VIDEO CIRCUITS: Magnetic Tape

Saturday, 5 April 2014

Magnetic Tape

Magnetic Tape is interesting to me. On reels or in cassettes each recording (or potential recording) is like a little curly drawing that pulls the sound through space, Only one position on the tape is read and so the linear nature of the tape allows the signal to vary the output is attached to over time. I messed around with wire recorders along time ago because I liked the fact that the sound is concentrated into a tiny line like space with the heaviness of the mark being replaced by the amplitude of the waveforms encoded as magnetic information. Here are some of my diy wall mounted ones, winding the pickup heads was a long day.

I also like Nam June Paik’s 1963 work Random Access allot, tape is attached to the wall as a drawing with the playback head made available as a mobile stylus so you can retrace his steps and listen to the recordings using the same gestures he used to stick them down. A kind of playable graphical notation

A good friend Dale has gone way further with visual tape based work and kindly sent me some photos of slightly insane pieces he is putting together at the moment. He selects tape based on it's visual tonality and creates geometric slightly illusory patterns building a second information set encoded in the the recording medium. I don't know if Dale does, but I find these relate to visual music and graphic notation practices too. Ill probably try to convince him at his art show at here in london on the 10th of April at six, come if you want to hang out we will probably drink beer after too.