Mistakes Negate Mistakes

Isolated text piece, two spoken sound recordings presented in two tin cans joined by a thread

A paragraph of text from an unnamed fictional novel was taken and sent to three people. The short extract described a man in his attempt to contact somebody else by using the horn in his car.

Each person was asked to listen to the extract and within the week to re-write it as they had remembered. After I had received their replies I chose one to send to another three participants.

The process was repeated several times, each time the snippet of text became increasingly fragmented and disjointed. Acquiring anew meanings through tricks of the glitching memory and occasional cryptic trips of the imagination.

I also asked if the participants would mind writing a short statement about what they imagined was happening in the wider narrative of the fictional story. This invariably became a second sound piece.

On one end of the thread one can hear the mutating accounts of the story by a cycle of various voices, each linked by the vague memory of one-another's tale.

On the other end of the thread are the voice's attempt to understand the world they are remembering.

A cycle of indirect communication from which the receiver must try to identify an increasingly indistinct source.