PLAYBACK HEAD
An audiovisual installation by Alexandre Klinke
October 25 – November 5, 2022 | 9:00 PM – 5:00 PM
Lobby screen array – SFU Goldcorp Centre for the Arts
149 West Hastings Street, Vancouver
The images and sounds in this installation are playing in an aleatory fashion, determined by a custom-made program. They are not playing in a loop, and can be combined in countless different ways, offering a unique experience to anyone who enters the space at any given moment.
Assembled from home movies collected over a period of fifty years, Playback Head considers the transience of time, the bonds of family, and the experience of (im)migration. The installation juxtaposes events from different periods of time—recollections of childhood, traveling, and different homes—looking for threads and patterns that connect two generations of a family, living separately in two different countries. Images shot in Brazil, Canada and other places in Europe and South America (on Super 8 film, VHS, and digital video) are combined with a collage of evocative soundscapes and music, creating scenes that allude to the associative nature of memory and its ambiguous essence.
Music and Sound Design / VHS and Digital Footage/ Programming: Alexandre Klinke
Super 8 and VHS footage: Clóvis Klinke
Special thanks to all friends and family featured in this work.
This project was made with the support of the SFU School for the Contemporary Arts and the Glenfraser Acoustic Communication Research Award (SFU).
Biography
Alexandre Klinke is a composer and media artist from Sao Paulo, Brazil, based in Vancouver, BC. His work encompasses different fields such as media art, music for film, sound design and performance.
He releases music under his own name, and also using the alias Playback Head, an experimental music project that marks a departure from the Brazilian/Worldbeat characteristics of his previous work. This time his music abandons rhythm as the driving force, and focuses on timbre and sonic textures, rather than on melodic and harmonic development. Playback Head's debut album, First Sounds, consists of evocative music pieces that are quiet, abstract, and mostly beatless. They merge traditional instruments such as acoustic guitar and piano with sound-making objects and field recordings, creating an interplay between musical and environmental sounds. The album was released in December 2021 through the label Hotham Sound (Vancouver), on cassette and digital formats.
His works in video and multimedia installation explore the perceptual effects of the relationship between sound and vision, using both analog (magnetic tape, super 8 film, VHS) and digital technologies. The juxtaposition of the warm and noisy characteristics of analog equipment with the hi-fi crispness and endless possibilities of the digital medium results in a variety of textures that suggests the ambiguous nature of perception and memory. The sense of foreignness associated with the experience of immigration is also often present in his pieces, where he seeks to find connections and patterns in seemingly unrelated events, juxtaposing audio and video material from different times and places.
We respectfully acknowledge that we live and work within the unceded, ancestral and traditional territories of the xʷməθkwəyəm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and Səlílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) First Nations.