Liz Phillips is a pioneer in the development of electronic sound and environmental art. Her sound practice encompasses interactive sculpture and interactive installation with occasional excursions into performance and dance. Phillips’ works point toward a non-musical emergence for creative circuitry in art of the 1960s and 1970s, and specifically illustrate the interaction of homemade electronics with environmental practices. Her works, both in the gallery and in public spaces, also use responsive electroacoustic systems to highlight their connections to social issues and community-making, and transform the paradigm of the electronic circuit into one of the social circuit.

Charles Eppley spoke with Phillips about her experiences with electronic circuity, and the development of sound installation as an artistic practice. This interview is presented as part of our performance program Circuit Scores, which featured a discussion panel with Phillips, Julie Martin (Director, Experiments in Art & Technology), and members of Composers Inside Electronics.¹

Charles Eppley: How did you first get involved with electronic circuitry?

Liz Phillips: Well, I came totally out of sculpture, not out of music. First, I did a lot of ham radio stuff as a kid. I built little crystal radios and all that stuff. I was interested in sculpture and how to scale it to work with people moving around, tune it into where they were at, their size or speed. I was also interested in light changing on sculpture, how sculpture is corroded, how landscapes change over time, how a sand dune shifts with erosion, ecological changes. When you walk around a tree, it affects the earth, it affects what is living around the tree. I was interested in capturing that sort of thing in my artwork - the impression people make on a landscape.

I first worked with these metal objects and shreds of Mylar going into big metal circles and squares, which were situated in space. One of my first pieces in high school was like that, with lights shifting on it, and a pressure pad on the floor – the sounds of water, like a brook, running through the space were activated when you went in. The pad activated a recording that was playing on a looping tape. That was my first sound sculpture. But then I noticed the Theremin and also the lines on my television, which shifted when I went near and far from the device because of transmission interference. I thought “This is way more what I’m looking for…” I stuck my fingers inside of television sets to find the place where you could shift frequencies by movement, which I removed and wired onto metal plates.

CE: So you dissected preexisting technology –

LP: – to find oscillators that played between stations. I was in the country, in Vermont, so it was easy to find lots of [open] space with oscillator [signals]. There were no phase loops so [the signals] ran freely between stations. You could kind of harness them. I was also using traffic light timers, which are huge round spools, and setting them at different timings. I had big light-bulbs in ceramic fixtures all over the floor, and built little square wave oscillator circuits that corroded and broke apart as you shifted their pitch with a light sensor. I stuck them on the walls all around this giant carriage barn, and all of these lights in different sequences on the floor, the audience ran between and sort of danced between the screeching pitches.

CE: What year was that?

LP: 1969–1970. [The system] would hear one sequence of lights near it and then another far away. You could tune them to sound pretty neat. The pitch wasn’t musically tuned at all – it was pretty raw. I tuned it to the audio range and tried to tune them into each other.

CE: It’s interesting to think about this practice as an alternative emergence for the sort of circuit play beyond, say, the work of David Tudor and others. Rather than music, your electronics practice came from communications technologies and sounds that you sourced from broader engagements with circuity and [electromagnetic] capacitance fields: television, radio, traffic lights. Things that communicate information… but you [manipulated the] distortion of that information.

LP: Yeah - it’s really about sculpture, space and time. It’s interesting to work with technologies, but when I started there was nothing else. You have to understand that the army had most of the circuits. Some companies had infrared but it was very hard to get your hands on technology. You had to deconstruct things. I used automatic range finders to pick up where people were along lines: an ultrasonic tick that goes out and retrieves spatial information - echolocation. You can determine distance by the length of time it takes for the sound to return. What’s really interesting are sub-echoes. Computers weren’t fast enough at the time to pick up those trajectories, but now you could map a whole space in no time.

CE: Ultrasonic sensors don’t sound like something you could have found in a consumer electronics store. How did you come by these materials?

LP: I read a lot of popular electronics magazines and there were a lot of engineers whose brains I picked. I worked at the Riverside Research Institute in New York City, which was doing defense contracting [for the United States Government]. I was their artist-in-residence.

CE: Was that before the Bell Labs artist residency program?

LP: No – around the same time, or a little later - late 1960s. I was still in college when I started working there. The only artist who had been at Riverside before was Salvador Dali. He wanted to use their photography studio. They had amazing stuff - strobe lights, microphotography. I couldn’t stabilize the electromagnetic fields in my work. I started working there to get help.

CE: The fields you were making with radios and televisions?

LP: Capacitance fields - they can’t be stabilized, basically, and I didn’t know that. At the end of three months there, the engineers said, “Well, fifty physicists could write their thesis on why this should or shouldn’t work in what you’ve done, but we’re not that interested because it’s unstable.” Now there is a great interest in these fields. Everyone is using them with [touch] screens and such.

CE: It’s funny how technologies can sit dormant –

LP: – for years and years. This was hard science to deconstruct. Especially for engineers because as soon as you put a capacitance field in a metal box and ground it, you’ve lost your field. They were so used to building metal boxes for all of their circuits, they kept defeating the work.

When you understand an open system, it begins to work better… as soon as I got to college, I studied with Thomas Standish, a Marxist economist at Bennington College who was into systems theory and macro-economics. [Standish researched how] a democratic system [could] turn itself over, which is exactly what I was looking for: to build pieces that varied over time and could completely transform themselves with audience input. He really understood the concept of open systems. I used social systems as models for open systems, hopefully making pieces that could become models for people to engage socially.

CE: In Circuit Scores we wanted to emphasize the concept of the social circuit - something of a metaphor for social action and interaction. In our program, we wrote about Experiments in Art and Technology and how [that project] is often characterized as technical innovation: that bringing art and technology together will create new materials or technical practices. However, a key interest of E.A.T. under Billy Klüver, Julie Martin - as well as you and Standish - was social interaction and community.

LP: That’s right. I would not have used electronic sound if not for sensors. I had no interest in making a piece that was composed from beginning to end and making people sit down and listen to it… if [the listener] couldn’t deconstruct and reconstruct sound, listen to parts and go back to those parts, then hear how they started and ended… without those events, I thought they would just hear sound as from another other world – space-age sound, no human understanding. If people couldn’t tactically engage with the piece, then it wasn’t interesting for me. I was interested in sound because it surrounded you and it was physical. Sound was a way to describe activity. I could show you videos from 1971 where the audience interacts with fields in space.

LP: I found the other day a really big old light sensor that I used in my early pieces. I was working at MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies and and we’d go out into the country to these huge yards, huge buildings full of junk, piles of refuse electronics. I came back with microwave stuff, stuff that’s probably – stuff that said “Radiation: DO NOT TOUCH.”

CE: You probably came back with something else…

LP: I came back with monstrous stuff that had all these [warning] signs. I took anything that looked good: sensors and various boxes to take apart. I mean, at Riverside, I used gold-plated parts. They gave me two oscilloscopes. I was the only women who had ever been in the circuitry area, and the men were really pissed. They had all these pictures of naked girls on walls in the backroom. They gave me great parts, lots of help, so I was pretty lucky when I started. I got to know engineers who helped me make sense of what I wanted to build, and they brought me into these places.

CE: Presumably the engineers had some interest in your work?

LP: Well, they had several interests. This was during the Vietnam war - [there was] subversion - and they wanted to get engineers to think about things other than war and bombs. I was told many years later that the gold-plated (non-corrosive) parts were originally used to set off bombs at White Sands Missile Range, but it is important to note that I had only the minimum level of security clearance, certainly not enough to know military details. They really wanted to get better uses of technology, get their engineers to go in other directions, and I was good for that […]² things they never would have gone near in biotechnology, which was part of the progress, a brand new field.

CE: That’s interesting. The same might be said with Bell Labs. This interest in the arts was to some degree possibly altruistic or philanthropic –

LP: – but it wasn’t. It’s data visualization and, you know, speech recognition, data sonification. That was all pushed ahead by other interests.

CE: There is an ulterior motive to these art and technology engagements. The commodification of unused technology, militarization, surveillance.

LP: We were helping them as much as they were helping us. It’s always been that way. People don’t give you anything for free. [At Riverside], I was able to use a krypton laser. I could only stay for five minutes [at a time] and had to put on a lead vest. I could take a prism and spread any color of light, take the laser to color the room with a field of color. You could etch a dot or point on the wall, and spiral it out. Super powerful laser. I couldn’t take any pictures and had to leave quickly.

CE: Where was the building?

LP: It’s now Columbia University – the art and music building on 125th Street. When I was at MIT, that’s when I figured out, well, I better find my own lab. I learned a ton of technology picking the brains of engineers, but they got a lot out of me too.

CE: Can you describe some of the variables that you’ve used to define listener interactions?

LP: Broken/Unbroken Terracotta (1975) had a lot of them. There is a circular field, broken on the outside, a whole circle on the inside that is made of Mylar on the ground, and one field is radiated from that. The other is radiated from a band of copper coated aluminum that exists like a large flag, but it’s held up on four corners on strings. It stretches out along a wall parallel to the ground, slightly tilted, and curves so people of different heights will create different sounds. They could walk under and up to it, or from behind. It was exhibited at The Kitchen, placed between two columns, stretched. The piece had two freestanding omnidirectional loudspeakers, so I could carefully tune sounds that moved in between.