Degradation Loops
A site specific multi-channel sound installation, Jasmine Guffond's Degradation Loops gradually and completely bit crushes her 2015 album Yellow Bell over the duration of Muse Ruole, Trans Art Festival, 2018. Installed in a green house, the gradual yet definite degradation of sound speaks to the impending degradation of the earth’s environment.
Initially exhibited at Sydenham Road 55, Marrickville, Sydney, Degradation Loops gradually and completely 'bit crushes' the artist’s 2015 album Yellow Bell over a period of 16 days. A process of sonic destruction unfolds in response to a group show where visual artists destroy and reassemble their work, to create new work, and to question the dominance of commercial imperatives within art.
Using intricate and highly articulate audio loops from an existing authored work, the algorithmic unravelling of these tracks renders them increasingly discordant and unpredictable as time passes. Sound becomes noise. Beauty is broken down allowing another type of beauty to emerge. Degradation Loops speaks to a contemporary audio realm where principles of High Definition transference dominate in an overall musicscape preconceived as uniform. An industry standard sampling rate of 44.1kHz, and a bit rate of 16 was established by Philips and Sony with the Compact Disc format in 1982. This became an encoding standard by which to communicate, listen, and make music.