Monday, September 12, 2011

"Apophenic Ecosystem C10 C30" at TACTIC, Cork

tape loop

"The Uncanny is a Freudian concept of an instance where something can be familiar, yet foreign at the same time, resulting in a feeling of it being uncomfortably strange or uncomfortably familiar."

Liam Slevin has curated an exhibition of sound and video works based on this theme, opening Wednesday 14 September at 7pm. Exhibiting artists include Dominic Thorpe, Stephen McGlynn, Erin Gee, Jessica Conway, Dave Fyans, Sarah Lundy, Richard Forrest and Dan Guiney. I am happy I was asked to take part and will make it "down south" for the opening.

If you can't make it then, the show is open until 24 September 24 on the 2nd Floor, Old Government Buildings, Sullivan's Quay, Cork, Ireland. You can find TACTIC on Facebook and at their own dedicated website.

Here is my statement to accompany "Apophenic Ecosystem C10 C30":

I grew up with cassette tape, an accessible and personal medium for storing sound. The act of recording a tape -- inscribing it with songs I chose, personal messages and even original music -- made it my own. But the ferric oxide overlaid its own distinctive signature. Hiss, wow and flutter, frequency filtering and pre-echo combined with peeling tape surfaces, misaligned and dirty heads, recording glitches. The innate properties of the medium made of my sounds a palimpsest that mapped some spectral domain. Listening back, I could sometimes hear strange music I had never recorded. Unexpected voices issued from a foreign land discovered in the space between tracks. 

This sound installation consists of 83 tracks played back through two independent and unsynchronized stereo sources. Playback volumes are low enough that the background noise of the tape and the ambiance of the listening room fuse. The result is a meeting of the enfolded sonics of the tape and the open space of the acoustic environment, the past overlaid on the present. This is a machine for generating apophenia. 

All original sound material has been sourced from my own cassette tapes, now three decades old.

noise high output

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2 comments:

robin said...

Thanks to Liam, Pamela and the rest of the TACTIC crew for the opening tonight. Had a great time!

robin said...

The official web page for this exhibit is here:
http://www.tactic-art.info/uncanny-sound.html

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