Samenstück

installation for five hanging cassette players, tape, and plants
2024

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Samenstück is a sound installation consisting of five independent 45-minute cassette tracks created specifically for the UW Biology Greenhouse, presented May 22–24, 2024 on the DXARTS exhibition “An uncanny garden.” Each track is comprised of improvised loops using granular synthesis techniques from samples of classical music that invoke or depict plant life, in various “ripe” (heavily altered) / “unripe” (quotation) and “seed” (chopped) / “plant” (linear) forms. The cassette tapes were chosen partly for their practicality—the greenhouse environment is constantly subjected to water and therefore expensive equipment was out of the question—but more importantly for their symbolic power, as physical “strands” of sound and icons of nostalgia. The listener is invited to consider the relationship between analog technology and nature, as well as to uncover the web of themes that these classical works import in their associations with nature: love, longing, God, alienation, human folly.

Each cassette showcases a narrower genre of source material, namely: piano music, orchestral music, medieval and renaissance music, operatic music, and one tape dedicated solely to Schubert songs (Schubert being one of my most persistent musical fascinations). The greenhouse’s maintenance systems make it an inherently noisy environment; the lo-fi quality of the tapes thus blends the installation organically into its surroundings.

During the installation, additional decorative strands of cassette tape were added to visually connect the medium of the sound with the organic plant bodies. As the tapes ran out, each one was manually rewinded, causing the “channels” to fall out of sync and an irreproducibly-evolving soundscape to emerge over time.

EXHIBITION HISTORY

May 22–24, 2024: presented at DXARTS exhibition “An Uncanny Garden,” UW Biology Greenhouse (Seattle, WA)