WORT 89.9FM Madison
Negativland Pushes Limits of Art and Law
Hi, this is Brian Standing, host of the Monday 8 o'clock buzz. Thanks so much for listening to the program. Hope you subscribe to our podcast. And if you really like what you're hearing, consider donating at W-O-R-T-F-M dot org. Since 1978, the San Francisco musical collective Negative Land has pushed the boundaries of experimental music, performance, art, intellectual property, and the public domain, ranging from tweaking the Irish band U2 to mashups of the Teletubbies themes to animatronic Abraham Lincoln mannequins. The band continues to lampoon modern culture. Negative Land, along with visual artist Sue C comes to the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art on Friday, September 27th at 7 p.m. along with the screening of the documentary Standby for Failure, a documentary about negative land. We're joined now by phone, by Negative Land's John Leidacher. John, welcome to the 8 o'clock buzz. Hello. Thank you for having me. And we're also in our studio as our old friend, curator James Krell. Welcome, James. Good morning. Thank you for having us. So, John, tell us a little bit about Leidacher's, I'm sorry, about Negative Land's trip to Madison here. You're joined by Sue C. Is this the first time you've collaborated with the artist Sue C? Well, we've been working together for about six or seven years. And I've known her personally for 25 years by this point. So, she's an old collaborator. We barely even need to talk. We just know what to do. And what can people expect when they come to the performance on Friday? Well, we work with Sue because she is a genuinely live video artist. Many video artists work with three recordings. And she has a live camera trained on her table. And she, let's just say she has, like any musician, she has reflexes of under half a second. If something happens in the music that Mark and I have never done before, she's right there with us. So, it's pretty radically different every night. And as we mentioned in the introduction, Negative Land got first hit, I think, sort of many people's consciousness with the tweaking of the Irish band U2. What kinds of projects has Negative Land been working on since that era? Well, one thing that's been happening recently for the last five or six years is that we're sort of doing things most people would call music again. We're writing our own tunes instead of making samples out of other things. And sort of all of the vocal tapes are still taken from mass media. We're sampling Silicon Valley CEOs talking about new technology. The set that we're bringing to Madison is largely about video game technology and the things that's been happening with video games for the last 25 years and how it's become the preeminent, the world's preeminent storytelling technology. It's the way what we noticed sort of, if negative land is anything, it's sort of a media literacy group that instead of writing about media literacy, we make sound and art that's about media platforms. And so, we've been thinking about video games and how just about everybody under 40 years of age never grew out of playing them. And most of the major works of art in the world are in the video game sphere. They're not movies, they're not radio, they're not music, they're something else. And so, we're trying to catch up as people well over, well into our 50s and 60s, we're just almost trying to educate ourselves as to what the modern stories actually are. And are you still playing with the idea of copyright and public domain and where that line is? Yes, but the interesting thing is it's shifted. Whereas, in the 90s, intellectual property had become this sort of corporate means of control keeping people from, I think what we noticed as a band was that the most interesting works of art were getting sued out of existence, not just experimental people like us. Like, all the most important pop music made by hip hop, those people are getting sued out of existence. Bands like they lost all in public enemy were no longer being allowed to make works of art in the mode that they wanted to. And so, the fight seemed to be coming from the underground and we realized that fair use was a free speech issue and that people who wanted to make fun of a band like you too or make art using things that happened to be copyrighted, well, this work was now being considered illegal. Now, we're still doing that, but the strange thing 30 years later is that the gate is swung all the way around and now it's the corporations arguing that they have the right to everything that's ever been made without having to pay for it. So, transformative fair use is now an ethical argument being used by corporations to justify AI and the use of all human outputs ever to create well, whatever it is that AI is. Does negative land use AI in any of your performances? There are samples that we have been using, we have been using some of the tools because there isn't really music that sounds like this out there yet. We're just trying to figure out what all of this is and we're trying to do it in a way that's interesting but also that helps us, again, media literacy, what is AI because I don't think it's exactly how it's being sold to us or whatever it is. Jim Crow, let's turn to you. How did this come about? How did you manage to land this gig here in Madison and you've moved the event? It was really going to be an arts and literature laboratory and you had to go to a bigger space, didn't you? Well, arts and literature laboratory was never really properly set up for what they want to do with this and they definitely wanted seats and rake seats and so forth. The mimoka auditorium definitely was a better option and it's a collaboration between mimoka cinema which is one of the hats I wear and Mills Folly Microcinema, an experimental film series at Arts and Literature Laboratory as well as the Oracle New Music series at Arts and Literature Laboratory and I first found out about the documentary "Stand by for Failure" which actually we have shown at mimoka cinema and the filmmaker Ryan Worsley was very generous in sharing that documentary a few seasons ago and so I'm very excited about the possibility of bringing both the documentary back and have the live performance. I was contacting through Ryan when negative land started making plans about a Midwestern tour and I love it when a plan comes together. So a little bit of half of the stands but certainly a great event coming up. John, is this your first visit to Madison? It is. Yeah, I will be brand new to the area. And I hope you've heard good things from Jim and others but is there anything in particular that you're looking forward to checking out while you're here? It's the best way to visit a city is just to put yourself into the hands, is to have a reason to be there playing music and then to put yourself into the hands of your host. Yeah, no, I'm looking, we've been playing currently we're in Kansas City, we've just come through St. Louis, Nashville, these are all places we haven't played for 30 years or are playing for the first time and there's a lot of politics in our sets. So we are basically being careful to listen as hard as we can to views that we normally I live in the Bay Area, Mark lives in Asheville, near Asheville, North Carolina and so we're just trying to be good guests. Well, welcome to flyover country. Yes, exactly. It's important to be here. And Mark and I figured out that the last time negative land came through was Club Dewash in 1992. So it's been a while. Oh my yeah, and that venue no longer exists. All right, we've been speaking with negative lands, John Leidecker and curator James Krell. The event is coming up Friday, September 27th at 7pm at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art. We have a pair of tickets to give away right now. You can get them by calling 608-256-2001, or your receptionist will be happy to take your call. We'll take the first caller who calls us at 608-256-2001. And you can pick up a pair of tickets to negative land plus SUSC plus the screening of the documentary standby for failure. All that's taking place this Friday, September 27th. And Jim Krell, John Leidecker, thank you so much for joining us on the eight o'clock buzz. Thanks for having us.
Photo courtesy of Jim Kreul and Negativland