FOUND TAPES: TELEPHONES
PART OF THE SERIES YOUR MAGNETIC LIFETIME
Audio-Video interactive installation

Telephones is a work in progress, which conceptually consists of of 'amateur anthropology' mixed  with 'electronic archaeology'. it also deals with the idea of voyeurism in its presentation in  installation form.


The core of the work, or at least its content, relies more on chance and coincidence than artistic  intention, since the tapes are found dumped in old audiocassette answering machines and  dictaphones, picked up by the artist on night time rambles round the city. The lucky finds are  then added to the collection.  

The collection process, the gathering of content material, is ongoing. Periodic multi- channel sound installations, (made up out of  playback machines found dumped and modified), are used as a way of making this material  accessible to audiences.
  
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Installation One (Espacio Melounge, c/San Pedro, Madrid 2005)

-Modified telephones - initially 4
-Film: Telephones II (11mins, looped playback)
-Audio Montage: Disposable Memories Audio (45 mins looped playback)
-TV
-AV playback equipment

This random collection of (often thwarted) attempts at communication between  strangers offers the audience the chance to "tap" the phone line; the work may hint at the idea  of voyeurism but at no point is the identity of those on the recordings revealed. They exist only  as voices, as sounds found by chance with no inherent context.

As nothing is known of the personal background of the voices, the listener has to assume to role  of  'context creator' : he or she is forced to construct an identity using the small clues  offered in the recordings : the sounds and tones of voice, the events described, emotional states  of the speakers and so on. From here can come a series of deductions , judgements and  speculations on the speakers' lives. Fragments in installation One include such as the middle  aged couple in heated debate over the frequency of their lovemaking; or the young woman's  ill-fated journey from Belgium to Madrid (illustrated by an increasingly desperate-sounding  series of messages left on the answerphone of her friend who appears to have either forgotten  about the trip, or did he go AWOL ? we will never know).

The installation One explores not so much bi-directional communication, found in the  'normal'  use of the telephone, but presents a recorded voice as a 'past presence'.

This material is also used in the eclectikturntablism performances
early prototypical installation
RAW MATERIAL - PART OF THE ECLECTIKTRONI
K FOUND
TAPES ARCHIVE

 

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