Installation at Location One, New York

Found audiotape is spliced together into one continuous line that wraps around and weaves in and out of the gallery’s structural columns, literally drawing a thin line of sound through space.  In contrast to the vertical columns, the horizontal lines of audiotape are variable, fluid, and expressive.  The intersecting bands of magnetic tape—shiny brown on one side, matte black on the other—mimic, on a monumental scale, the looping action of tape inside a cassette.   As it leads the viewer into the space, the site-specific installation gives the leftover materials of music production a compelling physical form.  Without the technology to play it, the recorded sounds that are embedded in the surface of the magnetic tape are silent and inaccessible.  The work speaks to the materiality of music and sound, as well as the rapid and inevitable shift of recordable media from utility to obsolescence. 

Courtesy of Jean Jin