A Queens-based artist is giving obsolete media a new life and, in one case, making a CD-ROM playable on a turntable.
Artist sTo Len used a record cutter to carve grooves into a blank CD-ROM, creating a disc that can be played like a vinyl record.
“This is to me very fun. Taking an obsolete technology and making it new but then making it sound really old at the same time,” said sTo Len, who has been an artist-in-residence at Materials for the Arts, or MFTA.
Queens-based artist sTo Len is giving obsolete media a new life. (Spectrum News NY1)
The nearly 50-year-old city Department of Cultural Affairs program collects donated materials from across the five boroughs and makes them available for free to arts nonprofits, public schools and city agencies.
For sTo Len, the opportunity has meant exploring the MFTA warehouse and finding old vinyl records, VHS tapes, cassettes, slides and films to reuse in his work.
“A lot of it is about memory, how do we record our lives and how do we sort of see ourselves in media and in mass culture, and that has changed so much in the past 50 years,” he said.
MFTA’s Artist-in-Residence program has been around for more than a decade. The program gives artists time and space to explore ideas using the donated materials while demonstrating what can be created from items that might otherwise be discarded.
“They work here for three or four months. They have the time to introduce our audience to all their great ideas, to inspire schools, libraries, all the different recipients to do their own programs,” said John Cloud Kaiser, director of education and gallery director at MFTA.
Each artist-in-residence gets a solo exhibition at the MFTA warehouse gallery in Long Island City.
sTo Len’s exhibition, “The Accidental Archive,” opens Sept. 24.
“It’s all about how I have collected all this media but also how I put it all together in a way that makes sense,” he said.
sTo Len said some visitors will have direct relationships with the old media featured in the exhibition, while others may not recognize it. Either way, he said, the work creates a conversation about how people have recorded and experienced their lives over time.
“The Accidental Archive” will be on display at the MFTA Gallery through Jan. 13. Admission is free.
MFTA welcomes three artists-in-residence and two designers-in-residence each year. Artists are selected by a gallery committee and receive a stipend from MFTA’s nonprofit Friends of Materials for the Arts.