This screen-print is one of a series of five images that were first presented in Berlin, in January 2017, at the exhibition Minute/Year (2016). Thematically, it is part of the longer-term work around the ongoing durational installation, Minute/Year.

Minute/Year is an automated, multi-year durational installation artwork. The work creates a new, one-minute-long layered audio recording, and accompanying spectrogram image, every day, and alters location every year. It has been ongoing since January 1., 2016. This means that it has now created an archive of over 2,000 recordings — one for every day since it began. The project has its own website, onto which each day’s recording and image are posted, and which also outlines the full details of the work.

The series of five screen-prints that were presented at this exhibition were derived from the spectrogram images that were created by the first full year in which the installation was running. These spectrograms present the frequencies of each recording as visual information — so the sound of a single minute-long recording creates an archival visual record, with an axis for time (zero to sixty seconds from left to right) and frequency (zero to 24kHz from bottom to top).

These prints were large-scale ‘de-digitalisations’ of images that had been originally computer-generated from sound input. In their accompanying text for the original exhibition, the artists outlined their perspective as follows:

The large-scale screenprints that we have created from the spectrogram images exist because of our interest in the potential to de-digitalise images that have been created by software. Every day, the Minute/Year sound installation automatically generates these images. But can the software-defined process that generates these images be ‘re-humanised’? What happens when these images are re-inscribed through manual labour? How does this process change the nature of the original image? These screenprints are the result of our attempts to consider these questions. These screenprinted images are an analogue object, created from digital information – they re-materialise an automated, digital process. The prints are each just over 1 meter square – specifically, they are 1024 x 1024 mm, thus linking their physical dimensions to the digital dimensions of the spectrogram files from which they are derived, which are each 1024 x 1024 pixels.

Kata Kovács and Tom O’Doherty, Minute/Year (2016) exhibition text, January 2017

The original recording from which the screen-print was derived is available to view and listen to as part of the project’s online archive.

The work was screen-printed by hand by Kata Kovács and Tom O’Doherty, with the assistance of Guy Briller, at SDW Neukölln.