18 and Half Minutes
This project examines political erasure through the erased segment of audio from Richard Nixon’s White House recordings, a “silence” central to the Watergate investigation. The white noise from the original tape is reconfigured as a physical object within an installation that includes field notes and other investigative materials. Three versions of the installation exist in the colours of the American flag—Old Glory Red, Old Glory Blue, and white.
A text on this work by Anthropologist Thomas Ross Miller can be downloaded by clicking the white button below.
On June 20, 1972, three days after the Watergate break-in, U.S. President Richard Nixon discussed the case with his Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman. Through a concealed switch installed in the Oval Office, Nixon operated a Sony 800B tape recorder hidden in the floor below. His secretary, Rose Mary Woods, later transcribed the tapes in her office using a Uher 5000 tape recorder for playback. But when the tapes were subpoenaed, there was a mysterious 18 ½ minute gap where the crucial conversation should have been. While the sounds and magnetic marks imprinted on the tape are consistent with a series of manual erasures, the words have never been recovered because of machine noise overwritten onto the erased portion of the tape.