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TAPE BRITAIN (19-23 January 2015) is a new work by Alan Dunn for RadioCity, a project devised for Tate Britain in collaboration with artists Marion Harrison and Harold Offeh, and Tate's Early Years and Families team.
TAPE BRITAIN is a cover version of the Production Line project initially developed in 2012 by Paul Sullivan (Static Trading), Clinic and Sam Wiehl. Originally presented at Static, Eindhoven PsychLab and Liverpool PsychFest, where Dunn assisted, Production Line is concerned with divided spaces, microphones and making sound (the recording process) visible and tangible again. The project involves the placing of microphones around a building and drawing those feeds back to one central source where second-generation cassette recordings are mixed and made. By nature, the project asks the question of why we keep returning to the RECORD button.
The cover version takes the initial project construct and expands it to explore participation and editing. Based on observing Paul Sullivan taking a portable cassette recorder around Liverpool Psychfest, visitors to the Tate will be loaned recorders and C2 cassettes to create their own snapshots of the building. In addition, we will be placing microphones in four highly visible places around Tate Britain to capture audience, ambience, engineering and movement.
Visitors will be invited to participate in some editing, working during the five days towards one cumulative composition. Beginning with a recogniton of the splicing work of Gysin, Burroughs et al, Dunn has begun experimenting with lengthways splicing of cassettes, aided by a newly designed device developed in collaboration with Alan Stoyle at Leeds Beckett University. Rather than simply splitting left from right, this process generates incredibly unpredictable results, extracting simultaneous information from two sources and pushing the playback technology to its limit (this is a brief MP3 of the very first test, using a 'Maximum Rock'n'Roll Compilation' and the spoken word 'Grey is the colour of hope').
* The original TAPE BRITAIN proposal also included changing the name outside the building from TATE to TAPE for the week (negotiations in progress at time of writing).
