How is being an artist different than a machine that is programmed to perform a set of actions? How can we stop thinking about artworks as objects, and start thinking about them as triggers for experiences? In this conversation with Max Cooper, we discuss the beauty and chaos of nature and the exploration of technology music and consciousness.

Max Cooper is a musician with a PhD in computational biology. He integrates electronic music with immersive video projections inspired by scientific exploration. His latest project, 'Seme,' commissioned by the Salzburg Easter Festival, merges Italian musical heritage with contemporary techniques, was also performed at the Barbican in London. He supplied music for a video narrated by Greta Thunberg and Pope Francis for COP26. In 2016, Cooper founded Mesh, a platform to explore the intersection of music, science and art. His Observatory art-house installation is on display at Kings Cross until May 1st.

Photo credit: Alex Kozobolis

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

Tell us about Seme and how it originated.

MAX COOPER

That was a commission from Salzburg, a classical and opera music festival, a very well renowned one. Each year they have some sort of electronic related project amongst this non electronic program, so they asked if I could do that. They said that their program this year was around Italy, so Italian opera, Italian classical music.

Palestrina choral music was one of the main interesting and beautiful discoveries for me. I was delving into a lot of historic Italian music, and a lot of it just didn't really lend itself to what I'm interested in musically. A lot of it was commissioned by very grand people for very grand places to sound very grand, and that didn't really resonate with me. But when I went to Palestrina, it was music from the 1500s that was written for worship, church music. With the help of Niels Orens, Tom Hodge, Kim Sheehan, and Sarah Aristidou, I was able to take these original scores from Palestrina, and more or less keep the music as it was, although there was one of the pieces that we modulated a little bit into a slightly more modern scale. We slowed them both down as well to give each harmony more breathing space. Sarah and Kim sang the vocal layers, I played synth layers, and Tom played piano. It was a musical discovery I wouldn't have come across if I hadn't had that unusual brief of trying to make a project around Italy.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

Tell us about some of your earliest musical memories and your journey towards music.

COOPER

Music was always there as I was growing up. My mum was a music teacher, my dad was an engineer, so there was always music and science around me, but I didn't really engage with music seriously until I found electronic music. Something about the purity and the simplicity of it really grabbed me, and then I got into the whole club scene and started DJing and all that. I came to music in a serious way much later than I'd come to the sciences, for example. I'd always been studying sciences and progressing that career well ahead of my wanting to delve into music, but music was always there and it always connected with me emotionally. I found at some point that if I sat down and tried to render how I felt musically, it led to interesting results, and music people enjoyed, so I kept pursuing that and then linking in my scientific interests. I didn't want to only do music, I didn't want to only do science, so it was: How can I tie all these interests together? I started experimenting with commissioning visual artists to make science related work, collaborating with people interested in the same sorts of things, and then building a system for playing visuals and the music in live contexts. And I just followed that path down to where I am now.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

For a work in progress expanding upon ideas in your 2022 album Unspoken Words, you’ve been asking people: I want to know how you feel and what it's like to exist inside your mind. What would you like to say that you cannot say in everyday life?

MAX COOPER

I can describe things technically; as a scientist, we have language to describe. You could say the neural correlates of consciousness, right? You could describe what they are and how the brain functions and behaves in an objective manner. But that really doesn't seem to get anywhere near the question of what it's actually like to be a human. Music, essentially, for me is: I can sit down, and I can make a chord progression, and make a musical structure that resonates with how I feel at that moment and seems to capture things which go beyond anything I can put into words. That was the idea of the Unspoken Words project: To try and capture those things and then interpret them with visual artists. For me, that's as close as I can get to describe what it's like being me. So I'd say you just have to listen to the music, and then you'll hear what it's like, I suppose.

Harnessing Historic Architecture in Audiovisual Art

​​I love working with historic sites. I've done a few events and installations working in old cathedrals; we did one with And& Festival in Leuven, and in Carlisle Church in Belfast with the AVA Festival guys, and the Acropolis of Athens, and lots of other venues. I love venues where I can turn up and map projections onto architecture. Particularly when you're using old historic buildings, they're full of feelings and ideas before you, you know, from the history and what you associate them with. That embeds itself into the music and the visuals that you're presenting, so you get this extra layer of engagement and emotion and ideas coming through, which I love. I generally use projectors rather than screens for that reason, so that I can use the architecture and try to make the show itself interact with it. Whenever I can, I try to project. It adds to the storytelling, I think, and it makes it feel more special. We're all used to going to clubs and festivals, you know, the big black box of the club and there's a sound system and there's a screen—we're all used to that. But when you go somewhere with crazy historic architecture and you're having a party inside that space and there's all these moving things, there’s the extra magic. 

The Artistry of Nature

I find the most beautiful projects are the ones where I can map a natural system explicitly. A lot of my projects—if I'm approaching some sort of very human idea, for example, like I did with Unspoken Words—have to be quite interpretive. But I love when I'm working with a natural system which is really boiled down to something. The Fibonacci sequence is an example of that, or the distribution of the primes, or the digits of pi in a treemap, or waves or symmetry. There are these ideas which are really foundational to science and nature which are boiled down to simple quantitative systems. I find that whenever I do a project representing something like this with a visual artist, instead of seeing the artistry of the artist, or my idea, what we see is the artistry of nature. And the artistry of nature is always richer than the artistry of a human, in my opinion.

The Importance of the Arts

The sciences don't teach us everything, and we're moving as science and technology become ever more dominant. The arts become ever more important for us to stay in touch with the things that the sciences can't tackle: What it's actually like to be a person, what's actually important, what we know. We can have this endless progress inside this capitalist machine, for greater wealth and longer life and more happiness according to some sort of metric, or we can try and quantify society and push it forward. Ultimately, we all have to decide what's important to us as humans, and we need the arts to help with that. I think what's really important is exposing ourselves to as many different ideas as we can, and being open minded, and trying to learn about all facets of life so that we can understand each other. The arts are an essential part of that.

This interview was conducted by Mia Funk with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Associate Interviews Producers on this episode were Sophie Garnier and Lyle Hutchins. The Creative Process is produced by Mia Funk. Associate Text Editor was Sofia Reecer. Additional production support by Katie Foster.

Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast (Conversations about Climate Change & Environmental Solutions).
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