Ken Hollings Testimony Transcript

Anthony Auerbach: So, the next witness is Ken Hollings.

Tom McCarthy: Ken, hi. Just before we start interviewing Ken I'd just really like to thank Polly Staple and Cubitt and London Arts for facilitating this, these Hearings, and Laura Hopkins for designing the camera and Jenny Kagan for lighting it and Alex Hamilton and John and...

AA: Eugenie...

TMcC: Eugenie, and Martin Pickles, and everybody else that's been involved in producing this event. Thank you very much indeed. And to loads of people I missed out. Ken Hollings: hello, thank you for coming. We've invited you here today because you've written widely about and participated in practises of sound manipulation, data streaming and viral broadcasting. We'd like first of all to look at your own work in this area. In the eighties you collaborated with a rock band called Biting Tongues... not as a musician yourself but rather with text and messages which you'd manipulate and insert. Could you tell us a little more about the nature of this collaboration?

Ken Hollings: Certainly. Biting Tongues was set up in the early eighties to provide the soundtrack for a silent film which was first shown in the old Factory Club in Hume in Manchester. And it was a collective of people who didn't really know each other socially but who had lots of parallel and shared interests. One of the number was Graham Massey, who went on to form 808 State and become a backbone of the Manchester techno scene, and later went on to work with Bjork and a number of other groups. And between the two of us we began to develop a strategy of using a number of prerecorded tapes during the performances which would just be running continually through the monitor and actually through the PA as well, which would provide an uninterrupted stream of voices, loops, radio interference etcetera.

TMcC: And where were you pulling these voices from?

KH: A lot from shortwave, some from tv. There was a performance we did in London which included a loop of the first announcement of the discovery of bodies in Dennis Nielsen's flat...

TMcC: He was the civil servant...

KH: Muswell Hill, yes. And so for a large part of the performance the audience would hear occasionally depending on the volume of the musicians, it's always going: 'Murder tonight in London: the search for a possible thirteen bodies continues...' repeated and repeated.

TMcC: Do you have any... I see you've brought a tape machine with you.

KH: Yes, this is recording.

TMcC: Oh, I thought you might have brought some samples with you.

KH: I don't know what you're going to do with these tapes, so I'm making my own.

TMcC: To protect your interests?

KH: Absolutely.

TMcC: That's sort of like the pot calling the kettle black, isn't it? Could you tell us about your more recent collaboration with Huib Emmer? Did I pronounce his...?

KH: Huib Emmer.

TMcC: Huib Emmer.

KH: Huib Emmer is a Dutch electronic composer who I first met in the early nineties. We originally came together to create a three-act opera based around the death of William Blake.

TMcC: Blake again.

KH: Absolutely: how can you get away from there? The premise for the opera, the one that we both shared and were most excited about, was a couple of apocryphal accounts which Georges Bataille...

TMcC/KH: Him again.

KH: ...quoted in his essay about Blake for the Literature and...

TMcC: Literature and Evil...

KH: Literature and Evil collection, which he wrote as a riposte to Sartre Qu'est-ce qu'est la Littérature? These accounts placed Blake squarely in the madhouse, squarely in Bethlehem Hospital on the banks of the Thames, and were considered authentic at the time, primarily because it included anecdotal evidence which was borne out in Blake's own art. For example, he's described as drawing the ghost of a flea, and as having to start the drawing again because the flea had moved its head. And also an ancillary piece of data, which was the presence of John Martin, who was an arsonist who was caught trying to burn down the choir of York Cathedral. And together these pieces of information created a kind of viral myth that Blake had ended his days a screaming lunatic, as a public display, as it were, for the great and the good of London. My own feeling, and the feeling of Huib Emmer the composer, was that, that in fact what the myth responded to was a particular notion of how the Enlightenment had constructed not just science and discourse but how it had constructed the personality, the individuality of the citizen. If you like, the Enlightenment saw the rise of the citizen state in which not only is the human defined really for the first time socially, culturally in terms of language, in terms of nationality, in terms of marital relationships, in terms of whether they're a machine breaker or a machine minder or a machine supervisor; but also you're beginning to have this myth whereby that identity is becoming a universal unit of measurement...

TMcC: Yes: the subject.

KH: ...by which the cosmos itself becomes vectored and mapped and charted.

TMcC: So the, sort of Bataille and Sade would be an alternative, I mean a sort of counter narrative to this, to this super-narrative?

KH: Exactly so. In the case of Sade you have a writer and thinker who was actually using the actual methods of enquiry formulated through and by the enlightenment to actually demolish that actual element of measurement, that sacred human inch if you like, because it is sacred...

TMcC: There's a wonderful...

KH: ...it must be cast out.

TMcC: There's a wonderful anecdote somewhere in Bataille where, I don't know if it's true or not, maybe you can help us with this, where he's describing Sade. It's about transmission and revolution and completely ties in with all these viral notions. That Sade, when the crowds are gathering round the Bastille, Sade takes his, his potty I guess, this sort of...

KH: It was a kind of urinal spout.

TMcC: Urinal thing. And he inverted it, and made it into a trumpet, and said: 'They're killing the prisoners in the Bastille!'... which they weren't. And then the crowds storm it. So there's sort of transmission through shit, you know, rather than through the ego.

KH: And they storm the Bastille and found that there's only about seven people there, most...

TMcC: ...and lost A Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom...

KH: ...and lost A Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom... for the moment.

TMcC: Well, a moment that was about, eighty years?

KH: More than that. I think it turned up in Berlin at the beginning of the twentieth century. But it's interesting, just to finish the... because I think it's interesting, the notion of storming the Bastille, of bringing down the walls, of creating this great insurgence, that...

TMcC: Through disinformation...

KH: ...through disinformation, of course, that they found so little to show to the masses that they had to eventually exhibit a printing press which had been confiscated from a small revolutionary cell and lay this before the public and say: 'Here are the instruments of torture by which these despots have been enslaving you! Here is your torture device!'

TMcC: Which is not far off the truth perhaps.

KH: Not far off the truth at all.

TMcC: Was there not at the time of the French Revolution a lot of popular pornography going about which involved royal and political figures? I mean, completely libellous, I mean it would never be allowed today.

KH: Absolutely. I mean, Sade himself got into quite a lot of trouble. He was after all accused of writing a pornographic account of Napoleon's life. It was one of the things that kept him in Charenton. Whereas of course Blake died singing happily in the fountain, in the fountain court of the Temple in London, Sade actually did die in the madhouse, where he also finished one last work, which unfortunately is lost, which included in its list of characters which I believe is all that exists now Charles the Tenth, who was a particularly vicious and savage noble, as it were, rather than a noble savage. And Louis the Fifteenth, who was a cad as well.

TMcC: So, you've worked with Huib Emmer again. You're working with him now on a piece called Welcome to Disturbia.

KH: Welcome to Disturbia. Yes. This is being created for a national Dutch radio station, probably the equivalent of Radio Three. And it started out as a commission from a Mezzo Soprano we worked with previously on a couple of touring stage pieces, one of which was called Rorschach Audio, which was inspired...

TMcC: Rorschach as in the ink blots...

KH: Yes. Which was actually a piece of text taken from one of the EVP recordings.

TMcC: Which are like audio ink blots...

KH: Yes. It involves a side-show mind reader, actually, channelling details about the Stealth Fighter, but she's actually in the nineteen-thirties, and the actual broadcast of the Stealth Fighter is taking place in the nineteen-seventies. It's actually based on a, an incident that took place at Stanford University in the late seventies, when they were working with a remote sensing project, looking at Area 51 in the Nevada Desert, and the sensor started picking up this image of a piece of black light moving through white light, and a sense of energy but without circuitry, and Airforce Intelligence got hold of this report and yanked the photographs and yanked all the findings and severely investigated the entire project. So we thought it would be more interesting if it was a nineteen-thirties carny mind reader who's there to help people with their love lives and when their luck goes sour on them, suddenly getting this message. In fact, the piece ended with the CNN broadcasts from the Baghdad Hilton during the first night of Operation Desert Storm, forms a kind of white noise that takes over the stage. So she was interested enough in our work to ask us to write a solo piece for radio for her. And, curiously enough, my starting point was Cocteau's La Voix Humaine.

TMcC: Sorry?

KH: La Voix Humaine: the idea of the soul...

TMcC: 'The Human Voice'.

KH: 'The Human Voice', but the single female sort of chained to the wall by the telephone. And then I realised that I wanted it to be far more mobile; I wanted her moving through the entire house, and that's when I got... I went back to one of my matrices that I like to draw on, which is the nineteen-fifties. Anything to do with the nineteen-fifties: design, science, technology, pop culture, pop whatever. And began to examine the development of what were known as the Levitstown Projects, which was a kind of uniform method of manufacturing, mass-producing houses in what had originally been areas of rural emptiness outside major cities. So there was a large conurbation outside New York, which was originally grown out of these projects. They're almost like the housing equivalent of Macdonald's, you know, three thousand built today, four thousand built today. And they were all exactly the same, they had these white picket fences, the inhabitants were sort of encouraged to build barbecue pits in the back yard, to clean and maintain the drive, grow lawns. god knows why but they all had to have lawns. And so there was this notion that there was this great happy conformity going on, I mean, you know, nineteen fifty-five is the year in which Disneyland is opened, this black, dark Sunday on which Disneyland is first opened, and it was a disaster. And in the same way the psychiatrists and sociologists were beginning to examine these new communities that were springing up in these suburban conurbation's and finding they were going nuts. And, you know, they weren't happy behind their new picket fences, they weren't happy with their green grass. And it was mostly the women, who at that point were still pretty much chained to the kitchen...

TMcC: So in Welcome to Disturbia you take, your heroine is one of these women.

KH: Yes.

TMcC: But if I understand it right from your previous descriptions of it to me, the radio is very... or she's almost like a radio: she's this...

KH: She is like a radio. She's a kind of obsessive-compulsive figure. Completely alone in the house, husband's at work, kids are at school, sister's in Cleveland. And she's just going through enumerating all the things that she has in her household, including the radio, the tv, the refrigerator. I mean, this is at a time when kitchens were being designed to look like scientific laboratories, when you could buy a vacuum cleaner that was shaped like a telecommunications satellite. So this notion that space was actually invading the home was a very very potent one. At the same time you have experiments with spectral realities. This is the age of the 3-d movie, which didn't catch on, but it's also the age of the stereophonic hi-fi system, which did. And you find that a lot of records were released at that time which were purely sound effects, the idea being that you've got these wonderful, life-like, ghost-like copies of live sound. So the idea was your front room could be a drag strip; it could be a scrapyard; it could be a railway station. And I kind of, I kind of like the idea. The initial thought was that there is a woman enumerating everything in her house AND SUDDENLY A TRAIN GOES BY! And she has to kind of deal with that idea and say: 'Well, what's happening in this space that I'm in now?' And then she has to go back to enumerating where she is again and what's in the fridge AND THEN A DRAG RACER GOES BY! And then there's Rod Sterling on the tv or there's the amazing Kriswell offering predictions on the radio or there's Marshall McLuhan making one of his very early interviews. And this kind of information is bombarding her more and more.

TMcC: So the piece is like the radio itself. It's a radio piece about the radio about the radio, this kind of infinite regress...

KH: It is a radio piece about the radio that's actually embedded...

TMcC: As a sound collage, as a time collage, as a psychic collage, as a...

KH: Yes, exactly. And it will be embedded in a talk that I'll be giving, which is exactly about the mapping of Disturbia in terms of electronic media, in terms of projections of the future.

AA: I mean, is there an important parallel then that you make between the post-war experience of radio... We've talked about, kind of, the nineteen-thirties, the nineteen-forties, where we've explored a kind of subjectivity connected with radio. And does that subjectivity then for you become totally involved in the consumer subject? This consumption being the major cultural revolution of the nineteen-fifties.

KH: I think without a doubt. If you like, there was a... The nineteen-fifties in economic terms was quite unique, because you had this enormous boom, and it was like the final explosion of industrial manufacturing, of probably the largest ever consumer-led economic expansion. And if you like it's the pre-echo of what's going to happen in the nineteen-seventies, when the industrial powerbase begins to collapse and you begin to look more and more towards a culture of consumption, a culture of service; or as we're now having to do deal more and more with a culture of data-processing and data-streams. But having said that, what we're also looking at I think is a notion of an evolutionary jump, which I think is, if you like, transcends notions of production and consumption. Because production and consumption if you like together create a notion of progress, which is a phantom I think we're still having to fight with today. But behind that, almost as a kind of spectral shadow, following this notion of progress, is this notion of an evolutionary leap. If you look at a lot of the literature in the nineteen-fifties, a lot of the science fiction movies, a lot of pulp magazines, there is this thought that somehow, by the end of that decade, something remarkable was going to take place. A step would have been taken. It would mean that either we're all vacationing on Mars or we'll be taken over by giant radioactive ants, you know, under the control of the International Communist Party. But it's interesting that both are addressed with equal confidence, with equal certainty. And I certainly think that by the end of the nineteen-fifties we'd lost that sense of certainty. But I don't think we ever quite lost the sense of that evolutionary change might still be possible.

ZZ: Yes, it's just: in the course of this conversation I've realised how much, what a variety of sounds you've come across and used. And we are talking all the time during this evening about the identity of the sound being sort of constantly sort of in quotation marks. That is, it's not ever being properly unique and individual; it is always a reflection of larger sound, of the sound of society so to speak, of the country in industry or something. Did you come across a kind of unique sound ever never been repeated, on your memory at least?

KH: A unique sound?

ZZ: A unique sound.

TMcC: An original.

ZZ: An original unique sound, which is not consist of echoes of...

TMcC: ...found. Original versus found.

ZZ: Yes.

KH: I don't think I completely understand the question.

ZZ: It's like for example... For example you've been using for example Nielsen's voice, David Nielsen, for example...

KH: No, we used a news report about Nielsen.

ZZ: Oh, right. But anyway, it's just it's again I'm coming back to the question I asked somebody else. It is about, say, the perception of evil sound. Is it our perception that it's, that we know that it was associated with the evil act, or it's uniquely evil, it is just essentially evil? Is probably it deals with the psychology of perception of the sound, rather than...

KH: I think it's interesting that quite often you've been posing questions about the truth or falsity of the signal, or the meaning of the signal, almost in moral terms, as if there is still some kind of grander arbiter.

TMcC: But Zinovy's original question was... I don't think it's the same as when you originally phrased it...

ZZ: Originality, singularity of the sound.

TMcC: I mean, at a phenomenological level, in this Heideggerian sense, like most of your, the sounds you're describing are traces, yes? They're found.

ZZ: Exactly.

TMcC: You're re-covering and repeating. I think Zinovy was saying: 'Is there such thing, could we posit... okay, a) have you ever found one? but b) could we even posit the existence of an original one that is not a trace but rather the thing that makes the trace?'

KH: No and no.

TMcC: Yes. That answers the question. If we could move on: you recently were at the Transmediale Festival in Berlin, where you participated in an event called Audio Propaganda.

KH: That's right. The Transmediale Festival, which has been running now for about fifteen years, is one of the largest media arts and electronic arts festivals in Europe if not the world. And this year the theme was 'Go Public', which I thought was great for a city's that's actually as depopulated as Berlin is. It seems as if the public has gone.

TMcC: 'Go, comma, public.'

KH: Anyone who's ever wandered around the middle of Berlin at nine o'clock in the evening to the sound of their own footsteps will know what I mean. It's a strangely depopulated zone, due obviously to the geographical stresses that...

TMcC: Sort of like Radio Three at two in the morning or something...

KH: Exactly. Exactly. Transmediale works from different sites and different locations, either as a series of seminars or exhibitions or demonstrations, but the most interesting, the most prodigal part of the whole event for me was the part I was asked to take part in, which was called Club Transmediale, which is where they were examining ways in which electronic music, visuals, text, live events etcetera, could be streamed together to create a larger environment in which to exist or to inhabit. And there was a kind of interesting historical dimension to this, that the site chosen was an old transformer house called E-Werk, which used to be on the Eastern side of the wall.

TMcC: E for electricity?

KH: Yes. I mean, Berlin had the first electrical manufacturing concern in Europe, Siemens. In fact it was so...

TMcC: One of the first big E-scenes as well.

KH: One of the first big E-scenes as well! And interestingly enough, the E-Werk became a site for raves in the early nineties, after the wall came down. It was actually just round the corner from Tresor, which was another of the major techno clubs. And both these sites are right on the edge of no-man's land. I mean, we're talking about an area where only rabbits and razorwire had duplicated before.

TMcC: Sure. So what were you doing during the Audio Propaganda event?

KH: Well, we were... The Audio Propaganda night, it was their selection as a theme. I was asked to take part. In fact I was the only writer to take part. It was a very interesting position to be reading from my novel Destroy All Monsters in the context and in the company of a large number of people who all were sitting with laptops, either sort of controlling the stream of images or music. And I realised for the first time that we were actually all assuming the same body position, that for the first time there wasn't actually that great a difference between presenting a reading and presenting a concert. You were working within the same series of parameters and how you choose to interpret them.

TMcC: It's all an issue of streaming.

KH: And because I was the only one who was actually going to open his mouth in the entire night, I was asked if I would open the evening and do my reading then, which would lead in turn into a remarkable installation piece by members of the Berlin techno group Rechenzentrum, who'd worked with a radio producer to cut up and encode George Bush's messages on the War Against Terrorism.

TMcC: And encode?

KH: Well, in the sense that they were slowing the voice down, speeding it up, doing it digitally so, you know, Bush's voice would just become elongated and suddenly snap back into focus again. And in the same way they were friezing images of Bush. I mean, for example I delivered my entire oration under an enormous image of George W. Bush pursing his lips at the audience in a rather flustered manner. And later during the piece you would see his wife's rather unfortunate smile at the memorial service in New York after September the 11^th. She suddenly does this little smile which was edited out of later broadcasts, and this was focussed on. And I was very very proud to have led into that event. I was very proud to have been a part of that experimentation. My own novel, Destroy All Monsters, was a recasting, or is a recasting, of Operation Desert Storm as a giant monster movie, and I'd re-written parts of it, or I'd added additional material because I was in Germany and because it's the only country that Elvis ever visited outside of the United States and because Elvis, or at least an animatronic version of Elvis, is one of the main characters in Destroy All Monsters.

TMcC: There are Japanese Godzillas in it as well...

KH: There's Jap... yes, there's a large number of Japanese monsters which are bred on Earthquake Island and which are brought in to fight Operation Desert Storm, because in my version of events it's not the clean, surgical version of events that the media was presenting it as at the time; instead it's a long, nasty, dirty, protracted Vietnam War, using in fact the technology that was developed out of the Vietnam War. So I think all those fancy gadgets and smart weapons that were being channelled literally directly into the media: for example, you know, the fact that the cruise missile recorded and broadcast its own destruction.

TMcC: It's sort of like Peeping Tom, isn't it?

KH: Absolutely like Peeping Tom.

TMcC: You told me something about the director of the, no the scriptwriter...

KH: The scriptwriter, Leo Marks...

TMcC: ...that was astonishing in terms of the Orphée moment we started from...

KH: Leo Marks wrote only one film script, and that was for Peeping Tom...

TMcC: ...which is the movie in which the cameraman murders and films while...

KH: Murders women but films, but reflects their reactions...

TMcC: ...to them as they die...

KH: ...as they die. Marks was a mathematical genius who at about the age of twenty was inducted into the Secret Service to work as an encryption expert. His role was to create codes that enemy agents can take into occupied territory and which they would a) be able to remember b) would be easy to dissemble and reassemble back in the UK. They discovered that a large number of agents were being caught because they would quite often make a mistake in the broadcasting of their coded message, and London would be saying: 'No, you've made a mistake, send it again'; and they'd send it again, by which time the Germans had...

TMcC: ...had honed in...

KH: ...the Germans had found the beacon and Alles was hin. So Marks was inventing means of creating easily memorable codes. He stopped using quotations from other writers because they were actually too easy to get at, or hint at, or think around. So he would actually invent his own poems. And he would teach the poem to an agent knowing that it was very likely that they'd never come back. And so he'd be teaching them the poem alone in a room and he would be trying to remember every feature and detail of that person's face knowing that he would probably never see it again.

TMcC: Almost as though the poem itself was killing...

KH: ...the poem itself was killing. In fact, one of them ended up in a famous poem called Carve Their Name with Pride, which is about an agent called Violette Zabor, and it was Marks who taught her the poem. And in fact she said: 'Who wrote this poem?' And Marks is supposed to have replied: 'I don't know. I'll find out. I'll tell you when you get back,' knowing that she would never come back.

TMcC: I feel that there's a... Well, yes: I feel there's a figure that's haunted the INS from day one, and certainly this, these hearings, which is William Burroughs...

KH: Uncle Bill...

TMcC: Uncle Bill. And I know you've written widely and extensively on William Burroughs. I'm particularly interested in this context in, well, a) his ideas of disinformation, propaganda and also 'the death code', I mean in terms of this... Doesn't he postulate the existence of a 'death code' in 'The Invisible Generation' or 'The Electronic Revolution', there's a notion that he had...

KH: He wrote a couple of essays which I think are extremely germane to our discussions here today. These were in the late sixties, early seventies. One was called 'The Invisible Generation', which he wrote, interestingly enough, for an underground newspaper in Los Angeles; and the other was 'Electronic Revolution', which was published privately in the same year that Constantine Raudive's Breakthrough was published, with its record of early EVP.

TMcC: Burroughs was obsessed with tapes at the time rather than radio...

KH: Burroughs was actually obsessed with tapes; and this was one of the reasons I actually found him very easy to get on with. He was one of the first authors I read as a, I don't know, I was about twelve or thirteen. He was certainly the first author who excited me enough to want to read. And I think one of the reasons for that, which was borne out in these two essays, was his obsession with tape recorders, and particularly reel-to-reel tape recorders. I grew up in a household that had a reel-to-reel tape recorder and I would spend hours recording voices, playing them backwards, messing around with the playback head, overdubbing, using different speeds etcetera, just to see what you could do with voices and sound. So when this writer comes along and starts saying: 'Well, beyond the text, let's start looking at how we can use tape recorders to foment disinformation. Let's see how we can use tape recorders to break up the messages that are being piped into our life...'

TMcC: He has an idea that you could actually start a riot if you went into a peaceful demonstration and played the sounds of guns and screams...

KH: Exactly in the same way that Sade did in the Bastille.

TMcC: Exactly, yes.

KH: I mean, you know, you're basically walking around with your own little urine spout under your jacket going: 'Oh no! They're killing the prisoners! And now there's a riot!' And out of that the riot emerges.

TMcC: He said you could cause a car crash by playing screeching brakes...

KH: Exactly, exactly...

TMcC: ...and a bang, and people would look around and crash.

KH: And in the same way you could take a political speech and edit animal noises in, or completely random details.

TMcC: Yes. But then he uses this very biological metaphor of virus. You know, Jane was talking about the noxious effects of radio; John was talking about virus. I mean, how does he see...?

KH: I always had a great deal of difficulty with Burroughs's thinking on the virus. What I find engaging about it is the fact that it flips the notion of writing and literature over into a scientific method, into a system. Which I think is a very important thing for literature to establish, is the means for its own creation. Above and beyond that, I've never fully understood how you take a tape and a picture and cold sore and kill the president with it.

TMcC: Yes.

KH: What is interesting, though... I'm sorry, to finish my thought: what is interesting is the way in which Burroughs looks at all technology, all media, and I include the novel itself in this category, in terms of how to use it as a weapon. I think of all the people that we've been discussing here today he's the one who just any... 'All right, how can I hurt someone with this?' He's not interested in what it sounds like; he's not interested in the aesthetic glory of it, but just 'Can I hurt someone with it?'. You know, 'What does it do?' And I think that kind of thinking is, you know, very very interesting, very refreshing, even now.

TMcC: Although I would actually contest that. I mean, there's a wonderful bit in the Orphée sequence, seconds before the bit we played, when Death, Maria Césares, Orpheus's death, says to Cégeste: 'Transmit! Transmit!' You know, for a partic... a function which she wants the transmissions to effect. But then she also says: 'Your messages are exquisite!'

KH: Ha ha ha ha!

TMcC: And I think it's the same with Burroughs. You know, he says: 'No, I'm just interested in the effect.' But then he comes up with these incredible lines of poetry. They're as good as Eliot. I mean, they're... and they clearly are quite...

KH: Burroughs was a poet, but he also...

TMcC: Leaves rustling in a Mississippi backyard...

KH: Oh he was a tremendous writer...

TMcC: ...trains whistling over distant landscapes...

KH: ...but he also went through this very interesting phase in the nineteen sixties where he was obsessed with experimentation. He was accessed, obsessed with that kind of popular mechanics American kind of mentality which was very much a part of the nineteen fifties: how does it work? How does it fit together? And I think in a sense it was a shame that he allowed himself to be reinvented in the late nineteen seventies as a quote-unquote 'writer', because I think there's definitely a moment when he would have said: 'No, I'm an activist; I'm an engineer; I'm a scientist; I'm a strategist.'

TMcC: Yes. We've really got to wrap up in a sec but there's one thing I want to ask you about, which is silence. This is a strand going through your work. You were in a group called Biting Tongues; you produced a book that came out of a Bataille conference you organised called Violent Silence; and I found a passage from an interview... it was from an essay you've written. It says, you say... It's about William Burroughs, and you say: 'Recorded silence only becomes a political act once it is played back.' Which I found a really fascinating configuration of transmission/silence. What did you mean by that?

KH: I meant one very specific thing and one very abstract thing. The very abstract thing was that the actual gesture of playing a silent tape, of actually just breaking the seal on something and sticking it in a machine and listening to it, is an act of refusal. In a more specific sense, the playing back of silent tape as a revolutionary act refers to something that I want to go on and spend some time researching soon, which is the accumulation of silences in Nixon's Watergate tapes.

TMcC: Which is where he's edited it out so as not to 'intend to criminate himself' or whatever.

KH: Well, there is an eighteen... there is a sequence of eighteen minutes of silence which at least two laboratories in the United States are currently attempting to re-erase.

TMcC: Un-erase?

KH: Yes.

TMcC: They're erasing the silence to get back the...?

KH: Yes. They think it's possible. What happened was that the tape was recorded on one machine, one playback head, and it was wiped with a completely different machine, so there's just a slight discrepancy of alignment between the two heads.

ZZ: But does it exist the silence at all? I mean, because every soundless space has its own atmospheric kind of buzz.

KH: Well, I was very, I was very fortunate to have spent some time working with John Cage, and the time spent with him has convinced me there is not such thing as silence, except an inner one.

TMcC: So what's going on in Four and a Half Minutes? I mean because...

KH: Four Minutes and Thirty-three Seconds?

TMcC: Yes. Because the most basic reading of that would be, yes, a transmission of silence. So how could you, how could one redefine that with silence under erasure?

AA: But Cage is a performance of silence. But I think the interesting thing you're suggesting is this trace, this recording of silence. So there is a kind of inalienable silence that is encrypted somehow.

KH: Exactly.

AA: And that this potentially contains the revolutionary moment.

KH: Yes. Exactly so.

TMcC: Maybe our radio project should be a quest for that silence then.

KH: I would strongly recommend it.

TMcC: On that note let's wrap up. Thank you very much for coming in.

KH: You're very welcome.