an interview with Stanley & John Matthias
// The World’s Best Ever, September 2010
__________
— How did you come to be an artist?
I didn’t make a conscious decision to be an artist. When I was an adolescent it was not what I wanted to do; I wanted to do something else, but I never got the job so I ended up unemployed and doing art because that’s what I did and then it continued from there. When I realized I was an artist was when people would say well what do you do, and instead of saying ‘well, this and that and all kinds of things really’, I started saying just to make things easier, I said I’m an artist and really that was only about five years ago [i.e. in 2004].
— You've been doing Radiohead's album artwork for quite a while, how did you get involved with the group?
I met Thom at college, along with John (Mathias) here as well who I'm working on the sound installation with. I was unemployed, and one of the things I did with a friend of mine called Jim was hitchhiking around England busking. What we did was fire breathing — so we'd kind of breathe fire in the evenings in town and try to get people to give us money for it. And one of the towns we ended up in was Oxford and Radiohead was still ON A FRIDAY in those days I think and I said look, my friend is in that band, we should find them and we should do fire breathing as their support act. So we went and we found Radiohead and met in a mall and said hi, hi, hi, and look at this thing we're doing; can we be your support act? And they said yeah, that would be brilliant.
So they were playing upstairs in this pub in Oxford and we turned up with our bottles of paraffin and fire torches, and of course the landlord of the pub wouldn't let us do it. It was ‘no, you must be insane’. So we didn't get to support them but, we got to meet them and then they became a world famous rock band and I ended up doing their artwork. So it all turned out okay in the end.
— Who are the people that you look to for inspiration?
I just keep my eyes open really. I mean, I've been sort of influenced or stolen ideas from many artists over the years from Peter Kennard was a very influential artist for me. And then I'd say influenced by the obvious people like Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, even Jeff Koons I would say at times. But, more recently I just keep my eyes open. There are so many artists, there's so much stuff going on and the more I get involved in art the more art I see, and a lot of it I think I wish I'd thought of that. But yeah you know, I'm influence by everything really, everything that looks good.
— Email spam is heavily involved in Over Normal, your most recent show, can you please explain?
I've been collecting spam subjects lines for a long time, a number of years. I've been sort of waiting for an opportunity to do something with them because I love them; they're the most interesting emails I get. What I do with the text is slice it up, taking all of the words and phrases out of context and re-assembling them so they form something else.
— Your color palette is very striking.
I've been using this palette of colors since 2003, so it's ages now. It seems to me, very quintessentially west coast American; they're very bright, they're very brash, you can't avoid them, they look very happy but there's something else going on as well. They're all derived from petrol chemical processes; they're all ultimately derived from oil, and coal, and non-renewable resources, and out of this black sludge we've made these incredibly bright, beautiful colors. The colors that I use are the sort of colors that are used in flags and warning signs as well as adverts for Coca-Cola or whatever.
— How do the landscape, culture, and colors of Britain compare?
Well it's very different, the light is fantastic. In England the sky is usually grey, it's usually raining. Everyone is pretty gloomy, everyone is pretty miserable. Our kind of version of humor is a very dark kind of sarcasm, and no one says quite what they're meaning. We take the piss all the time; we just lie. If someone says something to you, your first instinct is to say something that isn't true. And then you come to the west coast of America and you say why would you do that? Why would you lie? Why would you be miserable? It's great here; look at it. There's the sea, there's the sun, there's beautiful landscape, great people. I don't live here, so I don't see the dark side.
— Could you ever see yourself relocating?
I've talked about that with many people and you know, there's something about the misery I do like. So I'd probably have to stay underneath the gray skies, and complain about the weather all the time, and just moan. I think it's in my blood. I don't think I could live in America because it's too cheerful. Everybody is happy. The American dream is just there, just slightly out of reach but, it's there. We don't have an English dream; we have an English nightmare I think. We're all just laughing at the idea of an English dream.
— When did you first met Stanley?
John Matthias: We were at college together in the late 1980s, so about 1988 I would have met him. I did physics at the time and gravitated to all these people doing art and theater and stuff like that, and I ended up becoming good friends with him.
— You've worked with Radiohead as well?
I'm a violinist, so I played strings on the Bends. Thom got me to do that I was at college with Stan and Thom. They didn't have a budget for a big orchestra, so they just wanted to use a violinist and a cellist. The producer John Leckie — he's a real nice chap, he produced the first of THE STONE ROSES albums — wanted to choose an established violinist who had been used a lot, but Thom said no, no, no I want to use my friend from college. So I said okay, well if you insist. So it was me and I came along and played. All the violin parts were over dubbed to make it sound like an orchestra. So yeah, I was very lucky really to be asked to do that and that it worked out okay. Luckily I didn't ask the cellist before what she'd played on because I think if she'd told me I would have been nervous and I wouldn't have been able to lead her along in the ensemble.
— How did this idea for the Overnormalizer come about?
I was involved with a big sound project in the UK last year called the Fragmented Orchestra. It was with Jane Grant and Nick Ryan and was located over 24 places all over the UK. So one of them was Millennium Stadium in Cardiff where they have all the big rugby games, and at Everton Football Club, and a school, and then in London at the National Portrait Gallery and a couple of churches... lots of different kinds of locations with different time scales. And what we did was stream all of the audio from the microphones we had at each site, to a gallery in Liverpool. And in Liverpool we had this 24 artificial neuronal network. One of the reasons that we got into that is that we were interested in sound signals that weren't completely correlated, but weren't completely random.
— How does this integrate?
What we've done in this show is we've recreated this 24 neuron thing in the computer that keeps going round and round. So it's like a little tiny, tiny cortex. A brain has got a 300 billion neurons roughly; we've got 24, so it's a very, very simple thing, this computer. It keeps going round and round and round, and every time it fires it retriggers this simulation that we've got made out of the original speech synthesizer that was exhibited at the 1939 World Fair. So we're kind of bringing to life this very old style speech synthesis with this spam and modem ideas of this working the brain into this installation, plus there's a strange ring in the background. One of the reasons for this was that when it was made, it was really in a kind of pioneering can-do kind of spirit.
— How does that work?
If you take a signal or a set of signals that are completely random — meaning that they're not connected to each other at all — and listen to that, you grow tired of them pretty quickly because our brains just filter it out. And if you have a completely repetitive situation the same thing happens, we filter that out. But there's a whole kind of temporal domain between the completely random and the completely correlated where things can be connected to each other but, not predictable. It's indeterminacy and randomness. Something can make something else happen but, you might not know when it's going to happen. So what I got interested in the way neurons work and the rhythms of lots of different neurons connected together.
Say you look at something like a clock, then a light comes into your eye. You've got neurons at the back of your retina and they fire, they fire a lot, and they send signals to other neurons. So all that happens in the processing bit of your brain, which is called the cortex, is patterns are firing, fire, fire, fire, fire, fire, and they're all connected to each other in quite a complicated set of connections that can die or can be born depending on what happens. And if you recreate those connections in your head, then you basically relive the experience. So that's kind of what a simple model of memory is. We got very interested in the rhythms of these connections being the sort of rhythm of thinking.
— Can you run me through the paintings as they relate to the overnormalizer?
The paintings are taken from a scientific diagram. If you look at those pictures, forget about the words for now, and imagine in place of the words that there are numbers one, two, three, four, up to 24 all the way to the top. So where the bottom axis is — the horizontal axis — that's neuron. Above is neuron number one, and at the top is neuron 24 and there are 24 horizontal lines if you like. Every time there's a dot, that neuron fires. So the dots are the patterns of the neurons fired with time running along the bottom. And what Stanley has done is basically used these pictures — because they're actually from our computer simulation — and he put them with the spam email. So the idea is listen to this sound that keeps evolving while looking at these plots.
~
<<< radiohead.presse <<< main