Open Music Archive, Premonition 2037: Bambooman

In the spirit of the 1960s project of the Museum of Modern Art Oxford, to make contemporary art freely accessible to the widest audience, Open Music Archive produce an archive of recorded sounds – auditory traces of activity in the gallery, available for use by a future public, without restriction and beyond the scope of the current copyright term.

Tape hiss, voices, musical fragments, audience shuffles and applause, recorded at past public events, are digitised from videotapes and audio cassettes held in the Modern Art Oxford archive, to generate a new sonic inventory. In addition, samples have been ripped from chart hit records from 1966, the museum’s inaugural year. The artists process the archival sounds using emerging information retrieval technologies, to create a bank of source material.

Open Music Archive invite collaborators to reanimate the collected sounds, during a series of live public events that fast-forward to 2037, the year that much of the material will legally fall into public ownership.

Leeds based producer Bambooman, remixes sounds digitised from audio cassettes held in the Modern Art Oxford archive.