Sounds that reproduce sounds that reproduce sounds Remembering Michael Snow

With a prolific production, Michael Snow’s visual and conceptual experimentation was fundamental to structuralist cinema. This Canadian artist, who died last year, pioneered many of the resources that have, in time, been made available by digital media. ‘I am interested in narrative as just one of the things you can do with film but I'm not interested in examples of it particularly’, he said in an interview. With an aesthetics close to Minimalism and Conceptual art, Snow addresses important philosophical issues such as the configuration of memory and the nature of representation. The MACBA Collection includes two of this artist’s most representative works: a visual installation about sound and a film investigating the semiotics of cinema. In the first, Hearing Aid (1976), the regular signal of a metronome is recorded on a cassette player that emits the recorded sound, which is then played back on a second tape recorder, and then a third. The second work, So Is This, is a 45-minutes film in which the sole image on the screen is a text that advances at one word per sequence: a self-referential film that addresses cinema as language.