Sofy Yuditskaya interviews Jess Rowland
Edited by Elizabeth Hoffman
Frances Dyson says in The Tone of Our Times on p. 52 that Punk rock “barged its way through the polite discourse of musicology” with its noise. Noise is tied to the perception of decline, as well as protest, youth anger, anachronism, the idea of “no future” and the aesthetics of technology. This protest is linked to a protest against the idea of eternal growth in economics, and culturally has origins in theology. This origin paradox allows it a freedom of interpretation and movement.
Punk is always to some extent a celebration of the technology sounding itself, a stepping back of the human performer and a turning up of the speaker, or a destroying of it, or a loud strumming of the guitar, in its most basic chords, an allowance for the breath of feedback. Punk takes place in squatted spaces, outside the purview of the lords of the land, and old industrial spaces, no longer contributing to global consumerism. As such, the halls of social media are already a corporatized and owned space, but the electromagnetic spectrum holds many pockets through which to send and receive signals.
Below is the very famous map of the Electromagnetic Spectrum. It is a part of nature but simultaneously the locus of technology. The poster below shows how vibrations and frequencies in the electromagnetic sphere become colonized and privatized by corporations and nationalized by countries and their defense systems. Sound itself is one of those frequencies when emitted by a speaker on a DAC. It is when that emission hits the open air, and starts to push molecules around that it is transformed from electromagnetic, to mechanic.
One of Jess’ projects is a deconstructed speaker project which investigates just that transition from the electromagnetic to the mechanical. Another is cell phone feedback which takes audio input and channels it through the cellular communication infrastructure only to have it come back out again. This feedback is not the immediate information overload that analog punk feedback is, but rather the slowing down of feedback accumulations. These allow us as the listener to tune into the network based compression and delays mixed with the device’s audio pickup capabilities, immersing us in the space of audio transmission in cellular communication. We usually experience this on a personal level when having a conversation, this time, experienced expository on a system level.
Finally there is the piece “Laptop Destruction” which she performed at the start of her career. It reads as a punk gesture of instrument destruction while at the same time a significant piece of performance art. While the ownership of guitars is not universal, the ownership of laptops is much closer to being so. It is an instrument many of us use for work, so the act of destroying it carries a different meaning. The sound of laptop destruction comes from contact mics placed around the device. It is a transmission of the mechanical act of laptop destruction.
Jess came up with the idea of dedicating performances to the Electromagnetic Goddess, a goddess Jess invented. She believes the universe has a feminine energy to it, which is aligned with anti-consumerism and exploring voice as a hidden impulse in whatever body nature provides, including a technological one. This is connected to a universal principle of spirit and expression as well as to her specific experience of being trans and expressing her own gender identity. She has said in performances that the Electromagnetic Goddess expresses herself differently at different times. It cannot be predicted or forced into a specific behaviour; this is a reflection of its connection to the improvisational nature of our performance and also to the immutability of the force we are channeling through our instruments.
Sofy: Tell me how your performances tie into causes and ideas that are important to you personally? What are those ideas and causes?
Jess: I started out in a San Francisco scene that was anti-capitalist and anti-consumer. This experience deepened a line of thought I was already committed to – and I probably, on some subconscious level, was drawn to the community I found in the Bay Area. This was in the 90s, fyi, and since then a lot has changed. Some of the folks are still there, but most have moved on. A lot of my performance work is tied to an exploration of consumerism – I never really got into the more overtly political anti-capitalist thing. I grew up in a suburban world where consumerism was everything. It felt like to me a substitute for substance and a substitute for love. The idea that Ronald McDonald would stand in for your father, and that the bliss-point of snack food would make up for real meaning in one’s life. I told people that corporations hated humanity. Most people disagree, but I still think it is largely true if you look at what consumerism has done to the planet. It’s a lot of what Kurt Vonegut was talking about – How do you explain what people do to the planet and each other? The only answer he could make sense of was that people actually hated being alive and wanted it to stop. I saw my thinking as a continuation of that line of thinking. He was mostly talking about nuclear weapons, but I saw it more as the effect of consumerism and corporate American-style capitalism.
So, when I perform the eating of a bag of snack food, I’m acting out that process of how we take in consumerism as a substitute for nourishment and love, and that includes self-love. when I do the googlespreadsheet sonification, I’m talking about work, as in 9-to-5, and its emptiness. Sofy, you probably don’t know this work, but I used to do a lot of video/music improv like “McDonaldland is Changing” and “John Ashcroft vs. the Space Librarians” and “The Barbie Explosion”. This was my thinking mostly as I started out in performance, and I still explore that theme, though it has changed over time.
“McDonaldland is Changing” and “John Ashcroft vs. the Space Librarians” and
What has changed in the idea of the work is then – how does consumerism and work and consumer technology affect our body. Especially the body that wants to be expressed, for me that is Woman-ness and Woman power. When i think about how these forces of capital and consumption act on myself, I see the way the systems that are in place act against: transness, queerness, and the female body. Much of my adult life has been committed to expressing the feminine in myself. This is fundamentally a feminist, or trans-feminist perspective on consumerism. And, since consumerism acts – in our society – on the deepest levels of our being – how negative perceptions of the self work for capital and how love, if it is possible, can counter that. I hope when I perform ,there is a little bit of that love that can reach the audience, even in the darkest, most excorcism kinds of performance. Maybe there is a purging, the way to remove things from the deep insides.
These days, consumerism largely acts through technologies, cell phones, computers, etc. When I perform the laptop destruction or cellphone thing, it’s an attempt at purging as a feminist action.
Sofy: What are your thoughts on queer and feminist visibility? How do you express it in your work?
Jess: I think I might have just answered part of this question. Visibility = good! When i perform it is important that I am seen, that is part of the process of a ritual of purging. But more generally, I feel that trans visibility and trans-feminine energy needs to be out and about.
Sofy: Can you describe your spirituality (or thoughts you have on spirituality) and how you express it/perform it in your work?
Jess: This is a big one Sofy! Growing up, i considered myself a Taoist, and largely I still do – at least as a spiritual practice. As a kid, i had an experience with music that was a sort of spiritual awakening, and when I started reading about Taoism, I realized it coincided with the kind of experience I had. I sometimes think of this as a sort of “musical taoism”. The basic idea, if it is possible to express, is that the universe is energy which flows through everything and is, in fact, everything. Creativity allows us to tap into this energy, the way a radio can tune into a radio station. The truer you are to the moment you are in, the less the ego demands to assert itself, the less you fight against the natural power of that energy, the more that energy can work in a positive way in your life, but most import for us artists – the more you are in touch with the source of creation. and for me, this expresses itself mostly in music. This is where my commitment to improvised music started. In San Francisco, I had a band called Spork, which was committed to this idea. It was (at least at first) a 100% improvised ensemble. We never played the same music twice, because no two moments are the same. when we were in touch with the power of that energy, we felt it and it shows in the music. I’m still committed to improvisation, and it acts in my performance as a force which can counter consumerism, conformity, and surface-awareness. The energy of the universe I consider primarily a feminine force, and – as you know so well – we have our group dedicated to the Electromagnetic Goddess.
“The Barbie Explosion”https://www.discogs.com/Jess-Rowland-Scenes-From-The-Silent-Revolution/release/3879362
overall speaker stuffhttp://www.jessrowland.com/art/
music for earringshttp://www.jessrowland.com/music-for-earrings/
laptop destructohttps://vimeo.com/154124264
piano rollhttps://vimeo.com/249305849
Electromagnetism and the spirituality of electromagnetism is huge in my practice. In addition to the Bunker, my art practice focuses a lot on homemade paper speakers and other unexpected sound-making objects using embedded circuitry, all relying on electromagnetism. These are technological objects. But they stand against consumer technology. It is a feminist statement against the system of technology which corporations try to force us into. this work is also essential an expression of my particular journey as a trans person: it explores voice as hidden impulse, a speaker where no speaker is allowed, sound made manifest. Quite often my works require interactivity to activate sound, the active search for the truth of bodies that are otherwise hidden, bodies inhabited by sound. A good example of how this feminist critic of music technology plays out, is my audio jewelry and music for body space. a vast majority of music technology has a masculinist-aesthetic, a robocop or terminator kind of feel to it. With the audio jewelry I wanted to challenge that aesthetic explicitly. I created some music for the audio jewelry, a four channel spatialized piece (2 earrings, a necklace, and a bracelet). In making the music, I played off the idea of an “etheric body”, the aura that supposedly surrounds the body. The music is meant to generate a sound-field to protect the feminine body, or as I sometimes call it “sound perfume”.
My circuit prints are often stand-ins for the body, and the electromagnetism contained therein is a stand-in (or might literally be!) spirit. The foil surfaces are meant to act like the metallic gold leafs and precious stone inks of Illuminated Manuscripts, as a connection point to deeper truths.
I’m currently reading “The Mysticism of Sound and Music” by Hazrat Inayat Khan,a Sufi musician and mystic, which expresses these ideas – and more! – about sound as the source of all power and the center of the body in ways better than I could. It is interesting to see so many of the thoughts I’ve had about sound as a spiritual power from a taoist perspective, be matched from the perspective of Sufism, a different (though slightly connected) spiritual tradition than Taoism.
“The Mysticism of Sound and Music” by Hazrat Inayat Khan https://www.shambhala.com/the-mysticism-of-sound-and-music-1071.html
Snaxxx https://vimeo.com/319382872
Sofy: Tell me about your electronic techniques, hardware or software configurations or objects you have made to create your unique sound. Basically I am curious about the tools of your trade as, on the technical side this is a very NIME-like round up of performers. You can speak about a particular piece or your practice at large.
Jess: These days, I use Max a lot. Though I use it in a specific way – as a controller of sound, but not as a content-creating device. Snaxxx, for example, uses Max as a signal threshold detector for a contact mic on the snack bag. The detector then triggers pre-recorded sounds to play. The sounds themselves were recorded from a performance of feedback elements. Outside of Max, almost all my tools are analog, the input sound is analog and the output is often played through analog materials. In this way, I think of my technology practice quite often as “postdigital”. The paper speakers are probably the best representation of my kind of postdigital aesthetic. I use foils and magnets to create embedded circuitry, and some of these objects are intended for performance, at least of a sort. I have performed on the piano roll before, which uses circuit-completion with a foil backing on the piano roll, connected to a computer running Max. Again, using signal threshold, the circuit completion triggers pre-recorded sounds. I still rely on old-fashioned pedals, which often I find more effective and useful than staring at a Max patch for hours on end. Laptop Destruction uses contact mics hidden in the laptop to be sent through loop pedal, delay, reverb, and ring modulator. The cell phone piece uses induction – like our Bunker performance – and also contact mics on the cellphone. So: lots of contact mics, induction mics, analog signal generation and completion, often connected to Max.
Bio:
Jess Rowland is a sound artist, musician, and composer, and a 2018-20 Princeton Arts Fellow. Much of her work explores the relationship between technologies and popular culture, continually aiming to reconcile the world of art and the world of science. At UC Berkeley, she developed techniques for embedded sound and flexible speaker arrays. Her research includes music perception, auditory neurosciences, and music technologies. In addition to an active art practice, she has taught Sound Art at The School of Visual Arts in New York and continues to present her work internationally. Recent installations and performances include the New York Electronic Arts Festival, Simons Center for Geometry and Physics, Berkeley Art Museum, and Spectrum NYC.
