Nice threads Issue #26

Sonic Fabric makes new use of old-fashioned cassette tapes

By Amber Drea
Published: December 1st, 2005 | 4:05pm

Alyce Santoro is an accidental artist and a creative scientist, a philosopher and a physicist. Her inspiration for Sonic Fabric, a textile woven from cassette tape and cotton, came from personal childhood experience and Buddhist ritual. “I grew up racing sailboats, and on sailboats you use often a little strand of cassette tape to tell the wind direction,” she says. “I used to imagine that when the wind blew a certain way, I’d be able to hear the sound that had been recorded onto the tape. Then I learned about Tibetan prayer flags, which are little squares of cotton, and they have mantras silk-screened on them. The idea is that the mantra is activated by wind, and then it carries the healing energy of what’s on there out into the world.”

She thought it would be cool to make flags that actually had sounds recorded onto them. After gathering hundreds of tapes from friends and from her own collection, Santoro sculpted an audio collage from recordings of her high-school punk band, the ocean, improvisational music, spoken word, and other audio. Titled Sounds of (1/2) Life, the collage sounds like turning the knob on a radio dial, the snippets fading in and out and overlapping with static. It is recorded onto spools of tape and sent to a textile mill in Rhode Island that manufactures Sonic Fabric. The result is a durable and pliable material with a texture like softer, smoother canvas. The combination of colored cotton and shiny tape creates a metallic sheen that makes the flags and handbags she sells on her Web site (sonicfabric.com) elegant and unusual.

Though it has been featured in museums and gallery shows and interior and fashion designers clamor to use it in their own work, Sonic Fabric began with only two yards of material — Santoro’s version of prayer flags. “As far as I was concerned, that was pretty much the end of the project,” she says. “When I moved to New York [four years ago], it was post-September 11 and it just meant a lot to me that these two pieces had a little slice of the human experience encapsulated in them.”

The progress of Sonic Fabric has always been spurred by the serendipitous crossing of paths. In New York, during one of French conceptual artist Louise Bourgeois’s Sunday salons, Santoro discovered that the fabric was still audible by dismantling a Walkman and running the tape head over the fabric. And a winter solstice party in Vermont brought her together with former Phish drummer Jon Fishman, who asked her to make him a sonic dress using his tape collection, which included rare bootlegs of live Jimi Hendrix performances. (Santoro couldn’t bear destroying such valuable cassettes, so she made copies and returned the originals to Fishman.)

Santoro is no stranger to the connections that occur in life. The orange circles silk-screened on many of her pieces represent the String Theory, which hypothesizes that the smallest particle in the universe is like a tiny loop of string. In fact, Santoro had considered herself a scientist until she moved to Rhode Island to study scientific illustration and began branching out into sculpture. “It dawned on me that the scientists themselves had lost the magic and mystery in what they’re doing because that’s not really condoned in science,” she says. “There’s no room for being philosophical. So when my work became about the philosophical aspects of science, I had to stop calling myself a scientist. And then I didn’t know what to call myself, and I still don’t know.”