—CHRISTIAN MARCLAY: Testing, one, two, one, two. Can you hear me?
—MAN: Yes.
—MARCLAY: I'm soft-spoken. But it-- it feels like it really bounces around,
so I hope you're happy with this sound.
I was experimenting with records, melting them in my kitchen in the stove.
And uh, the fumes, I think, got to me.
That night, I went to sleep and I had this dream that I ate a record because
I felt so nauseated. I thought, "Well, maybe I could make a little video."
I enjoyed music as a physical experience. I used to love going to clubs and hearing music very loud
that just would, you know, take over your body.
Now, I regret it because I'm like half-deaf.
But, um, I think there was something fascinating about sound being objectified.
My influences for DJing really came more from Musique concrète or John Cage.
So I was always interested in the conceptual side of things.
In the 80s, I started a band called The Bachelors Even. It was a duo and my
collaborator was a guitar player, Kurt Henry.
That's when I started using records.
I would record these skipping records and use cassettes onstage as these background rhythmic loops.
We had a lot of destructive actions, actually, breaking things for the sound, uh, that it would make.
A very liberating moment was punk rock. You know, here were people performing without any training.
The combination of punk rock and performance art really allowed me to get involved in music.
Everybody I was hanging out with were either dancers, musicians, painters, sculptors,
performance artists in the East Village, just being creative and collaborating very often.
I came to London with my wife. We needed a change from New York.
Over the years, I've done many different things. When I was a kid, I would always be collaging.
I'm still the same person, cutting and pasting.
My work is quite eclectic. If I'm doing something new, I'm excited,
and I might work with a printer one day or with film fragments that I collage or graphic scores.
I think it's important to make discovery through the knowledge of other people. That's what I've
enjoyed about music all my life is it is a collaborative effort. So the thread of my work
maybe is sound. But sound is such a wide subject, so it allows me to work in many different media.
Video, because it includes sound and image, is a good medium for me. Now, it's, of course,
very easy. You can film a video on your iPhone and edit it on the phone and just send it around.
You hang this one and I'll hang this one?
I see, yea.
Otherwise they, ah the mobile goes...
The Snapchat project came about as a surprise.
For me, it was a chance to work with contemporary technology.
I'm like really a low-tech person. I'm not-- not very good with computers.
Because I don't use social media, I didn't know what Snapchat was. So, I did a little research
and realized that three-and-a-half billion Snaps are created every day and that just blew my mind.
I wanted to shift the focus so it wouldn't be on the image but on the sound.
It seems more active today.
It's talking a lot to us today.
What I like is when they all go on together.
Yeah.
So that we really get this chorus effect.
Yeah.
Right now the library is just one Snap for each frequency, right?
We're going to have a thousand Snaps with each frequency
and it's going to make it feel a lot better.
The Snapchat engineers were amazing.
They developed these algorithms allowing me to find what I was looking for.
People are going to have such a blast with this!
—I think so, yeah.
I ended up making five different sound installations,
most of them interactive, from Snapchats that were publicly posted.
The one that I spent the most time working on was called "All Together."
As I would maybe make some 10 turntables, here,
I had 10 iPhones and I created a four-minute mix of Snapchats.
For me, what was interesting is that this is a new form of communication.
People are creating their own language using image and sound, which for me, of course,
is interesting because it is about image. And I've always been very interested in images,
even though sound is so important to my work.
Over the years, I've collaborated with many musicians and always felt intimidated by
their incredible knowledge and years of practice. But they were very encouraging
in the sense that they thought that my way of doing things was interesting.
I can't read or write music traditionally, uh, so I had to invent my own ways.
The more recent performance I've done is called "Investigations."
It's a series of found photographs which were cropped, and they show
the hands of different pianists. I wanted to provide this to people who can read music.
The posture on the image has to be emulated. So it's this overlap of different actions.
I like to use the potential of images to create music.
I love onomatopoeias because they're words, but at the same time, they're image. You can't
really separate the word from the image. It's a very expressive way to draw a word.
A graphic score is really an open musical score.
My graphic scores can be fragments from comic books or photographs.
I like the idea that an image can suggest sound rather than a note on a staff line.
The choice of the performer is really important. It's almost like selecting an instrument.
In order to work on that Manga scroll,
I bought a lot of Manga translated into English and I cut them up.
—I think it's okay, yeah.
—I mean, I can put more if you'd like it more transparent. But I think you can see it anyway.
—No, I think it's gonna work.
—All right, cool.
I never thought I would get interested in prints, uh, and I've worked in different studios now.
I used to work at Graphicstudio in Tampa. And then,
when I moved to London, the commute was a bit long.
I became aware of Manga comic books traveling in Japan and
seeing everybody in the subway reading this stuff. You know, it's such a popular thing.
The woodgrain has an expressionist quality. I thought this would be
appropriate because the collage is made out of fragments and is cut out and glued.
They're reminiscent of Edvard Munch's "Scream," which has these concentric
lines that feel like the sound is really coming out of the mouth.
The exhibition at Paula Cooper was very much about this anxiety mood
that we're living in right now politically.
If you overlap 48 war movies on top of each other,
you end up with a cacophony and you can't quite follow the narrative. It's not a pleasant video.
The sound becomes quite aggressive. It's just a loop and it goes on
forever. And this tunnel vision, for me, the video, is just a different
way to express the kind of frustration that we're all experiencing right now.
I want to comment on the everyday life that we're all living and the things that surround us.
When I first came to London, every day was a visual feast just because
I was looking at things differently. On my walk from the studio to home,
I take a lot of pictures, though I don't know these days if my camera is better than my iPhone.
Recently, I've made animations with some of these photographs of trash
that I would find on the street.
We showed the one with chewing gum in Times Square.
For me, it's just a form of note-taking.
It was nice to bring back to the street what I had found on sidewalks in London.
I wanna just be a dilettante for the rest of my life. Just be able to change.
The street can be a place of creativity and the street can be the studio as well.
The power of visual culture and of sound works on us in a very subliminal way. But it's there.
You never know when some idea's gonna hit you. It can happen anywhere.