This prototype electro-mechanical sound device is based on the Roland DXY pen plotter, a discontinued printing technology of the 1980s, which is combined with audio cassette tape technology in order to playback prerecorded ‘found’ sound recordings from a magnetically encoded audio tape surface. The resulting installation is a multi-temporal assemblage of these marginalised technologies, a hybrid sonic drawing device able to recall and explore archival media. Within these recordings, existing narratives are disrupted and fragmented, straying from chronological order into non-linearity. This draws on analogies to both the device’s merged hardware assembly and to the ‘media archaeological’ interweaving of media timescales and histories. 

The REMAP project (2014) engages with obsolete media artefacts and technologies, with an intention to use such past mediatic devices to help critique the impact of current globalised digital and technological consumerist culture. It seeks to explore the notion ‘Zombie Media’ (Parikka/Hertz), ‘the living dead of media culture’, an accumulated mass of discarded waste electronics and a continued physical existence beyond obsolescence. 

REMAP (Roland Electro-Mechanical Audio Plotter) is a project by UK artist duo Signal-to-Noise, Oliver Wilshen and Niall Quinn. 

About the artists:

The collective Signal-to-Noise (Oliver Wilshen and Niall Quinn, UK) explore the materiality of dead media artefacts. Their work is manifested through direct and playful interaction. The duo create unconventional instruments that question the nature and meaning of performance, originality and memory.

In 2013, they were awarded first prize for the “Interfaces” Interactive Art Competition from the Research Centre for Science and Technology of the Arts (CITAR) in Porto, Portugal. They have exhibited both nationally and internationally including the The National Art Center, Tokyo, EPCOR Centre for the Performing Arts, Calgary and The Victoria & Albert Museum, London. Published work has also appeared in ‘A Touch of Code: Interactive Installations and Experiences’ (2011 Gestalten) and more recently in ‘The Creators Project’ (2013 Intel/Vice).