Live stream: Kate Donovan – Portal
Wednesday, 9 September⋅5:00 – 5:30pm
At 5pm this afternoon we are transported to the inside of a chamber holding one of the world’s largest collections of wax cylinders via a live audio steam courtesy of artist and researcher, Kate Donovan.
‘Portal’ takes us inside the much contested space of the Humboldt Forum in Berlin. Famously invented by Thomas Edison in the late 1800s, wax cylinders are the earliest commercial medium for recording and playing back sound. Because they are made from soft wax—such as beeswax and ceresin—they are extraordinarily delicate, prone to cracking, and highly susceptible to mold. Due to their fragility the sounds are held there in a state of stasis, while machines work to control the climate of the room, keeping the temperature and humidity stable. This live audio transmission is a way to create a kind of portal, allowing an institutional space that houses dormant recordings to disperse out of the walls and onto the airwaves, or perhaps rather to allow listeners inside these walls from afar.
This is part of a larger project supported by the 4A_Lab in Berlin (Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut | Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz) that proposes transmission-from-archive as a form of critical practice that makes institutional thresholds porous without reproducing the collections that they hold, thus positioning radio as a means of thinking through the ambivalences of archival holdings.