Sound Art A conversation with Dan Senn, sound artist and director of Newsense Intermedium by Ron Glowen, Artweek, August 1996, Vol. 27, #8
Since 1978, installation sound artist and composer Dan Senn has been creating sculptural sound instruments and developing personal composing software called the Raku Composition Program. While attending music school, Senn was introduced to raku pottery, which shifted his musical aesthetic to a process he calls the "elegant use of awkward materials," and toward highly considerate, non-linear systems of sound creation. In addition to percussive instruments made from utensils, common industrial materials and electronic components, the artist works in video, installation and performance modes centered on his sound pieces. He has exhibited and performed in the United States, Canada, Europe and New Zealand, and was invited to Poland and Germany to perform this fall.
Senn holds a doctorate in Music Composition and Ceramic Sculpture from the University of Illinois. He hails from a small farming town in Wisconsin, and retains a strong allegiance to ethics and sensibilities with which he was raised; he moved to Tacoma in 1992, and a year later founded Newsense Intermedium.
Artweek What is Newsense Intermedium, exactly?
Dan Senn It is a nonprofit organization specializing in the presentation of experimental performing art. A core group of about fifteen people are involved.
AW How did it come about?
DS I'm interested in integrating contemporary art with audiences that come from my own background. There are ways of integrating the most extreme contemporary art with working-class audiences, with regular society, if its done in a sensitive way. I like Tacoma because it's a working-class city with many old warehouse buildings that provide numerous installation opportunities. I am able to get artists here to, at a minumum, bring existing work, which in most cases will be a completely new experience for this audience.
AW What are some of the projects you've organized so far?
DS I've done several inner-city installations and a neighborhood concert series. I brought Dutch composer Paul Panhuysen to install and perform a work inside the huge old Municipal Dock in Tacoma, which had been closed for fifty years. I wanted Paul to turn the building into an instrument. These events were premised on a belief that "high risk art," if presented respectfully and with care for detail, will be accepted by even the most conservative as natural and necessary, and in turn will have a significant impact on social consciousness.
AW Do you think this activity translates in any way to your own sound instruments?
DS There's a connection, yes. It's very important at this stage in my art that people see how my instruments work, without mystery or awe, or at least the kind of mystery which might push them away from personal involvment. I feel its important for viewers to be able to figure out how the instruments work and how they're made, and so I work hard to keep things as simple as possible. I really value the elegance of Alvan Lucier, for example, who has tended also to work in this way. On the other hand, I embrace technology completely--I have good recording equipment and absolutely no fears about using existing software or developing my own. But my sound art tends to be very low-tech and immediate.
AW It seems very complex and randomized.
DS The Pendulyres, Shmoos Harp and Scrapercussion instruments are actually highly controlled and very precise --that "elegant awkwardness" concept is at work here. The metal objects in the Scrapercussion piece (ordinary household metal objects connected to a water-filled pan on wobbly legs) have their own peculiar frequency spectrum. When the water shifts, contact speakers and microphones pick up an incredible range of timbral richness. Technically it's more closely related to Jimi Hendrix than to John Cage.
The first Pendulyre had wind-blown pendulums on strings with contact microphones that struck other tuned nylon strings. They now use sub-audio pulses from speaker pumps, something I've developed over the past couple years. I discovered that if the pendulum lines are set in motion, they will go into a complex back and forth movements. By weighting the pendulums precisely, I can statistically control the way each one strikes the tuned strings, or resonators to its left or right. It is very gestural. By controlling the pendulum lines, I work until I get a gesture that is pleasing to me. The struck lines interact and create a visual redundancy. I can control the motion in phrase-like patterns--left, right, left and center, right and center, and so on and in this way the instruments become naturally stereophonic. It becomes a far more determined sound piece then if the same gestures were scored paper for live performance.
The "percussive videos" are a frame-by-frame rhythmic mappings of an object or a territoty in real time, done with the knowledge that I'm going to use multiple monitors turned on axes and that they'll be integrated with music performed beforehand or in real time. I do some things in monochrome for practical reasons--I have many used composite monitors.
AW Recent works, such as the Catacombs of Yucatan, done last year in a cave in Minnesota, and the piece you're creating for the new Washington State Historical Society Museum in Tacoma, include videotaped interviews with workers or local residents who are elderly, and have stories to tell. What role does this play in your installation work?
DS I see it as a social experimentation. I believe that elitism in contemporary art is a myth, not a reality. [It's there as a by-product of laziness, social insensitivity or because it is when wished for.] These people lived and worked when there was greater mutual trust, and my intuition is that these methods are a powerful tool for reaching out to new audiences. When people encounter art in a context and presentation that is familiar, their perception shifts in a way that can never be reversed.