This Book is a Collection of Songs Embedded in Images- a Visual Mixtape

As a teenager I would spend hours meticulously composing mixtapes and creating elaborate cases for the tapes that would then be exchanged or given away. These days, if I want to exchange my mixtapes with friends I can do it almost instantaneously and traditional mixtapes are rare to find and even harder to share.

The term ‘mixtape’ is still used, though now it is a metaphor to denote any collection of songs composed together, and the physicality of the object will soon be forgotten. This book is a digital mixtape, a collection of songs embedded in visual codes.

Digital mixtapes are common but lack the experiential nature of the original analog tapes in two ways: One, the time that it took to make a mixtape was real time, a person has to listen to the tape to make the tape and this was inherently understood in the exchange. Two, the physicality of the tape necessitated that the exchange happened in real time and so the packaging of the experience became a valuable extension of the tape itself. The original mixtape carried a temporal and physical weight that current digital mixtapes do not convey.