Minute/Year

Minute/Year is an automated, multi-year durational installation artwork, by Kata Kovács and Tom O’Doherty.

The work creates a new, one-minute-long layered audio recording, and accompanying spectrogram image, every day. Each day’s recording is published on this site — and additionally on Telegram, Vimeo, and Twitter, and as a short weekly podcast.

Minute/Year alters location each year. For the whole of 2024, the work is installed in the main staircase of Olin Library at Wesleyan University, in Middletown, Connecticut, in the United States.

Minute/Year began on January 1st, 2016. It has no set ending date.

Minute/Year is an automated, process-based, durational work, in which sound is played, recorded, and layered, in a resonant space, for one minute each day. The result that is created each day is then automatically published online.

This process occurs daily, but the location of the space in which it occurs alters annually. Over time, this has meant that the work has existed in a variety of public, private, and semi-public spaces, outlined below. Each day’s one-minute-long recording is archived as audio, with an accompanying spectrogram image and video. This ongoing daily process has created an accumulating archive of these sounds and images, which continues to grow.

This archive — the daily images, sounds, and videos created by the work — has in turn been the source for a series of derived works.

The recordings from Minute/Year are published daily on this site. They are also published on Telegram, Vimeo, and Twitter.

Additionally, the recordings are available as a weekly summary podcast, available via RSS, on Apple Podcasts, and on Google Podcasts. The three most-recent episodes of the podcast are shown here — for the full archive, take a look at the weekly podcast page.

Minute/Year is privacy-focused, GDPR-compliant, and anonymous. See full details on the privacy and data page.

The space in which Minute/Year is installed alters each year, and has encompassed a variety of public, private, and semi-public spaces. In each space, the work is installed from January 1. until December 31., and runs for one minute each day during this time. In each location, the work as installed is materially functional — it comprises two speakers, two microphones, cables and mixer, and a small computer that runs each day’s process of playback, recording, and uploading.

The different places in which the work has been installed have had widely-varying social purposes and backgrounds. This reflects a curiosity in how the work will adapt to different spaces, and how these contrasts in both sonic and social space will be reflected over time.