playback. no rewind button

In this installation, visitors make unique, unrepeatable sets of sounds by stepping (or jumping, or stamping) on a floor strung with miles of amplified music-wire – “the world’s biggest electric harp.” The title alludes to Nam June Paik’s words: There is no rewind button on the Betamax of life. Paik looked fiercely into the future; this work creates an imprint of the present instant, relentlessly slipping and endlessly tipping us into tomorrow. The “envelope of the now” is at the heart of the installation, incarnated by its “moving parts,” the persons of the audience, whose unprepared, instinctive reactions bring it to life. The wires are stretched taut in fans of discrete lines a few millimeters above the floor, covering the entire gallery. As people walk on them, they fret and vibrate the “harp,” creating eerie dissonant noises, as well as phantasmogoric reflections and evanescent shadows on the walls. The aural/visual evidence of their steps echoes in memory, like visible ghosts of the immediate past and future, illuminating and outlining precise slivers of overlapping presence