The Player Piano, like the Victrola and Music Box, is situated in a technological history of automated devices that read inscriptions and codes to produce “live music.” This could only be repeated using the machines designed in tandem to match that code. What happens to player piano rolls, cassette tapes, CDs, and so on if the companion machine is broken, missing or forgotten? This installation takes expired technology and creates new technologies out of them--breaking apart the machines involved, reassigning them roles for which they were not purposely built, and translating their codes into creative information and new connections. This transformation dislocates these machines from their initial consumer matrix in which the vicissitudes of economic and technological development chose, for a brief moment, piano rolls and typewriters as the privileged means for coded reproduction.
By augmenting the ‘flutter’ of information left in the recording material, magnifying the ‘wow,’ and featuring the resultant distortion in the machine as its most desirable product, we question the illusion of seamless, transparent authority that coded systems tend to disseminate in defining desire and experience. We have resurrected old devices and outdated terminology in order to reconsider how these media and their content leave their marks and traces on us.
Wow and Flutter: Revolutions in coded, de-coded, re-coded memory, March 2011
This exhibition was curated by Joey Yates and was a two-person show featuring my drawings on player piano rolls and visual poetry by Joshua Hamilton also on player piano rolls. The exhibition included two collaborative installations by Joshua Hamilton and myself. Wow and Flutter was on exhibit March 4-27, 2001 at the Vox Populi Gallery in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Alison McMenamin, Recall and Wow and Flutter at Vox, The Artblog, http://theartblog.org/ March 14, 2011.
Player Piano