Artist R. Luke DuBois is a composer, performer, conceptual new media artist, programmer, record producer and pedagogue working out of New York. Tonight he will be speaking in Chelsea about his work, both past and present.

Stephen Squibb: Can you speak a little about the intersection of technology and politics in your work?

R. Luke DuBois: On the subject of technology and politics, I guess the first thing to point out is that politics avails itself of technology and technology has a politics, so sticking the two together isn’t particularly unusual, at least outside of an art context. I use a lot of technology in my work both in pre-production (using computer algorithms to analyze bodies of text) and in production (where the piece itself is an interactive installation, for example), but I don’t rely on any specific workflow to make art. As I’m fond of pointing out, every culture uses the maximum level of technology available to it to make art, so I don’t particularly think using ‘technology’ in art-making is controversial or even interesting. Painting is a technology too, and every medium is ‘new’ for a brief, fertile period, before it simply becomes yet another genre.

As to politics, I’m drawn to information-space versions of what we used to refer to in media-space as ‘culture jamming’, using the tools of a particular established medium to critique it. Politics in the 21st century, especially in the United States, is all about controlling and mediating the flow of information; whoever has the best grasp on the 24-hour news cycle wins the debate, and the last century’s mediatized channels of discourse and protest seem quaint in the age of leveraged social networking and YouTube. I’ve done a few pieces around this theme, including Hard Data, a work of music using the casualty stream of the Iraq war, and Hindsight Is Always 20/20, which creates eye charts from presidential speeches as a comment on the role of rhetoric in American history. I would much rather be labeled a political artist than a technological artist, as I think the latter description is disingenuous.

By training, I’m a composer, and so I have a different understanding of how information, technology, and politics intersect. Music is the original ‘information art’, in that at its essence music is a stream of abstract information ‘sonified’ through performance. Similarly, unless you’re singing music you’ve improvised, a capella, unamplified, and outdoors, you’re using technology to make music. Notation is literacy, spaces are architecture, instrument design, amplification, recording, broadcast: all are technology. And music, in its traditional role as a ubiquitous, ancillary art form (you usually appreciate music as an accompaniment to something else), is inherently political, as the tasks to which music are coupled infuse it with a contextual agency and subtext that you really can’t avoid.

SS: Can you speak more about Hard Data in this context? How did it originate and what were some of the ideas behind it?

RLD: Hard Data was a commission by New Radio and Performing Arts through their turbulence.org website. The idea was that the Iraq war, as an ‘American’ war, is the first large conflict in which the average American has more data than knowledge, which is to say: we have lots of facts and figures about the Iraq war, but it’s thousands of miles away in a country most of us have never visited, being fought by a volunteer military that most Americans don’t participate in, and paid for, essentially, by deficit spending so as to blunt any economic hardship upon the country as a whole. We know facts and figures, but comparatively few of us are impacted by it directly, in the way that we as a country were during the world wars or the Vietnam conflict.

So the idea was to take the data from the conflict and turn it into an open-source score of sorts that different composers could set to music. This didn’t quite pan out, but I do have two versions; one, the web site, uses an algorithm to take the data stream of casualties, oil revenue, U.S. congressional appropriations, and The New York Times news feed, and turn it into a timelapsed musical score of the war, one second per day. The second version is a string quartet in six movements where each movement represents a group of casualties in the war, and the movements each stylistically quote other composers who have written music in times of war, though the base musical setting of all of it is the Iraqi national anthem, Mawtini.

SS: What are you working on now? And what will you be speaking about tonight?

RLD: Right now the biggest project I’m working on is a census of the United States based on online dating information. I’ve been analyzing 16+ million online dating profiles in the US, sorted by congressional district, to make my own version of the US census, based not on median household income or voting trends but on romantic interests and how people describe themselves and others in the context of looking for love. It’s called A More Perfect Union. Tonight I’ll show a few preliminary sketches of that piece, along with the Hindsight project which is up at Google right now, and a few of my other, recent pieces.

Hard Data and Hindsight: Interview with R. Luke DuBois

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