Telematic Tape: Notes on Maryanne Amacher's City-Links (1967-1980)

Abstract

Reel-to-reel recordings and 15 kilocycle telelinks converge in Maryanne Amacher's telematic installation series City-Links (1967-81). As long-duration recordings of urban sites, City-Links queries the musicality of ambient sound on tape, a question of critical importance to many composers of the period. But as expressly telematic tape, City-Links embeds these recordings within a transforming US telecommunications industry where expanded long-distance dialing relied on the high-tech labour and gendered discipline of telephone operators, enrolling tapes' ambient sounding in broader questions about the technological mediation of gender, listening and long-distance embodiment during City-Links late 1960s and 1970s span. An extended reconstruction of one City-Links's tape's tactile qualities interprets this complex interimplication as a kind of telematic 'weave', with a spatiotemporal warp shuttling between the weft of environmental sounds and their technical traces.