Pinar Yoldas is a multidisciplinary and multimedia artist and PhD student in the Art, Art History and Visual Studies department at Duke University. Produced in collaboration with scientist Clinton Francis and composer Jamie Keesecker, Yoldas’s installation “the Very Loud Chamber Orchestra of Endangered Species” will be exhibited in the Brown Gallery in the Bryan Center from Oct. 25 to Nov. 3 as part of the 2013 Duke Arts Festival. Via email, Recess writer Yunyi Li interviewed Yoldas on her work and inspirations.
Recess: You are interested in collaborations between art and science, particularly biology and neuroscience, as well as in working across different sensory modalities. Can you talk a little bit about your interest in interdisciplinarity?
Pinar Yoldas: The definition of interdisciplinarity varies. It can be a fancy word for academic attention disorder deficit (AADD), it can simply be random information hoarding or it can be connecting the dots to create new meanings or new solutions. Again the problems or issues we face today are so complex that it may not be possible to fully address them within the limits of one discipline. I believe in a healthy mix of art and science, humanities and engineering.
R: Who or what inspires or influences you?
PY: My main inspiration for this project came from neuroscience. I was reading about how emotional arousal affects (enhances) memory formation. Another inspiration was aerial wolf hunting videos, this video of a whale condemned to a slow and lingering death after having swallowed 17 kg of plastic waste, plus countless other articles and images on the impact of anthropogenic forces on non-human animals. Part of my inspiration came from non-human pain and suffering. Other influences are Elizabeth Grosz, Arne Naess, no Deleuze and this quote by father of futurism Tomaso Marinetti: “The life of matter can be embraced only by an orchestral style, at once polychromatic, polyphonic, and polymorphous, by means of the most extensive analogies.”
R: Your latest project, "the Very Loud Chamber Orchestra of Endangered Species," is concerned with how humans interact with and affect nature. Using the skulls of different organisms equipped with motion and audio systems, your project "gives a voice" to species whose ecological habitats have been threatened by environmental degradation. It's an age-old question, but could you discuss how your work is (or is not) political, as well as the relationship between art and politics more generally?
PY: I don’t think being apolitical or not being political is an option, specifically for my generation.
R: Clinton Francis serves as the scientific advisor to this project. What is the role of the scientist here?
PY: From where to look for datasets to how to interpret them, or which skulls to choose over others, Dr. Francis has been a key player in our creative process. My interaction with him and other scientists at NESCent (the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center in Durham, North Carolina), or simply just to breathe the air there, gave me a deeper or more accurate understanding of ecology and evolution, which I am grateful for.
R: Your work deals with how "humans have alienated ourselves from the interspecies culture of mother earth." What is this "interspecies culture?" I'm particularly interested in the language of "mother nature" and how your project relates to (or doesn't relate to) ecofeminism.
PY: This project is not by default ecofeminist just because I am a woman or because I am a feminist. Jamie, my main collaborator, is a man . We have to approach ecofeminism in its historical context—that is, as a cultural and political movement of the seventies that had its day and faded away leaving deep traces behind. If we are looking for a conceptual hashtag for the project, ecofuturist could be better, as an attempt to bring the rebellious and uncontainable energy of futurismo with the depth of ecological thought.
R: A lot of environmentalist rhetoric is about preserving the environment, which suggest humans to remain outside of and perhaps also in control of nature. This seems very different from the notion of an "interspecies culture"—what are your ideas about what should be done in terms of environmental degradation?
PY: Our relationship with nature is an intricate one. Nature is a pretty desktop background, nature is the spring collection of Alexander McQueen, nature is your next vacation destination, nature is sold at Whole Food. Nature is commodified, idealized, rebranded, repackaged, etc., etc. The first thing to do is to acknowledge that there are many misrepresentations of nature that actually distance us from what our true nature is. Nature is not a pretty cute thing that needs to be protected, climate change is not something that only happens to polar bears and plastic waste is not only in dumpsters and beaches of some third world countries, but in our very veins, in our very bloodstream.
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