A Recording Score...Magnetic Film

A Recording Score ↩

Since the early 2010s, I have been collecting recordings of everyday sounds. What I find powerful about sound is the way it leads me to create an image in my mind. For example, when I hear someone using a tool, I can  listen to that it’s a kettle, what kind of kettle, how far away, where, etc. There’s so much information, even in half a second, I can tell. And so all the information in the sound is very complex and rich, and it immediately creates images in my mind based on what I hear

A Recording Score was created to store the collection of recordings and to represent the relationships between the instructions and the score. I encountered a completely different reality by continuously translating each recording at different times. Translating the audio into text allows me to give them another reality. My translation is a sequence of my voice. I created this button that allows this sequence to play randomly as if other or many voices were reading the score.

It is a physical process, almost like walking through the website with a listener. The relationship between the audio and the text changes the structure of time and space. Mobility suddenly becomes this space where you can have a very individual experience while you are in the public space or while you are navigating.

Magnetic Film

Magnetic Film is a hard copy of various sources of A Recording Score recorded on cassette tape. The cassettes, scaled down to a different scale, have only one-way playback; my mobility and orientation information is embedded in the cassette, and the video disappears, leaving only the audio-text relationship. This is a part where people are deprived of one kind of sensory information in order to focus on other sensory information. This notion of separating the sound from the video was important to me in terms of what it does to the listener when they’re just listening to consent.

From a series of physical signatures of recordings, I translated these traces into screens through codings such as glitches, pixel sorting, and data moshing. I found this transition a long time ago when I dragged the old movie file to the desktop; the pixel of the movie screen was broken. So glitches, pixel sorting, and data moshing are the transitions between time and scale that evoke hierarchical or unequal relationships.

Instead of a flow, I wanted to represent the actual process that takes place where things do not seem to meet. I described that the transitions between the images shouldn’t be smooth because they represent the process by which the thing is completed in terms of the production system and the way it is produced. I was constantly thinking about this kind of translation process, and each time I translated; I got a completely different reality. The whole screen is active; this kind of screen where every little inch of it is changing as I see it, rather than being a performer or something like that.

Conversation

.

Video Excerpts

Credits