all my Friends

From a technical perspective All My Friends is a “sonification” project in which I downloaded the profile pictures of my current Facebook friends, and transferred the raw data into a sound editing program. This produces a lone-end drone which I exported as a WAV file. I then converted the WAV files to MIDI, and assigned piano as the interpretation method. This left me with 463 unique piano compositions. I then transferred these composition on to individual cassette tapes creating a physical archive. As an addendum I have also created, and hand bound several volumes of music notation derived from these compositions that are displayed alongside the archive.

Though All My Friends leans heavy on software, I felt it was important that we never those sight of the artist's hand. Like much of my work, this piece represents a disruption of an otherwise literal medium (photography), and at it's core is an act of physical translation.  Each new iteration of these images – from WAV files, to cassettes, to music books – generates new flaws in the representation. The notation which at times runs straight off the page, the flaws inherent in hand-binding books, all of these represent the expressive qualities that are gained through what is lost in an act of translation.