Jesper Olsson on Tape Recording and Postwar Media Poetics

This talk, held on March 14, 2017 at KU Leuven, deals with the exploration of audiotape and tape recorders by poets and artists during the cold war period. Through a reading of works by Vito Acconci, David Antin, Henri Chopin, and others – focusing on issues of voice, signals, time, and performance – tape recording is discussed both as an aesthetic device for generating new experiences and as part of a technological dispositif – or the “media as system” (Siegfried Zielinski). As such, the tape recorder can also function as a media archaeological probe for analyzing and reflecting upon the ubiquitous digital media ecology of today.