pauline ontiveros by cory arcangel

PO I’ll tell you a few things that happened. My nonprofit, Deep Listening Institute, recently did a project called the Deep Listening Convergence. We had 45 musicians in a virtual residency using Skype. The project was to have new ensembles form and rehearse online for five months. Then we brought them all together upstate at the Lifebridge Sanctuary, which is a really beautiful place, and we did three real concerts of only material that had been developed online.

CA What keeps pushing you to drive in these directions which haven’t been driven in before? To take what you just said as an example, video telephones certainly were not designed for small musical ensembles, but you decided to push the technology in that way. And now you’re working with DARPA technology to organize multi-site performances. These technologies were not designed for these uses, and yet you have continually bent them to your vision

PO I could fall off the cliff. What keeps me going is the interest and excitement. It’s very amazing to work with people in that way, and it’s also very difficult. I do believe that relationships are the Wild West, and that working physically and virtually is part of developing a more peaceful world. This has to be learned through listening and negotiating. Improvised music is a great model for community building and reconciling differences. My work with Deep Listening supports this idea. A community of Deep Listeners has grown out of the summer retreats and workshops are given in many places in the world. People who listen together grow and expand together.

CA Do you ever think about how all the things you have been working in for so long are now the direction that everything has taken? Like the online collaborations—look at the online networking sites. It’s amazing to look at all the things you’ve been hammering away at for years and now see what has happened in culture. The average funny Internet video or audio clip that gets passed around more often than not is the result of a multi-site collaboration. Most media today is participatory in this way. There might be rock bands in the future that will get together in the same way as the ensembles you brought together did.

PO Alex Carôt in Germany made a software called Soundjack to rehearse his rock band.

CA There you go.

PO Yeah, there it is. It’s very high quality and low latency; I’ve worked with it. You can download it at Virtualsoundexchange.net, which is a website where you can get all kinds of expert advice on using different technologies. That’s the net: you can start collaborations with people anywhere in the world—except for the places that don’t have the Internet.

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PO I’ve been surfing technology for 50 years; more than that, probably. But I’m not a technologist, I never pretended to be one, but I’m using it, and that’s different from somebody who’s hacking it. I hack it conceptually. I think about what hardware and software can do, then try to push it beyond what it is supposed to do.

CA Also, hacking takes so much time. Once you figure something out, the next thing is already here. You really have to invest. Hacking is like learning an instrument. As the years wear on, I have more and more difficulty keeping up. I found a solution though: I just started to make work about that difficulty! These instruments are always disappearing and new ones are coming, so in a way it’s better just to surf because you’re able to roll with the punches. In the last couple years, there’s been a shift. I think a lot of the innovation and technology has been towards self-publishing. How do you think that affects the next generation of composers? Now they have immediate access to a global audience, and that’s fairly new.

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