Everything is Everything...
I philosophy, possibly speak tongues...
Everything is Everything(1)...

Lauryn Hill

Attracted by the geometric irregularities of the world surrounding us, mathematicians have unsuccesfully tried to determine the length of a coastline(2): this can never be determined but any coastline possibly grows into infinity when looking closer, each bay and peninsula entailing yet smaller bays and peninsulas - ultimately down to the atomic level.
Distortion also hovered above the origin of mechanical sound recording(3). Edison's gramophone not only captured previously fleeting acoustic events. With its variable speeds of both sound recording and replay, the possibility of free distortion also first appeared. As a free frequency, information can be steplessly be translated into other media channels(4).
The video installation ISLAND PLAYBACK approaches the coastline of a small anonymous island in the Mediterranean sea by first photographing it from the air. The aerial photographs of the coastline are then fed into a virtual synthesiser and translated into a sound curve. The oscillations on film lead to a corresponding soundtrack - according to their vertical, horizontal or chromatic properties.
A certain underlying wish for harmony in this video project talks of a human need for narrative closure in the endless canon of Nature(5), and in the arbitrariness of fate in particular. What can be expected of such a digital ars combinatoria, of transposing picture into sound within the grammar of the moving image?
According to the theory of language instinct, meaning should evolve by itself(6). Sounds seem to naturally peel out of the moving landscape. However fragmentary the elements that are sent into the game, human language has been found to always produce an equally complex and complete communication system.
This holds true for artistic interventions aswell. They are transparent reinventions of the world according to their very own rules(7). While the oscillations of its coastline move across the video screen, the island can acoustically replay itself as if put on a turntable - ISLAND PLAYBACK.

1) Lauryn Hill The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, 2003
2) Benoît Mandelbrot How Long Is the Coast of Britain? Statistical Self-Similarity and Fractional Dimension, 1967
3) Friedrich Kittler Gramophone-Film-Typewriter, 1986
4) Jonathan Crary Modernizing Vision in Hal Foster (ed.), Vision and Visuality, 1988
5) Steven Jay Gould Questioning the Millenium, 1998
6) Steven Pinker The Language Instinct, 1994
7) Vladimir Nabokov Transparent Things, 1972