Artist: Jacob Kirkegaard
Title: Rewind | ©
Date: 2007 – 2010
Duration: 8′40
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photos by: Jacob Kirkegaard
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THE SOUND
Some years ago I started to collect the tape that I pick up in the streets and sidewalks around the world. I walk a lot wherever I visit, and every now and then I come across one of these crumbled old pieces of brown tape that somehow managed to escape its music cassette and is about to end its days as an abandoned and long-forgotten little piece of sound. I regard each string of tape as a secret witness that might tell a story, sing a song, provide a random and unexpected information about its habitat. So I pick it up, put it in a little plastic bag and note down the date, hour and location. If I happen to have brought a camera, I will also take a picture of the place. At home, I wrap up my find into a cassette, play it back and make a recording of the sound, or the fragments of sound, that are left on the tape.
This work consists of two pieces of tape that I collected on two different trips to Havana, Cuba. The first 4 minutes of the track are the A and B sides of a string of tape that I found last month. The tape was stretched out in the middle of a street in the center of the city. It was moving slowly down the hill towards the famous Malecón promenade as the cars drove by. (See picture) The second part of the track, 4.5 minutes long, consists of the A and B sides of another piece of tape that I picked up from the gutter in Habana Vieja, near the Malecón as well, in December 2007. It was curled up in a messy lump next to a garbage can.
THE ARTIST
Jacob Kirkegaard is a Danish artist who focuses on the scientific and aesthetic aspects of resonance, time, sound and hearing. His installations, compositions and performances deal with acoustic spaces and phenomena that usually remain imperceptible. Using unorthodox recording tools, including accelerometers, hydrophones and home-built electromagnetic receivers, Kirkegaard captures and contextualizes hitherto unheard sounds from within a variety of environments : a geyser, a sand dune, a nuclear power plant, an empty room, a TV tower, and even sounds from the human inner ear itself.
Now based in Berlin, Kirkegaard is a graduate of the Academy for Media Arts in Cologne, Germany. Over the last fifteen years, Kirkegaard has presented his works at exhibitions and at festivals and conferences throughout the world. He has released five albums (mostly on the British label Touch). Among his numerous collaborators are JG Thirlwell, Philip Jeck and Lydia Lunch. Kirkegaard is also a member of the sound art collective freq-out.
