately, I’ve done interactive pieces and electronic pieces. I wrote a piece for myself that I played a few times for percussion and computer. I’ve written a handful of computer and mostly single instrument pieces, since that’s an easier thing to do, just logistically. But I’ve written a lot of acoustic pieces too. Probably more of those are older pieces, I would say.
EJ: Did you study electronics as well, or you just kind of got into it?
JB: I did a lot of music technology classes, computer music, and sound art. I took a sound art course, and I’ve done other workshops and things like that. There’s this place in Toronto that I mentioned called NAISA, New Adventures in Sound Art, which is – they have a studio there, and they do workshops and present pieces. I went to a workshop in Mexico at CMMAS, a center for electro-acoustic music research. They do the same sort of thing, they have symposiums, and they invite composers to write different pieces, and people give lectures on this kind of stuff. So I learned a lot of it from that. And it’s good, because people go, and trade patches, or trade ideas. It’s so vast, what you can do with technology just in terms of an art practice. So many people have different ideas, and different approaches to what they do, and its great to share ideas from different perspectives.
EJ: I was talking to Julia [Tai, SMO conductor] a little bit about the concert they have coming up and how to kind of prepare people who aren’t in the new music club already, to – not even to enjoy it, but just to be present and listen when you don’t have a background in listening to, like, Morton Feldman or whatever. People are like “what the hell? This isn’t music!” And she had some interesting ideas about that, but I wonder if that’s something you ever think about. Because this realm is a little esoteric, and you’re in an art space, and people also have preconceptions about that. You know what I mean?
JB: For this piece?
EJ: Yeah. And in general.
JB: Well, I think a lot about how people approach a piece, any piece. I think it’s getting harder for people to go to a concert and just sit. Like the idea of sitting in a concert and listening to something super weird or foreign is hard. And it seems like in general, people go to concerts less. Especially if you’re not used to that, or grow up with that experience – I guess not a lot of people go to art galleries too perhaps. Although I think the gallery experience is more common. People certainly seem to be more – I don’t know what I want to say – maybe tolerant of art that is super weird when it’s in a gallery.
EJ: You’re right, that is interesting. You don’t have to be so involved with it somehow, I guess.
JB: Well, I’ve had a lot of conversations with composers about this too. I had a friend who was like, “concert music is like you’re in prison!” [laughter] Because you’re forced to sit there, you can’t just like get up and leave. Once the piece starts, you can’t just walk out of the room. I mean, you can, but it’s almost a form of torture or imprisonment because you’re forced to be in a space. You’re forced to stay there for a certain duration, and that’s difficult for some people. Which is – I don’t know if I’d go that far to say that it’s like prison, but –
EJ: Yeah, it’s kind of a catch-22 in a way. I’m having this specific memory, I used to work in a theater here, a contemporary theater for performing arts. And there was a piece on stage that had some similar elements to what you are doing, actually. But a lot of people were really mad, because they were like, “this should be an installation! I shouldn’t have to sit here and listen to this!” There was only a person on stage for the first ten minutes, and the rest was all algorithms. It was material from Hamlet, I think. And the lights, everything – nothing was pre-set, either. I don’t understand how that stuff works but I really loved it because I was like “I don’t know what’s going to happen! And no one is telling me what to do!” And I don’t think I would have taken it as seriously if I were in a gallery because you can just watch for like five minutes. And I was like, “no, I’m in it for an hour, I’m going to take this seriously.” So I had a completely different experience.
JB: Yeah, that’s something that is absolutely valuable about the concert experience too, in that respect. It’s a kind of focused attention. That’s true. So maybe it requires more thoughtfulness from the composer to create something— that you can get away with more in an art context.
EJ: Yeah, I don’t know. It’s a challenge.
JB: I remember I did a sound art piece where it was a small room, and it had a small pool of water, like a table in the room, so it had interactive sound moving around as you moved the water around in this table. So in order to experience anything you really had to interact. Probably part of the Oxbow piece will be similar – people walk into the gallery and might be like “oh, it’s this” and then just walk out. So it takes some initiative to really experience it, which perhaps is in some way similar to a concert piece. If you’re going to make something which has duration, which a lot of gallery pieces don’t have duration in that sense – it’s hard to get people to experience it in a way that would be the most desirable. I mean, I’m allowing for some variability, so it’s different, it’s changing each time, which I like, but you still would have to spend some time there to get some sense of what the piece is. I guess I kind of like that – people can sort of discover or explore the piece in that way.
EJ: Yeah. So you’re not going to, like, tell them. Like give them a little card when they walk in or something.
JB: Yeah. Well, people are invited – we have this dodecahedron thing/room and hopefully it’s obvious that people can go inside.
EJ: Yeah. People will want to go in!
