The San Antonio new media duumvirate better known as Potter-Belmar Laboratories took a moment to talk to me about new media in TX. Leslie Raymond, head of the new media program at the University of Texas (UT) at Austin, and sound connoisseur Jason Jay Stevens started their collaborative video and sound experiments back in Michigan years ago. The married artists moved their headquarters to San Antonio after Leslie took an offer from UT San Antonio to start its new media program. Since then, Potter Belmar Labs has slowly acclimated to Texas flora and fauna. The couple bought a voluminous warehouse near the abandoned Lone Star Brewery in South San Antonio. Their style of appropriating archival footage, video clips and manipulated soundscapes constantly challenges viewers to reexamine familiar images. I met with Jason and Leslie at their warehouse a few weeks ago to talk about recent projects. Part of the interview was conducted online to update recent show information.

Michelle Valdez: How would you describe Potter Belmar Labs to someone who knows nothing about your work?

Leslie Raymond: Although we have worked in multimedia installation art and multimedia sculpture, the core of our work over the last five years has been what is most often referred to as “live cinema.”

MV: Can you give me some feedback on your most recent show in New York?

Jason Jay Stevens: We performed for three to four hours following sunset each evening, from Monday, [September] 3rd, through Friday, the 7th. Lexington and 47th is a very busy corner in Midtown Manhattan. The sidewalks are always full of people. When our sets started, our audience was mostly folks determined to get home or to appointments after work. But for the last couple of hours each night, we were providing spectacle for in-between bar-hoppers.

We received submissions in the form of little pieces of stories from friends around the country, via email and mail, and directly from New Yorkers, especially people staying at the Roger Smith Hotel . These became title cards that were projected, big and luminous, on one-third of the Lab’s window space (it’s a corner lot, fishbowl gallery). Whether or not any contributing “author” was present during our performances to witness our interpretation of his or her particular submission, we cannot say, but we used the various submissions/suggestions to inspire the “plot,” that is, the content of the video projected onto the other two-thirds of the gallery window space, as well as the back wall, and the audio coming from speakers inside and outside the gallery.

LR: I would add that these suggestions in this context provided more of a tone or trigger for us to create a particular “environment” through sound and image. When using this technique with a sit-down audience (Salon Mijangos, San Antonio; Sound Art Space, Laredo), we would arrange the “intertitles” (suggestions) into some kind of narrative arc before sitting down at our gear to play. They provided a skeletal system on which to improvise. In the case of the New York show, our audience was not captive, [so] was not to be led through a sequence of sound-image events, and as a result our performances became much more ambient, something one could catch in a short glimpse or hang around for an hour and witness a slow development.

One of the most exciting things to me was seeing people standing outside watching us, and then talking excitedly on their cellphones to someone, describing what they were experiencing. There were also a few instances of people catching our eye, smiling and giving the thumbs-up sign — and in one case a guy actually took the time to write us a note that said, “GREAT WORK!” and held it up to the window for us to see. How wonderful!

The way we set up at the Lab was also an artwork in itself — it wasn’t a straight projection, but a two-projector installation… We hung rear-screen projection material on the huge plate-glass windows lining both Lexington and 47th, with open strips through which people could look in and see us. One projection was onto those windows, and the other was on the long wall inside the Lab. They both showed the same thing, but this provided multiple viewing possibilities — on the windows, the image was divided into two major sections, cropped views of the original image, which was shown in its entirety on the back wall. At the right angles, one could see the back image interacting with the images on the windows, which was yet another completely different way to experience the piece. The sound was coming out of speakers mounted on the outside of the building. There was actually a third projection, of the intertitle cards that people submitted to us, which we shot digital stills of and burned to a DVD. An opaque projector would have been perfect for this projection, but it was amazingly impossible to find a rental company who had one. These were projected onto the window as well, just a little further [along 47th] down from the imagery.

I’d also add that I was mixing in video imagery that I was shooting in the city, and some stuff from that street corner where we were performing. This was a very interesting aspect to the show that I would develop even further, given more time and resources — to take some of those suggestions/intertitles and shoot based on those, and get people involved in maybe acting out some responses, and working THAT into the mix. Midtown is pretty devoid of the whole art scene, and what we were doing completely punctured the scene there.

MV: What do you think is going on in new media as far as the contemporary art scene, both locally and nationally? Give some of your own impressions of the media and where you see them fitting into the picture. Do you see any trends? Do you feel like you have other contemporaries, or that maybe you’re ahead of the curve here?

LR: From where I’m standing, I see [in the contemporary art scene in San Antonio] that there are a handful of artists who work in many media, and video might be one of them. Michele Monseau and Chris Sauter are two people who immediately come to mind. Then there are people like Karen Mahaffy, who is primarily a video artist but doing more gallery-based work. John Mata is also another person who works in everything and uses video as well. I haven’t seen a lot of new technology work here.

JJS: We’re definitely ahead of the curve when we think of ourselves in terms of our roots. You mentioned San Francisco, and in a way we belong in San Francisco because everything we do is sample-based and remixed.

LR: That’s the mecca.

JJS: And even the San Francisco aesthetic, we kind of fall into that. I talked to some San Francisco folks recently, and they assured me there are all kinds of people doing this kind of work. Still, I have yet to see anybody doing what we do in Texas. Especially in terms of cinema, because there are DJs and VJs all over the place and that’s almost as common as gin and tonics in the bar scene.

LR: I’m really interested in what’s going on in Dallas and Houston, but we haven’t explored those scenes yet.

MV: Why are you so interested in those scenes?

LR: I’m interested in Dallas and Houston because they are nearby. I still don’t know a lot about what is happening, but Aurora Picture Show is in Houston — and they are a very well-respected experimental moving image center that showcases avant-garde/artist-made film and video, and even brings in “live cinema” performers. “Live cinema” seems to be one of the more used terms to describe what Jason and I do.

Andrea Grover, the founder of Aurora, is teaching a class this term on participation art at the University of Houston. Participatory art is a fascinating area, hardly new (look into the surrealists and Fluxus for starters), but heavily influenced now by the internet, text messaging and other contemporary communications media.

Aurora has recently started its own library of moving image material — it happens to be located right next door to Patrick Kwiatowski in that bizarre Menil neighborhood. Patrick is part of Microcinema — a DVD distributor for avant-garde/artist-made (and other) moving image work, which evolved from Blackchair Cinema, which was started by Joel Bachar over a decade ago in Seattle. I became involved with that scene when Joel picked up my optically printed 16mm film Rife W/ Fire, an experimental documentary about pyrotechnic artist Steven Rife, who I became friends with when I lived in St. Paul. I completed that film in 1995 and Blackchair/Microcinema showed it all over the world. They are part of the “new media scene” (although film and video are hardly new anymore) in that they helped explode this whole movement of microcinemas.

As for Dallas, I know that there is a pretty big art and technology department at UT Dallas . That’s pretty exciting to me, though I know very little about it — other than artists and engineers are collaborating, they have a virtual gallery set up in Second Life, and Dean Terry is doing some interesting [exhibitions] and other projects there. There is also And/Or Gallery that Paul Slocum runs — don’t know too much about that either, but have seen a little bit of Paul’s artwork and am glad that he’s in Texas to help blaze the new media trail.

I would also add that there is a transmedia program at UT Austin. I have seen the work of people like Luke Savisky and Murry McMillan (now collaborating with his partner Megan McMillan) who studied there — they are out there and making great work!

Seems like everywhere I go around here, people are like, wow, I’ve never seen anything like what you are doing!

JJS: With improvised cinema, we are identifying a common zeitgeist by collecting a little bit of wit from anybody who’s game to contribute. Wikipedia is a representation of global consensus on all things factual, established also by anybody and everybody with a little time and will to contribute.

That’s an interesting comparison, considering our next single-channel work may be a kind of poetic encyclopedia.

An iPhone with the ability to access Google and Wikipedia satisfies a centuries-long arc of development in the technology that aggregates and disseminates global consensus. One website connects you to everybody’s advice and all the perspectives on every issue (albeit ranked to their scheme, tsk); the other presents an ever-changing and yet egalitarian consensus report (the resolution of which is increasing exponentially, by the way). And you can talk to anybody on earth at anytime, anywhere, on the same little device.

The noosphere is physically realized, fully accessible. Scholarship is liberated from the library table. The distribution of reproducible culture is flattened out. Trivia is more trivial; knowledge is way cheaper, familiarity just a few moments away.

MV: I recently watched a biography of Jacques Derrida and I wrote down a lot of quotes that were relevant to my own artwork. You need to introduce your own artwork here, because some people might not know exactly what it is. I emailed Jason and said I wanted to talk to you guys about The Future, and then I found this funny quote from Derrida that says, “Prepare yourself to experience the future and welcome the monster.” You did mention deconstruction earlier, and so I was thinking, what do you think about this quote? Are you always thinking about the future?

LR: I’m not exactly sure what he means by “the monster,” but I feel like it’s really here. And as far as thinking about the future, my VJ name is Future Worker Girl and my motto is, “Working for a better tomorrow today.” I always feel like the more I can sort of amplify positivity, whatever little steps I can take in my life or through my work are hopefully going to have positive implications for tomorrow and so on.

JJS: I guess by chance, I don’t think of it as the future. This is really weird and sounds pompous to say, but I feel like a lot of my life I learned about things like, “Oh, that finally happened, it really came true.” My guess, in that quote from Derrida, from a deconstructionist point of view, the monster is the unknown and it instills fear. If you break it down into the smallest components, it’s this unknown that he’s talking about in being prepared for the future. It’s the unknown and it’s scary; the future is always scary.

MV: In that quote, he’s talking about normalcy, and a monstrosity reminds us what is normal — for example, a human face and what you expect to find in a human face. I just really liked that quote. I think what you’re doing is avant-garde, for Texas and maybe even the rest of the country. If you’re already on the cusp of the next thing [new media], there’s still this question of the future. What could new media be after this?

JJS: Well, maybe this will be one of those things like I said before, “Oh, wow, that finally happened...” There’s this very comforting feeling that it was only 120 years ago when musicians... the best you could do was go down to the street corner and strum and set your hat down. You get a gig, but before the first records. It’s like we’re coming back around to that. The playing field is leveled with YouTube and the internet. Maybe the 20th century was the anomaly. Maybe we’re not heading into an anomaly; we’re heading out of an anomaly.

MV: What are your thoughts on modern cultural phenomena like YouTube and internet-based art? What does it all mean for artists?

LR: One of the most powerful aspects of the internet is that it gives people a truly democratic platform from which to express themselves, to write or to post images and instantaneously share these with thousands of other people. There is also lots of room to engage in critical dialogue, to be able to critique our public leaders and to suggest alternate solutions, etc., in word or image. Bloggers are not constrained by the commercial interests of the old media, where you have, for example, a company like Monsanto putting the pressure on Fox News to kill an investigative report revealing the harmful effects of their product rGBH. Because of the large financial relationship the two companies share in terms of advertising dollars, Fox was forced to try all kinds of methods to shut the reporters up. I won’t go into all of the details, but just want to make the point that the internet is a very interesting place right now, especially in terms of the kind of debate that can exist. [See the film The Corporation and the book Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig.]

MV: In conclusion, I recently read somewhere that the definition of avant-garde could simply be “those artists who have the most energy.” Do you agree? Is Potter Belmar Labs a catalyst for new media? How will your collaboration echo into the Texas art ether?

LR: To me, the avant-garde is about being tuned into and responsive to the zeitgeist. Using contemporary media is an extension of zeitgeist, but maybe you don’t have to use computers to be avant-garde nowadays.

You could be someone like Howard Finster — an artist with lots of energy, inspired by the good lord to paint thousands of paintings. He wasn’t avant-garde; he was a folk artist. And that does not diminish the quality of his work, nor the amount of respect I have for him one bit. Also, it seems useful to mention that new media does not necessarily equal avant-garde.

Are we a catalyst for new media? I hope so. My mission in San Antonio is to start a new media program at UTSA. My students are pretty excited to work in new media and video, and that enthusiasm will spread, especially when they get out of school and continue making their work. I’m trying to contribute in the community as well by opening up to the public educational system film and video screenings that I organize for my classes. The community can stand to have more understanding and context of where new media art is coming from. I might add that video is hardly a new media.

I’m also on the board of the Artists Foundation of San Antonio, so I hope to be able to positively influence that organization to understand more about media art in general. Media art is one of the least understood art forms — even by media artists themselves. I just read a report put out by Rand called “From Celluloid to Cyberspace” about the development of the field, and a major survey of the scene from the perspective of granting agencies. There is a lot of confusion and very little hard data on artists, audience, funding, etc.

How will our collaboration echo into the Texas art ether? Hard to say — we gotta get some gigs! It takes a lot of time and energy to chase those down — we need a manager or promoter or handler. But eventually, new media art will be here... it’s only a matter of time. Texas seems slightly behind the curve — I don’t know why. In San Antonio it may be due to economics. It is only natural for artists to adopt and play with new technologies, and the further they become embedded in the culture, the more access and interest artists will have.

JJS: I thought by calling something “avant-garde,” it meant you’re not really sure if you like it.

LR: What PBL does is an extension of the whole long history of art — from Lascaux onwards.

JJS: ...the magic lantern shows that existed for centuries, leading up to the invention of motion film. Experimental film, stretching back to innovators like Mary Ellen Butte, as well as the expanded cinema experiments of the 1960s, including the psychedelic light shows put on by such groups as the Joshua Light Show. [Dude!]

LR: Art is a dialogue that builds upon itself, responds to the current time and is interwoven with culture, society, politics, fashion, etc., telling and retelling the story of human experience.

JJS: The economy of culture is convulsing. The role of the artist has been in flux for a century already and it won’t settle for a while. (LR: If ever) Riding this current, an artist, as an entrepreneur, focuses on labor as a creative force and on art as a uniting force [with] experiment as a necessary means of exploration.

Images courtesy the artists

Michelle Gonzalez-Valdez is an artist and writer currently living in San Antonio. She also performs under the name Bunnyphonic and has a blog about art in SA.