The Player Piano, like the Victrola and Music Box, is situated in a technological history of automated devices that read inscriptions and codes to produce “live music.” This could only be repeated using the machines designed in tandem to match that code. What happens to player piano rolls, cassette tapes, CDs, and so on if the companion machine is broken, missing or forgotten? This installation takes expired technology and creates new technologies out of them–breaking apart the machines involved, reassigning them roles for which they were not purposely built, and translating their codes into creative information and new connections. This transformation dislocates these machines from their initial consumer matrix in which the vicissitudes of economic and technological development chose, for a brief moment, piano rolls and typewriters as the privileged means for coded reproduction.
By augmenting the ‘flutter’ of information left in the recording material, magnifying the ‘wow,’ and featuring the resultant distortion in the machine as its most desirable product, we question the illusion of seamless, transparent authority that coded systems tend to disseminate in defining desire and experience. We have resurrected old devices and outdated terminology in order to reconsider how these media and their content leave their marks and traces on us.
Leticia Bajuyo creates, lives, and teaches in Southern Indiana where she is an Associate Professor of Art at Hanover College. After earning a BFA in 1998 from the University of Notre Dame and an MFA in 2001 from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, she came to Hanover College to join the Art and Art History Department.
Joshua Hamilton is currently a Spanish teacher at the University of Louisville while finishing his doctoral dissertation on neo-avant-garde visual poetry of Spain through Indiana University, Bloomington.
Joey Yates is a musician and curator. He holds an MA in Critical and Curatorial Studies from the University of Louisville. He is gallery director at Land of Tomorrow, a Kentucky project space with locations in Lexington and Louisville. He currently plays drums in Six White Horses and colorguard in The Crispin Glover Cover Band.
