The Juggling Jukebox raises other thought provoking questions. By merging man and machine, it explores the meaning of our humanity in the context of a society increasingly technological and commercial. Are our lives reduced to monetary concerns? Have we become machines? The lifeless stance of the juggler between "plays" prompts children to ask (and maybe even some adults may wonder)

"Is it real?" As Battey and Jay note in a grant proposal they wrote, "Laughter is, after all, the only way to reconcile the utter absurdity of transforming a human being into a vending machine. "

 

Last fall James Jay and I arranged to conduct a real-time, online interview over the Internet (using Unix's "talk" facility, for the techno-savvy). This saved the time of transcribing an audio tape and meshed nicely with the "cyber"spirit of the Jukebox. Here is the result of that interview:

 

Performance History

JW: How did you get into juggling originally?

JJ: I learned juggling as an undergraduate at Earlham College (Class of '90) in Richmond, lnd. I suppose learning juggling in college isn't that unusual, but I actually learned in a juggling class, for credit, which is a bit odd.

 

JW: What were you majoring in, and how did you decide to take the juggling class?

JJ: I majored in English literature. Earlham is a very academically conservative school, but for some reason they had a physical education requirement. A student organized a juggling class as one of the "Sport and Movement Studies" options.

 

JW: How did the idea of the "Juggling Jukebox" first occur to you?

JJ: After moving to Seattle in 1990, I was trying to think of a way for a juggling act to work at Pike Place Market. The market is the place for street performing in Seattle, but the spaces are very small, so a traditional juggling act doesn't work. I had been thinking about what would work in a confined space, and somehow I came up with the Juggling Jukebox. The idea of starting up a performance with people inserting money is a fairly traditional street-mime thing, and I had seen guys on the streets of San Francisco doing the robotic thing.

 

JW: What "robotic thing?"

JJ: A lot of young black men stand on the waterfront with music playing from boom-boxes. They will stand with a cup out and do some robotics when you put money in their cup. The more money, the longer the performance. So there are some precursors that I owe part of the idea too, but I have never seen anyone approach it in quite the same way.

 

JW: Had you done much performing before the Jukebox?

JJ: At the Pike Place Market Festival, I had a paid gig performing in the Kid's Alley. That went alright, but it was pretty much like other juggling acts. As I was exploring the idea of getting out and street performing, I realized that the traditional street act didn't really play well with my strengths. By nature, I'm somewhat reserved, so the Juggling Jukebox (which is totally silent) worked well for me. It's very focused, so I could practice the specific mime skills that I needed. It concentrates on showing tricks, which is what most jugglers work on but most acts squeeze in between the jokes. So I could use my juggling skills and present them in a way that exploited to my strengths and downplayed my weaknesses.

 

JW: How did this evolve into the high-tech version?

JJ: After I had been performing the original (low-tech) Jukebox for a bit over two years, I came across a grant offered by 911 Media Arts (a Seattle-based center for the development of the artistic application of broadcast, video and communication technologies). They, along with a group called Northwest Cyberartists were putting on an art and technology festival and conference called "Beyond Fast Forward."  I had another idea for a street performing stage with video setup and so on - the idea was to contrast high-tech with the traditionally low-tech genre of street performance. I liked the idea, but as I thought more and more about it, I realized that what I had thought before was too simple an update of the Jukebox was actually much more focused and feasible. I approached my friend Bret Battey, an interactive algorithmic composer, about the possibility of tying electronic music to the Jukebox. I realized that if I was going to link music to the Juggling Jukebox, I would have to be able to easily start and stop for drops. Thus, I reasoned, it would have to be computer controlled. Bret agreed that we could tie the music to the movement. So this expanded my original idea quite a bit.

 

JW: What is the relationship between the high-tech Juggling Jukebox and other high­tech juggling acts such as the Karamazovs body suit routine and Dan Menendez's bounce piano routine?

JJ: The Juggling Jukebox is unique in that it uses computer readings of movement as well as hits. Every other high-tech juggling routine uses a ball hitting a drum pad, keyboard key, or body trigger. The high-tech Jukebox uses triggers on my palms, but also measures the movement in my elbow. I see this as expanding the possibilities significantly - instead of a 0 or 1, you're receiving a value between 0 and 255, so you can control pitch, volume, tempo, anything that's not a simple on/off value. This permits a much richer set of responses.