Vague Terrain

Nadav Assor is an Israeli digital media artist whose work has been exhibited in Berlin, Chicago, Israel, and soon Italy. He is currently pursuing his MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Nadav's work explores interactions between the physical world and digital media, using a variety of mediums including live video performance and installation. On his website he states: "Many of the mechanisms inherent in my work require palpable, physical effort or struggle to manipulate, thus exposing the constant friction between body and media. I do not want my devices to 'run smoothly'."

On Saturday, January 23rd 2010, Nadav Assor and Surabhi Saraf will be performing live at Netmage 10 in Bologna, Italy, under the collaborative title NASSA. Despite being in the midst of preparations for the upcoming show, Nadav put aside an hour of his time to talk about his art, development, and inspirations.

Transcripts of a conversation that took place on January 13th

Ben Baker-Smith: Let's start with what inspired your first exploration into live video performance.

Nadav Assor: When I was in high school I was much more into music than visual art. You know, it was high school in Israel and it was before the web basically, or just about when it started, like '94 or something like that. I remember seeing an article about Jaron Lanier [WIRED Magazine issue 1.02], he's one of the prophets of VR. He had these big dreadlocks, and would go on weird performances with this VR glove. It was mostly cheesy stuff, but I really liked the concept of this person performing but also manipulating this invisible realm of media, of images that you can't touch. He was doing something that previously I thought was impossible. What drew me to it was physical, like sculpture or like dance or like music.

BBS: What was the first video performance that you did?

NA: It was from this idea that I had pretty much from the beginning of my freshman year [of college]... Everything was pointed in this direction of doing things that were physical, and this bodily or physical interpretation and transformation of media. It's not always about video necessarily. For example, there was this one piece where it was only a sound piece and a live performance piece. I had two wireless mics on two ends of a pole, and I was walking around the machine shop in the school. I invited all the school to the performance, and they were in another room that was beyond this long corridor. They were between a huge set of PA speakers, and while I was spinning the pole between different machines [the audience] were in this very physical and very mechanical and sometimes very aggressive, sometimes very quiet, soundscape. They were watching a live video feed of me, but it was more about this physical manipulation, and breaking down and transforming boundaries and systems.

BBS: I noticed that in Camo, Razor, and the Tunneling (pictured above) pieces you deal with covering and uncovering things. Does this stem from somewhere? Does it just come naturally?

NA: Yeah, it obviously stems from somewhere, but it came naturally so it's both. It's from my interest in layering, and this great word that I learned last year when I came [to Chicago], which is "palimpsest." I'm really interested in that concept.

BBS: What is that?

NA: Well, historically a palimpsest is this thick piece of leather or other material that people wrote over. All the scratches and the ink are absorbed into it, so it builds up a physical history. I think for me it's less about history, and more that many things are happening at once. Like, that Camo project that you mentioned was a big project related to this camo pattern that's used by the Israeli airforce. It was a video installation, a sculpture, and prints. The sculpture, for example, was all about this very simple process: taking the abstract pattern of camouflage, and transforming it through a system that's used to map heights in geographical maps (with green for the lower levels, yellow [for the middle], and brown for the high ones). So, [the process was] laying this pattern over the wall, and then digging into the wall according to that system. The lowest points were actually exposing the street outside. That was an interesting transformation: taking this virtual thing, overlaying on a physical thing, and then exposing the outside which is another physical layer in the space. And, of course, in Israel this has lots of other connotations which I'm interested in, which I grew up with. It's about archaeology, and about tunneling in the various militaristic or terrorist aspects of it.

BBS: Are you going to apply some geography-specific elements to this upcoming show? Or will it be the same as one of the previous performances?

NA: That's a good question. I'm really interested in [the Tunneling project] being site-specific, but, like somebody recently suggested to me, maybe it's better to term it as site-sensitive because then I don't completely make a new project for each site. Of course, it all depends on the scale of the work. When I did it in Chicago it was a small scale, one-off thing, and in Italy we're also doing it one-off but it's larger scale. In Israel I did it as an extended installation and three day thing. It followed almost a month long residency, so there I could make it very site-specific. In Italy, Im going to make it half site-specific.  I'm going to use contours from maps of the area, and I tried to correspond with the organizers there and to learn about the history of the place we're performing in. It's called the "New Palace" because it was built only in like 1270, so it's "new", and of course it's got a crazy history. We'll probably be starting with images that are more related to the actual space, and then moving on to stuff that's more imaginary or that we brought with us. I'm really interested in that also, in giving a personalized point of view.

BBS: How do you generally do the soundtracks?... For Tunneling specifically.

NA: Ok, so it's already the third iteration, and each time it was a bit different. The whole idea for this project came out of wanting to do a collaboration with a friend of mine who graduated last year, Surabhi Saraf [ed note: the Netmage 10 performance will feature Nadav and Surabhi under the title NASSA], and she was doing more sound work at the time. We wanted to collaborate on a  piece, and I was already working on this concept of digging through layers and walls, that was something I was into for a long time. So, that was a good opportunity to combine forces. The second Tunneling project was a bigger project that I organized, and I invited a long-time collaborator of mine in Israel to participate in it, again with his approach to things.

BBS: You've also been working on non-live pieces recently. Can you talk about how you've found that to be different?

NA: I've done quite a few of what you call "non-live" pieces along the way, but all of them contain these elements of process and transformation and physical involvement and fragmentation. The end product is a very flexible thing for me. Like, the way I think about my current [non-live] project is as a live event.  It might branch into a live theatrical piece, and also end up as a single-channel or multi-channel video piece, or a combination of the above.

BBS: So they're not traditional editing intensive anyway.

NA: Yeah, I mean, I try. I sometimes try to do that, but my mind doesn't really think that way. It's a problem.

BBS: Or not.

NA: No, I mean, I like it, but also it's sometimes difficult to zoom in on certain things, because I just let [the process] dictate how the piece will be shown. I understand it's more interesting to me so it might be more interesting for others to watch also. Right now I'm working on this piece with 15 - 18 different simultaneous points of view of a situation, they are sometimes very different from each other and sometimes very similar, but from different angles. You get this very dense cloud of video, of different people experiencing the situation differently and translating it differently. And then, what do you do with it?  Well, I'm still thinking of what you do with it. I'm interested in trying to zoom in and create one or several single narratives from it, but I'm not sure that I can. Maybe I'll end up showing everything as this mass. 

BBS: What software do you use for audio/video performance?

NA: For preparing clips I use regular editing software like Final Cut, After Effects, and all that. Then for the more customized, live tools that I build I use mostly Max/MSP and Jitter. I mostly work with Jitter. I've been working with it for quite a few years, and teaching, but right now that's just because it's the tool I'm most comfortable with. I know that it's not the optimal tool for everything. It's great for doing things quick and dirty, and very physically, which is why I'm so attached to it. I would really like to get to work more with Open Frameworks and with game engines, which are getting to be more and more of a great tool for working physically with live video. Most of all I would like to work with a good programmer of these things. That's the way to go. You prototype things fast, with the tools you're comfortable with, and then you go to somebody who can do it much more logically and analytically and efficiently. It's very hard doing these transitions between being an engineer and a director and a producer and five other things at the same time.

BBS: Do you have any inspirations or recommended viewings you'd like to share?

NA: A long-time favorite is always Gordon Matta-Clark, who has physically cut up buildings and stuff like thing. Basically all of his work, even other kinds of work that he did, is amazing to me. Among the old-timers, photographers like Bernd and Hilla Becher. They're really amazing. And then more contemporary guys like Matmos, who do amazing stuff with music, using sounds from various situations. They did a whole album composed of sounds from plastic surgery clinics. It's an amazing album, really. And, well, tons of others. There's this great live performance group called 5VOLTCORE, they're awesome. One of my favourite pieces of theirs is this piece where there's a massive PC on a table with its guts out in front of the audience. The PC is constantly sending video out of its video card to a projector [in the form of] a feedback loop. Basically, this robot arm is slowly carving away parts of the computer, with all the sparks and everything, and that's causing the graphics to behave differently and causing the robot arm to behave more strangely. So, the computer is destroying itself, and broadcasting it through sound and video.