The squeaks, burrs and hums of a scanner as it reads and translates an image into digital bits – these are a sort of sound that hadn’t quite existed previously. Incidentally rendering the sound of images, the action of the scanner has added another possibility to our aural environment. The decision to use a scanner as a musical instrument seems obvious.
As holds true for any, more conventional instrument, in order to be elevated to the condition of music the “notes" produced by a scanner must be organized and ordered. Achieving this ordering requires no additional instrumentation, though. Computer software allows composers – here Peter Barrickman, Paul Dickinson, Annie Killelea, and Didier Leplae – to manipulate the notes in any way they wish. The transformation of pictures into music thus remains untainted.
To accentuate that purity I’ve selected images of musicians – specifically, the most ancient images of music-makers archived. Introducing pictures of Sumerian, Egyptian, Mesopotamian and Greek musicians into present-day technologies via images whose preservation and dissemination have been secured by a nineteenth-century invention – the camera – yields a complex, layered, tense-confounding comedy: Scanasonic. With the help of some contemporary collaborators, the ancients get to perform an encore.
David Robbins Milwaukee 2001