"even as
strange geographies corrugate, fracture and smear worldly scale and
tempo, the ground isn’t somehow evaporated into virtual
information flux, but, quite to contrary, we are brought to the end
of the non-place, to a point where place can be and must be
re-established anew as an accountable habitat in the renewed image of
these very same deformations."
- Benjamin Bratton, 'On the Nomos of the Cloud: The Stack, Deep Address, Integral Geography'.
the short study Edison ledges (diagram for twelve archival silences), re-purposed various
archival sound recordings, in this case, commercially released
Edison wax cylinders c.1890-1920 catalogued within the 500+ cylinders
that form part of the collections of a small Hobart-based museum dedicated to sound technologies, the Sound Preservation
Association of Tasmania (S.P.A.T). The cylinders were recorded, and the music subsequently
removed, leaving only the precursory audio, and the final run-out
grooves. Inverting the kinds of editing processes used, for example,
in digital archival sound preservation, in which an editor would
normally edit out these audible silences and use noise reduction
software to progressively remove the grain media to reveal the music,
here, the grain, the noise and the silence are all that remain of the
technical, epistemological and economic act of late 19th century audio recording.