All the Mirrors You Put Around Yourself, Tell You Who You Are: A Conversation with Andrew Schneider
Can the unfathomable cosmos combat existential dread? In the work of Andrew Schneider, such freeing possibilities lie within live performance. Returning to the Walker for a second time, this OBIE award-winning performer, writer, and interactive-electronics artist discusses a practice that spans artwork, technology, and performance. From his time as a Wooster Group company member to his solo work exploring time and identity, Schneider reveals the ideas and experiences that led to the creation of N O W I S W H E N W E A R E (the stars).
Jake Yuzna
Can you tell me a little bit about your project that will be coming to the Walker this winter?
Andrew Schneider
The piece I’m working on now is called N O W I S W H E N W E A R E (the stars). I wish that we could just keep changing the title (laughs). It is in the form of an interactive light-and-sound installation.
JY
What led to the creation of this work?
AS
This is a tough one to answer because I’ve been thinking about the exact same ideas for the entirety of my life, from the moment I woke up crying and ran into the living room to my parents, because I was scared of the concept of forever. The existential concept of forever. I’ve just had this deep fascination with time, identity, and our place within time. Our geographical location in the cosmos and also our temporal location in the cosmos. So, I started exploring that early on with projects like YOUARENOWHERE that was presented at the Walker in 2017, which focused on the multiverse, parallel universes, and deep autobiographical identity stuff.
YOUARENOWHERE started with the idea that if you can light one specific place, then, instantly, you light a different place, you could sort of change the channel of the architectural space. You could be in one space and then all of a sudden be in another space. That was very interesting to me. Those sorts of ideas are emotional to me. I go to a rock concert where the music and the sound don’t have a narrative necessarily, but I feel very emotional when I see everything is bathed in blue light and these minor chords are happening. I’m with all these people live. I could see the same thing on television, but it wouldn’t affect me in the same way.
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Andrew Schneider, YOUARENOWHERE Invisible Dog, Coil festival 2015. Image courtesy of the artist. -
Andrew Schneider, YOUARENOWHERE Invisible Dog, Coil festival 2015. Image courtesy of the artist. -
Andrew Schneider, YOUARENOWHERE Invisible Dog, Coil festival 2015. Image courtesy of the artist.
Live performance is a total emotional medium. It can bypass the intellect, go straight into your brain, and make you feel things. You have ability to design tensions and releases for an audience using only light and space. We used to seeing a jump cut in a film, but if we make a jump cut happen to you live, then your corporeal body feels that that’s not possible. Suddenly I’m questioning my own reality. Then I can ride the emotional content in on the back of your body trying to understand this new possibility.
After YOUARENOWHERE, my next project, AFTER, was about collective hallucination and possible afterlives. That led to another piece called >>REMAINS<<, which is all about swapping consciousness, swapping identities, and branching realities. If you made this decision, your life could have been this way. If you made this decision, your life could have gone this way. Then while I was in Berlin, I got a phone call from Brown University, and they said, “You need to spend the rest of your research funds.” I told them I already had, and they responded, “No, that was your class budget. You still have a research budget. You need to spend it by Friday.”
I thought, what a gift! I had this idea for a show forever but never the resources, and now I do. That was the genesis of N O W I S W H E N W E A R E (the stars).
Bringing it back to how this show started, it has just been this long line of questioning: Where are we in the cosmos? The small miracle of the fact that every decision you’ve ever made in your entire life has led to this exact moment. You, Jake, and me, Andrew, every decision we’ve made has led to us having this conversation right now. That’s fascinating to me and it’s happening all of the time. This show especially really maps out what those trajectories are.
JY
Were you always interested in having technology as a part of your work or did it seep in along the way?
AS
I was a super-late bloomer with technology and didn’t have an email address until I was a junior in college. I didn’t even get a cell phone until around 1999. When my partner at the time texted me that they loved me, I thought, “This is awful. This is like the downfall of civilization right here.” Of course, now, we do it all the time, and I would definitely do it today.
When I was a kid, I would hook up strings and pulleys to the light switches from my bed at night. I loved pulling on one string to turn the lights off and then another string to switch them back on. I feel like I’m still doing the exact same thing with this work.
The technology has always been a tool to make something happen that otherwise wouldn’t be able to happen. As much as I work on the technology side of it, I’m working on the storytelling side.
The thing that I like to explore is bodies in space over time. Whether or not that involves technology isn’t the chief concern. I might have an idea for a work that involves perfect synchronicity of twenty people in a park. The only way to do that is to get some hefty technology involved. You start to ask, “How do we do this? Can we use people’s phones? Can we use network time protocol? Do we use something in people’s ears to sync everybody up?”
I went to school for musical theater performance. I was playing the dentist in Little Shop of Horrors for years. Happily. Later on, I was interning at the Builder’s Association and someone from that theater company said there’s this school called the Interactive Telecommunications Program [at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts].
Because I was doing Little Shop of Horrors, I knew I loved telling stories in live spaces. I loved being on stage. There are invisible things that are happening because you’re with somebody in a room together. You can smell them. You can see them. You feel the pressure of the air in that room. I knew that I needed to do live performance, but maybe a man-eating plant who sings wasn’t the story I wanted to tell anymore.
JY
Earlier you mentioned time and identity. How do you think the two are linked?
AS
I was an early fan of Back to the Future and the idea of time travel, but over time I became more fascinated with the concept of the cosmological horizon. Basically, the cosmological horizon is the idea that there are parts of the universe that we can’t see and that we will never see because the universe is expanding too fast for that light to ever reach us. These other billions of stars will be lost to us forever. We’ll never be able to see them again because the light is not traveling fast enough. They’re traveling faster than the speed of light away from us. And so that light will never reach us. That makes me feel so differently about getting in a fight with my partner. (laughs) Those things are still very important, but reading about how the sun will someday expand and engulf the Earth makes me feel okay about not going to a certain party. (laughs)
JY
The comfort of our unfathomable universe.
AS
Absolutely. It is like the overview effect, when astronauts look back onto the Earth and reflect on how insignificant things we take so seriously are on a cosmic level.
Carl Sagan used to talk about it, the amount of bloodshed that happens for temporary control over a tiny section of this tiny plant in the universe. It’s almost unbelievable. So, for me, all of the science, the physics, and the cosmology are deeply philosophical. It makes me feel differently about myself. It makes me think about how all the mirrors you put around yourself tell you who you are.
As far as I know, I have my identity and that’s it. That, though, is terrifying and incredibly privileged. I have to treat that with such respect and care and try to get to know as deeply as possible other people’s experiences.
I have to assume that my experience is so vastly different from everyone else’s experience. What I’m trying to do in the work is to say, “Hey, what if your perspective is not the center? Your perspective is the center for you, but you have to remember that it is only 1 of 8 billion.” If we all acted with a little more care toward other people’s lived experiences, I think that things might go a little smoother.
JY
Is that what you hope those who experience N O W I S W H E N W E A R E (the stars) take away from it?
AS
I hope you start the beginning feeling like, “I don’t understand.“ (laughs) That could be a “I don’t understand what you’re saying,” “I don’t understand where I am,” “I don’t understand how this is possible,” or even ”I don’t understand how this works.” Then I hope that after that first few minutes, you get wrapped up in it and let yourself go a little bit. I also hope that everyone questions their reality somewhat.
With N O W I S W H E N W E A R E (the stars), you walk through these moments. I hope that makes you question your reality, which has all these different implications. Maybe it’s getting out of your habits and your usual way of thinking. I hope it brings out these invisible things that you take for granted.
JY
Since this work is an environment that you’ve created that the audience moves through, how do you feel about your work being presented in a performance context?
AS
Well, I could talk about the field of performance for a long time. (laughs)
I don’t know if I fit into it. I would like to. I hope I do. I don’t know who gets to decide that. I’ve been so happy, lucky, grateful, and privileged to be able to tour my work around. But I also have never felt like one of the cool kids or part of the club. So, I don’t know if I fit in.
If someone says, “Hey, I’m going to go see this installation. It is at this gallery downtown,” you will have certain expectations that are different if the person tells you, “Hey, I'm going to go see this performance. It’s at a theater.” You enter the architecture of a building with a certain set of assumptions that are visible or invisible. For instance, if you’re going to see an installation in a theater, you might expect to have to be there on time; it is going to be durational. You won’t pull out your phone during it. Whereas, if you go to an installation in a gallery, you probably wouldn’t worry about being on time. You would take pictures of it on your phone. Not that you think these things consciously. They are the expectations you have before even walking in.
In terms of the larger scope of that question, I wish that it didn’t matter.
With this particular show, it’s important for me in that we’re alive in this space together. Everyone who comes through, and this will be true at the Walker, will have a moment together. We talk, the group is lead in, and then it begins. That ritual of theater and the unwritten mechanics of it has become important to me because it’s important that we should feel that we are in the here and now. We feel each other’s presence in the room together. I think that would be harder in a different setting or less precious somehow. I want to point to the importance of that ritual.
Something I really like about when people come see the work is when they say, “My friend told me they came to see it and I should go. I had no idea what it would be like. That’s the best. No expectations. It is so wonderful to come in with a small group of people you know and just let it wash over you.▪︎
Learn more and get tickets to experience N O W I S W H E N W E A R E (the stars) here.
N O W I S W H E N W E A R E (the stars) is copresented by The Great Northern.