A table shot from above and an expanse of unusually assorted small media objects: microphones, tape recorders, a record player and even some Polaroids. This is how the sound performance Forest Scratching, Sounding Polaroids by Alexey Seliverstov is presented to the Instagram public. It’s a work that began years ago through recordings of songs and bird calls made around the world, but spectators just need to press play to enter the imaginary forest of sounds that comes to life while the artist, like a demiurge, starts his very personal orchestra. The vinyls begin to spin, European diurnal and American nocturnal birds jump out of the tape recorders, coexisting for the first time with each other and again, with other birds, this time completely artificial, which echo between the different microphones. And then the polaroids, taken in the woods of southern California, transformed through the application of VHS tapes into sound magnetic cards and read through a Califone Cardmaster Magnetic Card Reader, a device originally conceived to teach children or people with learning problems to read and pronounce words correctly. The ecology of means of reproduction set up by Seliverstov chases the complexity of the starting ecology, mixing it but without significantly altering its perception. The estrangement of sounds with respect to the manipulated instruments is activated both in sound form and in its visual component, merely functional, but still tenaciously present.

 

Alexey Seliverstov – Forest Scratching, Sounding Polaroids

@grayskiesforever

♬ original sound – Alexey Seliverstov