Amazing Portraits Made From Cassette Tape Ribbon

Erika Iris Simmons aka iri5 (pronounced “iris”) brings an antiquated technology, one very close to our hearts, back into the limelight with her artwork. The New Orleans-based artist likes to take the media associated with the person and use it to create a spitting image of them. In her series “Ghost in the Machine,” the composite artist pays tribute to musical legends such as The Beatles and Jimi Hendrix by cutting and rearranging the tape ribbons to create memorable one-of-a-kind portraits. According to Simmons, “The single cassette tape I thought of as representing the mind. The tape ribbon represents our thoughts, the data within. Taking that data – those bits of memory – and rearranging them to form what we see as a face is my way of finding a “ghost in the machine.”