User:Lbattich/Transcript of interview by Yuzhen

Unedited text of interview. (interviewer: Yuzhen; interviewee: Lucas)

I’m curious about what are you being busy with at the moment.

That’s a good question, well, the thing is that I’ve been working on a few different things. so, one of them is being in appropriating works. i made a series of small books which take manifestoes from, especially from early twentieth-century avant-garde, futurists and Dadaists manifestoes. And then I changed them so that each sentence of the manifesto would be in a backward order. So the first sentence would be now the last one, the second sentence would be the one before last, so you would read it in a reverse mode. But what it’s interesting is that in Dada manifestoes, it still makes quite a lot of sense, because [this reversion] doesn’t chafe a lot the text. That’s one of the projects’ I’ve been working on.

Is this a series work that you are working on, or you just take a specific manifesto of the avant-garde?

Yes. I picked 3 at the moment, I want to do more. I was looking at, well, first the Futurist manifesto, because it was one of the most important manifestoes that started this craze to do manifestoes and to write manifestoes, and it’s been considered like a template of manifestoes. So that’s why I chose that one, and then other important manifestoes after that. And the idea, well, I wanted to do it because it’s like a “going-back” to modernism, you know, very literally, putting those sentences in a different order, so they back to the idea of modernism that we don’t have anymore; these manifestoes don’t have the power that they used to have before.

But what do you think about… because the manifestoes we are reading now we are reading them in a different context. What do your think about those changing contexts, that have their impact on your work?

You mean, putting them in a new context, what this does to me [my work.]

Yes. What I thought about these manifestoes, because they are really referring to currents at that time, they countered something. But for now, what do you want the audience to get from this manifestoes?

Well, I think, from the experience of reading them I don’t think I want the audience to get too much, because they don’t change that much, as a reading experience. But what I wanted to get was, I realised also, a very nostalgic sense. for me it was a metaphor for a desire to go back to that time, when, you know, manifestoes had that power, when they thought that art was going somewhere, or they thought they where doing something that was changing art for a utopic idea. So it’s kind of very nostalgic, I think, because it’s like a metaphor for a desire to go back in time, going back with the text. I think that’s not really what the audience gets, but that’s kind of my idea.

That’s interesting, but do you put them in a sequence, like there is a manifesto following the previous one, and the audience maybe gets them as a whole, like you can really read from something, and they will see the power that comes forward from each one, to the previous one, to the next one? How they make a sequence and how do you pick their relation?

That’s very interesting because I didn’t think so much, so far they are like separate books. So I tried to pick a relation that would kind of follow the traditional line of art history, so Futurism, Dada; and also looking at very influential manifestoes. But I think that’s already a bit difficult, because there are so many interesting manifestoes. That’s a question I’m still dealing with, what is the relation from one book to another book and another book, and what is the line that I want the audience to follow, that is something that I still have to work on, I think.

I’m curious about how, why you started those appropriation works. Have you already worked with this content?

Yes, that’s good, because I have worked.. I’ve always been interested in that time, that time of history, well, with Dada and Russian avant-garde. And I have previously worked in appropriating – or perhaps “appropriating” is not a very good word, maybe “quoting” or “using” other works by Dada artists. Especially I was very interested before in sound poetry, so the Dadaists were some of the pioneers of that. So I worked before in appropriating Hugo Ball’s works, Raoul Hausmann and Kurt Schwitters, and translated into binary code what they did in that time. And I think that for me this Retrograde Chapbooks are not really to do with sound at all, is a purely literary technique, just treating what they wrote, their texts, as literary texts. So… but I’m still interested in other things too, to work with other ideas, or other works that they had – like sound poetry for instance. But in this case I took a more purely literary text.

You said, it’s not the sound that you are looking at in the sound poetry. Do you think that at the time that poetry really made sense, in a way, if we really get rid of the sound part.

Yes. I think that what interests me actually was, well, many things. but one of them is that there are no recording of them, so the way that they… what we have are scores, they are actually written poems – in a way they are literary because they are texts, the poems are texts. But But they are sound poems in the sense that when you read them they don’t make any sense, they are just sounds, in a very strange language that doesn’t make any sense. And I think that that’s what Hugo Ball, and Kurt Schwitters also, had just letters, so he wrote like a score like a poem – that was written, as a text – but you would read it almost like you would sing, so it was a mix between poetry, music, and for some of them it was an important thing that it was not in any language, in the sense that it was like, well they were in that time a little bit utopic perhaps, they thought it was a pure expression of sound without the dirtiness of language.

But then would you say that it’s more a visualisation of the sound, instead of literature? Because you also did a visualisation in putting it into binary code.

Yes. I think that’s true, actually, because it is both visualisation… It depends how you… That’s a good question because I think, it depends how you look at it. So my point to turn it into binary is tow show that as long as you put anything into a computer it turns into binary. so if you put this poem in a computer or you find it on the Internet, in a way they are already binary, and all we see if the surface – so I wanted to see what is behind. When I put them binary is to see what had happened to these poems. And they are still texts, and the original were texts, so they are both texts, and that’s why I want to read them as poems – even if it’s pretty boring, because they go like “zero, one, zero…”. But at the end it is more about the visualisation that the written words, because no one would read like 400 pages of zeroes and ones; so I think it is a very visual thing, it’s not something to read anymore. But perhaps that’s the interesting part, where do you say it is visual and where do you say it is literary.

To the computer it makes sense, but not to humans.

That’s true actually, to the computer it makes sense. So maybe if you train yourself very well you can read binary. But also I think – well I’m going to dart into another area I suppose, but in general we suppose that we can keep and disseminate things through the Internet, but in a way having books, for instance, it is, well, it’s kind of like a storage device in a way, perhaps lasts longer than the Internet. But there are… if we have everything in the format of zeroes and ones, then we need the computer to decode it.

Also, actually that’s really interesting, I was about to ask you why do you choose books as a form. If you can expand on that, as you already explained part.

Well, that’s a good question because, well… With the Retrograde Chapbooks it’s been a deliberate choice, in the sense that I wanted to make these works in the traditional literary chapbook format. So chapbooks would usually be limited editions very short publications of new poetry, so it’s a very literary kind of format. So I wanted to use that for the manifestoes. Many of the manifestoes appeared, like the Futurist manifesto appeared first in a newspaper, so it’s not that I’m using the same format as the originals. But in a bay books for me – and these chapbooks as well – they have this kind of authority perhaps, and that’s something that I wanted to use. And also, well, with the sound poetry books, they have that sense of being a storage, a devise that will last in time. that another reason why I wanted to use this kind of books.

So for the next step how do you want to develop more.

I think with the Retrograde Chapbooks, I’m still thinking about that. I think about what other manifestoes to use, and in a way compose a version of art history depending of which manifestoes are chosen. But in a way I think that that project is almost finished, in a sense that it will continue to do the same thing with the works that I already have. But to continue in a different step, well, I’m starting to look again to the digital codes of colours, and that’s an area I want to work in. And int rems of appropriating and using works from the Dadaists or from early modernist, I think for the moment I’m not going to do that a lot at the moment. I think on my next projects I want to concentrate on the issue of colour. But also to think, well I think with the sound poetry works I still would like to continue, I’m still thinking what would be the best, because that’s an area that interests me more, and what people where doing in that time. It would probably involve looking at other artists, specially later artists, so no only early twentieth-century artists. So I’m still in that process.