A counter-tenor soars above the drone of my laptop fan in overdrive. The camera shakes as a performer hammers away at a waterphone. Percussion reverberates into digital noise. Looking around a spartan industrial space with my mouse, I chance upon a woman in a suit dancing to herself in the corner as two shiny balls hover in the air. Then suddenly my screen goes blank, and only a google translate icon floats fixed in mid-air. Glitches notwithstanding, or maybe because of them, I feel like I’m trapped in the subconscious of google street view—perhaps what the camera does when no one’s paying attention.
Conceived as a labyrinth of interlinked rooms, Billy Bultheel’s Songs for The Contract is probably one of the more striking pieces to come out of the covid rush to digitise performance. A simple navigation system lets visitors shuffle between sequences of 360-degree footage almost like a video game, while the atmospheric quality of each vignette is perfectly attuned to the attention span of a browser. But it doesn’t just sound good, it’s also an economic experiment. Each of the nine rooms is designed to be sold as an NFT, while each performer maintains a permanent percentual share in all proceeds from the performance. When we sit down to discuss it over virtual dinner, I’m in Berlin and he’s in Athens already working on two new pieces. The following conversation has been reconstructed from countless freezes and cut offs.
So you released your most recent composition, Songs for the Contract, in April this year—at a time when most musicians and performers were unemployed, depressed, or both. How did you come up with the idea for the piece? What was it like making it during the third Berlin lockdown?
Winter in Berlin felt endless and the lockdown made it impossible to escape that. A lot of people in the city felt very frustrated. There was this urgency to do something, to be busy, even though it was impossible to really do anything. Songs for the Contract was an attempt to make sense of that moment for me. Doing something with the space and the materials I still had access to.
I was working on a performance for metal drummers, a work called The Contract that will be shown at the Athens Biennial in September this year. I had been making a bunch of percussion instruments for it and they were just standing around in my studio waiting to be shipped. So I decided to start working with them in my studio, creating small performances for each one. Like a song-cycle for The Contract. Hence Songs for the Contract.
The piece is pretty much a collection of short scenes that all take place in the same room, my studio. They were filmed on different days and at different times of day, so that you would lose the sense of time. The work is very static, but spanning over an unknown time frame, connecting non-sequential, disorienting scenes together.
So each room revolves around a certain instrument?
Or several instruments. When you go to the folia website, the rooms are shown in a three by three grid. I wanted to create a structure that is non-linear, where you can roam through the performance along different paths. You can move in a line up or down, corner to corner, from top to bottom of the grid, etc. There are these relationships between the performers that develop depending on how you traverse the grid. Does that make sense?
Instead of being submitted to a linear structure with a set time frame like a movie or livestream, where one just watched beginning to end, the performance functions more like an interface the visitor can find their own path through, and take their own time. Something closer to an adventure game like Myst.
The 360 degree footage also allows the audience to look and distort the image as they watch the performances. You can look around and search for clues while you witness the performances. I wanted to create a space for the audience to have some kind of agency even though it’s a mediated non-live event.
That makes a lot of sense in relation to your earlier work where the moving audience is pretty central. Compositions like Signs of Invasion (2018) and When Doves Cry (2019) were concert installations where people freely wandered through the venues. Minutes of Olomouc (2020) replaced the viewers with multiple cameras filming a livestream as they moved through the performance.
I’m trying to see these musical performances as a field or a kind of map, through which both audiences and musicians move. The way we listen to music is determined by the context in which we listen to it. Performance offers a space to listen to music in a different way because it embeds the listener in a fictional context. It can offer another dimension to composition, like an atmospheric dimension, or a specific state or context in which music becomes suggestive, narrational or ritualistic.
Signs of Invasion, for example, was staged as three musicians who were locked up in an abandoned office building and they were waiting for a contact that would come from the outside. So as the audience, you’re stuck in that space with the musicians and trying to understand what they’re waiting for, witnessing them as they make all these musical gestures to the outside.
I like the ideas of maps and narrative, because it also feels like there’s a strong sci-fi element in your work. Do you see your compositions as a kind of world building?
I thought of Songs for the Contract as this box of crystal balls, the snowy ones that you buy at souvenir shops. The performance is built through this collection of incomplete scenes or memories. But it’s not immediately clear how they interconnect. As you look through the work, each of the scenes start to shape this world. It’s similar to some ofChina Mieville’s short stories, which are often written as a collection of postcards or letters that indirectly suggest some uncanny narrative.
I really like the idea of all these memories being sold as NFTs and every scene ending up in a different crypto-wallet. Once folia.app stops hosting the performance on their website, the performance will be dispersed and each scene will get lost in the corners of the cryptoverse.
I keep imagining that someone would find a scene while looking through some NFT collection and have no idea how to understand what it is. But the scene is still there, just endlessly reliving itself, like an artefact of a larger story that got lost.
Speaking of the economic aspects, one of the topics you mentioned a lot while working on the piece was the work of French economist and historian Jacques Attali, especially Noise: A Political Economy of Music. Can you tell me a bit more about which of his ideas were important for you?
Attali’s book describes the correlation throughout history between the economy that supports musical production and musical expression. He goes all the way back to the Middle Ages and talks about the shift in music’s economy from the monastery to the troubadours, and how the change from domestic to migrating musicians brought in elements of travel and more worldly stories.I started reading Attali again when thinking about NFTs and connecting myself to this new market.
He describes how changes in the economy bring about changes in musical expression. And in my case it isn’t just about music but also about performance and the idea of an intimate experience that could now be distributed on this digital terrain. I was curious to see how music could exist in a sort of virtual environment, and what it would mean for music to be always attached to an environment in which to listen to it—like a hardcopy of an intense memory.
You specifically sought out the Berlin-based collective Black Swan to help you develop a financial “backend” for the piece, in other words the titular “contract.” What happens to the money when I buy one of the NFTs? Where exactly does it go?
I saw a lecture by Black Swan in 2019, and it was my first introduction to blockchain technology and what it could offer as an alternative financial structure for art production (1). It responded to a lot of frustrations I’ve encountered working in the field and offered ideas for how I could organise my projects differently, especially their financial aspect. But it wasn’t until I met the people behind Folia (folia.app) and started thinking about making NFTs that a collaboration started making sense to me. Folia is an online space for exhibiting NFTs. They’re quite open-minded and really push for more unorthodox NFT projects. It really encouraged me to think beyond my normal practice and try something in the digital sphere.
All of the revenue from the NFTs automatically ends up in a smart contract. Something like a shared wallet between me and my main collaborators: Alexander Iezzi, Shade Theret, Andy Stecher, and Steve Katona. Each member has a share allocated in the wallet that they manage individually. When the NFTs are sold or when royalties from a resale are made, all revenue arrives in this wallet and every member has direct access to their share. This system will stay in place forever unless we communally agree on changing it. We used a program for this called Doneth, which was developed by Billy Rennekamp. The shift to recognizing my collaborators as stakeholders, instead of employees, is important. Everyone got paid a fee for the work done, and additionally has a share of the revenue.
You’ve also had a lot of experience composing music professionally for other people. Is that how your curiosity about new funding models started?
I am not a digital artist.I’m not even a visual artist. So making these digital visual commodities was not necessarily the most obvious thing to do. But I have always worked in various degrees of collaboration, and I can say from first hand experience that there is no financial system in place right now that can really represent the complexity of artistic value-production.
I think art in general, but especially with performing arts, everything is increasingly produced through a collective effort, and there are more and more creative people involved in every project. Even outside of performance, so many artists have studios with multiple creative minds being put to work every day. So if the art object is a complex commodity then there should be a more complex financial structure behind it. Only paying creative workers an hourly wage to produce a commodity that has an undefined but potentially extremely inflatable value, is exploitative. My interest in NFTs and working with Black Swan was mainly to find equitable ways of approaching and capturing the value of collaborative art production.
NFTs have been heavily criticised in the art context. Two of the most trenchant criticisms off the bat: On one hand, NFTs are liable to become just another instrument of financial speculation. On the other hand, the energy cost of “minting” the NFTs is so high as to be environmentally unsustainable. What would you say to these criticisms? Do you think the potentials outweigh the costs?
Those are two different issues. The environmental costs of NFT and blockchain in general are unsustainable but hopefully this is a temporary issue. There is a big incentive to turn towards green energy and implement proof-of-stake (a more energy-efficient blockchain technology) as soon as by the end of this year.
As for speculation. NFTs have many possible applications and not all of them will necessarily improve the current situation. The way speculation is driving the current market is maybe a sign of it still being quite immature and hype driven.
Going back to Attali, being interested in NFTs doesn’t mean we can’t be critical about commodification. But new economies make room for artists to organise differently and this is what I find exciting about them. As the title of the work underlines, the NFT is also a contract between artists. This won’t be the last or the best artist contract ever made, but the practice of contract-making is something I want to invest in more.
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