Alexwed27sept

1 press play to play

Press play to play is a interactive installation. It shows 3 ply wood boards next to each other leaning against a wall with 7 old classical tape players mounted on it, arranged in a grid. All of these players can be used by the visitor as one might expect: Press play, pause, change cassettes… By doing so they create a new composition and a new remix in a analog way. Onside of the installation there are different cassettes, that have been prerecorded and manipulated. Most of them now contain loops. The visitors are invited to change those tapes, play with the tape player, and to even re-record them.

While experimenting with samples in a digital way, I came across a old tape player of mine and wondered, if you could use it for sampling, remixing or making compositions. I started to experiment with tape-loops and multiple tape players to create new samples and compositions. Therefore I opened the cassettes and removed the tape inside. I had cut down 21cm of the tape and attached to both ends to each other with sticky tape. So if you insert this cassette into a the player it will play a loop of 4,3 seconds. On like 100 cassettes I recorded different samples, like drums, vocals… and by combining them you could create a new composition.

It started as a university project about remix and music, including a collaboration with DJ Spooky, a contemporary musician, and Richard Wagner, a german composer from the 19th century. I was curious about how an idea out of the digital age like sampling and remixing music could be translated into the physical world. In order to make visible what’s going on inside the blackbox computer and to maybe find new ways of understanding how remixes are made by literally getting hands on. Changing perspective and tools to gain new insights.

2 new tools for new design

New tools for new design is a book, but it’s also a research about tools and it’s usage in the field of design. Mainly lead by the question if new tools could change what designers create. The book looks like a magazine in the size of A5. It has a orange cover printed with black and white color on it. It shows a white grid with a distorted black typeface that covers nearly the whole page on it. The book does not have a fixed binding, it just consists out of single paged that are folded and put together loosely. Only a rubber band may keep them together at the back.

I started to make my own tools with my own rules and use strange tools for the matter of design. For instance I created a program to manipulate typefaces, to resample pictures like in a puzzle, I used a synthesizer to produce shapes and compositions… In the book I documented these tools and described the theoretical background I researched on. The inside of the book links my tools with the influence I found they have on the design and design process.

This project is my bachelor thesis for my mediadesign graduation. My main inspiration was the fact that I realised that when I look at my computer I see the pink InDesign Logo every time I’m working in a project regarding graphic design. So I kicked that icon out of my dock and tried to create a poster with other programs that where not intended to be graphic design tools and examined if it would change the way I work.