Our desire to use analog technology in this exploration is interlinked with our desire for materiality and tangibility. We are also interested in the way analog media shapes our relationship to time.
Time passes differently when you're reading a book, turning pages, to when you're scrolling through media on your phone. Or when you're listening to a record, turning it to the B-side halfway through, compared to the experience of listening to music on Spotify and skipping songs on an album. Analog technology feels more in touch with duration, like you're marking time through your interaction with objects. Each form of analog media is linked to its own movement and physicality; the difference between the act of reading a book and playing a record is obvious, but the difference in actions between reading and playing music on a phone is barely perceptible.
Real time in tech refers to something happening instantaneously (weather updates, video calls). To record something in real time is to capture it happening in the time it would take to perform. Real time is in essense, Live time.
RAZOR BLADES & STICKY TAPE
The editing process of analog sound is imprecise and destructive: you can't edit a tape without cutting it and sticking it back together.
Recorded sound is either classed as signal or noise. Signal is the voice/music you want to transmit, noise is everything else - breath, coughs, umms and ahhs, background voices and movments. We live in a world of signal that eliminates noise, because noise is inefficient. Microphones on mobiles automatically reduce anything that isn't foreground voice, which is why you can't whisper on the phone and be heard. Auto-noise eradication leaves it to modern machines to decide what has meaning and what doesn't, but in reality, noise can communicate as much as signal.
We are interested in amplifying the noise. The background hum of our lives. The clinking of ice in a glass. The shuffling of bodies. The unintentional utterances.
LIMITATIONS
We are paralysed by choices. The limitations of analog technology is part of its appeal.
The average person makes around 35,000 decisions per day. The paradox of choice is that when you have seemingly limitless options, you're more likely to panic when making decisions, and feel dissapointment or regret after. The limit of a roll of camera film means that when you're selecting photos, you're not overwhelmed by thousands of similar images. Digital cameras allow you to view photos immediately, so the act of editing seeps into
the photography; people are more likely to alter themselves and their surroundings when they're faced with their image. The ability to make endless changes whilst editing can make the creative process tiresome. Fewer options mean you can focus on the specifics.