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[ _last updated: august, 2023_ ]
Welcome to the 'Found Tapes Exhibition' (in Dutch : the 'Voddebandjes Tenhoorstelling').
In 2002 I started collecting the bits, knots and clods of thrown away cassette tape that ever so often could be seen lying or hanging around in the streets, parks, fields, in gutters, trees, fences... Despite the fact that over the past decade analog audio tape trash from a very common view —so common, by the way, that a majority of the general public appeared not even to be aware of its ubiquity— has turned into a pretty rare one (for reasons that you, readers, probably are well aware of, and that me and many others extensively wrote and talked about in other places, on many an other occasions), I continue to collect all of its remains that I come actoss. So, until this very day, whenever I stumble upon a bit of 'trashed audiotape', I stop still to jot down the place and time, on a piece of paper or digitally, on my cellphone. Mostly I will also take a picture of then find. I then pick up it up, put it in a plastic grocery bag, a paper handkerchief or whatever else I happen to have handy, and carry it back home.
Regularly ... (well, that is, the 'regular' actually stopped being very regular after, say, 2011) ... I then mount my finds back onto a cassette, to be able to listen
to them. You can find a detailed description of that 'restoration technique'
in the SoundBlog entry entitled Prof.
Dr. Cassette. 
The Exhibition is organized in series of
five (on the average, but there are - multiple - exceptions), each of which is called an
'acquisition', and it is exposed on its own dedicated web page.
From each of the parts of such a series I select one, or more, fragments,
which I then assemble (first I did this in ProTools, but currently I'm using
the very basic one-track audio editor Sound Studio), again in chronological
order, and create a 128kbps 44.1 kHz stereo mp3-file of the 'montage'.
The Exhibition archives the bits of found tape that I have
treated in this manner, and lists them in descending chronological order of
finding, together with the date and place of finding, as well as scans, photographs
and a description of what's on it ... as precise as I can.
[ Satellite pictures and street views of find-spots courtesy Google Maps. All other
pictures and photographs are part of the project; please do not use them without
permission and reference to their origin. ]
I have kept and will keep this Found Tapes site in the original format and style as I imagined it in its very beginning, in 2002, meaning that each and every page is hand coded in HTML, a way of 'webbing' that meanwhile has become as vintage and obsolete as the cassette tapes that it is describing.
Between 2010 and 2018, the 2002-2010 part of the collection could also be visited via a Google Maps interface, including the possibility to listen to a fragment of the audio recovered from each find. The creation of that interface at the time was made possible by a generous project grant from the Netherlands Foundation for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture. Changes in the conditions for the use of Google Maps and the ongoing changes in the scripts needed to make all of this work as of summer 2018 have obliged me to remove that interesting way of visiting the collection. What currently remains (apart from the database that was used, of course), is a collection of Found Tapes Map screenshot...
You can read more about specific finds and procedures in a great many entries on this topic in the SoundBlog. Direct links to entries related to specific exhibits are given on the corresponding pages.
Though none as longrunning as this online Exhibition, over the years I did come across a number of related projects and works; you can find some information and links, whenever these are available and (still) accessible, in the 'found tapes links' section, and more detailed descriptions in several SoundBlog entries.
Thank you for visiting...
Harold Schellinx, 2002-2023
found tape indexMy collection of found tape trash spans over two decades, 2002-2023. Only the first of these, however, has been fully indexed and documented (see below). The 2013+ tape trash is waiting for the right occasion (grant, residency, expo) to undergo similar treatment. Times passes, but trash's patient :-) ... (2002-2013) | |
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FT120.707 - 710 |
FT60.336 - 332 |
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_A Siren Song of Decaying Media_"Harold Schellinx' Found Tapes project is emblematic for the best pieces of art in the SHIFT galleries, mining beneath the surface of simple visual appeal to conjure richly suggestive narratives." - The Wire (february 2011) |
found tapes on the Sound BlogOver the years I have written an awful lot of words on analog tape and other media in my SoundBlog. Here is the full list of the SB-entries that are related to that topic. |
found tape links |
- In 2013 we celebrated the cassette tapes' fiftieth birthday, along with its inventor, Dutch engineer Lou Ottens. Lang leve Lou Ottens! is a tumblr full of visuals, made that year, and still added to occasionally. |