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Andy Slater interview transcript

Andrea Kennedy

Hello, I'm Andrea Kennedy and welcome to Outlook on the Â鶹ÊÓƵAV World Service, where you get to meet the most interesting people. This program is a bit of an aural treat, one to listen to on headphones if you can. We have two guests, each with a particular passion that takes you into other worlds, one through the medium of sound, the other through vision.

So later in part two, we'll meet Danie Ferreira. He's a South African photographer who fell in love with Antarctica when he was 19. He went on to make a living, filming and immersing himself in the icebound parts of our world. But first today is media artist Andy Slater. He recently won a prestigious United States Artist's Fellowship in recognition of his work. These are awarded to people described as creative disruptors amongst other things.

Andy calls himself a hyperactive listener, he lost his sight after developing the rare genetic condition, retinitis pigmentosa in childhood. As he stopped drawing, he started listening, playing, and experimenting with sound. Outlook’s Danny Greenwald went to meet Andy in Chicago. He also met his dad, Jim and his son Barron, who have the experimenting with audio bug too.

Danny Greenwald

So Andy?

Andy Slater

Yes.

Danny Greenwald

What is all this stuff?

Andy Slater

This is all my stuff. So this is a huge table of unorganised things, like some speakers, and a product that I bought over the summer and haven't even used yet.

Danny Greenwald voiceover

Andy Slater lives outside of Chicago with his wife Tressa and his son Baron.

Andy Slater

This is just like utilitarian stuff.

Danny Greenwald

What about, what about this thing up here?

Andy Slater

This, all this stuff in the shelf? Oh this? This is the make-noise…

Danny Greenwald voiceover

He's a sound designer, a composer.

Andy Slater

Um, here's an instrument I built in 1996.

Danny Greenwald

Whoa. Whoa. What is it called?

Andy Slater

Um, well, since it looks like a blue tortilla chip. I used to call it that, but now I just call it the blue axe…

Danny Greenwald voiceover

However, the first line of his website states, ‘I am a media artist and I'm blind’.

Andy Slater

…. and, and built it in my instrument class.

Danny Greenwald

Okay. That's pretty cool.

Andy Slater

I kind of embrace the language and the sound of the white cane. And the politics of being in space with other people and knowing that they're staring at you because yeah, my cane is riding up the wall of the subway tunnel and then up to the ceiling and that sort of thing. You know, me just going out and doing stuff always requires somebody looking at me. And I do a lot of sound compositions using those sounds right, those recordings, those field recordings. And so, you know, I'll take those instances and do something weird with it.

Danny Greenwald voiceover

Andy has shown his work and performed all over the world, Chicago, Berlin, Mexico City, San Francisco, a haunted jail near Melbourne. That's just to name a few, and recently he was awarded a prestigious United States artist Fellowship.

Andy Slater

You know, I've done everything from, you know, pieces to listen to on your stereo, your headphones or whatever. But then also, you know, multi-channel installations in physical spaces, like virtual reality. And you know, the cane is this hundred year old tool and you know, the blind people I know that either do music or compose or you know, do dance performance and stuff rarely use the cane to the way, to the extent that I do, where it can sound violent and, you know, wild and docile and cute. But there's always this disability presence and this built-in accessibility.

Danny Greenwald voiceover

One of my favourite pieces by Andy involved him performing in a freight elevator.

Andy Slater

Taking my cane and my recorder or whatever, and going into spaces where blind people aren't usually allowed on their own, like a big freight elevator that I don't think legally I'd get the license to operate. But being able to go into that space and use my cane and my hands and my feet and like echo location clicks and that kind of stuff to create this sort of, wall of sound or, you know, exploring the acoustics of this, you know, a dirty metal, filthy, freight elevator. I'm never, I'm never in a freight elevator without some kind of chaperone. So being able to like take over that space for 10 minutes while people watched and listened was really kind of cool.

And it's like this, having this moment of blind joy where it's like hey, I'm doing this, nobody's kicking me out. You know, it’s a big part of what I do and just how I feel like I live. Just so fun to go and just do something that absurd and that loud. And I think it all just comes down to me just being a weirdo, where it's like, I have a lot of confidence in doing something and experimenting, and I think that's attractive to people.

So many of us are used to having those moments where you bump into a street sign and then you apologise to it, or you know, the jalapenos somehow made it into my ice cream instead of, you know, whatever other thing I was trying to put in my ice cream, you know, that kind of stuff.

And it's all laughable. it's all funny. You know, it's not funny when we are the butt of a joke made by a sighted person. I can laugh at myself and I can laugh at other blind people, but you know, when I'm the punchline, especially when it's not a funny joke, then I get mad.

Danny Greenwald voiceover

Andy finds it really unsettling when others are inspired by him, solely based on the fact that he's blind.

Andy Slater

You know, for somebody who isn't disabled to become inspired by my own existence and you know, just feel good about themselves because I can tie my own shoes. You know or, look at this blind person, he can ride a skateboard, isn't he special? Isn't he the best? Those kind of things, it's like geez, you just don't think much of us at all, and it shows. Those are the things that really feed into why people think blind people can't do anything. People will just feel free to ask me questions as if like my medical diagnosis, my body, is their business, and then they get mad when I brush them off, or I you know, tell them to go away. But it's like, my life is not a Q&A, I don't have time for it. That sort of thing that confuses people into believing that I'm either faking it or that I'm helpless.

Actuality (Andy in conversation with a man on the street who questions his blindness)

Andy

You're trying to tell me that I'm faking, that I'm blind? I'm telling you I am not faking it, man.

Man

Okay. So then how are you able to work this? You can keep doing, you can keep doing this all day if you want to, but…

Andy

I do do this all day, bro.

Man

This ain't gonna work for you.

Andy

What's not gonna work for me?

Man

For the fact that you know that you ain't supposed to be using that camera. You can't visually see.

Andy

You're seriously saying that I'm faking that I'm blind because I can use an iPhone? You should get on the internet and see how blind people use an iPhone, man. Yo, yo, yo, yo. He's telling me that I'm faking being blind, man. This dude right here.

Andy addressing followers

Hey everybody, it's me, Andy. Um, I wanted to address the video that I posted the other day. That video is two years old, right? I have absolutely no interest in finding out who that person is. The reason that I posted that video now is cuz there's a ton of videos and stories that blind and other disabled people have been telling about how they endure ableism. And a lot of the times, if not all the times, there's, there's absolutely no proof of that. There's no video to back that up, so people still go on not believing us. It happens all the time to me. You know, one minute you're just on your way to 7-Eleven, and some dude steps in front of you and tells you you're faking it. Just because you're sending a text using Siri.

Danny Greenwald voiceover

The hurdles Andy would have to face were evident even as a young child in the public school system in the United States.

Andy Slater

I can pinpoint the exact moment in my life when I realized that the cards were really stacked against me. That moment was when I was in third grade. My, uh, class was going on a class trip to the planetarium, and I was so excited. I loved space, I loved sci-fi about space, I loved the stars in the universe. We had a telescope, went out and saw Haley's Comet. I would do all this stuff. It was something that my father and I were both very interested in.

The day of, moments before the class was ready to get on the bus and go to the planetarium, I was told I could not go because there was not a chaperone that could help me in the dark space, because one of the symptoms of retinitis pigmentosa that I had when I was younger was night blindness. That's, that's one of the symptoms that everybody with RP experiences at one point. They didn't even tell my parents. See the thing is, I was such a burden to them in this process of learning about our solar system, even though my parents signed the permission slip, they did not call them up and say, hey would you be able to be Andy’s chaperone? They just ditched me as if I didn't matter. Right? I was not as important as the other kids.

I was just left in a room smaller than a guest room, it was just a tiny, tiny room. They put me in there, they gave me some paper, they told me to write or draw if I wanted. This room had no windows, nobody came in the check up on me. They didn't even have the, the forethought or the, I don't know, the kindness to put me in the library where I could have done something, you know, read a magazine or whatever. I don't know, they locked me in there essentially, then when they came back from the class trip, they came and got me. I was third grade, I was nine and all of this happened, you know, before the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed and you know, accountability and accommodations and all these sort of things, none of that really was put into place while I was in the public school institution. It was a big bummer that I felt like I was not getting the education that I was deserved.

Danny Greenwald voiceover

Andy also developed a love for visual art. He was passionate about painting landscapes. However, when his sight started to wane, he stopped.

Andy Slater

I realized, well, I'm not really able to do the things that I want to do anymore. I wanted to paint really realistic stuff and I couldn't do that anymore cuz I couldn't see. And so I kept at it for a couple of years and then I guess when I was 15, I just stopped and I was like, I'm not gonna draw anymore. You know, this is a waste of time, I'm getting frustrated, I want to be an artist, I want to do art, but I don't have a medium in which I can feel like I can successfully get out of me what I need to get out of me.

I even applied to go to the art magnet school in New Haven and I didn't get accepted into there. And that is when I got a Tascam four-track cassette recorder so I could create something that wasn'tÌý musical but was still art, and maybe I could even try to capture what it was that I was trying to paint, right? I could record environments. I can just use found sounds and appropriated sounds from sound effects records and tv, and just kind of create these, you know, collages and sonic landscapes and stuff. I just started messing around.

I got really into it and realised, hey, I'm actually creating something that is art and it's something I can listen to and it's something I can experience on my own terms. I was just in the basement or in my bedroom doing weird stuff, constantly recording off of TV and scratching records, literally scratching records so that they would skip and I could record that and make a loop and that kind of stuff.

I made a 40 minute-long album of just collage and appropriated found sounds or whatever, and I sent it into this guy that did, a weird noise and sort of avant-garde music show on the Yale radio station. And I sent it to him, and then one day I was listening, it was like once a week at night, and then he was playing my tape and I'm listening like oh my God, that's me. And then I called up and said hey, thank you for playing my tape. And he was like wait, you're a kid. I was like, oh yeah, I'm 16. And he was just blown away that I was doing this, whatever, and I remember him saying, this reminds me of this music concrete of blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah Pierre Schaffer and Pierre Henri and all this kind of stuff from the forties. I have no idea what you're talking about, and I wrote it all down and then I went to the record store and the guy was like, you're, wait, you're really looking for this? I was like, I don't know, the guy on the radio said I should listen.

And so that kind of really fed my ambition to continue doing this because I got acknowledgement from an adult. Even though, you know, he was a, you know, college student, but still it was like, man, this guy thought what I was doing was neat and worth listening to, and he would play that stuff all the time.

This was 1991. You didn't have, the internet where you know, a kid can sit and watch a 20 hour YouTube video of the sounds of a Taco Bell bathroom. And so a lot of it was just informed and inspired by my own relationship with sound and just being a weird kid. And I was the only one of my friends that did this kind of stuff. Some of them understood it and they were like, you should come out to Chicago and go to art school. And so I did.

Danny Greenwald voiceover

Though Andy started to use sound as his artistic medium when he started to lose his sight, he was introduced to music way before that, as a child.

I had the opportunity to speak with Jim Slater, Andy's dad, about this period of time in his life.

Danny Greenwald

When did you start noticing that he really had an interest in art and music?

Jim Slater

Music, I think he got an interested, when he got a-hold of my stuff. I had a, a stereo system I bought when I was in the Navy and then, I had, I don't know how many albums. I guess they call him vinyl today, I had tons of Jimi Hendrix, Rolling Stones, Blind Faith. I liked Cream. Anything with Eric Clapton in it.

Danny Greenwald

Do you remember actually listening to records with Andy?

Jim Slater

I think we did. I think we did until him, him and his friend wanted to change the needle in my turntable, but they cut the wires trying to fix it. *Laughing* So that was the end of that one.

Andy Slater

My dad always brings this up where one of the channels went out on the turntable, and it was probably just dust on the needle, but you couldn't take the cartridge off those, the old dual turntable. You couldn't take the cartridge off, so I tried stripping one of the wires and then putting it back together without having any idea what any of that meant. Right, and then I think he got mad cuz he could no longer listen to his Cream albums.

Danny Greenwald

Did you know that Andy has a, a huge collection of vinyl?

Jim Slater

I do, he, he started his own band and a lot of the stuff that he plays, I noticed a lot of the older, styles of music that we used to listen to in there.

Danny Greenwald voiceover

When I was in Chicago, I went to a local record shop with Andy and Baron. Andy doesn't flip through vinyl so much anymore because of his sight, but he still really enjoys helping Baron find interesting records to sample.

Danny Greenwald

This is a sale right

Baron Slater

Yeah, this is buy one get one half off.

Andy Slater

What is this man?

Baron Slater

On the back it’s, two aliens. It's like a drawing of two aliens, in a womb. And the movie’s probably from the eighties.

Danny Greenwald

Do you drop a lot of money here?

Baron Slater

I've dropped at least hundred fifty here at one time.

Andy Slater

Where'd you get that money?

Baron Slater

It was Christmas last year.

Andy Slater

Oh. You better tell me where you're getting money you know.

Danny Greenwald voiceover

Baron is an amazing artist, in his own right. He makes hip hop beats under the name Jotek.

And he also plays in a band called Laikka. In fact, Barron's Band recently played with Andy's blues rock band at a legendary club in Chicago called The Hideout and Baron's Band drew more fans. Andy wasn't upset though.

Danny Greenwald

So who was the first person that you shared your music with?

Baron Slater

For sure my dad. I shared it with him and he helped me and got me some equipment, some software. Getting some feedback from him kickstarted it.

Danny Greenwald

So he wasn't like, son, I am so proud of you.

Baron Slater

No, no. It was just kinda like, oh, you should change this, or, you know, do whatever, you know.

Danny Greenwald

So his immediate response was to help you become a better producer?

Baron Slater

Yeah.

Danny Greenwald voiceover

Andy's love of sound and music, which he adopted from his dad at an early age, was able to be passed on to Baron. And one amazing thing that recently happened was that Andy was awarded a United States Artist Fellowship.

Danny Greenwald

I hear that's a big deal.

Andy Slater

It's a big deal. There's a lot of money. It was $50,000. First off, I never thought I'd ever see that kind of money ever in my life no matter what. But then, you know, being acknowledged for the art that I do, you know, that's, it was based on the merit of my work.

Danny Greenwald

What was the first thing you did with that money?

Andy Slater

Paid off some debt.

Danny Greenwald

What's the second thing?

Andy Slater

Paid off some of my wife's debt.

Danny Greenwald

Uhhuh, what's the third thing?

Andy Slater

Bought a new refrigerator.

Danny Greenwald

All right. Fourth thing.

Andy Slater

Well, I'm sure that the first thing I did was buy a whole bunch of pizza and booze, right? I mean, that's just, I think a given, right? I invested a ton of money into my home studio. I don't get the sense anymore that people are asking me to do stuff just because I'm the wacky blind guy they can throw in a cage and let loose. I think now it's kind of like, it gives me this freedom to propose my work and perform my work without being afraid to do so.

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