Text by Josie Thaddeus-Johns, accompanying the presentation of Carried Bells at Hošek Contemporary in October 2019.

Watch from the outside, can you see the molecules shake? No, and none of us can.

Artist talk about Carried Bells, given at Ponderosa, Stolzenhagen, Germany, in August 2019.

These objects are unique hand-made musical instruments, often centuries old. The process of creating, installing, and ringing them has aspects that are technological, artistic, social, musical, cultural, and religious.

Post on LACMA’s Unframed blog, coinciding with the presentation of Signal Tide in September 2017.

In developing their ‘response’ to the satellite’s ‘call’, Kata Kovács and Tom O’Doherty looked into the regional tradition of sacred harp singing, a type of choral music that traces its roots back to 18th-century New England. “The LES-1 satellite can be considered, anthropomorphically, as a weary pilgrim on a repeating journey, having left Boston in 1965 and travelled ever since,” the artists explain. “Signal Tide will allow the satellite to be serenaded with music derived from the place that it is originally from.”

Interview, with Rosanna Lovell, discussing Signal Tide and other recent work. Broadcast live on on 27. February, 2018, on Pi Radio’s Berliner Runde programme.

It was motivating for us to have a critical eye on technology through attempting to resurrect something that is otherwise just regarded as… junk. Space junk.

Preview of the presentation Minute/Year: Four Years, in grüntaler9 in November 2019, in the culture section of Der Tagesspiegel and in the Checkpoint newsletter.

Apropos Arbeit und Zeit: Sogenannte „Durational Works“, also Dauer-Arbeiten, bezeichnen Kunst, die wesentlich von der bloßen Zeit lebt, über die sich ihre Herstellung oder Aufführungsdauer erstreckt. Die Klanginstallation „Minute/Year“ des Künstlerduos Kovács/O’Doherty zeichnet seit dem 1. Januar 2016 jeden Tag automatisch eine Minute akustisch auf. Jährlich wechselt zudem ihr Raum. Bei jeder neuen Aufnahme wird zugleich über Lautsprecher ein Echo aller vorgegangenen Tage abgespielt, das so in jede neue Aufnahme hinein klingt.

Talk given at the third biennial PARSE Research Conference, at the Faculty of Fine, Applied and Performing Arts, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden.

The acoustic traces allow a kind of indexing of the mundane, in a form where it can become strange and transformed.

Article by Annika Haas about Minute/Year at grüntaler9 in 2019. Presented as an accompanying text for the Minute/Year: Open Minute #2, 2019 event on 20. May, 2019.

Minute/Year allows a remembering of the previous day, while at the same time it spurs thoughts of the following one: what will happen in this space tomorrow, at the exact same time, when today’s recording will be played back to it? This particular minute of the day can suddenly become an important moment for those who experience it in the space. Every day anew this minute holds the potential to record the most eventful — or the least interesting — archive of a particular day. Over the course of the year it becomes one of 365 snippets logging the specificity of the everyday.

Interview about Minute/Year, in German.

Seit bereits vier Jahren nehmen die Künstler Kata Kovács und Tom O’Doherty täglich für die Installation Minute/Year eine Minute lang den Sound im Raum auf. Das künstlerische Experiment erschließt akustische Basisnoten, die Räume unterscheiden können. Ob diese Klänge wohl auch die Atmosphäre von Orten verändern?

As part of Scope Sessions #66.

There is an odd kind of irony in having the ocean of capitalist efficiency engulf your artwork in unexpected ways.

Interview with Johanna Gilje conducted in January 2016, soon after the beginning of Minute/Year.

In a sense, we are ‘micro-surveilling’ one minute of our day, every day, but it’s not really a reclamation — more so a kind of absurdist indexing.

Interview by Fridey Mickel, originally published in The Berlin Agenda, on the occasion of the original presentation of Increments at ausland Berlin in 2014.

The aptly-named Increments uses minimal installation, sound, and a light performance element to break five hours down into thirty ten-minute-long increments of building sound drones, which are created through the performative process going on before the viewers’ eyes. In what would perhaps be imagined as a tedious, excruciating sojourn of waiting, time instead passes by quite fluidly, and the overall experience is tremendously cathartic. An hour suddenly seems like fifteen minutes as the waves flow through space and audience, somehow extrapolating each individual thought in the room and looping that into the flow that’s already swirling around.