Working With Bob Ostertag
Bob Ostertag and I are wandering through secret underground tunnels in the mountains of El Salvador, near the border of Honduras. Some of them stretch for miles, so guerrillas can make fake campfires far away from their actual camps to distract the approaching death squads. Bob invited me to join him and former leaders of El Salvador’s clandestine guerrilla army (the FMLN) in one of the remotest parts of El Salvador — the tiny mountain town of Perquín — which hosts an annual arts festival organized by former guerrillas and their children. This is Bob's first return to El Salvador since the ‘80s, when he spent ten years living here as an organizer, writer, and spokesperson for the guerrillas while the war was in full swing, infiltrating the death squads as well, recording intimate details about both sides of the conflict. He sometimes had to hike alone through jungles filled with landmines and risk ambush by both sides of the war to do so.
Emerging from one of the tunnels, I find myself in the remains of Radio Venceremos, the underground guerrilla radio station, which moved around with a portable generator and often broadcast from waterlogged caves. A woman I'm traveling with was once a leader in the resistance and had her own show on the radio. The radio itself was booby trapped and exploded on a helicopter mid-flight, killing death squad commander Lt Col Domingo Monterrosa and many of his top men, after he captured the radio as a trophy. The twisted remains of his helicopter are kept on public display not far from here.
Underground Tunnels, Remains Of A Clandestine Radio Station And Curtain Of Bullet Shells Leading To A Secret Guerrilla Camp (El Salvador)
Making "The Reach Of Resonance" has led me into many places and circumstances around the world that may seem to have little to do with the film's ostensible topic: music. But that is precisely one of the central points I'm exploring: how one's relationship to music (or a musical instrument) can transform a person's relationship with the world.
Bob expresses this so beautifully in his book Creative Life : Music, Politics, People, and Machines: “[There is a] fundamental motivation behind artistic endeavor: to provide a door through which we can become unstuck from our unique little point on the web in which our lives are entangled…Insurgent politics is necessarily experimental, unruly, and disruptive. It examines, tests, expands, breaks, and restructures the strands between the nodes in the web. It always centers on struggle. This is so close to my artistic aesthetic that in this light it is hard for me to even discern the line demarcating art and politics at all...[But] politics, in the end, is about winning, a concept that is meaningless to art…I don’t see myself as swerving back and forth between art and politics but engaging in a creative endeavor of struggle against the constraints of the web of social and physical relations in which we live. Farther downstream, this endeavor forks into politics (which seeks to win) and art (which seeks to illuminate), but upstream it is just the creative impulse that ultimately gives life meaning.
Munitions In The Jungle (Perquín, El Salvador)
"This is what I think of when I think of a creative life," Bob continues, "a life whose center of gravity lies upstream, where everything - profession and livelihood, location, even gender and identity - is up for grabs and we ride the tiger even when it takes blind turns and detours to destinations unknown. This is the realm where the impulse to create leads people to reinvent themselves: where John Cage’s musical curiosity led him to reinvent himself as a Zen Buddhist, where Jim Magee of New York became Annabel Livermore of the desert, where Anthony Braxton reinvents himself as reed genius, composer, chess master, and philosopher, and where [drag diva] Justin Bond reinvents himself as Justin Bond. It is the realm in which the best of the Central American revolutionaries reinvented their revolutions in small ways every day, reinventing themselves to the task at hand in ways that created masterpieces of politics equal in every way to masterpieces of art. This is the life to which I aspire, and it is why I do what I do.”
[Note: If you don't know who Jim Magee is (mentioned above), I highly recommend you acquaint yourself, here: https://www.steveelkins.net/Interviews/On-Art/James-Magee/
Historical Artifacts From The Conflict In Perquín, El Salvador
The degree to which the Salvadoran revolutionaries had to reinvent themselves is awe-inspiring. Just imagine teaching the most impoverished, illiterate peasants in villages with no electricity or running water how to evade the surveillance of American high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft equipped with long-range infrared night-vision devices...all while cultivating a highly nuanced understanding of the global nexus of economic, religious and political forces generating the brutal circumstances of their lives.
As Phillip Berryman, a former priest who lived through the conflict in El Salvador recalls: "The seeds for Liberation Theology were sown at the Second Vatican Council (1959), when Third World bishops insisted that the church should deal with the issue of development in the modern world. Latin American theologians were concluding that all their development - from conquest to the present - had been written around successive exports (gold and silver dyes, hides, rubber, coffee, and so forth) exploited by the centers of world production. As they realized that their theology was emerging out of that particular context, they began to see that the same thing was true of any theology. What they had once taken to be simply theology - seemingly 'universal' - they now began to see as a 'North Atlantic' theology, a theology of the rich world. The council led Latin American Catholics to take a much more critical look at their own church and their own society. Not only did they seek to adopt the council to Latin America - they began to ask Latin American questions."
Many leaders in the guerrilla movement were women. Bob tells me about his friend Reina, a political prisoner in the Ilopango prison for women. Despite being only 19 years old, 5 feet tall, skinny as a toothpick and raped on capture, she led her fellow prisoners in an extended uprising against their male guards and occupied the central prison office, taking four kitchen staff hostage. Surrounded by sharpshooters with their sights on her tiny frame, she negotiated for the lives of her comrades with none other than the minister of justice. Miraculously, she survived the next several years in the prison, and acted like it was her private estate from then on, insisting on wearing a black beret and tight jeans, receiving visitors with the same air as an army commander.
Or consider Bob's two close friends who are hosting us in El Salvador. One was raised to believe her mother had been dead, until she was a teenager. The other is her mother who was alive all along, but could not reveal this to her daughter due to the threat it would cause to their safety. One day they took us to a mountain peak high in the clouds overlooking a volcano, where the mother told us she had once arranged for her daughter to ascend to this exact spot, in secret, to meet her for the first time during the war. Here, her daughter discovered that she was not only alive, but one of the top people in charge of logistics for the rebel army; responsible for smuggling arms and supplies throughout the country, organizing poor farmers into resistance against the death squads that were funded and often trained by the U.S. She also fought on the ground herself.
The Secret Site Overlooking A Volcano Where Mother And Daughter Met
Once she was in a platoon of 150 soldiers that were ambushed. Two people survived. She was one of them. Abandoned by the other survivor, she crawled for four days without food and water to Costa Rica. Later her own army captured and tried to execute her. Her Sandinista friends in Nicaragua helped arrange an escape by plane to Sweden, where she lived in exile for decades. Our journey through El Salvador together was one of her first times back in the country since her escape. One day, she told me about the time she received a rose from Fidel Castro, who was once in love with her.
For decades, many children in El Salvador were raised believing their parents were dead, because they had to go underground. If parents ever hoped to return to their children one day, it was necessary to keep their identities a secret even from their own kids. In Perquín, I met Alba Gladis Villalobos Amaya, age 84, who ran a day care center for the children of revolutionary fighters during the war, an undertaking for which she could have been executed at any moment. Almost all the children in Perquín were raised to believe she was their actual grandmother, to keep the actual reason for her caretaking a secret. To this day, everyone still calls her "grandmother." And that's the reason the small shop she now runs just off the main plaza in Perquín is called “Abuela’s” (“Grandmother’s”), which is where I took a photo of her with Bob (below).
Alba Gladis Villalobos Amaya ("Grandmother") With Bob Ostertag + Remains Of Lt Col Domingo Monterrosa's Booby Trapped Helicopter In Perquín
"I have tried to take with me the kernel of what these extraordinary people taught me," Bob has said, "to stick to one's path — not a particular direction, or mode of travel, or speed or style, but the path itself. To always question what you have just done and remain open to the possibility that the future might surprise you...The range of possible 'next steps' in life paths is, I believe, determined by the creativity one has applied to the last step."
Retracing Bob's own creative path for "The Reach Of Resonance" was like riding a shotgun blast from the very first moment. The morning we first met at his home in December 2004, he had just caused a major corporation to lose billions of dollars in stocks due to a prank he helped orchestrate on BBC World News a couple hours before I arrived. It turns out Bob was a central behind-the-scenes member of the notorious culture jammers known as The Yes Men, who pose as representatives of prominent corporations on national television and at business conferences, confessing their crimes against humanity in the same language they typically use to conceal them. Announcing massive plans for reparations, they present the world as it could be rather than passively accepting its cruelties, to create situations in which those in power have to either admit to their atrocities, change, or embarrass themselves with an about-face.
The full broadcast of their prank on BBC World News the morning I met Bob can be seen in the video below.
(WATCH): The Yes Men Pretending To Represent DOW Chemical On BBC World News
I later interviewed Bob about his role in The Yes Men here: https://www.steveelkins.net/Interviews/On-Punking-The-Media/The-Mantle-Of-Authority/
Though I was not previously aware of Bob's role in The Yes Men, I should not have been surprised. His creative guerrilla activities are what led me to his doorstep in the first place. Bob's infiltration the war-torn Balkans for a clandestine concert tour (after its borders were closed to the outside world in the late 1990s) convinced me he would be a perfect subject for "The Reach Of Resonance." Amongst other things, I was interested in artists exploring music as a tool to illuminate aspects of the world around us which might otherwise remain invisible. Bob's concerts in the Balkans involved making music with a joystick that simultaneously triggered images demonstrating the overlap between war and video games; a radically new historical development in how warfare was being conducted in the region. The second half of the concert involved Bob making music from the audience's own applause to this. Unbeknownst to them at first, Bob sampled the audience clapping during the performance, then used software to sculpt it into sounds resembling bombs, marching boots and the crackling of refugee campfires; making a direct sonic connection between the large scale conflict in the region and the concert-goers own hands.
This highly provocative (and dangerous) undertaking was made possible in part by teaming up with Marko Košnik from the Slovenian avant-garde hardcore band Laibach, who — like The Yes Men — used guerrilla tactics to bait their own government into showing their true face. Laibach eventually expanded themselves from a musical collective into a micronation. Though still unrecognized as a sovereign state by the powers that be, Laibach nevertheless maintains consulates in several cities (including Umag, Croatia), and issues their own passports and postage stamps.
Laibach Poster, Album And Micronation Passport
Bob's harrowing experiences on this tour (including being assaulted by audience members, detained by police and working with an underground hacker collective in Novi Sad) is worthy of its own documentary. For anyone interested in going further down that rabbit hole, my interview with Bob's tour partner Richard Board can be read here: https://www.steveelkins.net/Interviews/On-Punking-The-Media/These-Hands/
This Yugoslavia tour highlights yet another central theme in "The Reach Of Resonance": the increasingly tense relationship between human bodies and technology. I mentioned earlier that the film explores the idea that one's relationship to a musical instrument can parallel or transform one's evolving relationship with the world. In this case, Bob's tense relationship to his electronic musical instruments became a nothing less than a microcosm of his tense relationship to the complex political and technological forces of our time.
Bob Ostertag And NATO-Bombed Bridge (Novi Sad, Serbia)
In Bob's own words: "Technology in my own work paralleled a similar long-term shift in my understanding of the role of technology in the broader culture. The idea that new musical relationships between musicians can be created through technology is analogous to the idea that new social and political relationships between people can be forged with technology, which is the central claim of the “information technology” industry...What changes is not so much our relationships with each other but our relationship with technology and, by extension, our relationship with the natural world...
"We see it everywhere, from the smallest scale where we struggle to not be overwhelmed by our cell phones, iPods, and laptops, to a larger scale where we struggle to contain the unprecedented power of transnational corporations whose vast holdings and operations are made possible only by equally vast arrays of networked computers…If art that makes intensive use of the latest technology is to be relevant in such a time, it must begin from here: how the tense and difficult confrontation of humans and their machines is reshaping and threatening our world…to be meaningful, it must involve the human body.”
Over the years we worked together, Bob explored a number of innovative ways to make the presence of the human body meaningful within electronic music. Some of these efforts turned out to be quite funny, something Bob decided was an important aspect of the human-machine relationship to put a spotlight on.
Bob Ostertag Kayaking In Alaska
For example, I'll never forget the day we met up in Oakland with another featured artist in "The Reach Of Resonance" — Jon Rose — who was visiting from Australia to turn the US / Mexico border wall into a giant musical instrument. Jon was also testing out some new technology he developed which translated the movements of athletes into music in real time while they play sports. "It quickly became clear," he told me, "that the better the athletes, the better the game, the better the music."
It so happened that Bob is a world class expert sea kayaker. In fact, just before we traveled to El Salvador together, he had made the first attempt to circumnavigate Sardinia in a surfski.
Filming Bob Ostertag Kayaking Around The Golden Gate Bridge (San Francisco)
So we all went down to Jack London Square in Oakland early one morning with some loudspeakers and blasted the waterfront with electronic music and harpsichord samples triggered directly by Bob's paddle movements as he maneuvered through the harbor, confusing the hell out of everyone in a half mile radius.
Jon Rose Making Music From Bob Ostertag Kayaking
Jon Rose Looking Classically Mischievious
At the time, Bob's latest project exploring the tension between technology and the human body was a collaboration with filmmaker Pierre Hebert, a major figure in the fascinating history of Québecois animation, who is certainly worthy of his own documentary. Pierre comes from a tradition of groundbreaking animators who have redefined the possibilities of the craft — yet still remain relatively unknown outside of Canada — including Norman McLaren (whose work painting directly on film negatives in the 1940s later inspired Stan Brakhage); Ryan Larkin (an Oscar-nominated godfather of psychedelic animation who became a panhandler on the streets of Montreal where I used to run into him); Karl Lemieux (whose work with the band "Godspeed You Black Emperor!" involves melting film as it goes through the projector); and graffiti artist Blu (who makes street art that transforms into narrative stop-animation films, then expands into three-dimensional mobile sculptures as it spreads across entire cities). A mind-blowing example of Blu's work can be seen below.
(WATCH): Italian Stop-Motion Graffiti Artist Blu
Left: Pierre Hebert, Steve Elkins and Elo Meunier At The National Film Board Of Canada In Montréal, Québec (Left) And Pierre's Friend Ryan Larkin (A Genius Homeless Animator, Right)
Pierre had pioneered his own original method of animation: he made films by scratching directly onto film negatives with a knife as it was being pulled through a projector. When the projector began to tug each film frame out of his hand, he frantically had to begin digging his knife into the next frame, then the next one, staging a comical tense relationship with the machine for live audiences. By the end of each performance, he would have an entire animated film.
Bob developed software that enabled Pierre to take this idea a step further, making live animations with paint and three-dimensional objects (such as toys, newspapers, pyrotechnics, etc) while sitting at a table. Pierre simply presses a button to capture still frames of his work on the fly, which he then assembles into an animation projected above him. Meanwhile, Bob uses graphics tablets to translate the images into sounds as they scramble together to make a complete movie in front of a live audience.
I filmed the evolution of this project in several countries. Performances become comedically tense and volatile as these two guys frantically try to keep up with the automated processes of the technology. Chaos escalates, their tools gradually self destruct, fires break out, and the stage becomes filled with ever-accumulating piles of garbage. The breakneck pace of the entire process became such a perfect encapsulation of the frantic realities of the digital era, that it enabled them to travel the globe following news events in real time and make guerrilla films about them as they unfolded, sparking dialogue about daily headlines far faster than conventional cinema is capable of. Performances typically began with the front page of the city's newspaper.
Bob Ostertag's "Living Cinema" In Taipei
Bob's exploration of this struggle to sense the presence of the human body in an environment increasingly mediated by machines is multifaceted and has spanned decades. In the early 1980s he built an "unstable" instrument made of reel-to-reel tape recorders and helium balloons that enabled musicians to improvise with a mechanically warped version of themselves.
Bob Ostertag's Instrument Made From Tape Recorders & Helium Balloons (Early 1980s) + Performing Joystick-Controlled Music With Experimental Japanese Turntablist Otomo Yoshihide
By the early 1990s, Bob had expanded on the idea in his "Say No More" project. Bob sent virtuoso musicians into a studio to record improvisations, then used a computer to explode the recordings into sound splinters, which he reconstructed into compositions that only a computer could realistically perform. The musicians were then asked to learn the computer compositions verbatim and go on tour performing them. As Bob describes, "In effect, the players were put in front of a machine-made mirror of themselves. It was not a perfect mirror, but more like the digital equivalent of a funhouse mirror that was curved, with wacky lenses that distorted the image into something superhuman. In the performances the musicians tried to keep up with their digital reflection, a task at which they could only fail." A sample of the computer music they had to perform ("Say No More, Vol. 1") can be heard below.
(LISTEN): Bob Ostertag's "Say No More, Vol. 1" (Excerpt)
Next, Bob recorded the concerts in which the musicians attempted to play this music live (which became "Say No More, Vol. 2"), exploded it into sound splinters all over again, and made an entirely new album of seemingly impossible computer music from it ("Say No More, Vol. 3"). The musicians — you guessed it — now had to learn to perform this music live for the next tour (which became "Say No More, Vol. 4"). This created an ongoing feedback loop between human and machine that put a spotlight on the tensions between them.
(LISTEN): Bob Ostertag's "Ink" (From Say No More, Vol. 3)
Bob's more recent work, "A Book Of Hours," expands on these questions, but by focusing on the possibilities of the unmediated human voice. As he explains in the liner notes: "Completing 'A Book of Hours' has me thinking about Karlheinz Stockhausen's 'Gesang der Jünglinge'...both address the meeting of the human body and human technology via the electronic manipulation of voice. Yet in other ways the two works are opposites.
"Stockhausen's work was completed in 1956 and is very much a product of its time. Like many of his contemporaries, Stockhausen believed that the timbral resources of acoustic music - voice and the instruments of the Western orchestral tradition - had been thoroughly explored and exhausted. Further explorations in timbre would henceforth occur in the electronic domain, which promised to make sound far more malleable, and give composers far more precise control, than acoustic music ever did...By breaking down the human voice into its sonic components and then recreating them electronically, the composer hoped to transform the resulting hybrid voice in ways previously unimaginable...
Karlheinz Stockhausen
"Then, just a decade later, a new generation of improvising musicians uncovered vast worlds of previously unknown sound (at least to Western ears) in exactly those instruments and voices that the high art composers of the 1950s had dismissed. Prominent among this new generation were Roscoe Mitchell, a young saxophonist in Chicago working in the newly formed Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, and Phil Minton, a vocalist in London's new "free improvised music" scene. This new generation was joined a decade later by younger musicians including vocalists Shelley Hirsch and Theo Bleckmann, myself, and many others...How could it be that the high art composers of the twentieth century, as obsessed as they were with being the 'pioneers' of new sound, failed to notice this motherlode of sonic possibility that was right under their noses all the time?...Among all the discoveries that resulted, none was more compelling than the discovery of the range of the human voice, the original instrument. As evidence for this claim, I submit the work of Phil Minton, Shelley Hirsch, and Theo Bleckmann in A Book of Hours, each one utterly unique and beautiful.
"The devotion it expresses is not to any god but rather the beauty of the world in which we live, as made manifest in the breath, the voice, and the reed."
(LISTEN): Excerpts From Bob Ostertag's "A Book Of Hours"
This brings us back to El Salvador and one of the reasons Bob and I are here. We are looking for a boy...well, he was once a boy whose voice was the source for Bob's piece "Sooner Or Later." Bob wrote it — in part — to process his experiences at the end of the war. "Sooner Or Later" is music made entirely from three sounds: the tears of this boy as he buries his father in El Salvador, a shovel digging the grave, and a fly buzzing around the body.
As Bob explains it, "The choice of sound source comes from my experiences during the 1980s, most of which I spent working in or around El Salvador. During that time I saw a lot of death. And in that culture, which is both Catholic and highly politicized, death gets surrounded with all kinds of trappings that are intended to make it heroic and purposeful. Death is explained as God's will, or as irrelevant since the dead 'live on in struggle.’ But most of the 70,000 who died were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. They didn't want to die. There was no plan, no glory. Of course, there are many Salvadorans who did die heroically fighting a brutal regime against overwhelming odds. But even for the heroes, there is a starker, more immediate side to their death. Sooner or Later is about that side. There is a boy and his father is dead. And no angels sang and no one was better because of it and all that is left is this kid and the shovel digging the hole in the ground and the fly. If we want to find beauty here, we must find it in what is really there: the boy, the shovel, the fly. If we look closely, despite the unbearable sadness, we will discover it."
(LISTEN): Bob Ostertag's "Sooner Or Later" (Live In El Salvador)
Bob invited me to document his performance of "Sooner Or Later" at an annual arts festival organized by former guerrillas and their children in Perquín, El Salvador (it can be heard above). The festival began in 1992 to celebrate the end of the war, when the area around Perquin was still full of revolutionary fighters waiting to go through the official demobilizing process supervised by UN officials. Many former revolutionaries still live in Perquin in little houses they were given after the war. Nearby is a community of several thousand people who fled in refugee camps across the border in Honduras and only returned at the end of the war. These people are still dirt poor, and still deeply affected by the war. This festival was, and is, their festival. We had reason to believe that the boy, if he was alive, would have maintained close contact with the people of Perquín and would almost definitely attend the festival. We hoped it would trigger a reunion between him and Bob for the first time since the war.
But if he was there, he did not reveal himself. Perhaps this is not surprising in a land where people and history can so easily disappear. It was the first and last time "Sooner Or Later" was ever performed in El Salvador, sandwiched between political street theater from local campesino teenagers about the privatization of water in their drought-ridden county, and a set by Sangre de Guerra, a rock band formed entirely of children of former guerrilla fighters. Bob wrote a moving article on the revolutionary songs of the people of El Salvador here: http://bobostertag.com/uncategorized/charlie-haden-pepe-guerra-el-salvador-and-my-mistake/
[Note on the photo, above]: The "White Hand" signature was left behind by U.S. trained death squads on the door of a slain peasant organizer in El Salvador. "What we did was help the peasants come to an awareness of their own dignity and worth, and that’s what the powerful can’t forgive,” a moderate priest in San Salvador said.
Sangre de Guerra, A Rock Band Formed Entirely Of Children Of Former Guerrilla Fighters (Perquín, El Salvador)
As I write this, El Salvador is currently the homicide capital of the world (more dangerous than visiting Iraq or Afghanistan), but one of the things I remember most is seeing a little Salvadoran girl at the festival watching teenagers from different villages making small steps toward peace by breakdancing with each other.
“We may be separated by race, class, gender, religion, geography, and time," Bob has written, "but our bodies are a shared experience from which we cannot escape...We struggle to make them do the things we want them to do. We have aches and pains...we know the extraordinary things the body is capable of, and the insurmountable limits it imposes...the uneasiness of the meeting of machine and body throughout culture today...can be seen in every human activity: war, work, play, reproduction, and so on. How machines and bodies will coexist is thus not a problem to be 'solved,' but the central tension of our time in human history...If forays into this terrain are going to go farther than mere advertising for technology, the tensions and difficulties of the body-machine relationship must not be ignored, swept under the rug, glossed over, or hidden by tricks and gadgets, but brought to front and center, highlighted, magnified, and investigated."
(LISTEN): Bob Ostertag On Techtonic (Part 1)
Five years after the release of “The Reach Of Resonance,” I accompanied Bob on part of his 13 month world tour (2015 - 2016) performing concerts in places as diverse as Lebanon, Java, China, Peru, Uruguay, Serbia, Taiwan, Mexico, Thailand, Chile, Argentina, and other locations across the Middle East, Indonesia, Europe, and Central America. Bob's poignant observations of global historical changes between people and technology he witnessed on this tour (thanks largely to smartphones) are the subject of his book “Facebooking The Anthropocene From Raja Ampat.” Bob’s interview on Mark Hurst’s radio program “Techtonic” (which can be heard in two parts, above and below) is a great primer on the book, in which Bob explores how human beings are changing even faster than the breakneck pace of technological advance, from how we make music, to how we have sex, to what we do to survive, and who we imagine ourselves to be.
As the book's jacket describes, in “Facebooking The Anthropocene From Raja Ampat” you will: Watch Buddhist monks take selfies while meditating. Ponder artificial intelligence with street kids in Java. Talk sex with porn stars who have never in their lives had sex off camera. Watch DJs who make millions of dollars pretending to turn knobs in front of crowds of thousands. Play World of Warcraft on remote Asian islands with indigenous people. Shiver with families huddling through the stinging Detroit winter without heat or electricity. Meet Spice Islanders who have never seen flushing toilets yet have gay hookup apps on their smartphones.
(LISTEN): Bob Ostertag On Techtonic (Part 2)
A few quotes from the book:
"My time in the Papua region was spent offshore in the Raja Ampat archipelago, so I did not visit the inland forests of the main island. But I was told that, had I ventured into the highlands of Papua, I would have seen some of the last men in the world who have never left the forest, walking around wearing nothing but a penis gourd held in place by a string tied around their testicles, carrying traditional mesh bags and iPhones."
“At the ancient Buddhist monument of Borobudur, I watched Buddhist monks in saffron robes taking selfies of themselves praying. Buddha taught that the self is an illusion. A Zen koan for the new century: when a Buddhist monk takes a selfie, what is in the picture?”
“If men the world over are taking their clues on how to be gay from Grindr, the selfie is teaching everyone everywhere how to perform happiness in the same way.”
“Broadly speaking, 'entrainment' refers to how two independent rhythmic processes can interact in such a way as to eventually synchronize. The process was first noted in 1666 by the inventor of the pendulum clock, who noticed that pendulums mounted on the same board eventually synchronize. Biological entrainment ranges from how living organisms synchronize to the rising and setting of the sun (synchronizing to a rhythm they have no influence over) to how fireflies flash together (mutual synchronization). Humans have the nearly unique ability to mutually synchronize to an external isochronous pulse (a pulse produced outside their bodies at a regular interval of time). And we can do more than that; we can infer a regular beat from a more complex pattern of sound which does not include the actual beat among its audible elements.
We dance to learn who our tribe is, who our equals and superiors and inferiors are, how to overcome fear, how to share in joy and sorrow, and how to love. From slaves in fields to armies at battle to sailors heaving rope on ships, we use a beat as a tool to aggregate effort. What, if anything, is lost or gained when we stop entraining to each other and entrain to machines instead? …from our inability to tear our attention away form our phones, to our inability to turn away from bizarrely authoritarian political leaders who rule by tweet.”
More stories from my experiences working with Bob can be found here: https://www.steveelkins.net/Interviews/Making-Reach/Kronos-Quartet/
(WATCH) Bob Ostertag: On Orgies And The Recording Industry
POSTSCRIPT: In this clip of unused production material from "The Reach Of Resonance," Bob Ostertag shares some illuminating thoughts on intellectual property laws.
Ostertag serves on the board of directors for QuestionCopyright.org. Their programs examine the educational and social effects of monopoly-based distribution in contrast with the potential of sharing-based audience distribution.
Their Sita Distribution Project is a public demonstration of how an artist can flourish — economically and artistically — by letting their works circulate for free. It's not about self-distribution, it's about audience-distribution: put the work out there, let people share it, give them the freedom to organize activities (both commercial and non-commercial) around it, and the artist will benefit, because audiences want to support artists.
The animation in this clip was made by Nina Paley.
The audio was recorded by John Rogers.
Special thanks to Larry Ochs.