James Hoff is an artist living and working in Brooklyn, NY, his work encompasses sound, painting, writing, performance, and publishing. He is co-founder with Miriam Katzeff of Primary Information, a non-profit arts organization devoted to publishing artists’ books and art historical documents. Through his own artistic practice, as well as his work in publishing, James has maintained a strong focus on distributed forms and experiments with language, bringing him up to his current cross-disciplinary investigations with orally-transmitted syndromes, computer viruses, and ear worms, all of which are discussed here. His project for PAN, which was released in 2011, was a stereo reduction of a multi-channel sound installation presented at Artists Space in 2009, with sound sourced from riots, political rallies, and audience recordings of rock concerts, drawing out the parallels between rock fandom and political agitation. James is a 2013 Artist-In-Residence at ISSUE Project Room, where he is presenting an on-going investigation of earworms. This conversation was presented live at the Goethe Institute New York as part of PAN_ACT in June 2013, and revisited and expanded later in the fall.
James Hoff closes his ISSUE residency with the premiere of two new works for brass ensemble on Wednesday, December 11th.
Lawrence Kumpf: I want to start the conversation by talking about your recent audio pieces that use computer viruses from the early 2000s to contaminate stock tones as a means of generating compositions. But before we go directly into that, I think it would be good to provide a bit of context for this work, starting with your background in conceptual writing and your approach to the use of language. So maybe we can start talking about language as a means of distribution and Shrinking Penis Syndrome.
James Hoff: I guess there's a lot to start with. Maybe we should we start with syndromes?
LK: Syndromes.
JH: OK, we'll start with syndromes. About three or four years ago, I became very interested in syndromes— and I think we all know what they are— or at least we know of them. So there are many different types of syndromes: they can take the form of an illness that affects the body (AIDS, for example, is technically a syndrome). But they can also take the form of a psychosomatic illness and these are more generally perceived as culture-bound illnesses— something like say Genital Retraction Syndrome, Alien Hand Syndrome, Social Media Remorse Syndrome, Missing White Woman Syndrome, the list goes on and on.
My primary interest in syndromes came from the perspective of language and Shrinking Penis Syndrome is one of the syndromes that illustrates this best. I have two concerns in this regard and the first comes from the phenomenon of syndrome titles: something like Alien Hand Syndrome (or Dr. Strangelove Syndrome), which is a neurological illness in which the hand acts to some extent as though it has a mind of its own— so someone with Alien Hand Syndrome may begin unbuttoning their shirt even though they do not want to. I’m sure there's a Latin name for it, but I don't know what that name is. However, I know what Alien Hand Syndrome is because its idiomatic name describes it and popular culture has provided a contextual understanding of it (particularly if referenced as Dr. Strangelove Syndrome).
The second concern is how these titles help to distribute the syndromes through culture. The concept of the illness is distributed through the title. As I mentioned earlier, this is more clearly demonstrated with Shrinking Penis Syndrome, a culture boundillness that has affected tens of thousands of people across the world on many different continents. It is a psychosomatic illness, where a man believes that his penis is shrinking into his body, and that he will eventually become sterile or die. I doubt there is a Latin name for Shrinking Penis Syndrome, but who needs one? This is what drew me to the concept of syndromes: the title, a linguistic construct that acts as both a descriptor and the point of distribution for the infection of an illness that is little more than an idea. The ordering system of language becomes a point of distribution . . . language itself becomes the medium.
So if you've never heard of Shrinking Penis Syndrome, you're never going to get Shrinking Penis Syndrome. It's only because the person next to you says "Hey, Lawrence, I think I'm suffering from Shrinking Penis Syndrome" that you contract it.
This idea gelled very nicely with a few projects I was working on a few years ago: one of which was the writing of several fictional slang dictionaries. It also dovetailed really nicely with my interest in the works of Vito Acconci and Douglas Huebler, which I think we're going to talk about later. I don't know if I want to give away the whole program, but maybe we'll talk about Huebler really quickly?
LK: Yeah, let’s talk about Huebler—
JH: Huebler made this comment in a catalogue for an exhibition that was published by Seth Siegelaub in January 1969 in which he said 'the world is full of objects…I do not wish to add any more'. In that statement he was making a case for conceptual art, in particular language-based conceptual art, and that always stuck with me— this idea of creating an art form that was built on language and could also be distributed through language, bypassing all other mediums. So that's where 'Shrinking Penis' came in, and from that I began a quiet, extremely quiet, project of making up my own syndromes based on stuff going on around me— in my community, around the city, or in my world— using them in everyday conversation in the hopes of these syndromes spreading through my friends or my social networks.
LK: You're exclusively distributing these through language, not print form, not publications— you're infecting your friends first and letting the syndromes spread.
JH: Yes, yes. The idea was to have this sort of quiet, almost 'whisper campaign' of distributing these language-based multiples that are based on the specific social/cultural framework of the syndrome.
LK: You have a background in publishing and more specifically a focus on artist books as a form of alternative distribution, but with your own work you start to take a more extreme turn in the sense that you're thinking about involuntary distribution systems, or systems that are capable of reproducing themselves, systems that can begin living a life of their own without having any sort of attachment to a material object or you as an artists for that matter. The work that you've been investigating during your residency at ISSUE Project Room is linked to this in some way in that it is structured around this idea of the 'earworm,' or an involuntary audio hallucination— songs or melody that get stuck in your head. Let's just talk about your initial approach to that and where these ideas came from and go from there.
JH: Well, the earworms, of course— everyone probably knows what they are— these songs that get stuck in your head. For me it was a pretty easy bridge from the project with the syndromes to go into a project based on earworms. I was interested in two things with the earworms. One was centered on this idea we’ve been discussing about the distribution of linguistic multiples. I had read somewhere that neuroscientists were actually trying to find the space in the brain where the earworm resides, and I thought, ah this is really interesting. There's this space, and in my mind it's kind of a room somewhere, this sort of Stanley Kubrick-esque room that you can go into that's all white, with white carpet and then—
LK: There's a comic in the New Yorker last week I really wanted to bring in but I couldn't find it, and it was a doctor showing an X-ray of this guy's brain and he said “see that grey area there? That's where we plan to build the Whole Foods”. I thought that was sort of relevant.
JH: Kind of makes sense, we should have that scrolling across the screen. No doubt, if there is a space, whole foods, jamba juice or starbucks will find it. . . But the idea stems from the relationship between language and music, which are very closely linked in the brain. So I was interested in finding out why we've evolved to have earworms stuck in our brains rather than words— I mean, some people do get wordworms, but very few. On the contrary about 98% of the population suffers from earworms at some point in their life.
And as someone working around the concepts of distribution and this idea of space, of finding these spaces to distribute work into— for instance choosing an artist book to distribute work into rather than a museum or a gallery exhibition— I was interested in this metaphorical space that exists in the brain and trying to figure out whether we could distribute both language and art into that space.
My second interest in earworms is that they in some ways mirror advancements in 20th century music, in particular with appropriation, sampling and minimalist repetition. So I really wanted to see if I could use the earworm phenomenon— my own earworms or other people's earworms— to figure out a way to compose music.
LK: Touching back on that connection between music and language— I think a lot of these ideas are coming out in this shifting conception of subjectivity that's linked to the work of Burroughs, who's probably most famous for articulating the phrase, 'the word is a virus'. And I wanted to read— there are many iterations of this idea in his work— I wanted to read this particular quote from The Ticket That Exploded, and there's actually a better one in an interview where he's describing how you can test yourself for the word virus but this is what I could find today. He says, “The word may once have been a healthy neural cell. It is now a parasitic organism that invades and damages the central nervous system. Modern man has lost the option of silence. Try halting your subvocal speech. Try to achieve 10 seconds of inner silence. You will encounter a resisting organism that forces you to talk. The organism in the word.” And in the interview that I was thinking about, and looking for, he basically describes just the process of trying to shut your eyes and silence your mind and the impossibility of that, and that for him is evidence of an infestation. As if you're seeing a parasite in your vision, sort of swimming around your eye that you can detect it in your body. And I know that you've done a bit of work on evolving your concepts in relation to Burroughs and in relation to the earworm, and I was just wondering if you could speak to that comment of this embodied involuntary parasite.
JH: Well, it's interesting with Burroughs. You obviously can't talk about viral language or language as a virus without talking about him. Honestly though— when hearing that quote, it sounds like he just had a bad day or something. I just imagine him with a big frown on his face, closing his eyes and being miserable, which is how he looks in every photo.
What I've always understood about Burroughs is that his premise for viral language is built on the idea that thought comes after language. You’re obviously not born speaking, so language comes from the outside into the body and then establishes itself in the brain to help promote and form thoughts and that's how it reproduces. Since thinking is formulated through, or as, language, the virus is able to reproduce through thought and then through talking, et cetera. Burroughs thought this phenomenon of language-thought-language built up walls around creativity; walls that he wanted to break down with cut-ups. I don't know in regards to this particular quote— it makes sense I guess, because that voice in your head is hard to turn off. But, I feel like there's a whole branch of monks out there that are good at turning off that inner voice in some capacity.
LK: Yeah, that's a rumor.
JH: He should talk to his pal Ginsberg and see if they agree on that, but there is something to be said about the way that language— because in this sense it seems like, is he referring to language or is he referring to thought?
LK: Well, I mean he's referring to a specific formation or a specific ordering, and I think that is essentially language and not thought. This is of course something that Ginsberg was into as well, and both of them are taking specific routes— Ginsberg with Buddhism and meditation practices as ways to clear out the normativity of language, whereas Burroughs and Gysin have in a way more materialist and biological approach to thinking about how the brain functions, which is coming out of this Walter Grey book, The Living Brain which was the standard neurological textbook in colleges during the 60s. Grey actually has a chapter entitled “The Flicker” in the book, and that's what was influencing projects like The Dream Machine and then ultimately the cut-ups. This idea of— I mean, it's really this idea of subjectivity and the body as this empty vessel that's being inserted with something Other that then produces a subjectivity which is what’s at stake here in all of this and thus you have ideas like control. Essentially they’re trying to de-scramble the code and invent other forms of subjectivity, so there's this political element to it. But I think that's a good way we can transition into talking a bit about 'code', and in relationship to conceptual poetry and language poetry and your relationship with Vito Acconci's work. The other day you we were discussing this quote by Acconci, it was something along the lines of, “Everything is romantic except writing in code.” As in code is the only thing that matters for the future writer, the future poet and that any other form of writing will ultimately be wrapped up with these 10th century humanist-romantic ideals.
JH: Acconci gave a talk in 2005 or 2006 at the Whitney Altria space and at that time I was working with him on reprinting and publishing 0 TO 9, which was an experimental poetry/conceptual writing journal— depending on which issue you're looking at— that he and Bernadette Mayer edited and published in the late 1960s. After going through his history as an artist, as a writer, as an architect, he said something along the lines of— I’m not really interested in literature anymore, I’m not really interested in poetry anymore, I’m not really interested in any of that stuff. He was only interested in 'code'; that was the type of writing he was interested in. His implication, at least as I understood it, was that everything else was so 19th century (i.e. romantic) and that anyone who's really serious about being a writer these days ultimately has to interface in some capacity, and deal, with code. That is something that at the time really stuck in my head and it's something that I have been trying to resolve ever since: as a writer, how do you deal with this type of text? I mean, obviously code is a language, too, and this code is all around us, though it's hidden below the surface. As a writer, how does one reconcile oneself with this form of writing? What implications does code have on contemporary writing, poetry, or whatever it is that one is doing? My interest in code has always been an attempt to reconcile traditional forms of writing with code-based writing and answering these questions, basically.
LK: Can you describe your process for creating these infected compositions?
JH: I was recently asked to do a sound installation and I had just finished this other piece that had involved making music with code using the Stuxnet virus for a show called Postscript, which is an exhibition about writing after conceptual art. At the time I had been reading about computer viruses and I also like to collect things in a kind of archival way, although I'm not an archivist. So whenever I come across a computer virus, I always save it and I have a little collection of them on my computer. So I was reading a little about the Morris worm, which was one of the first big Internet worms—
LK: Robert Morris, right?
JH: Yeah, written by a young Robert Morris, a young 22 year-old Robert Morris. I was reading about the history of that worm, and as I was reading about it, I envisioned this idea of computers just going down across the country. I mean, there weren't that many computers linked on the Internet back then. I think it was estimated in the late 80s to be around 60,000 and it's estimated that the Morris Worm took out about 6,000 of them in a few days. I just had this beautiful idea of these big computers going down at universities and at military installations and I wanted to try to recreate that in a sound environment, in a sound installation, not unlike How Wheeling Feels which was comprised of these recordings of riots that are happening all around the audience. So I started with that idea and a bunch of stock computer tones that I bought online from stockmusic.com— you know, the sounds of a computer beep or a computer fan running or a hard drive or something similar. So I took these .wav files, dumped them into a hex editor which breaks the file down into code and then dropped the virus into the code— I didn't use the Morris worm for that one, I used the Anna Kournikova worm. I then outputted the entire contaminated code as a sound file and then sampled the results.
Sometimes the results were really great, sometimes they were really nuanced or it didn't affect the original at all (depending on where you dropped the code). Sometimes I would go back and contaminate the original code 10, 20, 30 times before getting to a point where I actually liked the sounds that were being produced and emitted. After I had a nice collection of these new audio files, I recomposed them into the piece you just heard.
LK: I think the process and your background is very akin to the appropriation techniques of conceptual writing but working in code, even though it's formally similar, is ultimately very different because even though code is a syntax, it's a language that is executable, it's not telling you to draw this line here, there, there, but it’s actually executed, rather than transmitted – so there's no use of metaphor, metonymy, and these traditional tropes that have dominated literature and writing.
JH: Metaphor is bad. Well, no, that’s not true/it's true to an extent. Can we talk about conceptual writing for just a second, because that's another thing I've always tried to reconcile— the state of conceptual writing in today's day and age, which for me personally as a writer and an artist a bit of a dead end— and I think it's sort of meant to be that way. I think many of today’s practitioners, the pioneers of today’s conceptual writing (as opposed to those from the 60s) are very happy with it being a dead end in a way, and sort of reveling in it. That's good for them and produces some interesting work, but for me personally it always seemed like there needed to be something tweaked. At this point, it’s hard to get away from the strategies (such as appropriation, contextualization, decontextualization) of conceptual writing. However, taking a weather report you hear on the radio and putting it in book or journal form does nothing to change the book form, but the book form does a lot to change the way you would read that text; it changes the text. What I like about this project with code is that it does the exact opposite. It takes code and it infects the form. It changes the form. It's an appropriated text put into a new form that changes the form rather than the form changing the code itself or rather, the appropriated text.
LK: I think that that piece is distinctly different from your first investigations, namely in the use of a consistent unifying beat. And, you know, one of the ideas that motivated both Bill and I behind this project was looking at some of the intersections and natural conversations that are happening between seemingly different fields of experimental music and some underground dance music practices and some conceptual art practices. And so I think this piece is in a way sort of exemplary of a meeting of those intersections and thinking about dance music as a network of distribution, so I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about your sort of evolution from this asymmetrical, discordant music to something with beats.
JH: Basically when I was making the first piece that you heard (when we opened up the talk), I was listening to the samples on my headphones on the train, because I was getting ready to compose the piece. When I was doing this a couple kids came on the subway and started breakdancing and they were playing electro music. And of course I could hear it through my headphones at the same time I heard the noise, and all of the sudden something really synched for me. It was this idea that this sort of virus— these virus-loaded samples should be combined in some way to make dance music, and that's how the viruses should then be reactivated and distributed. It should be through this channel— the viruses should be taken back to the body to create movement using a language that is predetermined. I know absolutely nothing about making dance music, so it's sort of a new thing for me, but it’s— that's the sort of place that I'm trying to take it.
LK: When we were doing a studio visit the other day, one of the problems that you brought up was that when you're working in this way you're essentially working on the computer all day and the question is how do you get the work off the computer and out into the world? It's a problem that you haven't necessarily resolved with your works with the .jpegs and the .gifs, but I think there's a real sort of material— like with the .cad files— there's a material answer for it, and with this music there are theses sites of distribution that already exist.
JH: I think that's the key. I think any art— pretty much every artist is dealing with distribution in some capacity, you know? But it's important for me that this work enters into a distribution system of some sort, preferably one that is not necessarily through an art gallery context, where you're just hearing sound art. It can be a fine venue for hearing sound, but why not take conceptual art and put it into a venue where people just want to come and dance? I think it's a lot better that people just have fun and listen to something that was created and conceptually-driven than to enter a venue that is meant for looking and comes prepackaged with the burden of contemplation. You know, in this capacity I think that if sound art can find its way into the dancehall then sound art's succeeded in some way.
LK: Or perhaps the experimental music venue can be understood as a site of distribution. For your upcoming concert on Dec 11th you’ll be presenting a piece for small brass ensemble making a gesture towards the idea of new music. This links back to your yearlong investigation of earworms— can you talk a little bit about this piece and how it came together?
JH: For these particular works I began by charting my own earworms; that is, when I realized I was having them. Earworms kind of get a bad rap as something that are always annoying but most studies have shown that the majority of earworms are agreeable to those hearing them. So it’s possible that you could have an earworm and not know it, since it’s not disagreeable or bothering you. This quality of earworms— the residual, sometimes incoherent soundtrack that we all experience as we move throughout our lives--underscores the work which I’ve composed. I wanted it to sound slow. . . lurking, yet triumphant; in a word: cinematic. There is why I chose the horns as well as the vernacular of new music.
So I dipped into this log that I had been making over several months and then began to find these songs in midi format, which was needed so I could eventually output the work as sheet music for the players. I basically chopped and screwed the songs: slowed them down, took out sections, added sections from other earworms. The originals were disco and pop tunes by the likes of Chic, Cutting Crew, the Carpenters, Sister Sledge, etc. I like to think of this as recomposing the cultural runoff of pop music. With any luck, these new tracks will get stuck somewhere, become the new cognitive itch.
James Hoff's final residency presentation takes place Wednesday, December 11th, with the premiere of two new works for tuba and French horn derived from disco and pop earworms.
