3269: Elision

Piece based on Thomas Edison painting by Keira Simmons.
"In this piece I was interested in exploring Edison’s early wax cylinder phonograph recordings, as depicted in the painting. As the first recording technology designed to be listened back to, these wax cylinders arguably begin the trajectory that leads us here, to the proliferation of public access to audio recording, to skype calls, to hearing loved ones and colleagues over distance, whether a street or an ocean away. In the painting of Edison, I find the broken cylinder in the foreground particularly evocative of a continued struggle with the inbuilt fragility and unreliability of recording mediums through history, and a reminder of our human persistence to have our voices heard. 
"The two recordings most decipherable in the piece are both Edison: the first is the earliest known recording of his voice (Around The World On A Phonograph, 1888), and the second is the first public recording he made of his own voice (Let Us Not Forge