Jay Needham (USA)
is an artist, radio producer and composer. His sound and visual works address the politics of borders and the aesthetics of acoustic reception. His compositions activate listening as an irreplaceable component of an artistic cognitive process. Needham’s current work advances the critical placement of radio and the transmission arts as one of the most influential ontemporary forms of cultural communication.
Title: This is a Recording, 2009, 4:29
recounts some of the experiences I had while videotaping survivors of the Holocaust for the Shoah Visual History Foundation in the late 1990’s. The piece is a part of a series of inter-related works that include 13 Buildings and OPENED. These pieces are recomposed largely from my own fragmented family albums and sound recordings, and are essentially post-memory works, sound and visual pieces that explore personal migrations and erasures of memory. In the research and creation of my work, I situate narrative and documentary elements together in order to heighten creative relationships and also to reorient my audience’s expectations. As my memories of those interviews with survivors begin to fade, I am reminded of how vitally important it is to tell the stories of our many genocides, both historic and in progress.