Thursday, August 7, 2014

Janek Schaefer | National Portrait



Janek Schaefer
National Portrait
Red Hill, Australia: Room40, 2011
16.5 x 4.5 x 2 cm.
Edition of 7 signed and numbered copies

The London-based artist and composer Janek Schaker has released over twenty five recordings in twenty years, including Skate, a record produced by "cutting a concentric collage of individual short 'sound scars' onto the disc", and the brilliant Recorded Delivery (see previous post, here).

National Portrait, a twenty-four hour long album released on a USB circuit board, is based on an installation work (below) that recorded the sound of the very last day of the five analogue terrestrial TV channels in Liverpool, as they were broadcast live across the city on the 1st of December, 2009. This work condenses the 120 hours (5 channels for 24 hours) into a single day, with the tracks cut up into 1000 random length clips that are to be played back in shuffle mode, producing a varied series of sound bites. A portrait of the city, and country, emerges, as well as a document of the moment in television history when analogue fully gives way to digital.

The screen-printed remote, housing a USB board in the battery compartment, apparently came wrapped in a TV listings page, something I failed to note when my parcel arrived a couple of years ago. I discarded them with the rest of the packaging materials. 







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