Susan Schuppli

"The material witness — an entity (object or unit) whose physical properties or technical configuration records evidence of passing events to which it can bear witness. Whether these events register as a by-product of an unintentional encounter or as an expression of direct action, history and by extension politics is registered at these junctures of ontological intensity. Moreover, in disclosing these encoded events, the material witness makes ‘evident’ the very conditions and practices that convert such eventful materials into matters of evidence."
Material Witness, (MIT Press, forthcoming)

Two works by Schuppli feature in Eavesdropping.



1. The Missing 18 1/2 Minutes

'The Missing 18 ½ Minutes' is the most recent iteration of a long-term investigation into Watergate. At some point during the evening of 20 June 1972, a conversation between two men was secretly taped on a SONY TC-800B reel-to-reel voice recorder. Tape 342, as it is officially referred to, is but one of a sprawling archive of approximately 3,700 hours of audio recordings taped surreptitiously by the late American President Richard Nixon over a period of several years. Of the many audiotapes confiscated from the Oval Office, Tape 342 remains by far the most infamous. Not because of the shocking information it contains, but precisely because of its absence: an 18-and-a-half minute gap that occurs at 6 hours, 21 minutes, and 26 seconds of recorded material. A residual silence that is still haunted by the spectre of a President who refused to speak on the grounds that such testimony might be self-incriminatory.

In 1973, Nixon’s loyal secretary Rose Mary Woods testified that she was responsible for this gap and told an elaborate story about how the telephone rang whilst she was transcribing the Tape causing her foot pedal controlled UHER tape recorder to accidentally press the wrong button and erase the tape. Her ‘re-enactment’ of this infamous event for the federal grand jury is captured in the photo mural shown here, which is more commonly referred to as the “Rose Mary Stretch”.

With the advent of digitisation, press bureaus started dumping their wire service images en masse. From these discarded images, Schuppli has collected all that relate to the legal proceedings of Watergate Tape 342 during which 18-and-a-half minutes of noisy silence was put on trial. These archival materials are re-presented here as a photographic timeline accompanied by an audio listening station where one can listen to the actual 18-and-a-half-minute gap in Watergate Tape 342, which has been sourced from the US National Archives and Records Administration.

While this installation addresses the emergence of wiretapping and state surveillance within the political context of the 1970s, specifically around the defining events of Watergate, it is also set against the backdrop of current events in which practices of data harvesting (e.g. Cambridge Analytica/Facebook) have become commonplace.

2. Listening to Answering Machines

'Listening to Answering Machines' explores a collection of recordings gathered by Schuppli from thrift stores and charity shops following the transition to digital-voicemail in the 1990s: each tape is an accidental archive encompassing details about both the person who owned the machine, and all the people who reached out to them by leaving their messages behind. No doubt they never considered that their shared sonic intimacies might one day be sold off as mere detritus (the dead technological remains of domestic life), let alone imagine that their incoming messages and conversational fragments might make their way into the hands of others. Entire worlds and personal portraits are captured by the network of calls and messages left behind on such tapes. 'Listening to Answering Machines' invites us to explore these worlds and in doing so queries the transgression that listening to the sonic intimacies of strangers might provoke at a time when this form of listening has been scaled-up and routinised by always-on smartphones and other devices designed by the world’s most powerful governments and corporations.

Documentation