When and why did you start using light and sound as a medium? Did one or the other come first?

The use of sound as a medium in my art ultimately stems from my interest in music. I’ve always been interested in and curious about music of all kinds, but I only started to try my hand at creating it around the time that I began my undergraduate studies in studio art. The majority of my artwork at that time took the form of printmaking, collage, and eventually video—both single-channel and multichannel installations. As I continued to develop my “visual” artwork and practice, my interest and participation in creating music grew in frequency and intensity, beginning with hard-core punk type of sounds but slowly evolving into the improvisational / musique concrète / noise realm. I also began to realize that my approach to video editing was extremely similar to that of improvisational/noise music—cutting and pasting appropriated imagery in a very stream-of-consciousness manner—and that the aspect of my video installations that was of most interest to me and that resonated the most for me was the sound.

I suppose it was inevitable at that point that my focus on sound as a medium began to sharpen. I started pairing light with sound in my installation work a few years ago, as I felt the dynamics of the two could be just as similar and complementary as they could be different in their ability to affect space and architecture (as well as objects)—from creating an extremely subtle, sometimes almost undetectable presence or effect, to creating an overwhelmingly intense and dramatic one.

When you made your box for Self-Storage, were you thinking at all of Robert Morris’s Box with the Sound of Its Own Making (1961) [a nine-by-nine-inch wooden cube containing a three-hour tape recording of its own construction]? How did you approach working within the confines of a banker’s box?

That work by Morris did come to mind during my thinking about this project, and it has also influenced my past sound-based installation and sculpture work, much of which has been based on, and in response to, the site it inhabits. I am particularly interested in sites that are either in a state of decay or transition and/or parts of sites that are often overlooked or inaccessible. In working with these sites, I frequently find myself performing awkward and strenuous physical tasks during the installation, for instance navigating through the machinery underneath an elevator, the rafters of an attic, or the dirt-lined crawlspace beneath the floorboards of a building.

I’ve become more and more interested in and focused on these tasks, and the physicality associated with them, as abstract documents of the creative process. For the most part, my recording of these physical acts is by way of sound. The sound recordings that end up in the final work are occasionally identifiable—such as heavy breathing, groaning, or the shuffling and scraping of clothing, objects, and architecture—but simultaneously abstract and ambiguous, so as to leave interpretation open to the viewer/listener. Processed and mixed with other field recordings of the space, they begin to fade seamlessly into the preexisting sounds within and around the site, and the separation between the site and the work becomes blurred.

My approach to working with the banker’s box was rather similar in that I wanted to record the entire process of creating the box and installing the electronics that would create the light and sound. Instead of trying to avoid the association with Robert Morris’s box, which of course would be impossible since both works include a physical box and the sounds associated with its creation, I tried to focus on the differences between my box and Morris’s. The banker’s box is more or less disposable, lacking intrinsic value, mass produced as opposed to hand crafted, with inherent utilitarian associations. It is only the contents of the banker’s box that give it value.

I decided to challenge that notion by focusing on the box itself as opposed to its contents, utilizing my sound recordings less as pure documentation of the creation of the work and more as a means of infusing this ordinary object with a sort of “living energy.” I used sound transducers to turn the box into a large speaker and paired the sounds with reactive lighting that spills out of the handle holes. Periods of silence are edited into the recordings, emulating sleeping and waking states. The sounds were recorded primarily from inside the box, giving them a distinctive tonal quality.

Do you have an archive of material related to your art making?

I always try to document my work as best as I can, which is often more arduous and challenging than the production of the work itself. This is especially true of my installation work, where the experience of being with, around, and inside the work as it unfolds and experiencing all of its subtleties is next to impossible to document, even with photographs, video, or sound. As far as working materials go, I used to collect images en masse when I worked in the bindery at the UC Santa Barbara library and my art was centered on print and collage. My workdays would consist of examining and repairing a wide variety of books and publications—especially older ones—from genres of all kinds. It was a great way to be exposed to a random sampling of images and texts. I tried to take advantage of that exposure by making copies of interesting images and texts that I wouldn’t have sought out or come across otherwise, and they often found their way into my print and collage work.

The working materials that I currently collect and archive are mostly field recordings. I try to record as many sounds as I can that grab my attention—in both urban and natural environments, but especially when I travel outside of my usual locale. The process of recording and collecting is instructive in itself in terms of learning to listen carefully to one’s environment. The resulting catalog of field recordings is useful not only for reference and study, but also as raw material for my sound installation and performance/recording work.

Can you talk about your upcoming installation in Bay Area Now 5 [the triennial survey of Bay Area art, opening in July 2008] at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco?

I’ll be presenting a new multichannel sound and light installation as well as some photographic works. The installation for this show will be a bit different from those I’ve done in the recent past because I’ll be working within a “white box” sort of space as opposed to a site that already has strong visual elements hinting at its history. I’m going to be focusing on elements of the Yerba Buena Center that are for the most part unseen and unnoticed such as the electrical and mechanical rooms churning beneath street level. The sounds will be sourced from these subterranean spaces, the construction of the installation, and elsewhere, and they will be paired with reactive lighting elements, as in some of my past installation work.