The accompanying book for the exhibition Minute/Year: Seven Years, with excerpts from texts by Agnė Auželytė, Annika Haas, Ana and Sophia Tabatadze, Gabriela Gordillo, Kassandra Valencia, and Jasmina Al-Qaisi.

The works in the exhibition Minute/Year: Seven Years present excerpts from the archive generated by Minute/Year. However, beyond simply displaying serial remnants of a larger whole, they also attempt to reinterpret and reimagine this corpus in their own right. This archive can be considered as an incrementing accumulation of ghostly fragments. Through its sheer duration and magnitude, it resists attempts at direct observation. As such, any attempted excerpt is also a betrayal of the whole — a view that is more a glimpse than a gaze.

These works attempt to incorporate this paradoxical sensibility. The screen-printed works, for example, reveal, in their slight analogue imprecisions, the inevitable ambiguity that accompanies all hand-made retracings of the digital. The implicit drag and friction of the palimpsest is present, creating not so much a copy as an echo, a trace, a dub. In doing so, they reinforce the layered and recursive logic of Minute/Year as a whole, itself eternally repeating one day into the next.

Ana and Sophia Tabatadze · Curators, Halfsister Berlin · From the essay Minute/Year: Seven Years (April 2023)

Limited-edition cassette released by bb15, created by Gabriela Gordillo and Sebastian Six. The tape is a sound collage of excerpts from the recordings made by Minute/Year throughout 2020, during the time when the work was installed in bb15. See full details here (including cover artwork images, launch event details, and full credits).

During this period, incidental events and collaborations around the work took place at the gallery space, contributing to its layered archive of hums and drones. Listening back to these recordings, we discover a narrative of this passing time, that like memory, re-arranges into multiple readings.

This mix was commissioned by Los Angeles County Museum of Art, as part of the LACMA@home series, and features a stereo iteration of the music used in the installation work Signal Tide. The mix is a collaboration with David Bryant and Drew Barnet. Full details and credits are available here.

Interview, by Joel Ferree (Program Director, Art + Technology Lab, LACMA) about Signal Tide, accompanying the release of Signal Tide — Two Passes.

“[The LES-1] is a piece of space junk, that nonetheless seemed like it could be regarded poetically or metaphorically […] over time we honed this idea, based around this central point of a lonely traveller that has been orbiting the earth for many decades.”

Preview, in German, of the presentation Minute/Year: Four Years, in grüntaler9 in November 2019, in the culture section of Der Tagesspiegel and in the Checkpoint newsletter.

Apropos Arbeit und Zeit: Sogenannte „Durational Works“, also Dauer-Arbeiten, bezeichnen Kunst, die wesentlich von der bloßen Zeit lebt, über die sich ihre Herstellung oder Aufführungsdauer erstreckt. Die Klanginstallation „Minute/Year“ des Künstlerduos Kovács/O’Doherty zeichnet seit dem 1. Januar 2016 jeden Tag automatisch eine Minute akustisch auf. Jährlich wechselt zudem ihr Raum. Bei jeder neuen Aufnahme wird zugleich über Lautsprecher ein Echo aller vorgegangenen Tage abgespielt, das so in jede neue Aufnahme hinein klingt.

Both the moon and Minute/Year are part of other rhythms outside of themselves. The moon orchestrates tides, magnetic fields, and menstrual cycles; it visits many nights around the globe every twenty-four hours. Minute/Year listens to the sounds of nature, to urban environments, to indecipherable human language and humming machines. It computes from a Raspberry Pi, synchronizes with the internet, with digital platforms and with power supplies.

Las restricciones que establecen lxs artistas al evento sonoro funcionan como una abertura fraccional desde la cual se observa el andar de la vibración sonora. La obra está en continuo desenvolvimiento y opera de manera relacional con otras fuerzas, con otros materiales oscilantes.

A few years ago LACMA’s Art + Technology Lab hosted a series of special music performances featuring a call and response with a live satellite. Titled Signal Tide, the work was developed to be a poetic reply to the erratic signals of LES-1, a defunct spacecraft that ceased to function in 1967 but unexpectedly started transmitting again in 2013. Signal Tide was essentially a sound and extraterrestrial radio installation, which combined the satellite’s wavering signal overhead with a special generative musical score rising up from a bed of speakers resting on the ground.

Minute/Year allows a remembering of the previous day, while at the same time it spurs thoughts of the following one: what will happen in this space tomorrow, at the exact same time, when today’s recording will be played back to it? This particular minute of the day can suddenly become an important moment for those who experience it in the space. Every day anew this minute holds the potential to record the most eventful — or the least interesting — archive of a particular day. Over the course of the year it becomes one of 365 snippets logging the specificity of the everyday.

Watch from the outside; can you see the molecules shake? No, and none of us can.