New media come, old media go.
Take the good 'old' audio compact cassette. Over the last couple of years, as the prevalent means of mobile listening (on a walkman, a car stereo) it has near to completely been replaced by the digital mp3 format and the corresponding players. This 'fade into vintage' of the cassette tape comes with a subtle, very visual, effect on our city- and landscapes: have you noticed that there is hardly anymore tape salad ('cassetti spaghetti') sprouting from the pavements, winding down the gutters, flourishing in shrubberies or rolling along our highways? That there is no more tape waving from trees, caught in satellite dishes or strung around overhead lines?
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If you have payed attention, you will be well aware that for several decades this curious artificial vegetation bloomed abundantly. Lost Sound, a great short film made in 1999 by the British artists John Smith and Graeme Miller, shows the clods, wads, strands, knots and other varieties that at the time could be found in their London neighourhood. A year later, in 2000, German filmmaker Gunter Krüger used the magnetic tape debris that he came across in the streets of Jerusalem during a three month stay there at the Bezalel Academy as a guide for a wonderful cinematic dérive: Magnetic {Eye} - Jerusalem.
Early 2002 I started to systematically collect and document this random plastic-magnetic decoration of the streets, parks and highways along which I passed. I kept track of it ever since, in an online 'audiovisual travelogue': the found tapes exhibition. For many years I diligently continued my plucking of this strange fruit our cities bore, wherever whatever way would lead me. Lately, though, harvest is growing poorer and poorer. Indeed, I did not pick a single tape salad for over three months now.
A couple of years ago at the Conflux Festival one of the girl assistants there told me how much she admired the intricate and artful way in which I managed to drape these old tapes around the odd bits of weed growing out of the Brooklyn pavement.
You see, by now, I will really need to start planting them myself.
next: A map, a table, an instrument
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