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.

Interview about Minute/Year, in German.

Seit bereits vier Jahren nehmen die Künstler Kata Kovács und Tom O’Doherty täglich für die Installation Minute/Year eine Minute lang den Sound im Raum auf. Das künstlerische Experiment erschließt akustische Basisnoten, die Räume unterscheiden können. Ob diese Klänge wohl auch die Atmosphäre von Orten verändern?

Mix to accompany the presentation of 1–100 at Nearness in ausland, in December 2018. See full details and tracklist here.

Interview, with Rosanna Lovell, discussing Signal Tide and other recent work. Broadcast live on on 27. February, 2018, on Pi Radio’s Berliner Runde programme.

It was motivating for us to have a critical eye on technology through attempting to resurrect something that is otherwise just regarded as… junk. Space junk.

Interview with Johanna Gilje conducted in January 2016, soon after the beginning of Minute/Year.

In a sense, we are ‘micro-surveilling’ one minute of our day, every day, but it’s not really a reclamation — more so a kind of absurdist indexing.

Interview by Jeff from the XB Sunday Matinee collective, in a noisy corridor in XB-Liebig.

Interview by Fridey Mickel, originally published in The Berlin Agenda, on the occasion of the original presentation of Increments at ausland Berlin in 2014. Read the full interview here.

The aptly-named ‘Increments’ uses minimal installation, sound, and a light performative element to break five hours down into thirty ten-minute-long increments of building sound drones, which are created through the performative process going on before the viewers’ eyes. In what would perhaps be imagined as a tedious, excruciating sojourn of waiting, time instead passes by quite fluidly, and the overall experience is tremendously cathartic. An hour suddenly seems like fifteen minutes as the waves flow through space and audience, somehow extrapolating each individual thought in the room and looping that into the flow that’s already swirling around.