It’s a Sony…

In this interactive installation the visitor finds a table with a cd player, color markers and blank cd’s. When the person plays the cd, the voice coming from the cd invites the person to listen to a song that will play, called “My brain”, by Morphine. While the song plays and the record spins, to draw on top of the cd with the markers. The CD player work's with the cover opened, caused by a manufacturing problem. This allows us to use the Cd’s at same time as a “canvas” and as a regular music CD. Once the visitor completes the artistic process and takes the aesthetic decisions and finishes the “masterpiece” she/he can decide to take it home or to place it next to other Cd’s colored by other people.

This is an allegory of the use of technology, it’s ephemeral quality, the frustration felt by consumers to see how the expensive products they bought, quickly become trash and irreparable. This CD player started to malfunction just after the one year warranty expired. It was taken to the Sony repair service, but they said the cost of repair was more than the cost of getting a new one. This story is not new, but is something that reveals the dynamics of the worlds markets, manufacturing and consuming values in the last decades.   As a small and symbolic act of resistance, I decided to find a way to repair the “disc-man”, to bring this “man” to life again, and save it from becoming part of the tons of consumer electronics that we have to dispose every day. In 2005, Mr. Hernan Corrales, a great Colombian technician, was able to fix it in a couple of days, with a cost of only $15 dollars. Since then, it has been used by many people to listen to music and for creating beautiful drawings, and it just played a record while I was writing this words, in the year 2018.

This installation is also made as homage to musicians as Morphine, that through their hard work and passion, they allow people to create bonds around their music and sounds. It’s an example of how art an open platform, that can include as diverse people as we can have, without the need for a special talent or genius that only artists were supposed to have.