Electronic Beats Spring 2013 [antikvár]

"Everyone should have a daily ritual"Max Dax: I recently met Andrey A. Tarkovsky, the son of the great Russian director, in his apart-ment iii Florence to interview him for this issue of Electronic Beats Magaziné.Hans Ulrich Obrist: Funnv, I recently read Tarkovsky's collected writings in which he emphasized that everyone should have a daily ritual to follow in life.MD: We talked about rituals too.HUO: Inspired by Tarkovsky, I started a new ritual in my life: I ask everyone I meet to handwrite a sentence for me. And while they write the sentence, I take a photo and then post it on Instagram. It's a daily ritual, a protest against the disappearance of handwriting in the digital age. Umberto Eco has extensively described this pheno-MD: How do you view the difference between blogs and magazines? With Electronic Beats we try to reinvigo-rate and, in a sense, reinvent aspects of print culture with every issue. At the same time, we are devoted to blog culture and do our best to feature them on electronicbeats.net, though I perceive major differences in form and content.HUO: Well, apart from my Instagram blog I see my contribu-tions to a variety of magazines as my way to blog. Our ongoing con-versation for this editorial should\Vi(h the cxcepíion of (viiain smiopoliíkal sf rands of liip liop and anomalies üke Vlari Tcenage Riót, clcdronic iiiiisic, parlinilariv dancc imisic, is nol somethiiig most people associate with |m>lesl song. Hut ílie times they are a-thangúr, and so are musical foeuses. Whilc we at Electmnic Haris )l;u>n/.mo arc roiiunitted to continu-íiijí our cxploration of artists Sucli as Depeche pdc, Kraftwerk and Quster, whose iiiusic liiis served as (he hasis of so iniK'li of lodays house, teelmo and synthpop. wc alsó üike pride in scnitinizing lesser knowi coniers of the sonic juiigle, like (he low-cnd imiova-(ions of caraiidio hass and contributioiis to queer disroursc by the likes of Térre Thaemlit/, Hie Kiiile and IManiiingtorock. As ahvays, the fiiturc was yestenlay. Bnt you ui read alxuií it here.Kindest reganls,>lav Dax liditor-in-('liiefbe mentioned in that regardbut alsó my weekly contributions to the Zurich-based Das Magazin and other columns. If you under-stand the blog as a kind of replace-ment of the classic diary, then you could alsó consider my columns in various publications to be a kind of public diary.MD: Keeping a diary is alsó a ritual. And as we speak, you re currently showing a big Jonas Mekas exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery who, of course, was a key figure in the development of diari-stic filmmaking.HUO: He is the best example of a man who has thought and dreamt in diaristic terms over his entire life. He is a great source of inspiration in that regard. I know from inter-views tliat I did with Mekas that he considered the daily act of filming with his Bolex camera an important ritual. Just like Tarkovsky.MD: What were your thoughts on organizing such a large Mekas retrospective?HUO: Firstly, we are always driven by things t hat we want to share with otliers. For example, we want to share that feeling of being inspired by Jonas Mekas' diaristic film works, especially in liglit of him recently celebrating.his 90th birth-day. In a very real sense, organizing public exhibitions doesn't always mean that you're antici-pating the needs of a markét butinstead follows personal interest or instinct. To be honest, I see every thing I do as part of experiments in a larger laboratoryone that s open to the generál public.MD: For this issue we did quite a bit of traveling to meet people we find inspiring and challenging. We went to Miami, Manhattan, Hamburg and London to interview the likes of Hans-Joachim Roedelius, Dave Gahan, Kari Bartos and Terre Thaemlitz. What I personally like about all of these interactions is that they can be seen as a kind of mobile laboratory. You simply never know how they will turn out beforehand, and so you hope that they offer new angles to old questionseven though more often than not, they offer new ans-wers to unasked questions. How do you view the idea of questions, ideas and art as non-static entities that change over time?HUO: Well, one of my next exhibitions entitled Do it will revisit the originál Do it exhibition from 1993 I did with Christian Boltanski and Bertrand Lavier. It consists of more than three hundred instructions by artists that could then be interpreted by other artistslike a musical score written by one composer is perfor-med by other musicians.MD: Although here the "instructions" would seem to be even more open to interpretation, no? Now that is an experiment with an open end. ~