Untitled (Typewriter) and Continuous Memory

In 2017 I had the opportunity to record some family stories which were presented as part of the exhibition Galaxy Champion Fun Zone. These audio recordings, focused on my parents' experience of immigrating to Canada from Italy in the 1960s & 70s, gave some insight into what their lives were like in those early years, as well as how their own parents adjusted.

Fast forward a couple of years, and I was lucky enough to be included in the exhibition Continuous Memory, curated by Tyler Durbano at the Latcham Art Centre, and featuring the work of José Andrés Mora, and I. The exhibition explored the power & playfulness of text when pushed into relationships with memory and technology.

The show included some of my newer and older text based work, as well as a retro-fitted set of Dial Me a Story Phones, which now played back the aforementioned family history recordings. In addition, the exhibition debuted Untitled (Typewriter).

Press the large blue button, and the typewriter will automatically tip-tap out a the text of a family story.

Parent's of Parents, Alba

ALBA: Yeah, they stuck to a lot of their old ways, you know,
making their own tomato sauce and their own sausages and, you know,
like growing their own vegetables. My dad had everything in the garage,
chickens, quails, rabbits, and once the neighbour called the cops on him, 
and they said, well, as long as they keep it clean and it doesn't smell, he 
can have his animals. So yeah, we had two little ducks that I named Charlie 
and Daisy and they were my pets until one day they weren't there no more.

FRANK: It was dinner.

ALBA: But yeah, you know, they're trying to live country farm style in the 
city in the little backyards they had.

All of the stories on the typewriter are from the initial set of recordings I made of my parent's experience, while the Dial Me a Story phones elsewhere in the exhibition also include stories from my extended family.

The result is that there are multiple versions of the same experience: some told through voice, some told through text, some told convincingly with exaggerations, some told plainly and perhaps a bit more honestly. For example, as my father would tell it, as a 13-year-old in Italy he purchased a BB-gun with the money he was supposed to use for his accordion lessons, but, afraid that his brother would snitch on him, he "buried it in the backyard so nobody could ever find it. And it's probably still there somewhere". But in my uncle's version of the story, the BB-gun was simply found and disposed of, undramatically.

Taken together there is an interesting push and pull between these stories, and really, it is just fun to see a typewriter tap out a story in real time.

If you'd like to get into the specific technical bits of it all, I have a pretty comprehensive writeup here of how all of the wires go together and etc.