For a long time, I was attracted to the literal image of feedback.
Escher’s hands drawing one another.
An ouroboros consuming its own tail.
Two mirrors facing each other.
A camera pointed at the monitor displaying the same image the camera is recording.
In each case, something returns to itself. The result is fed back into the system that produced it, and the process begins again.
But what eventually interested me was not the possibility of perfect repetition.
It was the opposite.
What happens when something returns, but does not return unchanged?
In a diagram, it is easy to imagine a feedback loop in which a signal leaves, comes back, and begins again without much consequence. But when that journey takes place through physical objects, the return is never completely clean.
Something is added.
Something is lost.
Something is delayed.
The room enters.
The material enters.
Time enters.
In audio systems, feedback can be used to correct, stabilize, or amplify a signal. I became interested instead in the small deviations that appear when a signal passes repeatedly through a physical system.
Tape hiss.
Room reverberation.
A slight difference in timing.
Amplification.
Mechanical wear.
The deterioration of the magnetic material.
At first, all of these things might seem like noise surrounding the original information. But after enough repetitions, they are no longer surrounding it.
They begin to become the information.
To observe this process, I built a system using two reel-to-reel tape recorders and a short loop of magnetic tape.
One machine played a recording of my voice reading a poem.
The second received that sound and recorded it again onto another point of the same moving tape. The physical distance between the machines created a delay of approximately ten seconds.
The voice left.
It traveled.
The second machine received it.
It was recorded again.
And a few seconds later it returned to the beginning of the journey.
The recording continuously encountered itself.
At first, the voice and the words were still clearly recognizable. But every cycle added something from the conditions of the previous one.
A little more hiss.
A little more echo.
More reverberation.
Changes in level.
Small accumulations that sometimes began to resemble a chorus.
At the same time, the tape itself was physically wearing down.
After several minutes, the original poem became difficult to distinguish.
The voice was still there, but now mixed with all the conditions required to reproduce it.
The machines were no longer transparent devices for listening to a recording.
They had begun to make themselves audible.
I mounted the two tape recorders vertically on a wooden structure, leaving the tape exposed as it traveled between them. The speakers reproduced the changing sound while the system continued to record and modify it.
The loop could not last indefinitely either.
After roughly thirty minutes, the tape began to stretch and deteriorate until the machines could no longer transport it reliably.
It had to be replaced.
And replacing it did not mean that the piece began again from exactly the same point.
A new tape had different tension, a different surface, and a different process of deterioration ahead of it.
The sonic identity of the piece had to build itself again.
This made me think that repetition may never really mean returning.
Every cycle contains a trace of the one before it.
Even when we believe we are hearing the same thing, the conditions have changed.
The machine has worked.
The tape has moved.
The room has resonated.
Time has passed.
Feedback appeared while I was thinking about different forms of transmission. In other works, I was interested in what happens when information passes through a human body: how an experience is measured, remembered, drawn, or transformed by the person receiving it.
Here I wanted to observe something similar inside a machine.
But the machine was not simply carrying information either.
It read it.
Recorded it.
Amplified it.
Delayed it.
Deteriorated it.
And finally returned it as something else.
Over time, what had initially seemed to be only the support for the recording became increasingly audible.
The medium acquired a voice.
Not because the machine was trying to say anything, but because the message could no longer be separated from everything it had passed through.
That idea eventually led me toward the Player piano.
Both systems use a physical carrier of information, a machine capable of reading it, and an action that can be repeated. But repetition behaves differently in each one.
In the player piano, the same pattern can pass through the mechanism again and again and remain recognizable.
In Feedback, every pass modifies what the next one will receive.
Repetition does not preserve.
It accumulates.
And slowly, as the voice disappears, the system that was transmitting it, becomes audible.
2026.
Related Work: Feedback (Totem VI)