How to briefly introduce Tony Conrad? You could easily do it yourself by googling his name and come across a string of breathtaking references and countercultural links. You would find out that Tony Conrad is a composer who actually disposes the composer. Ever since the early sixties, he has been on the threshold of the avant-garde, continuously stretching the political and social implications of his radical art. I meet Tony Conrad, the composer, filmmaker, video artist, media activist, writer, and educator, in the context of Washington DC’s best kept secret, Sonic Circuits, a festival of experimental music where he was performing, aggressively but adventurously, with his recent musical companion Violent Raid.

I’ve been fascinated by your view of music as an experiential environment that you create for people to participate in. How do you see that exactly?

Tony Conrad: “I see that in a variety of ways. For example, music has a unique relationship to space, unlike many other forms of cultural expression. It is unrelenting and pitiless in the way that it surrounds people in the space and pokes into their bodies, occupies and causes their bodies to react. It’s a horrifyingly intimate kind of thing. That’s one kind of a relationship, and then another one of course is the political consequence of that. Music can be adopted and used in a veiled way to implement the designs of those who are in authority.”

Isn’t music something abstract? Where does the political element come in?

Conrad: “That’s a very complicated thing, because it happens on different levels and these levels don’t seem to be integrated. It happens in capitalism also. There are people who go to the store and buy things and they think that that is capitalism. Then there are other people who are actually investing money in elaborate corporate systems and they think that’s capitalism. These two levels don’t connect except through money, and this turns out to be very effective. With music, it’s a similar thing. There is the person who is listening to a song, the words, the beat, the music, the nostalgia, and all of the personal reactions it brings forth. This seems completely unrelated to the theoretical conditions in which larger structures sometimes seemingly automatically fulfill those needs. In the European tradition, there is a sense that concerts, music being played by orchestras while the audience is just listening, were always there and that this is almost a fact of nature. We begin to see more clearly now, as this institution is being threatened, that it was a temporary thing that only lasted for a few hundred years. If we look very carefully at it, we can see that there are reasons why this institution was brought into existence and that these reasons have to do with the way the society was organized into powerful states.”

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I’ve been fascinated by Werner Herzog’s uncompromising view on documentary filmmaking for a long time now. It is one that positions him radically as a poet of truth, not so much as an advocate of reality. In unforgettable documentaries like Little Dieter Needs To Fly and Bells From The Deep, the registration of facts is often set aside in favor of staged actions and written dialogues. Surprisingly enough, for Herzog “facts sometimes have a strange and bizarre power that makes their inherent truth seem unbelievable”. In his quest for “ecstatic truth”, Herzog approaches reality in metaphysical ways, leaving the viewer behind with an elevated experience: “I’m after something that is more like an ecstasy of truth, something where we step beyond ourselves, something that happens in religion sometimes, like medieval mystics.” In this highly entertaining interview, Henry Rollins is visibly astonished by the German director’s unique vision and approach. It includes a hilarious story about how Herzog got shot during a TV interview in LA.

Here for Werner Herzog’s website.

Here for Henry Rollins’s TV show.

a.k.a.Kurdistan is a documentary website begun by photographer, journalist and filmmaker Susan Meiselas. It came out of her book and corresponding exhibition, Kurdistan, In the Shadow of History, and is an attempt to create a permanent record of the Kurdish people and their history (one that has been overshadowed and overlooked by history-as-written). A people without a country, the Kurds live in a constant state of exile, whether they’ve emigrated to the Netherlands or remain on their home soil. Identifying itself as “a borderless space,” the website “provides the opportunity to build a collective memory with a people who have no national archive”.

Meiselas’s book and exhibition were the starting point for the website, and a.k.a.Kurdistan does feature many photos, stories and interviews exerpted from the book. But the website is a living, growing, and continually updated extension of those stories: the site invites Kurds, journalists, archivists, librarians, historians, scholars and others to upload their own photos and stories about Kurdistan and Kurdish history and culture, making it an ever-expanding record of the Kurds’ continuing struggle for a land of their own.

The book is available on Amazon.com, but only for $300 and up because of a combination of high production value and rarity. So a.k.a.Kurdistan makes the story at the same time fresher and much more widely accessible.

The FBI held Hasan Elahi in custody and extensively interrogated him for several days in 2002, believing him to be a terrorist. But even after his innocence was established, his name remained on the terrorist watch list. Partly to provide a future alibi and partly to raise some troubling questions, Elahi began tracking all his movements and activities using a GPS and a camera, posting the real-time results on his website. Hasan Elahi turned his life into a technological disappearing act and maybe also into a work of art.
Interviewed by Niels Van Tomme.

How is your relationship with the US government nowadays?

Hasan Elahi: I get harassed still to this day– every time I fly through Kennedy airport I get taken in for hours. Other airports are hit or miss. To be honest, I have very good reason not to live here after all this, but remain here. This is home, this is where I grew up, I’m an American citizen and this is my country. So it does pose a very interesting question when your idea of the country does not necessarily reflect your government’s policies. I am certainly indebted to the US for what I’ve established here with my citizenship, it would’ve been impossible growing up in a small village in Bangladesh. On the other hand, I don’t agree with what our government is doing and that’s one of the reasons I’m doing this project.

Your exhibition, ‘Tracking Transience: The Orwell Project’, sounds bombastic and scary, at the same time there is a certain peace coming from your images. Are we accepting fear?

HE: I don’t know if we’re accepting fear, I think acknowledging fear is a little different than accepting it. I have to take this to the point where it’s almost comical. Looking at my urinals, pretty much all of it is actually fun.

There are tongue-in-cheek things happening behind the scenes that defuse the tension of the real story. If I only focused on the negative, then it would become depressing and gloomy, it would become scary. Rather I reverse the situation, take control of it, almost create a satire of it by stepping back from it, and heighten that fear even more. There is something silly about the images of the airline meals. There is even a real knife. If I had a knife in my bag in any of the airports around here, I would get arrested and taken away, but as soon as I sit down on the plane, it’s perfectly all right to hand that knife to me.

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