Interactions with Sound: An Interview with Sound Artist Stephen Vitiello

National Art Education Association

Interactions with Sound: An Interview with Sound Artist Stephen VitielloAuthor(s): Nancy LampertSource: Art Education, Vol. 61, No. 2 (Mar., 2008), pp. 34-37Published by: National Art Education AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27696274 .

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In a school of the arts known for its faculty who break new ground, an unusual collaboration occurred between sound artist, Stephen

Vitiello, and eight inner-city school children. The resulting installation became a unique example of dialogical art, in which

Vitiello and the children brought typically unheard voices into contemporary art.

Kester (2004) expanded on how we situate art. He described artists who collaborate

with communities in the creation of their work and who carry the voices of commu

nities into the public sphere. In writing about his designation of these works as

"dialogical art," Kester asked, "Why bother

trying to explain this work to an art

historical and critical establishment that has so often treated it with indifference, if not disdain?" (p. 188). His response to the disenfranchisement of dialogical work was to note, "Even as dialogical projects

challenge the avant-garde tradition at

some points, they parallel and complement it at others" (p. 188). Dialogical art resur

rects the historically modern act of

confronting the status quo, hence making it postmodern. It does not attempt to

replace the modern tradition of breaking new ground to overthrow the past because

"Postmodern theory has taught us to be

deeply skeptical of this sort of linear historical narrative" (p. 188). Rather,

dialogical art appropriates a modernist

technique in its aim to bring unheard voices into public range.

With his sound installation of children's voices at the Virginia Commonwealth

University Fine Arts Gallery, Stephen Vitiello

upheld the modernist tradition of using innovative media as he employed a

postmodern strategy by giving voice to those who are often ignored. By situating the city children's voices, Vitiello asks viewers to widen their understanding of

art. Vitiello's collaboration challenges viewers on two fronts. First, he asks viewers

to consider sound as art, and secondly, he

asks viewers to consider a dialogical work

that goes beyond its own young tradition as a socio-political discourse between

adults. In his collaboration, he asks us to

hear the voices of children, in raw form, as

they collaborated in creating art.

Stephen and I are colleagues at the Virginia Commonwealth School of the Arts (VCUarts) in Richmond, VA. I invited Vitiello, as assistant professor of kinetic imaging, to

be a visiting artist in an after-school arts

program I coordinate for city school children. By e-mail, in the autumn and

winter months of 2006 and 2007,1 conducted the following interview with Vitiello about his work as a sound artist and about the collaborative installation he created with the children in our program.

Nancy Lampert (NL): Stephen, how did your body of work inform your approach to the collaborative piece you did with the children?

Stephen Vitiello (SV): i guess it's a combination of approaching the work

with the children, based on teaching I've

done, particularly workshop-based

teaching and then also in some sense, how

I approach site-specific recording projects.

In all of these cases I do my best to enter a situation with fairly limited expectations and then allow experience, often the

experience of initial contact, to suggest a

format of working. Before coming to the class, I asked you to have the students

prepare stories that we could record.

Obviously this is already a format but I didn't want to dictate anything more

regarding content or length, truth, or

fiction. I wanted to meet the children on their grounds?they were going to tell me what stories they wanted to record and I would suggest ways of bringing the stories to life, recording sound effects, extra voices,

pulling from already existing sources such as bits of music or environmental record

ings. I demonstrated some basic processing methods such as slowing their voices

down, playing them backwards. I asked each child for instructions on what I should do with their mix and then took the files off to my studio and assembled a mix for the short gallery presentation. I also brought to the classroom a couple of DVDs that I

thought might offer possible inspiration? an episode of Magic School Bus where the group goes to a haunted house that turns

out to be a "Sound Museum." Also, a DVD

extra from Brother Bear where the boy who

did one of the lead voices from the film goes to a Foley Studio to see (hear) where sound effects for film are recorded. It's a

really short clip but it definitely brought a buzz to the classroom. Jeremy Suarez in the

DVD is close to the age of the students in the workshop. He is also a boy of color.

There was a great feeling of seeing someone who could be in their class but is also the star of the show.

Interacti

An Intervi

34 ART EDUCATION / MARCH 2008



My approach to teaching

(for better or worse) has definitely been infQHPed by concepts of collaboration. I might have more influence on the final *

product, but I by no mean^ \ see myself as the onejfl?t?CL 'knows'and the students

as the ones who don't.

We're sharing experience, and I'm doing my best to

allow the students to make

their own discoveries.

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Stephen Vitiello, Carver-VCU After-School Arts Program, 2006, sound and photo installation, VCU Fine Arts Gallery, Richmond. Photograph by Grace Johnston, provided by Grace Johnston, Richmond.

By Nancy Lampert

NANCY LAMPERT / INTERACTIONS WITH SOUND 35



On another line of response: I can say that an enormous part of my background as an artist involves collaboration. I've had incredible opportunities to collaborate with some of the leading figures in the fields of video art, dance and electronic music. In my experiences of collaborating with figures such as Nam June Paik and Pauline Oliveros, I was always struck that they treated me as an equal, even if they were far more

experienced. That is to say, they never told me what to do, though there were subtle

pushes to get me up to speed. My approach to teaching (for tetter or worse) has

definitely been informed by concepts of collaboration. I might have more influence on the final product, but I by no means see

myself as the one who 'knows' and the students as the ones who don't. We're

sharing experience, and I'm doing my best to allow the students to make their own discoveries.

NL: You enabled children from our urban

community to speak for themselves, and then you brought their voices to a public space on campus. Your collaborative sound installation of their voices, in a darkened

empty room in the Fine Arts building, with candid photographs of the kids projected on the wall, caused me to hear the children in a new way, even though I know all of them. Was it your intention for the work to

expand perception in our community, as it did for me?

SV: I think you were probably more aware than I was of the poten tial to expand our (VCU) community's perception of the world of the children in the workshop. For me, the point really was to meet the kids and to give them a larger sense of how they could use sound and find a way to put their voices that much further into the world. I

definitely believe that the more you listen, the more you are aware of your surroundings and the more aware you are of the power you have to interact with your surroundings. I loved the photographs that VCU student Katy McDaniel shot. My initial idea had been to have each child's image on the screen while they were telling their

story, but then the final piece was a lot looser. I edited the audio to

just under 12 minutes. Katy had given me 130 pictures, so I just laid the photographs out to last that long. I think the final result has a nicer feel of (communal) collaboration. You're listening to the stories and see ever changing images of all of the children?recording, listening, interacting, alone. There's a great shot of one of the boys

with his head down (headphones on I think) and his friend

watching over him. You see a bit of my arm and the computer but the emotion is all theirs. I'm just there to catch what they put out.

NL: Another community-based work you did was with the Yanomami tribe in Brazil. How did that work come about?

SV: That was through the invitation of the Cartier Foundation in Paris. I was at Cartier for an exhibition called Ce qui arrive (Unknown Quantity) curated by the theorist Paul Virilio. The Cartier Foundation is a very interesting exhibition center. It's always seemed to me that because their funding does not rely on outside sources they are able to create exhibitions that others could not. Herv? Chandes, the director of Cartier asked me if I would like to participate in their next exhibition and explained that they were sending 5 artists (each at a different time) into a very remot?village in the Amazon to work with a

group of Yanomami and with a specific focus on shamanism. I didn't have a lot of time to

prepare, maybe a month, and it was just around the holidays. I left on January 2 and it took a bit over 2 days to get there?three commercial flights and then a privately rented Cessna. I really went there with as open a mind and ear as possible. I didn't start recording for the first day and a half or so, just trying to get my bearings. Also, I think I wanted to introduce myself and my technologies slowly. The Yanomami are a culture who lives

without almost any belongings (a hammock, a bow and arrow, a pair of shorts, a knife). Interestingly though, they did have this small concrete station with a wireless radio communication system and a PC computer. The PC was something very new. The culture had just created a phonetic written language for the first time.The computer was to make newsletters to other Yanomami villages and to be used to communicate with the outside world?the political powers in the UN and in the Brazilian government. Over the computer

ijteBJHSgnt. When I asked what it was, I was told it was instructions for using

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36 ART EDUCATION / MARCH 2008



NL: That work, like your work with the children, is another example of you bringing the voices and sounds of one community into interaction with another. And that interaction between gallery goers and your sound work is very different than the experience of

viewing visual art. Your installations with sound are enveloping and environmental. My experience of them has been that they provide multi-sensory impressions of subject matter that can be mesmerizing. When did you first start working with sound?

SV: I started playing music when I was 14 or so. I played guitar with friends and momen

tary bands in New York from high school through college. It was only after college that I - started to get to collaborate with visual artists, working on soundtracks for film, perfor mance and for video art. I spent a lot of time in the '90s making soundtracks, working closely with visual artists, watching and; listening to their unique processes of gathering, manipulating/and composing (generally through editing). In 1999,1 was awarded a

residency on the 91 st floor of the World Trade Center. That was really the transitional

experience of going from a musician who supported the work of other artists to becoming my own sound artist?focusing on installations of my own, rather than prioritizing the

response and hierarchical relationship of visual dominance.

NL: The work that resulted from your residency in the World Trade Center captured the

building's sound in the city. Among other things, you recorded the building creaking in a

strong wind. What a unique aspect of the building's presence those recordings document for us now, post September 11.1 would imagine that sound you captured was typically drowned out by other sounds in the city and for the most part unheard. Do you feel that most of your pieces focus attention on aspects of experience that might otherwise be overlooked?

SV: That interest in bringing attention to what would otherwise go unheard is definitely a

motivating factor. I'd have to guess that it is one of the primary interests of many of the

people in the field that I'm part of. John Cage really opened people's ears to the idea that all sound is worth listening to. I guess the next step is to start using some sort of aural microscope to get closer and closer. Also, I'd say there are parallels in other art forms. In video art, there is a tradition of extreme slow motion pieces (Bill Viola's work for example) in which our attention is brought to the details that might not otherwise be seen. I'm

thinking too of dance and performance (such as the Judson Group) in which everyday gestures are elevated to a form of visual poetry. For me, that practice of revealing what otherwise might not be heard also ties into one of the greatest pleasures, which is

discovery. After that experience of discovery comes the challenge of how to share that

discovery through the available technologies. It's also to make those discoveries available but not to the extent that they become didactic. Ideally, you create a space in which visitors also can make connections to their own experiences in ways which I never would have thought of or may never be privy to.

NL: Your idea of visitors "mixing" with your work, and making it new through their interactions, brings us back, full circle, to your interest in collaboration, becaus?as you describe it, even the gallery-goers collaborate in your work^ha?w^ intentions witfr\ sound are you working on? //' 7\ >

SV: I was just thinking that as anartist you sp?mpTj?^^ your future and the

struggîs to

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John Cage) and his group, Composers Inside Electronics. I am so excited about these recordings. For me, there is some of the same sense of discovery in working in. archives as there is as an artist. And then the future is grant proposals, exhibition proposals, working out the equipment needs, budgets, etc It's not to say that it isn't exciting and that I don't feel very lucky. I just am aware (in these cold winter

months) that there is always work to do. For the future, I'm plotting out budgets and equipment for a solo exhibition at the

Contemporary Art Center of Virginia and a two-person exhibition at the Lora Reynolds Gallery in Austin, Texas. Both of these exhibitions will include material from the continuing present?I'm still creating recordings in and beyond my backyard. I'm

looking/listening to the beauty and strangeness in the everyday as well as the incredible nature of Virginia. I'm also doing

my best to tackle this small modular

synthesizer and trying to use that rather than my computer. I'm surrounded by friends and students with their heads in their computers; I'm just looking for a different kind of electricity.

Reference

Kester, G. (2004). Conversation pieces: Community + communication in modern art Berkeley:

University of California Press.

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Documents

Interactions with Sound: An Interview with Sound Artist Stephen Vitiello