An Interview with Paul DeMarinis

Since the early 1970s, the American electronic media artist Paul DeMarinis (b. 1948, Cleveland, Ohio, USA) has created works that re-imagine modes of communication and reinvent the technologies that enable communication. His works (see Table 1) have taken shape as recordings, performances, electronic inventions, and site-specific and interactive installations; many are considered landmarks in the histories of electronic music and media art. Paul DeMarinis pioneered live performance with computers, collaborated on landmark works with artists like David Tudor and Robert Ashley, undertook several tours with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, and brought to life obscure technologies such as the flame loudspeaker (featured in his 2004 sculpture Firebirds). His interactive installation The Music Room (1982), commissioned by Frank Oppenheimer for the Exploratorium in San Francisco, was the first automatic music work to reach a significant audience. His album Music As A Second Language (1991) marks one of the most extensive explorations of the synthesized voice and speech melodies to date. Installations like The Edison Effect (1989-1993), in which lasers scan ancient recordings to produce music, and The Messenger (1998/2005), in which electronic mail messages are displayed on alphabetic telegraph receivers, illustrate a creative process that Douglas Kahn (1994) has called "reinventing invention."

Paul DeMarinis has performed internationally for several decades, and his works have been exhibited at museums including the InterCommunication Center (ICC) in Toyko, the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA). His work is the subject of a recent book, Paul DeMarinis: Buried in Noise (Beirer, Himmelsbach, and Seiffarth 2010). He is Associate Professor at Stanford University, where he holds appointments in both the Department of Art and Art History and the Department of Music. During 2009-2010, he undertook a residency in Berlin as part of a Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (DAAD) Berlin Artist Fellowship. This interview took place in his Berlin residence on 3 August 2009 and was supplemented with subsequent electronic mail communications.

Early Work and Education

Ouzounian:

I wanted to start with some general questions about your studies. I read that you had studied film and music as an undergraduate.

DeMarinis:

Yes. I came to music from classical music, which I studied as a teenager. In college, I became very interested in media: film and tape, making pieces with electronics. I went to a small liberal arts college in Ohio called Antioch College. Paul Sharits was there; he was a really inspiring filmmaker. I then went to Mills College for graduate school.

Ouzounian:

Is that where you met David Tudor?

DeMarinis:

I met David when I was in school at Mills. Bob Ashley was co-director of the CCM [Center for Contemporary Music] at the time, and he invited various artists for projects; David Tudor was one of those. Also David Behrman, Gordon Mumma, Alvin Lucier—they all came and did projects, so I met all of them during that period. I worked with David Tudor from 1976-1978 on the electronics for Rainforest IV.

Ouzounian:

What was it like to work on what would become such an iconic piece?

DeMarinis:

It was really remarkable. If you look at it in hindsight, the idea of David taking on unknown, inexperienced young artists in a project that was, for him, a pretty high-profile piece—in 1976, for instance, we presented it at the Festival d'Automne in Paris and the Espace Pierre Cardin in Paris—it was pretty amazing to manage to do this piece. That he would pick up this band of people. David Tudor

Table 1.

List of Works by Paul DeMarinis

was such a generous person. That whole generation of people—John Cage and David Tudor, Bob Ashley, and David Behrman—they were all so immensely generous in a way that was really unusual.

Ouzounian:

Were you studying electronic music at Mills College?

DeMarinis:

Yes, it was an MFA in electronic music and recording media: film, video, and electronic music. I started with film, and I got the bug of building circuits very quickly. I think it was when...