My Favorite Martian: Q&A with Stefan Brunner

Although you work as a consultant and developer with Cycling '74, you are also an active media artist. What kind of work are you doing?

Nowadays, my artwork is very often at the crossroads where art, music and technology meet. So it can be either some kind of multimedia installation, such as the work I did with Apparatjik or the follow-up pieces for the National Museum Oslo. Some projects are more into the realm of music - the improvisational duet The Hour of the Wolf or the work I do live and in the studio with Arto Lindsay.

What connects them all is that it gets really hard for me to make a separation between designing the hardware/instrument/installation and programming it. It could be a dedicated hardware for a dedicated program, like in the Alle Komponerer piece or something more reusable - like the effects and instruments that I use with the guitar (which are mostly Max for Live devices).

At the same time, I have a hard time distinguishing between instrument design and composition. The instruments are mostly custom made/programmed for one special piece anyway, so they are already crucial to the sound of the finished piece. So in my creative process there is no real separation between making art and concepts and programming and composing, and Max is the tool that keeps these borders fluid and permeable, which is crucial to me.

It seems like you enjoy working in collaboration with others, What are some of the difficulties you face in collaborating - especially if you are trying to inject or interface your tech with others' work?

For me there are mostly two different things to consider: technical collaboration (when you are developing the piece, installation etc.) and artistic collaboration.

Let me start with the technical part. I often work together with Timm Ringewaldt in the duo Audiokolor , and there we use Max projects a lot - it keeps everything neatly organized and when you share it on Dropbox and stay a little organized, you can go a long way. The next level is having the whole thing under source control like git.

As far as connecting to different tech - Sensors, Lights, Data input etc. - in Max, there is an object for almost everything, and if there isn’t, you just make one. It is amazing what you often can achieve with some MIDI and a little bit of tinkering.

As for artistic collaboration, it is different for different projects, of course - working together on concepts and design and that kind of thing. When actually playing with people in a band-like situation, I've found that I reduce the dependency on tech as much as possible, meaning no sync, no data exchange, and so on - just people with instruments (self-programmed, sometimes) that play together and react to each other. Very old school.

I know that you've done some travel related to your artwork. Where are some of the places you've gone, and where did you perform/install the work?

Various places the Angelica Festival Bologna, Signal and Noise Vancouver, Portikus Frankfurt, HBC Berlin, Coded Cultures Vienna, the Austrian EXPO Pavilion in Shanghai, Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin, the Oslo Museum of Contemporary Art, Go with the Flø Norway, and so on. But whatever the place, the people you meet are the real deal.

There is this modestly sized but very dedicated community of people that are into this kind of art-technology crossover and you keep running into them all over the place, which is just awesome :)

Impressive list of locations! Do you have any problems moving between countries? Are there limits to the technology you can use, or do you find other limits more widespread?

Nope, as long as they let me into the country, and can provide power and (sometimes) Internet, everything is fine. On the contrary, I find different environments very inspiring.

If you were starting new today, what would you do to prepare for the future in the media art world?

The funny thing is that I never prepared to be part of anything. I studied Jazz guitar and Computer Science out of interest, played in bands, and did all kinds of weird shit. So, I guess I wouldn't do anything different. Just do stuff, because then you learn stuff.