Many people remember playing their favorite songs on cassette tapes, but that might not always be the case, especially as technology has advanced and media has become available online. However, some of that old musical technology has been kept from becoming wasted trash by one Singaporean artist.
Jessica Chuan began her odyssey of using music as visual art after she returned home to Singapore after finishing school in the United States. She found a box of her old cassette tapes, many of which had personal significance. She used the cassettes to have a way to communicate meaningfully with a friend across the world, sending them recordings she made. Chuan didn’t use or listen to the tapes anymore, but she didn’t want to let go of something with such personal memories. With the help of her mother, she extracted the tapes from the plastic casing and wove it into a sheet of repurposed fabric.
Now called MusicCloth, Chuan makes everything from dresses, blankets, purses, posters, and much more from old tapes. There is even a global movement to send old cassette tapes to her so she can continue to make her fabric for her works. Chuan has also begun to dabble in making fashion and art from other media that is swiftly becoming obsolete: DVDs and CDs. She has made jewelry out of shiny discs, incorporating shards into her other work.
While Chuan’s art is beautiful and started off as a way to embrace something sentimental to her, her work highlights an important issue: e-waste. This kind of waste, which includes cassettes, video tapes, old cellphones, calculators, CDs, DVDs, and other devices rendered obsolete by advancing technology, accounts for significant bulk in landfills around the world. More and more initiatives are pushing for recycling such waste, but efforts like Chuan’s artwork are helping make the issue more visible.
For Chuan, creating her fabric has been a way to embrace art, push for an environmental cause, and also connect with people from all around the world who have been donating their old tapes to her project. She even recalled people warning her not to listen to the tapes because they have embarrassing recordings of them singing on it.
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To read more about Chuan’s repurposed art, go to https://www.tnp.sg/news/singapore/she-weaves-art-out-old-cassette-tapes.