The central text, “Ditties and Odes to T.A.Edison” is a poetic fantasia composed in OuLiPo fashion (restricted to the letters T-A-E-D-I-S-O-N) that ponders the history and nature of sound recording, and recording media in general, by imagining a series of scenes and encounters between T(homas) A(lva) Edison and a constellation of historical and fictional characters including his daughter Marion (aka "Dot") Edison, Albert Einstein, Ettore Bellini, Daniel Paul Schreber, Gertrude Stein, Rodolfo Tonetti and Santa Claus, among others.
The text is presented both in a Morse-code version and a spoken word version, the latter synchronized with the video scanning of a single black-wax Edison cylinder bearing the condensed but legible text on its surface. The Morse-code version fills the surface of seven brown wax cylinders, each custom engraved by a laser and played, in turn, by laser scanners. The overall sound is one of focused recitation within a crisis of machine mediated noises.
"Groovular Synthesis" was first presented as part of a larger framing project "Life in the Groove," (in coordination with Kazuhiro Jo), a collection of individual and collaborative works that investigate the symbolic status of analog sound traces within the regime of digital marks and noises, through current digital manufacturing technologies.
