All images courtesy of tapedeck
As a graphic designer and graffitist who has been making work since 1989, German artist neck, who also goes by Oliver, is a big fan of the “beauty and (sometimes) weirdness” of common audiotape design. His ambitious archive project, tapedeck, aims to document the wide range of cassettes produced throughout the latter half of the 20th century.
The cassette tape, invented in 1963, entered the market with a lukewarm reception as it competed with reel-to-reel and 8-track technologies. The suitability for recorded music along with its portability eventually put it on top of its competitors, and sound quality continued to improve in the 1970s. By the following decade, the cassette was a favorite among consumers, overtaking vinyl and continuing to dominate until the 1990s, when CDs superseded the technology.
Audiotapes, beyond their use for music and performances, were tools with which anyone could make basic recordings using a home stereo. The medium catalyzed social change thanks to its small size, durability, and copying capability. For example, underground punk and rock tapes communicated facets of Western culture among young generations behind the Iron Curtain, a political and physical boundary that divided Eastern and Western Europe between 1945 and 1991.
Celebrating the cultural legacy and aesthetic of a technology still admired by sound enthusiasts, tapedeck takes the form of a searchable visual database of nearly one thousand examples. The name derives from the deck, or machine, that tapes were played on. Searchable by playing time, color, material, and brand, the collection highlights the distinctive look of the double reels and recognizable shapes—a microcosm of graphic design from the 1970s to the 1980s.
Explore hundreds more on the tapedeck website, where you can also find information about submitting pictures of tapes not already in the archive.
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