Brian McKenna

Brian McKenna does a bit of hacking.  Actually, he does a lot of it.  Hardware hacking.
He makes devices that take audio and make video or vice versa.

Here, we try to understand the how and why of it all.




Chief Magazine: You're from Canada, right?

Brian McKenna: Yes, that's true. Sorry. But I spent half my childhood growing up in Scotland and England. Sorry for that too.

What were you into as a little kid?  Did you take phones and remote controls apart to see if you could put them back together?

Almost. But only the disassembly part actually.

According to the parents, my earliest hobby was just staring at things, objects, for ages and ages. Later, when I was 3 or 4 I'd be following around my uncle who was a DIY type. He'd give me tools to play with and I'd proceed to dismantle things whilst imitating his deep booming voice. All the door-handles in their house were removed, the control panel on their electric dryer dismantled, I hammered a hole in their car's muffler with a wrench. I must have been banned at one point and, to this day, when I visit my grandmother in Scotland, she's afraid I'll break her DVD player just by looking at it.

After that I was just into riding my bicycle, computer games when we got a ZX spectrum at home, playing with the VCR, Lego, various other toys and games; my brother and I got a boom box when I was 9 and we spent a lot of time making recordings, mostly recording over and over the stupid children's tapes we had. From about 11 and throughout my teenage years I was on a skateboard and that was a huge creative outlet... hacking away at curbs, building ramps, road trips, making videos, running from the cops. Playing bass and keyboard in punk bands came later into the picture as well as doing bass and percussion in the high school bands. Thankfully this involved getting the keys to the band room and making tons of noise during the lunch breaks and stuff.

Besides that... Doctor Who marathons on PBS beamed over from the states.

And now you live in Amsterdam?  How’d that move happen?

It started with the feeling that my life in Canada had somehow become perfect. Nice house, good roommates, a cool kitty-cat, great studio, cheap rent, lots to do... I entertained the idea of moving elsewhere in the province, just as kind of a thought experiment, which kind of irked me but it eventually felt possible if that makes sense. Some time later when I was in holiday/road trip mode, shooting videos around Western Europe for an art project and some Canadian TV stuff, I found an art school in Amsterdam which seemed interesting on the outside, and I really like the city, so I applied to be a Masters student. A few weeks later they gave me an excuse to jump over to Europe and within a month I'd moved without a second thought. So it was completely just sudden and random when it happened.

Are you high right now?

Totally... well... okay, not really, see, my stimulant of choice these days are those wicked strong Belgian beers brewed by monks... and coffee... I love coffee. I really smoked enough blunts for a lifetime during high school and amn't into it any more. A lot of people assumed that I relocated to Holland for the buds, but I usually point out that you could have stayed in Canada for the same thing. (the Trappist beer is much harder to get in Canada however.)

I'd say a majority of people at my school here thought that I was totally blown the whole 2 years I was there.  I'd arrive in the 'morning' (2 or 3pm) to comments like, "rough night huh?” from the staff... so I was all, "hey! I look like this because I worked in the studio 'till 6:30 in the morning", and they were all, "yeah sure, whatever, we believe you, sure."

It's different for other people, but I'd never be able to concentrate long enough to make anything if i got stoned. Neat ideas though, but I'd either forget everything or my notes are totally illegible the next day.

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It’s just that I find this dichotomy in your work.  There’s the final product, which overall seems to be very psychedelic while the actual work and process is extremely technical and tedious.  Especially with your VGA Expropriator.  Can you tell us about that balance, the balance between process and product?

To me it's really all about process, and that's what I get the most satisfaction out of. The day after day laborious parts can have a bit of a mind-numbing yet comforting desperation about them; but discovering something, or when something theoretical starts really actually working, it's the biggest buzz ever. Conversely, if things aren't working or can't be reproduced from before, I can carry a damn foul mood for days and will start to obsessively try to repair things, anything, until I get the feeling I'm back on track. Just recently I spent a week trying to repair an espresso machine and it was quite an emotional time trying to find cheap replacement parts and everything. Sort of like a slow extended panic... and all the while I was just trying to avoid coming face to face with a motivational dip in the self-imposed discipline studio routine. Overall, it's a real hermit-like way of being, I think.

In terms of product, I think that's more of a social thing, a bit of a container with which to show people what I’m doing. But this is also something to work towards, an excuse or even a justification for focusing on something intently. Showing things to people can be great of course, and it can be nice if it goes over well, but the actual figuring shit out part has always been the most fun. I think that's part of the reason I've been more interested in performance lately, because there's always a chance to be really discovering new things as it happens.

There's also the sort of capitalistic notion of product which I've been toying with a bit lately. I completed a first video synthesizer in November and I tried to make it seem as much like some sort of commercial product as possible. It was really fun imagining that I might try to sell 1 or 2 on eBay; making it look shiny, being thorough with the quality and testing... when it was all done and documented I got a lot of requests from people who wanted one, but when I really thought about it I was like, "no, no you can't have one". I guess that sounds kind of lame but making an actual sellable product would be far more difficult for a lot of reasons.

Your artwork, these machines you create. For me it seems like you’re regressing or mutating existing technologies to create new devices and actually new mediums in terms of live-performance.  One way to describe your work would be “the bastardization of hardware and digital inputs.”  How would you describe your work?

I think that the technologies readily available to us always were the illegitimate children of a much greater potential, so if you mean, "pointing out their inherent bastardness", then yes. Even the worst of the worst garbage devices need a home, and I do try to do my part.

A bit of a hacking/collage hybrid is how I'd want to describe the work. The hacking part is more like the process side of just tinkering away, chasing after ideas, finding, collecting, cataloguing, taking things apart, seeing what happens, things like that. The product side, as in making installations or boxes or videos is closer to collage: showing work so often implies a real or imagined deadline, and so under pressure I'll just rummage through all the things I've been messing with, treating everything like found objects and just try to build something cohesive with whatever I can find at the moment. 

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Some of your video demos feel like performances, like artwork in and of themselves, whole pieces rather than a demonstration of a device… do you utilize these devices?  Do you ever have “gigs”?

I've been playing out with the latest batch of constructions, yeah... at least the ones which are light enough to haul around. It's immensely fun. It's a bit like a mini-version of the studio process, just plugging things together in whatever ways and seeing what you can get them to do. I've done five live shows since December and they were all completely different. I'm always trying to be a bit site-specific and try new things, mix things up... like even sending videos out in the post, I always want to make a unique edit for wherever it's going to.

How does one even get started making these machines?  Between the electronic hardware and the software coding, there’s a whole new vocabulary to learn!  Is there a sharp learning curve?  How did you get started?

I've heard that the Forrest Mimms - Radioshack books are traditionally the best place to start with electronics, but reading and printing stuff out from the web can be great. Circuit-bending is probably the most instant-gratification place to start and there's lots of great websites out there to get inspired on and find plans and things also. (but on a side note: I usually find the "110/220 line voltage = death; end of discussion" type of disclaimers on some of those sites to be so fucking annoying. Like maybe try a bit of realistic safety education instead of scaring the shit out of people!)

I haven't done a lot of straight ahead bending myself, but I always like to check what people are coming up with and there's a number of related methodologies I tend to rely on... like "not really knowing what the hell I’m doing" much of the time is a great way to discover things for example.

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But I really started by watching two friends and occasional collaborators from Canada, who do various electronics, mechanical, sculptural type work. Denton Fredrickson and Robyn Moody. Just watching them work and asking a lot of questions. When we'd be working on whatever projects together, I'd get directed in how to do some of the labor which they knew best, like soldering andwiring or chopping wood, hunting for parts, and I'd be messing around in their studios learning new skills.

For putting more electronics or building techniques into my own work, there's a lot of it which is really coming down to space I think. Well over a year ago, I figured that the more tables I had in the studio, the more different kinds of work I could do. I had a space

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set up for only video and audio editing at the time. So I just set up another table with a soldering iron and a light; but I didn't use it for months and months, it just sat there and I kept adding things like shelves, old test equipment, tools, found objects, stuff like that.

I read a lot of DIY electronics sites and collected a lot of schematics and data-sheets for things I'd wanted to try. It wasn't until I eventually found a website that had big bold letters on it saying, "STOP THINKING ABOUT BUILDING", that I actually went and bought a breadboard and some variety packs of components and got stuck in. It was weird. I'd never understood how to get schematics onto a breadboard (or from there onto a circuit board) by myself before, but it had kind of soaked in somehow.

So it would be a long and spattered learning curve for me because it hasn't been constant like the strictly video and audio work has been over the years. Half-hermitic lifestyle, half-casual apprenticeship type situations in collaborative settings is how I really got going.

What’s next?  What are you working on now?

Running parts of video signals through various kinds of motors and through various mediums as vibrations: mechanical filters, resonating interfaces, etc. There's a few crackpot theories I want to explore. Some Theremin based stuff. Exhibition in Zürich in March. Gigging around with the video synthesis thing. Trying to find paid jobs. Working on a guitars based live A/V noise project.

What inspires you?  Whom do you admire?

The people whom I've worked closely on projects with. It's most inspiring to really experience the way people work first-hand, how they solve problems, manage their time, what their motivations are, etc.

So, the two guys mentioned above who I learned so much from I admire and am inspired by; and then also Kinga Kielczynska, Mike Ottink, Sagi Groener, Alberto de Michele, Guvara Soliman, Ruchama Noorda, Irina Birger... people I've recently collaborated on stuff with or worked for directly.

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Besides them, it would be the people I’ve spoken with, done gigs with, shared ideas with, seen the work of a number of times in person and asked lots of questions about it... in terms of AV electronics inspiration it would be Karl Klomp, Gert-Jan Prins, Andy Guhl... on the more machine art side, Peter Flemming, I've learned things from recently and been inspired by. But many there's others in related disciplines and people I've never met in person. And of course there would be the people I've worked on stuff with in the years past.

Also, all those hackers across the planet, the folk-artists who mod their cars, the train engineers, the best-boys, gaffers, and grips. The musicians who take things seriously but not too seriously.

It's weird, but actually just knowing that something is possible is more than half the work sometimes, so that's always inspiring.

Download

VGA Expropriator video experiment

Website

www.mediumrecords.com

Photos

Seamus Cater
DNK Concert Series, Amsterdam, Jan 8, 2007
Brian McKenna
Screenshots and VGA Expropriator

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