The Search For Unvarnished Experience // Andrew Schneider
When did you last “troubleshoot” something? Maybe your Bluetooth thing connected itself to the wrong thing, or the text you copied from that one place looks all wrong when you paste it to the place you really need it. What feelings came up for you as you troubleshot? Were you frustrated? Were you curious? Did you feel helpless? Were you excited? It is almost impossible to go a day in 2023 without having to “problem solve” some aspect of technology—so much so that most people probably don’t even register it as a unique thought process or how it affects them emotionally. Our technologies are constantly pushing back at us, reminding us of their existence: a not-so-subtle reminder of our not-so-subtle dependence on them in so many areas of our lives.
1929 AT&T advertisement (NWB magazine, December 1929)
The word troubleshooting didn’t exist until relatively recently. "Trouble Shooters" were hired by telephone companies in the early 1900s to proactively find and repair telephone line problems. The original term was “Trouble Hunting”, which adds an air of playfulness and fun that is a bit lacking in our contemporary version. This sense of adventure is perfectly captured by the above AT&T advertisement, as the Trouble Hunters literally laid the groundwork for the technology that allows you to read these words that I tediously arranged on my computer on your computer, or more likely, your ‘telephone’.
Andrew Schneider, through his innovative approach to live performance and interactive electronics, seems to have built a career of Trouble Hunting rather than troubleshooting. With regards to his process for creating new work: “It's 95% troubleshooting and 5% making. It's a crazy amount of it not working for a very long time. It’s the equivalent of me saying ‘Hey, I want to play you like this song on my guitar’ but then having to spend 9 months designing the amp and cables before you can even plug your guitar in.” I can tell that the hours, days, and months that Schneider has spent Trouble Hunting definitely haven’t left him unscathed, but underneath those calluses was an energy of insatiable striving behind the way he described his tech-first approach to performance and art making.
What is he striving for? I asked about the origins of his most recent work N O W I S W H E N W E A R E (the stars) which is currently at the end of a very sold-out run at Walker Art Center’s McGuire Theater, presented in partnership with The Great Northern: “I mean, to really get down to it, I feel like I've been thinking about this work for my entire life. A professor of mine in grad school used to say, ‘you're doomed to do the same project for the rest of your life.’ I thought it was a bad thing at the time. Now I think maybe it's a good thing because it means the questions that you're asking are potentially unanswerable or rich enough to keep coming back to. I see N O W I S W H E N W E A R E (the stars) as the next step in a trajectory of work that's questioning our place in the cosmos and questioning our place in time—as in geographic space and temporal time.”
“Failure teaches you more than success does. I think out loud better through using the tools than I can ever think on paper.”
The way that Schneider has decided to explore these ideas involves 4,000 reactive points of light with an enveloping 496-channel sound design, which with a bit of troubleshooting arithmetic is at minimum 4,496 things that could possibly go wrong at any given moment of the experience. So why does Schneider so often find himself at the bleeding edge of technological performance/experience possibilities? “I try to use technology to get past what we consider design and more towards experience. How can I put you through an experience rather than just have some cool design space?” And regarding the exponentially large possibility for technological failure that comes along with such complex systems: “Failure teaches you more than success does. I think out loud better through using the tools than I can ever think on paper. I can have steps 1 through 100 written down and then the minute I open up the tool, and I'm like, ‘Cool, how does this tool work? Let's turn it on and drag something over here…’ Step two is suddenly different from the step two that I had planned. Step three is wildly different. Instead, I follow what the tool or instrument tells me it's good at. That's where the ideas come from. The troubleshooting and the craziness of that helps me think of what these things are good at and what stories I can tell.”
The earliest inklings of this work arose in the depths of the pandemic. While many performance makers at the time went toward video streaming and digital experiences, Schneider found himself thinking in a more conceptual space: “We can't be together at the same time, but maybe we can be together in the same space at different times. What if you could leave a trace of yourself behind for someone else to discover? What if you could discover someone's trace? Who was here before you? That opened up all sorts of narrative possibilities—like the small miracle of the fact that every decision you've ever made in your entire life has led to this moment. Is there a show that I can make that isn't about me, that is more about you and how you've come to be here in this moment, right now?”
Photo courtesy of Andrew Schneider
In an era of subscription mindfulness apps and youtube yoga classes, Schneider’s approach to being “in the moment” is unique in its jarring reverence. It doesn’t ask you to look within or listen to your breath. Instead, you might find yourself questioning your own perceptual systems, finding yourself suddenly in, as he puts it, “an impossible reality.” In a Turrell-esque inversion of performance, perception itself goes from being a passive act to gaining an unignorable thingness. Schneider’s quest for unvarnished perceptual experiences was captured perfectly as he described an experiment in his studio where he was playing an acapella version of The Beach Boys’ God Only Knows as loudly as possible and “blasting the back wall with blue light, and the light wasn't changing…”
“...and then I would slow it down. And I slowed it down a little more. And I was like, 'Okay, this is perfect.' I spent two or three hours being like 'This Is It.' Great. But I don't know what I mean by that. I don't know what I mean by 'This Is It' other than like, 'I would sit here and watch this for 15 minutes.' And I don't know why. It has no narrative content. Everything is just a feeling. Obviously, I'm not going to present that as my work, but it's very informative to me that you can curate emotion without narrative.”
Technology is a great tool to accomplish this, but he is quick to point out that he doesn’t find the term particularly useful: “Sometimes I have trouble talking about technology as a category because it’s not really a category, like, it's just Everything. Some things have more LEDs and some make noises. But language is also a technology; fire, sound, and lighting are all technologies. Sometimes when people talk about it they're actually talking about new technology or new media. And even that I have a little bit of a problem because then we are just siloing these things. What if it was just normalized and we could all be using these things all the time and sharing more?”
I asked Schneider what made the Trouble Hunting worth it in the end:
“Talking to people afterward. Yeah, it’s super simple. Or someone writing to me saying ‘I've never experienced anything like that. It made me think. It was helpful.’ With this show especially a lot of people have written to me mentioning that it really helped them with their grief process. Just the fact that it touches people in a human way. That is the goal: at the end of the day, to have a conversation with another person.
I can't go up to someone on the street and be like, ‘Hey, do you ever think about the cosmic horizon and about how galaxies are expanding away from us faster than the speed of light? And how in a billion years we won't be able to see the light, and that the information will be lost to us?... Isn't that heartbreaking? And doesn't that make you think about how every moment of your brief life here on the planet is kind of a miracle? Does it make you think differently about what you do with your daily life?’ I can't just say that to someone on the subway [laughs].
So I can either hand them the books that I’ve read and be like, ‘hey, read this book, it's incredible, it blew my mind.’ Or I can try to make things and try to have that collective experience together and have it shift how you think about your day-to-day life, even if it's just briefly. Hopefully what you experienced stays with you for a little bit. In the end, that's the thing that makes it worth it to me: one person saying one thing about how it changed them, or how it made them see something differently. That’s it.”
N O W I S W H E N W E A R E (the stars) finishes its sold-out run on February 4th, but you can stay up to date with Schneider’s work by subscribing to his newsletter at andrewjs.com.
N O W I S W H E N W E A R E (the stars) is a co-presentation of Walker Art Center and The Great Northern