We track. We follow movement, note the progress or existence of something, we signal through sonar and bio sonar, radio and Morse, radar and scanners, heart monitors and surveillance. In so doing, we listen but also compose an acoustic space of our trailing, create sonic debris of our pursuit, a spontaneous audible record.

To consider this soundtrack, I turned to the 8-Track, an obsolete technology developed in the 1960s: a magnetic tape of 8 tracks would play two tracks at a time in stereo, automatically switching between the 4 programs in an endless loop. The result is Eight Over Two: A Soundtrack, a virtual 8-track, a meta-track that traces the sonic flotsam of our tracking in four programs.

Eight Over Two: A Soundtrack is part of a larger project, Eight Track, that explores the varied meanings of the concept of “tracking” through poetry, performance, photography, drawing, and sound.

Photo: Nicu Ilfoveanu

Oana Avasilichioaei’s art practice interweaves poetry, translation, drawing, photographic and moving image, sound, and performance. The work explores an expanded idea of language (whether textual, visual, aural, etc.) as reverberatory and evolutionary, language as trace and resistance, the social and political forces/voices of the polis, polylingual and polyphonic poetics, historical structures, borders and movement, and orality. Her five poetry collections include We, Beasts (Wolsak & Wynn 2012) and Limbinal (Talonbooks 2015); recent performance works include MOUTHNOTES (2016) and OPERATOR (2018). Based in Montreal, Canada, she frequently crosses borders to perform her work in Canada, USA, and Europe, and she was the 2018 Audain Visual Artist in Residence at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver.
www.oanalab.com

Recording, editing & mixing: Oana Avasilichioaei

Piece commissioned by SEMI SILENT.

Eight Over Two: A Soundtrack was granted the SEMI SILENT Award 2019.