Whitewall daily

In Part II of our conversation, Luke explains the relationship between musical composition and mathematics and discusses his feelings on the divisions between the arts.

WHITEWALL: You are a composer, artist, performer, not to mention a computer scientist. How do these different interests and skills come together in your work? And do you view yourself as a visual artist or really as a scientist?

RLDB: You know it’s a funny thing. I began as an engineer, but I flunked out of engineering and became a composer. Music at its most essential level is like a stream of information, if you can think of it that way. Notes, chords, rhythms, whatever…It’s like information. So it’s very mathematically malleable. And the visual art I do is sort of along the same principles. Often what I’m trying to do is look at a body of information, and look for commonalities. 

 WW: So you are looking for patterns.

RLDB: I tend to think of myself as a composer rather than a visual artist, because when you are a visual artist and you do music, then all of a sudden people think you are doing Sound art. And actually I don’t believe in Sound art. I see it as the composer’s shadow. I think it’s actually a massive betrayal of the work of composers such as John Cage. He spent his entire life trying to expand the definition of music. 

WW: Yes, I come from a family of musicians. And it does seem strange to take what can be considered contemporary composition and call it visual art. 

RLDB: It bothers me because I think all sound art is just music. John Cage tried to expand the conception of music in the face of massive resistance from the establishment. And it really bothers me when people say “You know this isn’t music. This is Sound art.”  And I feel like that is giving in. You are saying, okay, well fine. Let’s not talk about harmony and composition. Let’s talk about post-modern forms. You can use the vocabulary of music, and it has the ability to be much richer. It can be much richer than potentially jumping ship and working as only as a Sound artist. It’s a little bit like the relationship of Performance art to theater.  Theater would be much richer as a way to think of it, and allows for a more interesting dialogue.  I really think of what I do as composition. 

 I tend to think of myself as a composer rather than a visual artist... 

WW: Not that there has to be some sort of purpose, or message that you want the viewer to take from your work.  But it has a very complex concept, complex in the way that you created it, complex in the way that you present it… How and what are you trying to communicate to the viewer?  Do you care what the viewer gets from your work?  And if so, what would that be?

RLDB: I am of the opinion that Americans are not as attentive to the information in our society as we should be - in the way that we receive cultural information. We don’t pay attention to the words that we see or hear. Really, it is kind of ironic because there is this huge rhetorical division between the left and the right in this country. For example, look at the debates between Sarah Palin and Joe Biden. I mean, besides what you might think of them as people, they used a really different vocabulary.  They were saying really different things, and they were using really different words. And we’re not critical of that. We don’t pay as much attention to that as I think we should. And if you are thinking about history, as another example, it might give you some interesting space to draw your own conclusions about it.  It is about reducing it to a scale where the viewer can do that. 

The last really ridiculous piece that I did was about romance. It was a 72 hour film of a woman getting ready for a date. And the way I cut the film, and the way I filmed it, was about how you look at somebody who you are obsessed with: all the different ways, ranging from the grand romantic to the obsessive. How you might want to watch her from every angle, or be the only one that can see her. There is this huge art historical conundrum around "the gaze." And there is this huge art historical conundrum around political art which is completely different. They are both about creating typologies of information, and how exactly you might want to look at that information. And also it is all about word play.  So, I am on this kick now where I am taking these one word ideas and considering how I can represent something like ‘Love.’ It’s about finding these interesting ways of presenting things.