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Look at this gramophone record I’m holding. It dates from 1946. The material is acetate. I know that a message was recorded on its surface. These grooves still store those sounds, sounds that in the 1940s made gramophone needles vibrate.

The message was a verbal one, but even when nothing was said, needles vibrated. Like non-coding DNA, ambient noise influenced the transmission of information by shaping the way the record was heard. Inactivity is more active than we think, the geneticist was right about this.

It’s my record. I inherited it when my father died twenty years ago. It was one of his postwar projects. Following demobilisation, he and his brothers set up an ‘audio letter’ business. They built their own recording equipment and throughout my childhood, test samples like this were stored in the loft of our family home.

On rainy days I would play them on a wind-up gramophone and hear my father speaking before I was born. Sadly, they’re unplayable now. The acetate is turning to powder. In places, you can brush it away with a finger.

Even so, they’re not junk, are they? Then they’re not synergistic either. They’re non-coding. My father’s voice is still here [holds record higher], although no gramophone needle will release the sounds inscribed on the acetate again. Thus, this object endures, it’s vividly present, but without a function. Unless that is, its presence in my hands today, the hands of a contemporary artist, heralds something new and different. Imagine coming across this unfamiliar thing in a museum store. It would function like an artwork, an artwork that is seen rather than heard. Try it out. Here, now, before your very eyes, synergy might go to work again. Something we can’t quite imagine yet could be coding soon.

Thank you

It’s Not Junk – Where Museum Archives Meet Genetic Science | Chris Dorsett | TEDxBanbury – YouTube