The eighth annual iteration of Minute/Year will begin later today. As in previous years, the change of the year also brings a change in location. In 2023, Minute/Year is installed at Spektrum, a space for process-based art in Rumelange, Luxembourg. Throughout 2023, from the beginning of January until the end of December, the work will record and layer one minute of audio, at 8:23pm — or, 20:23 — each day.
This year the work also incorporates a printer, and so it will print out a daily receipt after each recording, and the receipts will accumulate on the walls beside the work, over the course of the year, forming a lunar calendar of sonic traces.
Spektrum, at the western end of the town of Rumelange, Luxembourg, is a newly-built facility that will open fully to the public in early 2023. The new building is constructed around a nineteenth-century listed building known as the Hames House. From the postwar era up until the 1980s, this was the studio of Luxembourgian sculptor Albert Hames.
Spektrum is a combination of a historic site — the preserved studio of Albert Hames, visible to visitors — and a brand-new space for artistic projects and experiments which are process-based, technology-focused, and collaborative. The artistic undertakings that will occur are being overseen by artistic directors Teena Lange and Sebastian Häger. The building was designed by 2001, a local architecture and design studio.
Minute/Year is installed in the winter garden area of Spektrum, a long hallway along one side of the building, and the accompanying receipt record stretches across two walls.
The receipts that will be printed throughout 2023 will be clipped to wires that stretch across two walls of the Spektrum building. The wires are arranged to form a calendar of the year arranged by the dates of the new moons, and so the most ancient form of calendar will be accompanying the work through the year.
Throughout the coming year, we are planning for there to be occasional events — interventions, micro-concerts, open minutes, and more — organised around the work. These events have been quite strongly affected by the pandemic over the last couple of years, but we really hope that this year we will be undertaking a few, and we’ll hopefully be able to let you know about the first of them pretty soon. All events will be curated by Teena Lange and Sebastian Häger.
The process of installing and testing Minute/Year for 2023 would not have been possible without the help of Stephen Doyle and Kris Slyka. Thank you both.
Each year, the spectrogram images that are generated by Minute/Year are posted online with a specific colour. This year, we will be returning to the colour that was first used in 2016 — a deep blue (specifically, #24378A). We are beginning a second cycle of the work, a new seven-year arc, and so the colours that have been used from 2016 to 2022 will now repeat from 2023 to, we hope, 2029.
Minute/Year is a durational, process-based work, ongoing since January 1., 2016. The daily archive of traces created by the work is available online, and can be followed on Twitter, Vimeo, or Telegram. The recordings are also available as a weekly podcast (via RSS, Apple Podcasts, and Google Podcasts). A full overview of the work is available here.
Last year was also the year when Mastodon became more generally prominent, and so this year the daily traces from Minute/Year will also be posted on a bot account on the bot-specific Mastodon instance botsin.space — so, you can see and follow the Minute/Year Mastodon account here.