Lost Tapes, Found Sounds
|
Tapes and tape recorders are good candidates for a virtual cemetery like Bruce Sterling's Dead Media Project.
Some years ago, the Dutch musician, sound artist and researcher started a tape collection by wandering through the streets of cities and suburbia, looking for leftovers, picking up thrown away tapes that otherwise would have been worn up by weathers and time to finally vanish completely. The photographs of his findings provide images of loss that cannot be kept as such in a picture: Humans are often more attached to the fetishes of material culture, yet tapes are about sound – and so are some of our most important emotional bindings.
On the Found Tapes Exhibition website, one can not only browse the contents of these revived Frankenstein style mix-tapes, but listen to and download their soundings as well. And from time to time, the artist invites the audience to live performances based on the acoustic treasures of his collection. Last week, following an invitation by Rinus van Alebeek's "Kleines Field Recordings Festival" Schellinx has been wandering through the streets of Berlin, while parts of his collection were on show at two gallery spaces: Transitlounge (focusing on FTE) and at takt kunstprojektraum (art project room), where the artist will also be part of the "Acoustic Flux" show running from February 18 onwards. Last Sunday Schellinx was part of the concert evening in the "Kleines Field Recordings Festival" series, dedicated to "Berlin Soundscapes". Missed it? radioINCORRECT has caught up the sound stream and will send it this evening, starting from 8 p.m. CET. [Pictures from the Found Tapes Exhibition website - Many thanks to Harold Schellinx!] |
Artists and amateurs are already ensuring that these material witnesses of the 20th Century sound culture will survive. One of them is 
Accordingly, also Schellinx' work is not about simply buying into another kind of ruin romantics. Even smallest bits and pieces are carefully collected and, if possible, sorted to be restored into what later may be listened to as memories from an almost forgotten past.
Leave a comment |
|
Very interesting.
Also worth to check out is http://www.sonicfabric.com/ a faabric made from old tapes.
I think I saw it here a long time ago.
yes, indeed - sonic fabric is also a great project and a nice site worth to visit anyway).
and you are also correct: régine blogged about it on wmmna, quite some time ago - in may 2005 (!)
http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/005722.php
and of course there are also other projects dedicated to tape culture (even some also dealing with found tapes) worth to be introduced here sooner or later.
well, i am really in love with media archeology art, so i think i'll stay with this as one of my blogging favs anyway.
hints and tipps are always welcome, of course!
Readers may be interested in a similar project led by sound artist Zoë Irvine - Magnetic Migration Music. Follow the link for more information and MP3s.
yes, indeed this is one of the projects in was thinking about when writing "even some also dealing with found tapes" ;-)
in fact i also blogged about it some weeks ago - but elsewhere in my own weblog (that is, however, in german - so i already thought to come back to m.m. also here on wmmna.)
what i really like about magnetic migration is the community oriented access.
Hello, please have a look at my website: http://www.magnetic-eye.de and http://www.nif-fo-gunx.de. I'm a filmmaker. In 2002 i finished my film "magnetic {eye) - jerusalem" which used audio and videocassettes found on the streets of Jerusalem.
Currently i work on a new film about berlin .... http://www.magnetic-eye.de
MAGNETIC [EYE] - JERUSALEM / FOUND TAPES, March 1, 2000 to June 20, 2000 shows Jerusalem in a small selection of fragments of audio and videocassettes found on the streets. These found objects, whose contents were unknown at the time of their discovery, are put together with spontaneous video footage of the locations of their discovery.
The film does not try to be a complete topographical representation of Jerusalem and escapes political evaluation of the newly erupted conflict by means of its strictly formal structure. It is much more a question of transporting the moods of a fragile and at the same time harsh city.
"MAGNETIC [EYE] - JERUSALEM collects 36 locations of sound and video tapes in Jerusalem, filmed at the beginning of 2000 and edited together with the restored found material, and produces a portrait of the city through this seemingly arbitrary process. A more precise portrait is hard to imagine."
(Heinz Emigholz, in the Arsenal program, 15 December, 2003)
"Using audio and videocassettes found on the streets of Jerusalem, MAGNETIC [EYE] - JERUSALEM delivers a personal topography of a city in the everyday activities of a state of emergency. This creates not only an urban portrait of a particular kind, but also a video that puts the ordinary ways of using self-produced, private recordings and mass media images at disposal in a new way."
(Art in Motion, catalog of the Munich Filmfest, June 2002)