Forms don’t precede reception fully formed, but are formed by the ways in which they are received, when, where, in what contexts, and by whom. In the late-1960s and early-70s, the form of information is shaped, calibrated, modulated – one might even say created – by new technologies of mechanical reproduction. In both state surveillance and in Conceptual Art, tape recorders and photocopiers transform the value and meaning of information.

The recordings under consideration here are unlike musical recordings, podcasts, or audiobooks distributed to a listening audience, traveling to, and often with, a listener who had no hand in their production. Nixon’s tapes, are produced as bargaining chips, blackmails, coercions, meant to go unlistened to until such time as Nixon needed them. As we now know, the tapes were leveraged not against his unwitting interlocutors, but against their producer, Nixon himself. Christine Kozlov’s tapes, part of Conceptual Art’s first wave, are recordings trapped in acoustic amber, similarly made never to be listened to. They exist as the accounting of a bound and gagged hostage (the recorder), held for the eventual attention of an unidentified eavesdropping ear.