Optical Sound

Do machines play music? Is there a difference between a dot matrix printer and a record turntable? Optical Sound, Taanila’s 2005 wide-screen interpretation of [The User]’s brutalist sound piece for an array of obsolete printers, depicts the devices ratcheting horizontally together in a stalled symphony, inkjets repeatedly blackening the same area on the page. It is not the blurring of man with machine that lies at the core of this film, but the blurring of the spaces that each has been traditionally obliged to occupy. We disappear into our data streams, which are everywhere and “nowhere” at the same time. (Ken Hollings)