i took a look at a VCR today – it was quite nice to see the magnets, motors, and machinery move all together. once i realized that was all switches moving motors, i started looking at ways to trigger the switches. nothing really hit me, so i started soldering wires to extend the switches to outside the VCR.
mechanics have quite their own aesthetic – i found it very interesting to just watch how the tape moved through the whole machine. it did make a noise, though and now i remember back to the ennio morricone experience i saw in edinburgh. they had a tape run through a whole mechanic mechanism to make the sound of crickets – it was as simple as that – a tape strung through a mechanical device.
i also think of vinyl records being scratched very gently – many vinyls are now being sold for $2 or just being given away – the analog doesn’t have a permanent home in this quickly moving digital age –
digital information takes up less space – it can live in virtual hard drives and does not demand the same physical presence as its analog counterpart. roadtrips consisting of books of cd’s have been compressed into an iPod. i do not necessarily lament the analog, yet the analog is now nostalgic.
in a purely digital world, continuity and mechanics are hidden aspects of this environment.
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