Ian Burn, Xerox Book, 1968 (100 iterative copies of a blank sheet of white paper on a Xerox 720, arranged in a book in the order they were created. The final pages in the series of copies were filled with black forms that had arisen slowly from the 'error' of the machine)
"It was not easy for a person brought up in the ways of classical thermodynamics to come around to the idea that gain of entropy eventually is nothing more nor less than loss of information."
(Gilbert Newton Lewis, Letter to Irving Langmuir, 5 Aug 1930)
"Something from a long time ago...in Brooklyn, 351 jay street...A fruitful evening in the studio... Home at last after a day of work at the answering service...answering phones for calvin klein, bianca jagger, steve rubell, and all the other somebody people...in our space station: home in my studio experimenting live. James is in the adjacent studio painting masterpieces. Roger is in the front, gluing old shoes on canvas and painting them orange... I'm clicking the old norelcos back and forth between channels...all the windows are open. The sound is spreading all over downtown brooklyn mixing with the helicopters, sirens, pot smoke and fireworks... It's crunchy, it's distorted...it's basinski archive circa 1982. The third track some of you may recognize: a shorter version was included as variation #8 on Variations: A movement in chrome primitive. So, this night in the studio spawned a direction I would follow for some time. As I love this document of that night, I thought you might like to put what came later into context, so I'm releasing this archival recording. The last track is a newly recorded reprise of the first track that I recorded with the original loop in February 2009 in Los Angeles."
(William Basinski, March, 2009)
William Basinski, 92982.3, from 92982