Interview with Christina “Chra” Nemec, Prix Ars Electronica Nominee 2011
Since 1987, the Prix has been an interdisciplinary platform for all those who use the computer as a universal design medium in their artistic work at the interface of art, technology and society. Prizes are awarded in seven categories: Computer Animation / Film / VFX, Interactive Art, Digital Musics & Sound Art, Hybrid Art, Digital Communities, u19 – freestyle computing and [the next idea] voestalpine Art and Technology Grant. Additional info and a list of past winners are available online at https://ars.electronica.art/prix/de/about/.
One of the big reasons why the Prix is a highlight of each year’s Festival is that the CyberArts exhibition held in conjunction with it offers a very high-profile showcase for Prix winners and their work.
One of the nominees in Digital Musics & Sound Art is Christina Nemec, aka chra, a musician who has gained considerable experience navigating in the sea of sound (that has occasionally turned out to be a musical swamp). She launched her career as a member of, among others, Mopedrock and SV Damenkraft, and then made a name for herself as a solo artist. For a couple of years, she’s been running her own label, ComfortZone. Last weekend, she appeared at Lower Austria’s Danube Festival on the “Female Pressure” lineup. The work that garnered her a Prix Ars Electronica nomination also originated in a feminist context—it was commissioned to mark the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day.
Ars Electronica: Tell us about your work. How did it come about?
Christina Nemec: It was commissioned for International Women’s Day, so I asked myself: How can I approach this theme without being too blatantly strident, too oversimplified? The subject is a year, which can be divided into 12. So I took 12 women—historical figures, musicians, artists, political protagonists. They were my own personal choices: Virginia Woolf, Käthe Leichter. The years cited refer to either the year of birth or year of death. But I didn’t just want to take women who are dead. Ceija Stojka is still alive. As for Tine Plesch—she was a music journalist and publisher of Testcard [magazine for pop culture] who unfortunately died in 2004. Phoolan Devi was a freedom fighter in India; they called her The Bandit Queen. She was the object of lots of very bizarre projections, and depicted in a highly sexualized way. In the case of Wendy Carlos, I chose the year 1979, which was when Walter Carlos was officially, so to speak—surgically, in fact—transformed into Wendy Carlos, so that I don’t have only biological women. I wanted as broad a spectrum as possible, including Alice Walker and Miriam Makeba from Africa. And Buffy Saint Marie, a member of an indigenous people. She wrote really famous songs that were made famous by others, folksingers, which is how it goes sometimes.
Then I thought: How am I going to go about this? I mean, a lot of people say there’s female music but I’m totally opposed to that. There’s feminist music or music by women, but there’s no female sound. Anyway, the first thing I did was clap into the microphone. From that, I calculated sine waves, and each time I used the year as the frequency—for example, 1,882 Hz for Virginia Woolf. Then I re-contextualized it a little bit and used the result as the starting point for the next one. So, you could say that this is total concept music, digital music, there’s absolutely no emotion in it, and each piece contains the information from the previous piece, because, after all, we’re always building on what others have already done. That’s why the pieces are in chronological order.
With the exception of the remixes, there are no beats, there’s no melody in it, there’s nothing you would associate with music you feel in your gut. This is pure mathematics, drawing board music. Now, the deep sine waves certainly do have a warm sound; it’s not cold, and because that’s so, the music actually is harmonic in a certain way. But I never wanted to be connected with that at all—I hate it when you get pigeonholed as women’s music or put into some other category.
Ars Electronica: You lived in Linz briefly. Do you remember the first time you heard about Ars Electronica?
Chra: Yeah, I still remember it vividly because I was a regular at the Stadtwerkstatt building that used to be where the AEC is now. The Stadtwerkstatt was where the bleachers are. And I went there a lot, to concerts, to punk concerts. You can read about the Linz scene in “Es muss was geben” [There Has to Be Something] by Andi Kump. In the old Stadtwerkstatt—that is, in the music scene there—there were never more than few women, but even back then there were female performance & multimedia artists. One time there, I saw a really funny performance involving a block of ice and a steam iron that I really liked. She sat there holding the block of ice and ironed it until the ice finally melted away. It took forever. Back then, people were really experimenting with video and stuff like that, and maybe the origins of Ars Electronica had something to do with this art scene.
Ars Electronica: Actually, it’s pretty interesting that AE emerged in Linz of all places.
Chra: Linz simply has a different meaning in Austria due to the fact that it was this industrial city, an iron & steel town.
Ars Electronica: How is it now? How do you perceive Linz?
Chra: In Linz, there has always been lot of support and encouragement provided. But there’s a good explanation why, in the mid-‘80s, the music scene in Linz was significantly more relevant than in Vienna—suddenly, with hardcore, with Kapu and other venues. Linz had to make an effort to rethink things because heavy industry as an employer isn’t as relevant anymore. Of course, the VOEST [steel mill] is still a major factor in the economy. But Linz had to position itself differently. In conjunction with the 2009 Capital of Culture Year too. The city has gotten cleaner; it’s really spiffed up, the Main Square and all.
What hasn’t changed all that much is the scene, since the major protagonists are still the same people to some extent.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SLrd5k4OcBk
Ars Electronica: The theme of this year’s festival is “ORIGIN – How It All Began.” What do you associate with origins?
Chra: I don’t know, rather negative associations. Homeland and stuff like that. Patriotism.
Ars Electronica: Last year it was “Repair – Ready to Pull the Lifeline.” This year, we’re collaborating intensively with CERN, which deals with questions of origins, to a certain extent.
Chra: Since I don’t believe in anything at all, I have a really hard time with things like this. Difficult question, but it’s very interesting. Origins; where do we come from? So, there must be something. But of course I don’t believe in God. CERN’s approach is much more to my liking.
Ars Electronica: But your nominated work does have something to do with origins, doesn’t it
Chra: Definitely, if you think about feminism.
Ars Electronica: The origin of your work is relatively technical. Do you believe that applies to our origins as well?
Chra: I believe that it’s simply a coincidence. And it all just somehow developed out of that, out of some kind of random coincidence. The conditions were probably favorable; otherwise we wouldn’t have turned out the way we did. But if you want to look at it like that, then I would have had to go even further back. Even back in the 16th century, there were always women who stood up for their rights. But I didn’t want to just take some theatrical figure or other from the 16th century, even though there is one that I very much admire for the work she did back then. But sure—every way of thinking has some sort of origins. After all, we don’t think up something completely new; instead, it’s something we picked up some time in the past, whether consciously or subconsciously.
Chra’s next appearance in Linz is on May 25th in Roten Krebs. Cherry Sunkist will present her album “Projection Screens” there. http://ifek.servus.at/?p=1444
