140 Ways to Make a Tape Unlistenable
A former tenant of my wife’s was a noise musician who left crates of cassettes behind when he moved out. Instead of simply tossing or donating them, I came up with as many interesting ways to not necessarily destroy them, but make them unlistenable. The idea came from the tapes, which were esoteric and already “unlistenable” to many. I executed and documented about half of the list’s items, presented here in book form.
Dan Nelson is a writer and conceptual/visual artist who lives in the Hudson Valley. He is the author of 140 Ways to Make a Tape Unlistenable
(Informal Noticings). His work has appeared in The Believer and, most recently, The Racket.
http://thedannelson.com/
thedannelson@proton.me
Nikki Nolan II Nikki Nolan
Born from a performance on January 30, 2010, by Nikki Nolan.
Nikki Nolan II evolved from the first face with the hat to the photo appropriated off the cover of marketing material for Pratt Institute. Both became cut-out faces.
Version two of Nikki Nolan II (black and white) spent longer in the world being photographed.
All performances with Nikki Nolan II were documented and predominately experienced through the face's Facebook page.
This book is a compilation of documentation of these performances.
Nikki Nolan is a conceptual artist based in the bay area. Their work explores the unreliability of human memory and how it shapes experiences. Their current work stems from the first time she remembers being documented, which prompted a sensation of self-doubt as to whether she was recalling her own experience or had substituted a detached replication of the event.
Their aim is to examine how an error-prone memory reacts to potentially conflicting versions of the event in which it was simultaneously created. Their installations confront the observers’ subjective impressions by contrasting them with photographs and video produced before their experience crosses the threshold into the perceived past. These exhibits are meant to explore the potential fragmentation of self and place that arises as our accelerating capability to record outpaces our physiological ability to comprehend.
The immediate availability of digital photos and video via ubiquitous internet access and cell phone cameras creates a constantly updated stream of information that daily outperforms our fragile human memory in both scale and accuracy. Our pursuit thereof is challenged both by our limited potential to understand and our expanding capacity to digitally record. We align and adapt our understanding of the event – yielding to and assimilation the impartial record. My installations demonstrate the alienating effects of this process in a microcosm.
Nolan’s work has become a network of images linked and interwoven. Every new installation has fragments from previous shows, manifested in prints and objects, carried over and situated in a new context. This mirrors our mode of integrating new experiences and observing the associate connections that arise regardless of their relevance to authenticity.”
https://nnolan.com/
thenikkinolan@gmail.com
