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For any art installation. Try having two magnetic tape reader
and recorder spaced across the room
In the middle is a constantly rotating loop of magnetic tape
that is passing via both devices.
Have a dividing wall that you can open or close between the
two readers.
Talking on one end will
incur a delay, as the tape loops to the
other side. Which apparently in art terms is meant to mean
to remind us that in the past, communication wasn't as fast
as today.
History of Looping
http://www.loopers-...story/Loophist.html Popular performance technique in "NewMusic" in the '80s [csea, Oct 24 2011]
[link]
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If you go to Bletchley Park and see the rebuilt computers which cracked the German Enigma codes in World War II, you will see that this was done nearly 70 years ago. The memory of the computer is a very long loop of tape (I can't remember now whether it is magnetic or paper tape) which spools continuously past a reader. If the computer wants to read a specific memory location, it just waits a few seconds for it to pass the reader. |
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Kinda. The Colossus has a loop of paper tape which is punched with the intercepted message; on each trip round the loop, the machinery does a test decryption using one set of candidate wheel positions, and does some basic statistics on the result to test how good the settings are. Once per loop, after the message finishes and before it restarts, the generating/counting machinery is reset and advanced to the next candidate setting. |
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(Oh, and Colossus was built to crack the later Lorenz cypher, not the Enigma which was cracked using the "bombe" machines.) |
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Thanks [Wrongfellow] - I knew my memory of the details was a bit vague. |
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I think this is excellent. |
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Such an installation must be practially achievable by caniballising two or more compact audio cassette players, and one cassette. And there are many potential configurations. |
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From wikipedia (Audio tape specifications):
//As the standard tape speed for a compact cassette is 1 and 7/8 ips and a C60 cassette records 30 minutes per side, a C60 cassette in theory holds 281Œ' (85.73 m) of tape. In practice there is some variation, for example Maxell quote their C60s as being 90 m (295') in length.// |
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If you unspooled and spliced such a cassette tape, you could have a recording player at one end of a room, and a series of players up to 45 meters or so long. So you could speak in at one end and then walk along[1], hearing it getting played. Or go back in time by moving faster than that. |
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You could have two-way conversations by using both sides of the tape. |
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[1] very slowly - under 5cm per second. A quarter of an hour to go the 45 meters. |
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Regarding your sub-heading, the Art categories are in "Culture". |
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I think Culture:Art:Interactive is probably most appropriate. |
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Even better would be to assert that this is what you
were doing, and construct the art using an
outlandish amalgam of machines, giant sized tape
and so on. I envision a steampunk sort of take on
early 1970s technology. The artist would need
worry only about the aesthetics of the thing, as all
the audio is handled digitally behind the scenes. |
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How about a video version, where a camera films
people watching a screen which is showing the film
made two minutes ago? |
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There's actually a sub-genre of "New Music" as it was known in the 1980s, called "Looping." |
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Pauline Oliveras and Paul Dresher, along with various others at The San Francisco Tape Music Center, and later UCSD, devised a number of techniques and compositions with large tape loops. |
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Here's a fairly comprehensive history [link]. |
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//How about a video version.....// Baked a long time ago by artist Bruce Nauman |
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