An Interview with Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork

Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork’s piece for TB13, Not Exactly (Whatever the New Key Is), 2017–ongoing, is a dynamic work of aural architecture. Black vinyl walls inflate and deflate in sync with a multichannel sound piece playing on speakers placed in precise locations throughout the space. 

Editor of Taipei Biennial 2023, William Smith,  spoke with Gork about the experience of refabricating her project in Taiwan, the avant-garde roots of her interest in sound installations, and the tangled histories of blow-up structures. 

William Smith: You first realized a version of this work at Empty Gallery in Hong Kong, where it was called Not Exactly B Flat. There was another iteration at Mission 365, an art space in Los Angeles. What’s different about the piece in Taipei?

Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork: The original was made in a space probably a fifth of the size of the gallery where it was in Taipei Fine Arts Museum. When I re-installed that piece in LA, it was in a gallery closer to the size of the current space. At TFAM I knew I wanted to retain the feeling of intimacy from Empty Gallery but with the feeling of spaciousness that came about at 356 Mission. That was a goal: I wanted visitors to feel choreographed and inside the maze, but they could also get out of the maze and experience the piece from the “outside.” 

WS: Do you consider the installation in Taipei to be site-specific?

JKG: I don’t think of my work as site-specific. It’s more site dependent. Acoustics are never going to be the same from one place to the next. The sculpture was also re-fabricated for this show. We tried to improve upon the previous design by re-engineering how the walls rise and fall. 

We also had to fit the scale of the museum. When I came to TFAM for a site visit, I noticed that it was a popular museum with a lot of people flowing through. I wanted the work to maintain an intimate feeling, even if there were to be 20 people in the room at once. At Empty Gallery, a maximum of around four people could experience the piece at the same time due to the size of the piece and the gallery. 

Everything was designed around the inflatables. Once I understood the acoustics in the room, I started to build the audio piece. Luckily audio is fluid and flexible. You can change keys, adapt different EQ settings, and make other modifications. 

WS: The works title suggests that you weren’t sure beforehand what key the work would be in—previously it was B Flat. 

JKG: Its frequency is about one key higher, 45hz. 

WS: What accounts for that change? Is that the nature of the blowers or the inflatable materials?

JKG: Everything. The smaller blowers I’ve used for previous versions of the piece tend to have a very loud resonant frequency. It’s a shrill tone. The ones I’m using in Taipei are each about four times bigger but the tone is not nearly as loud. They have a much softer resonant frequency. The tone has a different feeling to it. It’s a different timbre. 

WS: “Choreographed” is an interesting term for how visitors might experience the piece. What do you mean by that?

JKG: With a lot of my multichannel work, I think of the choreography or score as one-and-the-same with what you’re hearing. What you hear is determined by where your body is placed, and where your head is positioned in the space. Your movements in the space are creating a score as you’re navigating it.  The sound is pulling your attention in different directions. When you are outside of the sculpture and in the larger part of the room, you’re more of a voyeur—an observer of the sculpture. The acoustics are different when you’re outside of the maze. 

WS: When I was in the piece, I found myself paying attention not just to what I was hearing but also to the nature of listening in general. 

JKG: The experience switches between listening and understanding how you’re listening. I’m trying to bring about an awareness of how your body is placed and what decisions you might be making unconsciously or consciously in how you’re navigating the installation. The experience also changes as more people enter the space. As the walls fall down, you can see other people in the room, creating a dynamic of observing and being observed. 

WS: You introduced me to the work of Maryanne Amacher, and I’m curious how you see her influence on this piece. 

JKG: I was fortunate that I was able to study sound art as an undergraduate, when I was 20 years old. One of my teachers, Laetitia Sonami, was a colleague of Maryanne Amacher’s. Even though I never experienced any of Amacher’s installations in person, I’ve had the privilege of being friends with a community of people who have been her collaborators, students, or colleagues. Even before the current interest in her work, including the publication of her selected writings and interviews by Blank Forms, I had access to some of her writing and bootleg recordings of her work. I remember watching her lecture at Ars Electronica from 1989 and thinking, f**k. She’s speaking how I think about sound. 

I was inspired by her process of creation, the way that she worked with sound and architecture. Sometimes she had just one sound file that she would place in speakers all over a space. And she would live in the space, and spend time with it, slowly tweaking it, slowing changing things, listening. Our understanding of space happens over time. It changes based on other sounds that are in the space and people in the space, but also how we’re feeling, the time of day, whether we’re sleeping or awake. 

Early on I would spend days in an installation tweaking it, changing it, listening to it, over and over again. I wasn’t trying to copy what she was doing, but it was a process that I understood.

 

WS: I thought of Amacher's concept of “aural architecture,” which encompasses everything from a physical intervention in a space to the structure of someone's ear. 

JKG: We all experience sound uniquely. We are all individuals within collective architecture. It’s not just our cultural background or our understanding of music or our taste level that’s determinant—it’s also the unique biological structure of our ears. 

WS: How do you see the relationship between your role as a sound artist and your role as sculptor?

JKG: My background is in visual arts. Art galleries are not acoustically suited to what I wanted to do with sound and multichannel audio. I had to incorporate material in the spaces that would respond to and interact with the sound. I understood those interventions as sculptural.

The concept for the inflatables came about through research into acoustic modifications in stadiums. There’s an acoustic product—basically, giant black inflatable balloons—that can be placed in the ceiling of stadiums used for football games or Taylor Swift concerts. When these thick vinyl balloons are inflated with air, they provide some absorption. During a pop concert that absorption is needed for the performance to sound decent. When they’re deflated, they don’t provide any absorption, so a sports event can feel loud. I saw this product at an audio engineering conference. The balloons were just on the ground looking like giant walls. 

I’d always wanted to build my own architecture, but it’s so expensive. I was just getting tired of dealing with so much material, so much mass—controlling sound requires a lot of mass. I became interested in working with inflatables as a way for me to create mass without actually having to deal with drywall, fiberglass, all these things. 

WS: I wanted to ask you about the history of avant-garde music and sound, like John Cage . . .

JKG: We don't have to go into that lol.

WS: Lol right, but modernist music was of a moment when inflatables became an important part of avant-garde architecture. Is there an intertwined history? 

JKG: When I was in school in San Francisco I got to work with Chip Lord, who was one of the Ant Farm guys. They were very involved with the San Francisco Art Institute. A big Ant Farm retrospective, featuring their inflatable architecture, also came to SFMOMAwhen I worked there.  I've always been in interested in Utopian/Distopian architecture and how it relates to technology and social constructs.

I've lived on communes. I've lived in alternative warehouse spaces. I tried to do that in my twenties, in the Bay Area. 

WS: There's nothing hippie-ish about your installation. 

JKG: In my early work you'd see it.

WS: You seem to have turned the utopian impulse on its head by constructing an imposing maze. It feels like a barrier.

JKG: That drive to find that utopian space often results in a dystopian world. It's like they don't exist without the other. Those things exist in opposition together. That was my lived experience, even before trying to be involved in those kinds of communities. Escapism, liberatarian thought, the fetish for self-sufficiency. There's a desire to strive for something “better,” and in that process it can make the world worse.

WS: I see a lot of skepticism about avant-garde and utopian histories in your work.

JKG: A lot of those histories were made by a very specific demographic. They were not in acknowledgement of the land itself. Being part Indigenous, which is not something I speak about a lot, I felt attuned to the contradictions and hypocrisies of these histories. 

It’s not just something that I see, it also kind of exists in the whole East West thing. My dad is Jewish but he's Buddhist. My mom is Japanese but is atheist. A lot of  Buddhist texts were translated by Jewish white dudes, and it's all been transformed, rebranded in California, and fed back in a certain way. Here we are striving to create these utopian communities when actually those communities did exist. We just killed them. What the f**k is up with that? 

WS: That heaviness comes into the work. In the way you’ve lit the space—or rather kept it mostly in darkness.

JKG: But the work is also funny.

WS: Many people might associate the walls with bouncy castles. And when the walls deflate, become flaccid, and fall down—that’s the essence of physical comedy.

JKG: At the same time, inflatables are also used in architecture of war, whether as cheap, quickly constructed hangars, or as obstacle courses for training. Some of the obstacle courses are made by the same companies that make bouncy castles. There are complex tensions in this material. Technology that's used for playful ends often stems from something dark and sinister. At least in the US.

WS: Those implications are present for sure. Also fetishistic associations: shiny, shiny plastic

JKG: Oh yeah. I’ve always leaned toward that: attraction/repulsion. 

WS: Could you talk about the use of pop,  or pop-adjacent vocals in the audio?  Is that part of the public address of the piece?

JKG: Up until this piece I had only really worked with noise, non-language-based sound. And when I say language, to me language includes music. Language includes any kind of content that’s understood by other people without explanation. I think doing this work is important in some place that has its own history and relationship to pop music outside the US and the pop machine structure. 

I worked with friends whose jobs are in the pop music machine, writing commercial songs or writing songs for other singers or working in production studios. I’m still grappling with how that language is understood, disrupted, manipulated, and can fall apart—but can also be very powerful. 

For a long time, I didn’t listen to music. I still listen to music only in certain circumstances. 

As a kid, I got involved with noise and punk more because I didn’t like feeling manipulated. I didn’t watch Hollywood movies starting from a very young age because I felt like I was being controlled by the media. It felt very weird. Why am I crying? Why do I feel sad? Later on, I was able to let up, I thoroughly enjoy lots of that stuff. But I did not understand it at first; it made me immediately uncomfortable. 

WS: Your piece feels like a controlled exposure to the emotional manipulation of the pop machine. The polished vocals are so evocative in your work, but they’re in fragments.

JKG: You have to piece it together. That’s consistent with all my work that deals with noise. It relies on the audience to do the work of putting the piece together. And everyone is going to put that piece together in their own way. That ties back to Amacher’s thinking about how we all hear differently, we’re all very structurally different. How can work acknowledge and embrace that rather than dictating what the audience has to feel.