INTERVIEW: Jimmy Joe Roche on ULTIMATE REALITY, Dan Deacon, Lasers...And Everything Else In Between
A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of attending the Philadelphia screening of ULTIMATE REALITY.
The Film In A Nutshell: Forty minutes of pure color, live drumming, and solarized Arnold Schwarzenegger.
It is the latest audiovisual collaboration between Baltimore's electro-dance-freakout king, Dan Deacon; and pop-culture-psychedelic video shaman, Jimmy Joe Roche. However, the word "screening" does not do justice to the deliriously giddy, sweaty evening in its entirety. Dan Deacon and Jimmy Joe Roche's ULTIMATE REALITY tour is a moving visual and sonic immersion into every color of the rainbow and nearly all crevices of the audible spectrum...Coming to a 40 foot screen near you!
Lucky for me, Jimmy Joe found some time to let me pick his brain over e-mail. Check out a clip from the film at the end.
Any good stories about technical difficulties during ULTIMATE REALITY performances?
We had lots of people go into drooling freak out convulsions, and people who were on PCP trying to merge with the screen and take the drummers with them into hell, but not really any technical horror stories. One thing that is hard to explain is just how many crazy fucking ways we have rigged the screen and projector. If you have ever seen the movie Apollo 13 where NASA pencil pushers have to build an air purifier out of some duct tape, a sneaker, and a vacuum...We have been in that situation many times. I've gotten crazy "MacGuyver" on tour.
How does the experience change with the viewing space?
My favorite way to have Ultimate Reality screened is with the drummers on the floor, and a few feet full of of hundreds of writhing dancing bodies, then the video on a giant 40 foot wall behind them. Many of the shows on tour were as I described and I personally like this vibe more than the sit down atmosphere. I think that when people sit and watch the pieces they are forced into a more contemplative conceptual interpretation that makes the piece more cerebral. I don’t have a problem with this, and the piece can stand firm in both settings, but the energy of the first is how I really love the piece to be experienced.
What was the best and worst location to show your work?
I had a great time at Bard, and Irvine College. SCRUMMAGE in Detroit, and the Great American Music Hall, all rad shows. Worst: There was one place had a white piece of foam board, like four feet by four feet, and that’s what they figured we would project on. Things went downhill from there. And I left my fucking drill there! I ended up passed out on the floor in some weird back room, from whiskey that I consumed in frustration.
Do you care to draw a line between music and visual art, musicians/visual artists?
They are totally different worlds. BUT there is a lot that visual artists (especially those in art school) could learn from musicians. Its a long way to the top if you want to rock and roll. Lots of times artists get too caught up in a post-modern theoretical dialogue and lose touch with the reality of showing and connecting constantly with REAL life people through artwork. I think that many artists need to take a more DIY, gritty, no bullshit approach to showing their work. Musicians that I have had the good fortune to know over the years have certainly done that.
What is your criteria for a successful piece? How do you know when you're "done" with a video?
I like to work under a deadline. I start tinkering with something - a single idea, vision, or scene - then slowly it grows, and at some point I'll say “I should make sure that when I finish this baby I've got an audience”. Then I'll go about setting dates, or a tour, or a premiere at a festival. Then all of a sudden, the piece HAS to get done.
Is there a message(s) that you are trying to send out with your use of appropriated footage?
The work does have a political message, or certainly a sociopolitical message. The DIY underground Baltimore scene takes Arnold Schwarzenegger and reprocesses his images and iconography, subverting it to serve our message. We become active cultural consumers, reprogramming the psychology that was imbedded in our adolescent minds years ago, when T2 hit the streets.
Do you think that spending the amount of time in front of a computer screen with the type of images you're creating is doing or going to do any kind of significant damage to your eyes?
No, but the lasers I just shot in to them while trying to make a 3D scan of my head sure as fuck did. As did the hundred of Xeroxes Dan and I made of our faces while we were undergrads.
Why so much Mirror Effect?
Symmetry "mirrors" a more broad desire brimming in the youth culture right now for a more spiritual, structural, but non-denominational relationship with reality. It speaks to a sort of neo-ritualism.
How did the idea of collaborative live audiovisual performance take seed with you, Dan, others?
Dan and I just sort of always worked together. As for touring a film like a band, that just came for me out of a real frustration and disillusionment with the film festival system.
Totem - Pinkard Gallery, 2007
You're also a painter. Does this serve as counterweight to your video art, or is does your work function together as one body?
Right now, paintings are what I am focusing on. I have a show at RARE gallery in NY, opening June 26th, and I am really excited about it. I feel that it is going to "explain" what I have been thinking about. The work is on the edge of where our culture is going. I just don’t think my videos can express this as well as the paintings right now. I don’t see the paintings and the videos as a body, but disjointed, a little schizophrenic right now. I am, however, going to shoot a very short 16mm meditation film for the show.
How do you like your eggs?
Over Easy.
Purchase the full-length online.
- Post To:
Digg
del.icio.us
Advertisement
