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Extract 1: Edited Transcript
Steve: I looked at the etymology of interview, and an online etymology dictionary describes it as a ‘face-to-face meeting, formal conference’ so I wanted to try and draw some kind of map between the face-to-face meeting, two bodies colliding, the idea of being between sights and being between physical sites, as well as this final idea that the original interview is generally the 'joint product of some humbug of a hack politician and another humbug of a hack newspaper reporter'. When you put an image, an idea, between sites and reporting... I know that's massively broad...
Allen: So the site is the body is it at this moment? Because we're one site in one way.
Steve: In that we're physically positioned.
Allen: Yes.
Steve: So how does the physical positioning in different sites relate to the fact that I'm perceiving you now, through perception? Through the other notion of sight.
Allen: It's really quite an interesting question, quite a difficult question too, but it's worth it. Let's just talk about response to poetry and visual arts. If you imagine that I've just read something and you've just responded to it, in another hour it might be quite different for you due to all sorts of circumstantial differences, not just to do with the weather or whether you're warm or hot or who you're with or the ambience of the place. As you extend that, there's a whole range of potentials and that's why I eventually - I’m sort of going off at a tangent at the moment but I'll come back - realised along with others that there's a factoring process in which you make a piece of work which others have received, but in fact the actual production takes place in the receiving, whether that happens to be you re-reading it or you reading it or hearing it. So the actual production of the art process is continuous or rather it happens continually at different times. Continually is perhaps not right - it happens again and again, and potentially differently each time and potentially not necessarily very different. So the context is very important in that regard, and it's very important to recognise that if we talk about a time difference it's one thing, if we talk about a space difference it's another, and I've always thought that's actually a false separation. I rather teasingly always talk about spacetime, because although that's a term out of 20th century physics it actually does make some sense in the particularity of, you never meet somebody at a certain time you always meet them at a certain time in a particular place, otherwise how would you know where to meet them? So on and vice versa, on that banal level. So, I think that different spacetimes are important and on a mundane level it produces different contexts. But there's an undercurrent through all of this which leads to something more complex and interesting and that is that as I'm talking to you there's already a multiple spacetime potential. So while I'm saying something to you out in my ‘front head’ there's actually something in my ‘back head’ I'm not quite saying, or you're hearing this but there's also something you're wondering at the same time - or a bus goes by - and there's another bit of perception going on at the same time as this bit of perception, so there's already a multiple spacetime in the spacetime you're in, so to speak.
Steve: And that seems to be hinting at something which I haven't actually read in the criticism, but it is in your work, the actual poetry of the work, which is the notion of sound, and that interacting with spacetime in that, in the interview it's the voice that you're hearing, and the fact that it could be a different voice erupting from a different time.
Allen: I use time a lot, because it is quite evident that you hear a dog bark whilst I'm talking to you and you come in and out of aural perception of it, and a bus goes by and so on. But actually I think it is as broad as we've got senses and we involve ourselves proprioceptively in our physicality.
Alex: So do you think we choose the precedent or hierarchy of these, so we decide - you decide - that what Steve is saying to you is more important than what is going on in the back of your head.
Allen: I don't know if I decide it in the sense of I've just decided it, but you do yes, and I also think that it's intermittent as well, so as I'm talking that paper flicks in my ear, and so on, and it's just like being attentive and focussing or deciding entirely not to focus, and it's actually to do with response, and in a rather cheap trick it moves into responsibility. But you can take it into a whole range of levels. In Situationist ideas there's no longer an observer - if you're around then you're participating, and if you're participating by deciding not to take part, that is a participation politically, it's a decision to be separate from what's going on. Or, you participate in a way that will change it and that also comes from physics in another sense - a where there's parallels going at the same time - this idea, which has come out in the late nineteenth century, that the observer actually interferes with what they're looking at.
Alex: Like the Heisenberg uncertainty principle?
Allen: Yes. So your observation's interfering with what you're looking at, and as you're trying to measure something your measurement of it is changing it. It leads on to more recent physics where you've got people like Bell working at the CERN laboratory in Geneva talking about measurement and how we need to talk about the unspeakable and the unmeasurable, and how to do that, and how do we articulate that, and how do you do that actually without vocabulary, without philosophy actually, and, to some extent, unfortunately for me and many others, how do you do it without algebra? But I think you can and I think you have to.
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Friday 21 November, 2008