Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Medienwissenschaft

Elizabeth Skadden: Communist Cassette Tape Culture

  • Was Kolloquium „Medien, die wir meinen“
  • Wann 23.05.2012 von 18:00 bis 20:00
  • Wo Georgenstraße 47, R. 0.01 (Medientheater)
  • iCal

In former Communist East Germany and Poland, cassette tapes occupied a unique role as the point of connection of a micro-community of musicians who used media to defy a political system. Forbidden by the government, Western music was smuggled in and then dubbed to hundreds of tapes for distribution within the scene. These cassette tapes are now mostly extinct as their owners usually threw away the Eastern counterparts to Western records they were able to access after the Wall fell. My art practice is concerned with the resurrection of abandoned media and places as related to media archeology. I am most interested in documenting through my research and artistic practice the networks that existed to distribute these tapes as well as the subtle physical and audio variations between each tape and how they created the personality of the music for the listener.

Elizabeth Skadden
www.elizabethskadden.com