Article Collection – Stirling June ’72

—ANM012—
46 minute cassette tape
24 page Booklet. Offset / Risograph
Grey Chrome cassettes with blue cassette imprint
Offset printed artwork
Edition of 100 copies

In 2013, the post office delivered a package of documents to the wrong address — mine. Inside, I discovered photographs and correspondence from the Ministry of Defense within the Royal Netherlands Air Force regarding recovered aircrafts from WWII. Before returning them, I opened them and scanned each for my reference. The correspondences from the late 70s appear to question the recovered aircrafts that had crashed near The Hague during WWII. The images depict powerful post industrial wreckage salvaged, photographed, and documented.

I wrote and recorded many of these compositions while traveling by plane between Boston and Salt Lake City, Barcelona, London, or Atlanta, and then revamped them in my studio in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The pieces, recovered from the past few years, are a hybrid of analog and digital improvisations for modular synthesis, composed and executed using hardware modules, PureData and SuperCollider.

Inspired by the turbulent physicality of the low atmospheric pressure that affects one’s ears and sensibilities while flying, I wanted to create compositions that induce dizziness and uneasiness. These glissando structures mimic the vertigo of looking out the airplane window thousands of feet above the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

These compositions describe an immense gravitation towards yet repulsion from technological advancements in speed and pollution. They represent the idea of a reliance on and penetration by technology, an aversion to the embedding of technology into oneself, a process to which the body instantaneously responds and adapts. Like any parasite, this unilateral dependence requires a host. It is the mental map of the world we replace with a digital compass, the globalization and dilution of culture exacerbated through hyper-telecommunication.

Chris Latina, 2015