6pm Sat. 16/04/2011

Manan Haseyo
(Tape Releases)
Ian-John

RM is very happy to welcome Ian-John back to New Zealand, after spending the last few years based in Japan and Korea. On Saturday night he will perform some recent works from the 2010 Seoksu Art Project.

Tape Releases @ RM
２０１１年４月１６日

3 poems with tape recorders
Sound invades my space – it disrespects borders thereby making explicit the intensity of territory…
- Brandon LaBelle (Background Noise)

The voice is not an organic part of your body, it is coming from somewhere in-between your body. Whenever we talk to another person there is always this minimum of ventriloquist effect, as if some foreign power took possession. Voice – object of anxiety that distorts reality...the problem then is just how to get rid of this alien invader…our ego is an alien force distorting/ controlling our body.
- Slavos Zizik

Tape is the available, accessible medium of document stretching across the 20th century. To listen to the sound of a tape recorder working is to be filled with anticipation of an approach…it is the voice that is approaching across the striding tape. What voices? Where from?  It is an anticipation of intimacy.   

一　Tape recorder duet.
In this piece two tape recorders with loop tapes listen to each other and repeat each other’s utterances. Firstly, a voice from an audience member is recorded onto one recorder, which in turn plays it to the other player which is recording it. Then the recording player plays and the playing player records, so they change roles.
The two players begin facing each other at close quarters and progressively move apart…as this happens the original voice becomes modified by several factors, including the limited sensitivity of the tape medium, the acoustic properties of the gallery and the distance at which the players are apart. Thus indeterminate noise develops from the original sounds of the voice.
At some distance (about 4-5 metres apart) the players move out of ‘earshot’and can no longer hear each other, thus they listen only to themselves and to the background noise within the room, and sounds  that are penetrating from without.
Gradually they approach each other again, and noise builds and evolves as they take up again a face to face posture.

二　Tape release.
Music is small elements that move in time, and writing is small elements that move in time…and I can actually hear when I’m writing not only the harmony of the half sentence I’ve written but the harmony of the half sentence I haven’t yet written…including the words I don’t yet know because I’m looking for them, when I find them I will put them into the pattern…they exist…
A.S.Byatt

Audio tape is released from two handheld recorders and used to write text upon the floor. The standard speed of tape moving through the read heads determines the pace of the “handwriting”. The visible flowing of the medium, and the materiality of the cassette tape speaks in cooperation with the unseen waves that it’s movement reproduces, for at the same time speech is being released from the built in speakers. Yet to view the entire length of a cassette tape poured over an area is also to see something which our eyes are denied access. After the length of tape has all been spilt onto the floor the cassettes are changed and the players then begin to haul the tape back into the machines…the two machines each draw their tape in and on the floor the two lines of magnetic tape jostle with each other.
The spectacle of the ending appears as it is clear that the visible length of tape is also representative of a duration of time for which we are obliged to listen. Nonetheless a pleasurable tension emerges out of the anticipation of this meeting with cessation.

三　TURNoverTURN
OVERturnOVER
TURNoverTURN

Ian-john

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