‘It’s all just a little bit of History repeating’

Abstract

Abstract The chapter looks at the use of slide-tape by artists during the 1970s and 1980s in the UK. Slide-tape was a series of projected 35 mm photographic slides with a synchronized audio soundtrack. As a form, it is significant in the UK for being used by a number of key and emerging artists for a brief period before being abandoned. This moment itself has been largely forgotten, and the chapter considers this and the importance of slide-tape as a critical tool used in artists’ projected works. Slide-tape was a time-based media form, with the technology—the slide projector—itself having a distinct presence in the live performance of the work. Amongst the artists who used the form were Black Audio Film Collective and Tina Keane and others who took part in the key exhibition About Time: Video, Performance and Installation by 21 Women Artists, which took place at the ICA, London, in 1980. In the chapter the author accounts for the emergence of this work and suggests that slide-tape allowed for artists’ experimental work where the simultaneous projection of images and sound was transformed to establish a new form. As the form has been taken up and used recently by contemporary artists, the impact of this overlooked history to what is described as legacy media is discussed and located.