was trained as a classical violinist and Woody Vasulka had worked with electronic music, Bill Viola worked with David Tudor on the »Rain forest«, an amazing sound sculpture and Tony Oursler had also played music. He was in a band with Mike Kelley called The Poetics and he played drums with Laurie Anderson when he was in college, but I think he told me she fired him because he had bad rhythm. Paik has described this idea of playing images with his hands and fingers the way that he had played sounds on a piano or audio synthesizer. Another artist whose work I really loved was Jem Cohen. Jem was collaborating mostly with rock’n’roll groups such as REM and others and doing these sort of experimental music videos and we worked on several projects and some concerts together.

I guess that for me being a musician, starting to work with video artists actually became very natural in that; many of the artists that I was gravitating to already had a musical quality to their work. And I’ve never done a traditional soundtrack, I’ve never gotten a project where someone had a finished edit and said: here, put music on top of it. It’s always been: someone

has an idea, maybe they have some images, I start to create sound, they might even shoot while listening to my sound. Often, working in parallel, with a constant exchange. They might come in the recording studio and make comments and I might be part of shooting the image and in the end there is some kind of really tight collaboration in which image and sound come together. And it’s a luxury: I could never do this, if I was to work in a commercial area; but working with artists, especially artists that I like, and that I have collaborated with once and it went well, we tend to go on again and again.

Sound affects everything you see

Most traditional ways of working put all of the priority on the image. There are so many projects where people work for months and months on the image and then, well, they’re out of money, they’re out of time and they need sound quickly. It’s also the way that audiences respond; as soon as you put a picture up the image becomes dominant and sound becomes background in many people’s minds. I’m personally interested in ways that sound and image can go back