Get It On Tape
The next time someone tells you "You're totally rocking that tie," you can knock their socks off with your response.
Remember the days when cassette tapes were all the rage, delivering the latest tunes from boom boxes and car stereos that would sometimes temperamentally spit the tapes back out and send us into a comical rage? As with many technological advances, they've since gone the way of the 8-track and the dodo bird, but an inventive artist named Alyce Santoro has found a brilliant new use for them, coming soon to a haberdashery near you.
"As a kid, I raced small sailboats with my family," Santoro recalls. "We'd often use short strands of cassette tape tied to the rigging as wind indicators, or 'tell-tails... (it's) ideal for use as a tell-tail, as it's light and very sensitive to the wind, it’s extremely durable, and it dries quickly. I used to imagine that if the wind hit the tell-tails just right, the sounds of whatever had been recorded onto the tape (Cat Stevens? Beethoven? The Beatles?) could be heard wafting out into the air."
As an adult, she began knitting with strands from cassette tapes after an experience with Tibetan prayer flags sparked her imagination, and after some experimenting, she came up with a fabric that she now fashions into neckties and bags ($120) as well as art. Santoro calls it "an incognito good-vibe-emitting wardrobe accessory/work of conceptual art in one" and sells it on her website, appropriately titled Sonic Fabric.
Good vibes indeed; between repurposing long-lost objects into something functional and working with co-ops of female Tibetan refugees in Nepal to produce some of her fabric (the rest is made on a vintage loom in New England), Santoro's work is absolutely worth grooving along to.
