Monika Vykoukal, curator at Peacock Visual Arts, set the following questions for FOUND. On Wednesday 22 December 2004, Kev and Tommy gathered at Ziggy’s flat and attempted to answer them after several bottles of wine.
Monika Vykoukal: You are all showing individual work, work you have done together, and work with people outside of Found. What is your approach to collaboration? What are the differences between working together and individual approaches?
Tommy Perman: The whole is greater than the sum of its parts – the obvious benefits of collaboration are we work with each of our strengths and weaknesses. We all have different areas of interest – some crossover and some don’t. Basically, collaboration keeps things interesting. The creation of ‘fine art’ can sometimes be a lonely pursuit and having other people to bounce ideas off really stops it from getting too boring.
Ziggy Campbell: The problem with working alone is that your ideas can get really stale. It’s good to have a reference point for your ideas because you can go along thinking that something’s brilliant for ages but actually it’s pretty shit.
Kev Sim: It is in the nature of the areas that we work in to collaborate. Music is often about collaborating and sharing ideas.
MV: All of you have done participatory work. Does this inform your relationship to audiences, displays, performances, and, if so, how?
ZC: We look at audience participation as a reaction against the stuffy elements of the art world. I’d rather an exhibition was more like a gig, or had that kind of vibe to it.
KS: It’s more a kin to the other areas we work in; Djing, live music. It’s more inclusive and accessible.
MV: How do you go about the collection of found material?
ZC: There’s no one way of collecting found material. The thing I liked about the Random Audio Therapy project is that a dictaphone recording had as much importance as a recording that Kev produced in a fully equipped studio.
TP: And found sound was as important as a premeditated synth part or drum pattern. It’s like the title of that Wolfgang Tillmans show; ‘If One Thing Matters, Everything Matters’ – everything has the same importance, every sound is equal.
MV: What is your relationship with the gallery? What differences do you find between working in public spaces, outdoors, indoors, bars and galleries?
ZC: These are the spaces that we know; how long do you spend in a bar compared to how long you spend in a gallery?
TP: It’s also to do with the spaces that we’re offered to work in.
KS: Yeah, it comes down to necessity; we don’t have the opportunity to put on gallery shows often.
MV: Your work seems to be very much an exercise in cartography, documentation and research. How do you develop your explorations and how do you relate to your material?
TP: The work is about the documentation and creative process. Sometimes, it’s more about the documentation.
ZC: I always think that if there is not a guaranteed outcome – if we are introducing a lot of variables and chance elements – then it is really important to gather the material while making it.
TP: You are minimising the chance of failure.
KS: The cartography and documentation is the work.
MV: Your working methods are between extremes of high concept planning and chance, arguably with a playful, game-like element. In the description of Rootes Ziggy and Susan actually write about ‘the right amount of chaos’. Could you describe this attitude a little more?
KS: Take an example of an area we work in. Electronic music, can be sterile, repetitive, dull music – and we don’t want that, we want to keep it interesting for ourselves – even if it isn’t always interesting for the people who are encountering our work!
TP: It’s about allowing mistakes. In a lot of my individual work, I won’t allow mistakes. If you consider my canvases – I plan them meticulously and then I try and execute them as accurately as possible. If I make a mistake then I work really hard to try to undo that mistake.
ZC: So is Found like your tonic?
TP: It’s a release. It keeps me sane. How about the ‘right amount of chaos’?
ZC: The right amount of chaos? It goes back to what I was saying earlier on about collaboration. For me, whenever I try to plan something and get it right, it always turns out pretty rubbish, contrived and obvious. But if you just start to let things open up to other factors, then it starts to really colour the work – really make it come alive – in everything I do, music, art � I think if you just start to let yourself lose control but still maintain some authorship.
TP: So you have to make some decisions?
ZC: Yeah, but you have to find a balance – the whole challenge of art or creativity for me is finding that balance.
MV: How did you come to start working with manipulated recording equipment?
TP: To some extent, we’ve all always been working with recording equipment.
KS: 1993, Casio SK1.
TP: What’s a Casio SK1?
KS: It was my first sampler. It’s a keyboard sampler, I still have it. You can pitch stuff and you can loop stuff.
TP: You’ve still got it!
ZC: Why are you not still using it?
KS: It’s kind of broken.
TP: How many samples can you put in it?
KS: Just one! But there’s a two and a half octave range, so you can tape down the bottom octave and then tape down the top octave over that and it produces drones. It’s fully polyphonic.
TP: Wow.
MV: What musical / experimental work influences you?
TP: I went to see a great show at the Hayward Gallery called Sonic Boom – there was work there by loads of sound artists – it was great to see this kind of work in a gallery context. Other obvious influences are John Cage, Steve Reich, Mathew Herbert, a lot of hiphop and electronica – I tend to be more interested in experimental music / sound art that is also listenable. Concept is import, but ultimately I enjoy a good tune! That’s why I am so into Herbert.
ZC: What about Eno?
KS: Sure . . . and Rolf Harris.
ZC: DJ Spooky.
TP: And latterly Scott Heren aka Prefuse, Savath + Savalas, Piano Overlord . . .
KS: Daybre!
ZC: Gavin Bryars – the composer that used a tramp loop. He made a whole orchestral piece using one found loop of a singing tramp as a starting point.
MV: All of you, to varying degrees, work in pop/electronic music as well as the more narrowly defined contemporary art area. How do deal with creating work in these two separate contexts?
KS: They’re all the same!
TP: For me it’s all about diversity.
KS: Yeah, me too.
ZC: What I love about art is that it is forgiving of your interests. It’s really cool that I can bring my live music interests as well as any other sonic pursuits into my art. I love art as an umbrella for everything that I’m involved in.
TP: We do sometimes keep work separate. You might think, right, I’m working on a music piece, or, I’m working on a sound art piece, and you think about them differently, but it’s much better to share ideas across disciplines. I think that producing more populist work helps to keep you grounded – it’s much more interesting to work in a variety of circles – or on the fringes of scenes so that you can move between them and pick the best bits from each scene. If you do this, you can take the best elements from pop music and the best elements from making contemporary art and you don’t have to . . .
ZC: . . . buy right into it?
TP: Yeah, because I think that buying right into either of those scenes isn’t desirable for us.
KS: As opposed to seeing art as the umbrella, maybe the umbrella is something else – perhaps ���creativity��� - and art is under it?
ZC: Sure – but I’ve always thought that I’m a musician first and foremost, but I’ve never felt that music is that accepting of some of my interests – whereas art is all about appropriation; you’re able to take snippets – sample from everything and bring it all together.
TP: That’s like hiphop – it’s actually really conceptual without even knowing that it is and that’s the beauty of pop culture. It can be very clever, self-referential and boundary breaking without dwelling on it. It just does it effortlessly.
KS: It’s someone else’s job to conceptualise it.
MV: Most of your work appears open-ended, to be potentially continued, or remain in progress – Tommy’s prints and Kev’s sticker pieces for example, are variations of the visual remix constructed from basic building blocks. How do you map out stations in the development of these projects?
ZC: Each project is just a stage in development – each project builds on what has come before.
TP: I like the open-ended nature of our projects. I like the fact that we have the option to return to one a year after we have done it.
KS: Well, that’s the thing – the majority of them are based on this idea of building blocks, which can then be put together or taken apart not necessarily by us. For example The Three Sounds, has rules that anyone can follow. They are quite humble projects really – I don’t think we are suggesting that we are any better than anyone else who wants to try it.
MV: What is the attraction of the remix for you? Why do you want people to remix your poster?
TP: I’m fascinated by the fact that you can achieve very different outcomes from the same building blocks. It’s exciting to see what someone else will make from my work.
KS: It’s not static; it’s fluid.
ZC: Nothing’s sacred in what we do.
TP: We’re challenging people to think creatively.
ZC: I think it’s something that’s always been in our work, we’ve always felt it really important to explain the projects, or break it right down and say, this is how the trick is done.
TP: What like Penn and Teller?
ZC: I hate the thought of somebody saying, I didn’t understand that piece. That really gets me more than anything else.
KS: ‘Ambiguous-Unititled no. 23′
ZC: . . . yeah, I hate that, and I don’t the thought of someone saying ‘I just dinnae get it man’. I’d rather it was ‘I understood it, and I didn’t like it’.
KS: ‘I understood it, and it was rubbish’.
ZC: I don’t want to try and trick anybody. I don’t think any of us are into confusing anyone.
TP: No, I’m definitely not into confusing people, but I’d have to say that personally I’m quite into showing people that I have a level of skill.
ZC: Yeah, but if you’re showing people the process . . .
TP: It’s a bit of a challenge. I see the remix projects as competitive, not aggressively, because we’re not aggressive – well, maybe Ziggy.
KS: But that’s the game element, and we’re all into that.
MV: Your work seems to be in and about pop forms (graphic design, stickers, DJing, the ‘road movie’). Are you creating an image, a brand-identity with FOUND and the consistency of your graphic design?
TP: When we set up the FOUND catalogue we decided that each project would have its own logo so it would be in a sense ‘anti-branding’.
KS: Each catalogue number has it’s own identity.
TP: But at the same time it has a similar identity to the other catalogue entries and there is an overall look. Part of that for me comes out of working as a graphic designer and having to do crappy corporate IDs for people that I’m not really interested in. So with FOUND I have the opportunity to do something that I am interested in. It’s a treat for me because I love designing and here I have the opportunity to design for a group of projects that I care about. We’ve all put effort into making FOUND look interesting and accessible. These days everybody understands a brand. It’s kind of tongue-in-cheek but also a salute to how creative brand identities are. Some of my favourite designs are brand logos.
KS: We’ve all grown up with pop culture so it has had an inevitable influence on our work.
MV: How did you come to adopt this simple, sleek look for your creative output?
TP: If you keep the design around the work
really clean, then the work can speak for itself.
KS: As a printmaker, that style is relevant – in the workshops we taught, we made clear the benefit of creating a design that can be output easily as a print, or a stencil for a t-shirt, or a sticker, anything. When you get down to the actual mechanics of making a piece of work �Ķ
TP: so it’s almost a technical issue? That’s like when I’ve have been building the website, to some extent, the design has been dictated by my technical ability. My attitude is, let’s keep it simple, so that we can do it ourselves.
KS: Sure, you don’t want to have to rely on other people, so if you can do it in-house then you can retain control.
MV: What do the frog and key mean in your project symbols?
TP: As I said, each catalogue number gets it’s own logo. The actual relevance of the frog and the key are fairly insignificant. The key was my door key at the time . . .
ZC: and the frog was?
KS: The frog was from the frog CD.
TP: Ah yes, the North American Frog Call CD that my friend Roel gave me and I sampled for the Random Audio project. So the frog is relevant and Kev did a great drawing of a toad . . .
KS: Quite close to when we first started working together, you gave me a copy of that CD and we tried to make a beat out of it.
TP: Oh yeah, the ‘New Frog Chorus’ it could still happen . . .
KS: FND025
ZC: It’s on record now guys – FND025 – it’s ear-marked! Music for Frogs!
KS: It’s coming straight after Music for Dogs; FND024!
MV: Ziggy has talked about the development of a nostalgic mood in his latest pieces. Do you see this as a new departure? Does it potentially relate to previous explorations of time structures – loops as circular, time stands still - and manipulation of record players – ‘loss’ of function? I also feel that in highlighting the iconic qualities of temporary features of the urban environment and the road, Tommy and Kev are creating mementos to some extent.
ZC: I think it’s brilliant that Monika’s actually saved the most complex question for the end! Erm . . . there’s always been a mood of nostalgia in my work; I’ve always had a reference to a retro look, a retro design so it’s not really a departure as such.
TP: Why have you been interested in nostalgia?
ZC: More recently it’s been making sense because the new piece that I’m doing for the show; making a score for found film footage, is a sort of memento to . . .
TP: . . . things that have been lost? Lost technology?
ZC: Not lost technology, more just the past. Lost past. Now I’m seeing it more than ever. Whenever I go back home there’s much more changed, much more lost in my community, my past, my tribe I suppose. It’s all gone basically. In this piece I’m making for the show, I’m trying to make a memento or reminder – but I don’t want it to be over-wrought with sentimentality so I’m using someone else’s memories to do it with.
TP: So you’re slightly detached?
ZC: Yeah, I feel more comfortable if it’s not so close to home.
KS: If you look nostalgia up in the dictionary, although it’s often used as a negative term, the definition is actually a sense of belonging as much as it is looking into the past. It’s a sense of belonging to something as opposed to thinking of another time as better – you’re looking forward but still remembering the past. That’s my problem with nostalgia as a term. A great deal of my work has nostalgic values as well.
ZC: Yeah, I didn’t really think about it until Monika pointed it out, but you are making mementos of your mates – doing drawings of your friends, or people who have affected you. I think it’s cool that you are putting importance on something like that rather than something outside of your immediate sphere.
TP: I think that what we all do is to make sense of what is going on around us. My work is a document of what’s happening. I’m not looking back; I’m looking around at what’s happening at the moment. Once I’ve made the work, then it becomes a document of what was happening at the time. For example, I’ve done a lot of drawings of buildings that have now been knocked down.
MV: Your projects – working with found sound and footage, prints, photography, road movies – document and map localities but are never straightforward documentary. For instance, Tommy’s paintings and screen-prints of cityscapes are extremely realistic, but he chooses not to use the medium of photography.
TP: I wouldn’t say they are photo-realistic by any means. I choose not to use the medium of photography because I feel there are many better photographers than I. Also, I don’t think that a photograph captures what I want to say. I think that by selecting the bits that I am interested in, I create a new narrative for the viewer.
KS: Yes, it’s all about a narrative and selecting what information is important to reveal that narrative.
TP: Yeah, when I see a scene and take a photograph of it, there may be only one or two reasons why I have been interested in that scene, so I then disregard everything else.
MV: Prints are emptied of passers-by and signage, like portraits of different street corners, iconic, timeless and monumental, city as nature/landscape. People and action return in the audio pieces, especially in the Random Audio Therapy Unit you get circular, looped, timeless structures again.
TP: I am very into typography so signage is normally quite central to my compositions; car park signs . . .
ZC: Is that not true for both of you?
KS: Yeah, definitely typography and design in general. Design within the city. It’s almost like making something quite mundane become monumental. It’s not what I set out to do, or what you set out to do but . . . it’s definitely something that could be said of your work.
ZC: Maybe not making it monumental, but just finding the beauty in the ordinary.
TP: But also, I try to tell people that these buildings that are about to get knocked down have beauty and significance and they are monuments . . . landmarks. But with my SURVEY:UK project I am trying to highlight the fact that most of our towns and cities have a lot in common and you can see the same kind of thing everywhere; the same street corner, the same car park, the same high-rise, the same concrete block, the same signage. And that’s similar to what you’re doing – boiling things down to a graphic iconography.
ZC: That kind of signals the end of the interview doesn’t it?
TP: Well we’ve still not answered the last part of that question – that people come back into the audio pieces . . . Monika’s cleverly trying to relate Kev’s and my visual work to the audio work, and I do think there are relationships there that we’re not clever enough to think about!
KS: Yep, I think you’re probably right.
ZC: Well let’s just call it a night then?
TP: [refusing to give up] I know what she means – even though we reference people in those works, they’re not about one person, they are about people in general. And because you loop stuff up you take away that individuality. Do you reckon?
ZC: Kill it man.
KS: Thanks, bye.