Timo Tikka

entry date: 06.08.2024

Helsinki

 

Human Tape Echo

First there are two people who come to an agreement about a word. Any word. This word they pass back and forth as if on a conveyor or magnetic tapeloop spliced between them. They are the capstans, motors and recording heads. They hiss, they are prone to mistakes. They reproduce each pass as faithfully as possible, incorporating every nuance and slip into the loop.


Is this an act of reproducing? Replication? Interpretation and translation? It's balancing in between - in between people, and between listening and reacting. I like to see it as a play on media and the fallacy of documentary information. Something immaterial gets treated as the source media and the further generations of the loop get referenced back to that already fading memory.

Timo Tikka

entry date: 06.08.2024

Helsinki

 

My old shorts

Old shorts from H&M. They're nothing special, just cheap, plain black shorts from a chain store. I've bought them about 10 years ago, and they've accumulated something along the years. Each year has brought new stains and new cuts to the fabric, that has hardened itself and formed sort of a shell. It has shifted color, whether by UV-rays, dust or by chemical reactions with the fat and microbia from my skin. Around the leg openings, the fabrick is almost water-repellant, it has been waxed by my thighs while bicycling, sitting in trains or drinking the night away. I can peel back the layers, look into the summers past. There is still a spectre of the pristine pitch black color. I feel respect for the shorts, but I intentionally or subconsciously try to see, how much I can put them through. I overstuff the pockets, sit and rub my ass against sharp gravel, use the shorts to clean my hands from whatever dirt, chain grease and muck they're covered with. Everytime there's a hole or a cut, I take the needle and thread, and do a caring but incompetent surgery to CPR them back to life. At this point, they have gained a status of an anomality. After how many thousand hours of use, these 20€ shorts just shouldn't logically be intact. A bottomless bottle of wine, a magician's trick. They represent the cycles of time for me. Every year in the springtime, I start to anxiously eye them in the cabinet, waiting for the warm summer days. I'm looking forward to the day they just kind of atomize and disintegrate right off from me. I'll probably be a bit sad also, when that happens. I want to see this through.