Since 2007, I have actively explored the history of certain obsolete audio/visual media technologies, following a very specific line of inquiry: what sort of desires and fears of their time were these devices designed to address, at what point and for what reason were they discarded, and have their inevitable replacements addressed these concerns any more or less completely? This has led to a number of media archaeological re-enactments which place these discarded technologies in a contemporary context, coupled with a healthy skepticism of the idea of technological progress. In previous works, these media technologies have been the optical sound transducer (as found in any sound-on-film movie projector from 1919 up until the advent of digital cinema), the voice-encoder (AKA the vocoder, as found in mid-20th Century telecommunications electronics), and the vector graphics display (as found in most visual computer interfaces from the 1950’s up to the start of the 1980’s). My current research at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm focuses on the history of electronic music in Sweden during the 1960's and 70's through the reenactment of three idiosyncratic sound instruments: the Dataton System 3000 (Björn Sandlund 1970-80), the Ljuddar (Ralph Lundsten and Leo Nilsson, 1968), and the Andromatic (Erkki Kurenniemi, 1965).

Derek Holzer (USA 1972) is an audiovisual artist, researcher, lecturer, and electronic instrument creator based in Stockholm. He has performed live, taught workshops and created scores of unique instruments and installations since 2002 across Europe, North and South America, and New Zealand. He is currently a PhD researcher in Sound and Music Computing at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden, focusing on historically informed sound synthesis design.
Livestream Link: https://youtu.be/YFT_8fFdOc0