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conversation piece, '99-'02

Conversation piece was an early work using PIC chips and Chipcorder’s from ISD/winbond. The piece has taken several forms, but the idea is to create a handheld device that randomly (OK, psuedo-randomly…) records, pauses, mixes and plays back sounds from your personal environment. I have constructed several versions of the work, some that record/pause/playback quickly, others that soak up sound clips all day and then start to mix and play when you flip a switch – and other versions in between those extremes. The devices have been used in various performance environments, both instrumental and conversational. I did a version of the piece in Berlin and a professor at Humboldt University created and published a project about it:

The initial idea was to create a device that could explore the way we memorize sound, and the extents to which sound that is memorized randomly (on the device) may trigger memories that have been, perhaps, less randomly organized in one’s mind. The title comes from a version of the piece where a collaborator and I set the device up between us as we carried on a conversation on stage. The logic that caused the circuit to record, mix, and playback sound was different than the logic my friend and I used to carry on our conversation. As time went on the influence of the device on our conversation became more prominent.
Subsequent versions of the piece have included multiple users spending the day with the device and then meeting at a specific place and time for a performance, where the initial sounds were from wherever the individuals had wandered throughout the day and then, during the performance, the devices began to sample each other and the sounds of that moment.
This video was created by me for the German documentary mentioned above. There were actually two devices in the white, cardboard box, that were programmed to record, pause, and play back at drastically different periods, and at drastically different sampling rates. I kept the device with me all day as I left my apartment and visited friends in NYC. By the end of the day there was a lot of sound stored on the ISD chips and the resulting composition went on for quite a while before all of the archived sounds were overwritten by more recent sounds.