Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Wolfe, Julie
• Wood, Coleman

Titel

Restoring Stephan Von Huene's Tap Dancer: Finding Logic within Integrated Circuits

Ist Teil von

• Journal of the American Institute for Conservation, 2021-01, Vol.60 (1), p.50-60

Ort / Verlag

Routledge

Erscheinungsjahr

2021

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Taylor & Francis

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Stephan von Huene is recognized for his acoustical sculptures that combine movement and sound with the flip of a switch. This paper will focus on his Tap Dancer (1967) composed of cropped legs in pants and shoes on a wooden base that perform a 30-second tap dance at regular intervals. The movement and sound are controlled by integrated circuit boards wired to valves, a vacuum and recycled musical components. The condition of the wiring and circuitry is critical to allow the performance, which is intended to be random by way of an erasable programmable read-only memory (EPROM) and timing circuit. Von Huene's sculptures have conservation issues when exhibited and plugged in for action. Challenges arose during the exhibition of Tap Dancer at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles leading to conservation interventions including the adaptation of EPROM data to a solid-state controller. After exhibition at the Getty, the temporary solutions were replaced with a full restoration of the original circuit boards repairing wiring or damaged chips as needed. The history of Tap Dancer has shown that with the desire to exhibit von Huene's works as intended, the endurance of their structures is inevitably at risk.