Global Sonic Culture
Interviewing RanRan
Ranran is a fine artist, dance performer and sound explorer. She is adept at performing in the gravitational pull of photography, video, sculpture, sound and would like to experiment art in any forms of multi medias. She studied visual arts and philosophy in the United States and trained in Classical Chinese dance for a dozen years as a base of creating planes of stillness in motion through motion and short films of motion in stillness. Her research revolves around philosophy, visual art, literary, art history, film aesthetics, sound art and live improvisation.
Q:What are the differences and relationships from your feelings between sounds taking part when you are improvising and when you are making sounds pieces?
A: The sense of place is different. I am thinking myself as a sculpture when I make improvisations and immerse in the environment. I degrade myself and I am not the dominator of the sound.
While I am creating a sound piece, I need to make investigations for a certain topic and I find myself more like cooperating with the sound. I am the dominator of the sound and the sound is only considered as my output.
Sound is controlling me while I am controlling making sound.
Q: What are the differences from your feelings between sounds taking part when you are improvising and when you are listening to a playback after your improvisation?
A: Like when you’re in love, you definitely know the thrill of love at first sight with music and the feeling you have already known it’s him and you’re with him for life. On another hand, writing music is like making a project for business, you need to label it and need to make it more like planned. I dig into noise making because it has a sense of space and it is not just limited to do re mi fa so la ti and the rhyme. Noise-making and electronic music are more acting as ‘strangers’. Those randomness making them very hard to control the pitches and amplitudes.
Q: Have you ever had an unsatisfied experience with a sound artist for a untrained live performance?
A: Life is out of control–I HAVE TRIED MY BEST IN EVERY LIVE PERFORMANCE. Even if you have been training for a long time, you can’t guarantee that there will be no issues at the moment when you are on the stage. The emotional arousal of the moment will match my physical movement due to body perception. I might had an unsatisfied experience beforehand, but it was a dope.
Q: What is the difference between so called dance performance and art performance?
A: Performance art is very modern and conceptual. Dance performance like ballet and folk dance are trained to be on stage for business. Performance artists are making arts through multi-channels. They make their bodies as sculptures and everyone can become performance artists when they have a certain concept or an idea. We were making live performance once we were born.
Q: Are there any correlations between classical music and erratic sound designs? I mean may be it is only a sound piece combining with field recordings and white noises.
A: Of course. What’s more, I believe as long as a sound artist becomes a professor like Steven reich, his or her ears must be trained for years. A good sound art piece should be conceptual or narrative or logical. Not all sound artists are professional, they make sounds for living and money.
Ranran: I think Sound art is a symbol of future. I strongly recommend the book by Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner: Audio Culture and there was a theory mentioned: Vision is violent, sound is submissive. Sight is masculine, sound is feminine. For me, sound is very soft and the engagement is very high.
Q: How do you do researches when you are making a specific project?
A:I like observing people, watching films and reading. I feel like I’m doing things right now with a strong knowledge background and I have my own style. I read over 2000 books in 3 years and I watched 5 movies per week.
In this fast-paced era, fewer and fewer people spend time on reading paper books, replaced by a variety of ins tiktok short videos. I do believe there is nothing wrong with the short videos themselves, but you need to have your own methodology and worldview when you watching them. Other wise, you know it is a easy way to train your brain like a suck. People who are famous of making short videos are all rather artists or businessmen and they are so smart to make them simplify but attracting.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/flh39x3xg0761p4/interview%20ranran.mp3?dl=0