holding on to memory

Made for Time Studio (ARTF-134-902 - Fall 2025)
Video file - 1280x720 pixels
Duration - 7:07 minutes

Description - In this performance piece, I take a cassette audio recording of a "fight between parents over a child" that was taken during the previous classmates group project, and I play it back for the audience once. In the background I've edited footage of the fight in advance to be grim and becoming progressively more distorted until it's unrecognizable. Once the playback stops, I take the cassette out of the player, and the tape out of the cassette. I precisely run scissors along the tape to shave off parts of the magnetic coating that holds the information. I wind it up and play it back for the audience. The resulting sound is choppy and distorted, meant to evoke feelings of erasing one's memory through reliving childhood traumas. Something to note is that I am meant to be the child from the previous group's performance grown up. The video was shot on my father's Hi8 camera, which was used to film my early memories in real life, cut between with footage taken on a modern mirrorless camera.