Don't call it noise!

Interview with Bas van Koolwijk Bas van Koolwijk is a sound and visual artist, known for the Synchronator, developed together with artist and musician Gert-Jan Prins. The artistic duo also performed at the Stedelijk Museum on February 26th as part of the Sonic Acts Festival. While Paradiso was being transformed from a lecture hall back into a music venue, I was heading with Bas Van Koolwijk to the highest floor of this former church, to find a quiet spot where we could have a talk about his artistic practice and its its relation to the performance staged for the Sonic Acts Festival. His friendliness struck me, and helped me overcome my tiredness, after three days of festival. The Signal We opened our conversation discussing the beginning of Bas’ career. After reflecting on the media he used to deal with, including painting, he started focusing more and more on the affordable technology which was available on the market. It is in the nineties that he decides to abandon abstract painting and dedicate his research to sound and video experimentation. However, he considers his pictorial education the basis of his current practice. Just as abstract painting, the technological media, like the television, are capable of producing the same effect if brought to their primal constitutive element: the signal. For Van Koolwijk the signal became a generative starting point for either sound or images. In order to be able to translate the signal, he became a programmer; he could therefore build his own instruments, not to adhere to the pre-determined aesthetics imposed by consumer electronics. Delay Line Memory For Deadly Line Memory van Koolwijk and Prins developed a collaborative performance in which the first translated digital sounds into visual effects, while the second played the drums, improvising according to the sound environment. According to van Koolwijk the project stems from the analogies between the Short-Term Auditory Memory and the computer Random Access Memory. The parallel between the human brain and the computer brain is helpful to understand how our Short-Term Auditory Memory plays a central role into the Delay Line Memory’s performative deployment. During the performance the public literally listened to the images, but this connection between digital sound and digital image was not the only force at play. In this performance, the electronic sound generated by van Koolwijk was translated by a customized machine into a series of abstract colored pixels, which moved and shifted on the screen following the sound development, imitating the RAM process of a personal computer. While listening to the sound and looking at the screen contemporaneously, the public could experience something that van Koolwijk defined a “coordination problem”, which changes the perception of what people were looking at. The solid sound created by van Koolwijk, which was build from the resultants of the interferences between frequencies was accompanied by the drumming improvisation of Gert-Jan Prins, creating a multidimensional auditory environment. The humanly-created sound interacted with the digital one, a way of working and collaborating preferred by van Koolwijk. That is: the one in which each of the artists is free of expressing him or herself, without planning too much in advance, making each show unique. Don’t call it noise The uniqueness of this performance was also due to the setting. The room of the Stedelijk highlighted the tridimensional interaction between the two artists and the video. Bringing such a noisy performance in a Museum, temple of the arts, doesn’t have to be perceived as a subversive act. When I referred to the sound van Koolwijk created as noise, he corrected me, underlining how his practice is not aimed at contesting the authoritative image of the institution. He does not perceive his sounds as noises, because they are generated by ordered systems, by data he organizes and translates. The result is a sound which, of course, cannot be defined as noise, but can be perceived as such. Van Koolwijk seemed to agree upon the perceptual openness about it. Data translated into sounds and images, drumming improvisation in dialogue with the digital composition: these are the ingredients of a really good performance. Bas van Koolwijk gave me more elements to understand it deeper, and to go back with my memory to it, revisiting the emotions I experienced during its staging. Van Koolwijk even revealed to me some details about further projects he is working on together with Gert-Jan Prins, and I cannot wait to see how their work will develop in the future.