Artist  Statement

Clack, clack, clack – does that sound remind you of something? The moving sections of Solari Board flap displays echoed throughout airports and railway stations around the globe before the advent of LEDs, leaving their distinctive sound and mechanisms embedded within local and personal memories that span half a century. This installation, based on a disused Solari Board, attempts to piece together and offer up a fragmented universe of personal memories, from local archival documents, images, footage and interviews. Continually reconfiguring itself erratically, it searches for bits and pieces of the past; thus data is interwoven with imperfect human memories to create a hybrid and dynamic text-based representation which lies between a past that is being distanced and one that is being remembered – revealing the problematic natures of history and memory, of information and communication, and of our experience of time.

• Marco De Mutiis (Hong Kong/Italy) holds an MFA in Creative Media (City University of Hong Kong). He works with digital and analog media, exploring the relationship between the virtual and physical world. He re-engineers old sewing machines, split-flap displays and other mechanical devices to create kinetic installations that raise issues of perception and communication. His works have been shown locally and internationally in galleries, festivals and art fairs, including FILE – Electronic Language International Festival, New Media Archeology at ART HK 11 – Hong Kong International Art Fair and Hong Kong Contemporary Art Awards 2013. He is currently working as a Senior Research Associate in the School of Creative Media (City University of Hong Kong), where he is also Assistant Director for the CityU Laptop Orchestra. He is executive manager of Contemporary Musiking, an organisation promoting sound art in Hong Kong, and has recently co-founded the art collective SUPERTIMES.  marcodemutiis.com