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| Memorials to Active Listening III, 2014 Acetate lathe-cut records, usb turntables, headphones Dimensions variable Installed at Audio Foundation, Auckland |
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Memorials to Active Listening III, 2014
Acetate lathe-cut records, usb turntables, headphones
Dimensions variable
Installed at Audio Foundation, Auckland |
 |
Memorials to Active Listening III, 2014
Acetate lathe-cut records, usb turntables, headphones
Dimensions variable
Installed at Audio Foundation, Auckland |
Memorials to Active Listening was a project carried out in three phases dealing with the poetics of recording, presentation, re-presentation and site. The third iteration of the project was concerned with the fragile ontology of recording as an archival gesture. Three
acetate records containing the sounds recorded during the first part of the project are re-presented, this time audibly, playing until
the sounds scratched each face were worn away.
All types of recording borrow material from a past-present, and all archives are subject to change over time, but, with audio recording especially the product is forever altered by virtue of its removal from an original context by the methods used in removing it, and with acetate records in particular this facsimile is notably precious. The combined contextual and physical differences between the original, spatio-temporally specific moment and the one in which the product of the recording is experienced ensure that the reception of a audio recording is a profoundly different experience to that of the original sound.
In this instance, the sounds presented are affected principally by he means of this presentation, specifically the limitations of these means. Unlike with a pressed vinyl record, the method used in creating the records for Memorials to Active Listening involved physically etching the soundwaves into a polyvinyl acetate discs as they revolved on a turntable at the desired playback speed – 33 1/3 rmp.1 Over the course of the exhibition, the sounds on the records gradually become indistinguishable from the accumulating noise of the playback method. To experience sounds preserved using the lathe-cut method is to experience their fading from existence.
For the essay by Sally Ann McIntyre which accompanied the work, see here.
All types of recording borrow material from a past-present, and all archives are subject to change over time, but, with audio recording especially the product is forever altered by virtue of its removal from an original context by the methods used in removing it, and with acetate records in particular this facsimile is notably precious. The combined contextual and physical differences between the original, spatio-temporally specific moment and the one in which the product of the recording is experienced ensure that the reception of a audio recording is a profoundly different experience to that of the original sound.
In this instance, the sounds presented are affected principally by he means of this presentation, specifically the limitations of these means. Unlike with a pressed vinyl record, the method used in creating the records for Memorials to Active Listening involved physically etching the soundwaves into a polyvinyl acetate discs as they revolved on a turntable at the desired playback speed – 33 1/3 rmp.1 Over the course of the exhibition, the sounds on the records gradually become indistinguishable from the accumulating noise of the playback method. To experience sounds preserved using the lathe-cut method is to experience their fading from existence.
For the essay by Sally Ann McIntyre which accompanied the work, see here.
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1 Without the need for an expensive and labour intensive 'mother and father' plates, this method makes very small runs of records of records an economically viable option, however, the lathe-cut record has one great (if limiting) quirk: with each revolution, the grooves initially cut into the acetate are worn away by the needle of the record player. This causes the recorded sounds loose definition each time it is played, ensuring that each experience of the it is unique – that play #50 will be fundamentally different from play #51.