Episode 87: Steve Bates
Black Seas (Radius) (01:15:15)
Black Seas is an ongoing body of work under the influence of historical and contemporary experiences of auditory hallucination. After scouring texts from modernist feminist writing to horror and weird literature, cognitive science studies, oral histories, 18th century psychic journals, colonial postcards and “post”-colonial critique, film and music influenced, or traumatized, by hallucination, sound and communications studies, religious tracts, philosophical threads, Situationist diatribes, studies on the psychology of solitary confinement, stories of lost and dying explorers, numerous sound, installation, video and transmission works have emerged.
In the month of March, 2018, Bates was working in Krems an-der-Donau, Austria preparing for a Black Seas Ensemble performance at the Minoriten Church. Over five evenings Bates also did a daily radio broadcast from his studio. Black Seas (Radius) is a reworking of the material broadcast over these sessions and includes feedback, wind noise from a fan, piano resonance, radio static, and production recordings from the church.
Steve Bates is an artist and musician living in Montréal. Early experiences of playing and touring in punk rock bands, being a gardener for twelve years, managing a community radio station and studying philosophy and theatre design as an undergraduate student throughout the 1980-90’s all made significant impacts on his ideas of living and art-making.
Through his sound, video, performance and installation work he listens to boundaries and borders, points of contact and conflict. Thresholds are explored, stretched and, at times, completely broken in a desire to challenge notions of purity and reach towards ideas of a continuum between things. Information and signal feed back onto themselves creating new situations and events. The sonic is the starting point for his projects which are evocations of communication networks and systems, or expressions of spatial and temporal experience. He frequently uses sound material that is site-specific in an attempt to uncover place and how the sonic effects our experience of site. The history of ideas, experiences, and materials are an influence on his work and often lead to a research-heavy path resulting in multiple works around a theme.
Recent areas of investigation have included the history of barbed wire, feedback, boredom, the night as a sensual, political and free space, and most recently, auditory hallucination. He imagines this current project as a way of listening to noise through desire, agency and otherness. His work has been exhibited and performed in Canada, the United States, Europe, Chile and Senegal. He works in the field, on the air, in museological/gallery and performance contexts. These shifting territories reflect the content of his practice.
Radius Episode 87: Steve Bates originally broadcast once on the last day of 2018 on Monday December 31, 2018 at 12:00 AM CDT. Thank you to Radius, Martin Brandlmayr, Angelica Castelló, Michaela Grill, Christoph Kurzmann,Burkhard Stangl, Krems AIR Artist in Residence, Sabine Güldenfuß, Jo Aichinger & Imago Dei Festival, Conseils des arts et des lettres du Québec (CALQ).