Friday 29 August 2014

Sound Mirrors Echo Obsolete Military Technology as Art Installation

Before the invention of radar, the British military experimented with acoustic mirrors as a means of detecting approaching enemy aircrafts. Rather than displaying blips on a screen, these strategically placed parabolic monoliths simply reflected ambient noise from their concave surfaces, making it easier to discern far-off sounds, like the drone of an airplane’s engine.

After learning about the existence of these curiously primitive and imposing pieces of outdated surveillance equipment, which are still standing along stretches of England’s coast, artist Tim Bruniges recreated these interactive objects in a gallery setting. Earlier this year, in an exhibition called MIRRORS at Brooklyn’s Signal gallery, Bruniges installed a pair of 9 by 9 foot sound mirrors that he constructed from wood and concrete with microphones embedded in their center. The sculptures faced each other to create an interactive sound experience for visitors to the cavernous gallery space.

More here

Sunday 24 August 2014

Mediumship & Folk Models of Mind and Matter

The following is excerpted from Talking with the Spirits: Ethnographies from between the Worlds, edited by Jack Hunter and David Luke, published by Daily Grail Publishing.

Introduction

This chapter explores the role of experiences with trance and physical mediumship in the development of folk models of mind and matter, at a non-denominational spiritualist home-circle called the Bristol Spirit Lodge. Mediums and sitters often claim that mediumship has led them to understand the world differently, and to appreciate that the standard materialistic view of science is inadequate as an all encompassing model of reality. Certain key themes and concepts have emerged from my informants’ experiences with mediumship that hint at alternative models of understanding the relationship between mind and matter, including the idea that bodies are permeable, that matter is essentially non-physical, that consciousness is far more expansive than our normal waking state would lead us to believe, and that persons are multiple, can survive death, and may be influenced by external spiritual entities.

 To begin, we will briefly examine the anthropological debate over spirit possession,  taking a quick tour through the various theoretical models developed to account for the existence of this human phenomenon. This will be followed by an introduction to the history of Spiritualism, and in particular to physical mediumship, in order to give an idea of the kind of spirit mediumship that forms the basis for discussion in this chapter. The chapter will conclude with an analysis of extracts from ethnographic interviews with members of the Bristol Spirit Lodge.

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Psychic Science, by Sir Oliver Lodge (1922)

In the long evolution of humanity, we trace, first, the gradual emergence of the organic from the inorganic, the utilisation of highly complex chemical compounds for the formation and purposes of life, and then the gradual rise of living things in the scale of existence, until at a certain stage the rudiments of mind and consciousness begin to make their appearance. At some unknown time after this, must have arisen the power of choice and knowledge of good and evil, which may be regarded as the most definitely human characteristic. Then humanity, too, went on rising in the scale, until it blossomed and bore fruit in the creations of Art, the discoveries of Science, and in works of genius.

Nor is development likely to stop there. Hitherto we have known life and mind as utilising the properties of matter, but some of us are beginning to suspect that these psychical entities are able to utilise the properties of the Ether too - that intangible and elusive medium which fills all space; and if that turn out to be so, we know that this vehicle or medium is much more perfect, less obstructive, and more likely to be permanent, than any form of ordinary matter can be. For in such a medium as ether, there is no wearing out, no decay, no waste or dissipation of energy, such as are inevitable when work is done by ponderable and molecularly constituted matter - that matter about which chemists and natural philosophers have ascertained so many and such fascinating qualities. Physicists, chemists, and biologists have arrived at a point in the analysis of matter that opens up a vista of apparently illimitable scope. Our existing scientific knowledge places no ban on supernormal phenomena; rather it suggests the probability of discoveries in quite novel directions. Any possible utilisation of the ether, however, by discarnate intelligences must be left as a problem for the future. What appears to be certain is that life and mind require for their manifestation and terrestrial development some form of "material" in the broadest sense, and that there is certainly an interaction between mind and earthly matter.

Read more here

Saturday 23 August 2014

Spiritual Materiality: Contemporary Sculpture and the Responsibility of Forms, by Klaus Ottman

There is a history of forms, structures, writings, which has its own particular time—or rather, times:it’s precisely this plurality which seems threatening to some people.” —Roland Barthes

With the introduction of the notion of artistic will or urge, the Kunstwollen, which he believed to be an expression of the spiritual conditions of the time, the 19th-century Austrian art historian Alois Riegl opened the prevailing mechanical-materialistic formalism, the Kunstmaterialismus of Gottfried Semper and his followers, to concept and ideology. American critic Clement Greenberg, whose essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” has dominated American formalism since its publication in 1939, can be considered a modern descendant of Semper’s materialism. Just as Semper defined art exclusively by the parameters of material and technique, so Greenberg speaks of the “pure preoccupation” of the modern avant-garde “with the invention and arrangement of spaces, surfaces, shapes, colors, etc., to the exclusion of whatever is not necessarily implicated in those factors."

While Greenberg’s formalism denies form meaning, a European version, independently proposed by Russian film director and theorist Sergei Eisenstein and French structuralist Roland Barthes, following Riegl’s model, recognizes form as ideology and engages in an intimate investigation into the materiality of an object and its “functioning.”

In a conversation with Guy Scarpetta, Barthes hinted at a possible alternative to Greenberg’s formalism: “We should not be too quick to jettison the word ‘formalism’…attacks against formalism are always made in the name of content…The formalism I have in mind does not consist in ‘forgetting’…content…content is precisely what interests formalism, because its endless task is each time to push content back…It is not matter that is materialistic, but the refraction, the lifting of the safety catches; what is formalistic is not ‘form’ but the relative, dilatory time of contents, the precariousness of references.”

Instead of a mechanical-materialistic formalism, Barthes suggests a scrupulous examination of an object’s materiality as theoretical act. It is this structuralist activity that defines the object. Materiality becomes structure, an “interested simulacrum.” It “makes something appear which remained invisible, or if one prefers, unintelligible, in the natural object.”

Read more here

Monday 18 August 2014

quote

"I am inclined to believe that our personality hereafter will be able to affect matter.  If this reasoning be correct, then if we can evolve an instrument so delicate as to be affected, or moved, or manipulated...by our personality as it survives in the next life, such an instrument, when made available, ought to record something."

Thomas Edison, "Edison's Views on Life After Death", Scientific American (1920)

Sunday 17 August 2014

The Museum of Jurassic Technology

The Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles, California is an educational institution dedicated to the advancement of knowledge and the public appreciation of the Lower Jurassic.

Like a coat of two colors, the Museum serves dual functions. On the one hand the Museum provides the academic community with a specialized repository of relics and artifacts from the Lower Jurassic, with an emphasis on those that demonstrate unusual or curious technological qualities. On the other hand the Museum serves the general public by providing the visitor a hands-on experience of "life in the Jurassic"

The public museum as understood today, is a collection of specimens and other objects of interest to the scholar, the man of science as well as the more casual visitor, arranged and displayed in accordance with the scientific method. In its original sense, the term "museum" meant a spot dedicated to the muses - "a place where man's mind could attain a mood of aloofness above everyday affairs." By far the most important museum of antiquity was the great institution at Alexandria founded by Ptolemy Philadelphus in the third century before Christ, (an endeavor supported by a grant from the treasury). And no treatment of the museum would be complete without mention of Noah's Ark in which we find the most complete Museum of Natural History the world has ever seen.

The museum fell into dark oblivion, as did all institutions of learning, with the coming of the Middle Ages. However, during these dark times, the churches and monasteries, through collections of curiosities, allowed the spirit of the museum to burn through the ages as the famed Hetruscan sepulchral lamps burned through the ages without benefit of air or fuel in the dark of the tomb.

Relics and curiosities could be found in nearly every parish church no matter how small. In the ninth century, a hair from the beard of Noah was shown at the Abbey of Corbie. In the choir of the church of Ensisheim in upper Alsace, there is a portion of a meteorite which fell to earth in 1492; and there were antediluvian bones in the church of St Kilian at Heilbronn, in Wurtenberg. "In some churches, two eggs of ostriches and other things of the like kind, which cause admiration and which are rarely seen, are accustomed to be suspended, that by their means the people may be drawn and have their minds the more affected."

More here

Saturday 16 August 2014

The Acoustics of War, by Daria Vaisman

By the early 1990s, the United States was reassessing its self-image. The major conflicts of the last century—the two World Wars and Vietnam—had, for the most part, already been consigned to history (for a younger generation, they were only more media kitsch). But a protracted Cold War had kept the United States in a defensive posture for decades; now that the USSR had dissolved, the US no longer worried about the threat of a nucle­ar attack. The military wanted weapons that reflected the US’s new international role. What to do? In 1991, the Pentagon issued a directive to test an emerging class of arms: Called "non-lethals," these weapons were meant to disable their targets "in such a way that death or severe permanent disability was unlikely."

Most international policy was, at that point, riot control. The US had become a peripatetic interventionist, dabbling in United Nations sanctions and adjudicating regional skirmishes as if they were protests at a college rally. For an optimistic military administration, non-lethals were the humanitarian antidote to atom bombs. By 1996, the US had invested nearly $37 million in research for non-lethal weapons.

The ideology behind "non-lethal" weapons was not new. Police had used chemical sprays and rubber bullets, to name just two, to quell domestic riots in the US throughout the 1960s. A second-wave of non-lethals were introduced in the Gulf War and then, later, in Somalia in 1994: sticky foams to adhere a person to an object or another person; caustics to dissolve tires and roadways; lasers to disorient and temporarily blind; acoustic weapons that used high-decibel noise to cause pain, or infrasound to cause unbearable nausea. The US had already discovered, while dropping bombs over Vietnam, that sudden, high-decibel noise would deafen people, though this was not what non-lethal researchers had intended. (The 1907 Hague Convention clearly prohibits the use of "arms, projectiles, or materials calculated to cause unnecessary suffering.") But it presented an interesting question: Was it possible to project sound at a precise decibel level that caused pain without permanent ear damage? Furthermore, there was anecdotal evidence suggesting that at the right frequency, infrasound would "liquefy [people's] bowels and reduce them to quivering diarrheic masses."

Read more here

Friday 15 August 2014

The Kingdoms of Elgaland-Vargaland

The Kingdom of Elgaland-Vargaland was founded by Carl Michael von Hausswolff and Leif Elggren. A Kingdom which extends across the entire world, the only global nation. We have annexed and taken over all borders on Earth, all no-man’s-lands, the space that exists between all states, and declared this our physical territory. We did this in 1992, and since then we have established diplomatic relations with many different countries around the world by opening embassies and consulates. We have a constitution, we have a currency, we have stamps and we have passports for our citizens. We are a new and expansive country. We have applied for membership in the UN. We see two different routes to a new world order: one involves the gradual expansion of our physical territory through the breakdown of existing states into ever smaller units (possibly all the way down to the individual person). This would give us more and more land area as new borders are added. The other route involves states merging and abolishing their borders and thereby eventually eliminating us. Here again we would be moving down towards the level of the individual person. Both routes lead, in their own ways, to the same point…

The Kingdoms of Elgaland-Vargaland has its own life now, continuing by itself. People are taking their own initiatives, doing what they want and need to do. And that is good, of course. We only started the whole thing. It must develop and change and go further on its own.

I believe that the borders around nations, especially the wealthier ones, are getting tighter and more important these days. So much to lose, so much to protect. A lot of bullshit is spoken about the global village and togetherness and all that, but the past couple of months clearly indicate where we are going and have been going for a long time now. We do not need to cross a certain border, because we are the border. The Kingdoms of Elgaland-Vargaland is the border. I am the border. We have suggested to the UN that they can collaborate with Elgaland-Vargaland for to send personnel and intervene in conflicts between nations wherever they appear.

More here

Official site here 

Cabinet Magazine article here 

Sacred Bones, by Mark C. Taylor

Throughout much of human history, bones have been associated not with death but with life. In many cultures, people actually believe bones are the seat of the vital principle or even the soul. As the locus of life, bones have mystic powers ranging from cure and divination to birth and rebirth. In the Hebrew Bible, Eve is born from Adam’s rib: "bone from my bones" (Genesis 2:21—22). In other biblical texts, bones appear to be conscious and even able to speak. The Psalmist declares:

My very bones cry out,
‘Lord, who is like thee?—
thou savior of the poor from those too strong for them,
the poor and wretched from those who prey on them.’

(Psalm 35:10—11)

The most important and widely held belief is that bones can be reanimated and therefore are essential to rebirth. This conviction is especially common among people in northern Eurasia as well in parts of Asia and can also be found in the myths of Germany, the Caucasus, Africa, South America, Oceania, and Australia. Ancient civilizations in Iran, Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Ugarit also believed in the reanimation of bones.1 One of the most remarkable accounts of the resurrection of bones appears in the book of Ezekiel.

The hand of the Lord came upon me, and he carried me out by his spirit and put me down in a plain full of bones. He made me go to and fro across them until I had been round them all; they covered the plain, countless numbers of them, and they were very dry. He said to me, ‘Man, can these bones live again?’ I answered, ‘Only thou knowest that, Lord God.’ He said to me, ‘Prophesy over these bones and say to them, O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. This is the word of the Lord God to these bones: I will put breath into you, and you shall live. I will fasten sinews on you, bring flesh upon you, overlay you with skin, and put breath in you, and you shall live; and you shall know that I am the Lord.’ I began to prophesy as he had bidden me, and as I prophesied, there was a rustling sound and the bones fitted themselves together. As I looked, sinews appeared upon them, flesh covered them, and they were overlaid with skin, but there was no breath in them. Then he said to me, ‘Prophesy to the wind, prophesy, man, and say to it, These are the words of the Lord God: Come, O wind, come from every quarter and breathe into these slain that they may come to life.’ I began to prophesy as he had bidden me: breath came into them; they came to life and rose to their feet. (Ezekiel 37:1-10)

Where there is belief in reanimation, bones are often preserved after the flesh has decayed and are treated with special care. In some cases, they are given a separate burial or are preserved as objects of worship.

Read more here

Book: Luigi Russolo, Futurist: Noise, Visual Arts, and the Occult, by Luciano Chessa

Luigi Russolo (1885-1947) - painter, composer, builder of musical instruments, and first-hour member of the Italian Futurist movement - was a crucial figure in the evolution of twentieth-century aesthetics. As creator of the first systematic poetics of noise and inventor of what has been considered the first mechanical sound synthesizer, Russolo looms large in the development of twentieth-century music. In the first English language study of Russolo, Luciano Chessa emphasizes the futurist's interest in the occult, showing it to be a leitmotif for his life and a foundation for his art of noises. Chessa shows that Russolo's aesthetics of noise, and the machines he called the intonarumori, were intended to boost practitioners into higher states of spiritual consciousness. His analysis reveals a multifaceted man in whom the drive to keep up with the latest scientific trends coexisted with an embrace of the irrational, and a critique of materialism and positivism.

Media Archaeology Lab: Opening the Archive, Disrupting the Museum, by Lori Emerson

Founded in 2009 and currently part of the University of Colorado at Boulder’s Department of English, the Media Archaeology Lab (MAL) gives students, scholars, and members of the general public access to obsolete, functional media from the early twentieth century to the twenty-first century for hands-on research, teaching, and research creation. In this regard, the MAL is unique. Perhaps most importantly and broadly, the MAL turns the concepts of “archive” and “museum” inside out in the interests of disrupting two interrelated, cultural tendencies: a) the tendency to create neat teleological arcs of technological progress that extend from the past to the present and b) the tendency to represent such arcs through static exhibits that display the outside and surfaces of these artifacts rather than their unique, material, operational insides.

In my own research, I have used the MAL to describe a non-linear and non-teleological series of media phenomena – or ruptures – as a way to avoid reinstating a model of media history that tends toward narratives of progress and generally ignores neglected, failed, or dead media. However, I have come to recognize this sort of research is only one of the practices the MAL affords its interlocutors. I have come to understand it as a sort of “variontological” space in its own right, a place where, depending on your approach, you will find opportunities for research and teaching in myriad configurations as well as a host of other, less clearly defined activities made possible by a collection that is both object and tool. The MAL is an archive for original works of digital art/literature along with their original platforms. It is an archive for media objects. It a site for artistic interventions, experiments, and projects via MALpractices (residencies for artists and writers to first work and experiment directly with our materials and second, exhibit or perform their work either in the MAL or at a Colorado-based museum or gallery), MALware (our on-demand publication that documents events, MALpractices, and interdisciplinary thought taking place in and through the lab), and MALfunctions (monthly events for entrepreneurs, hackers, activists, academics, artists and designers that act equally as a hackerspace, makerspace, or straightforward venue space as a way to express the MAL’s extraordinary configurability). From the perspective of the university, it is a flexible, fluid space for practice-based research from a range of disciplines including literature, art, media studies, history of technology, computer science, library science, and archives and it is an apparatus through which we come to understand a complex history and the consequences of that history. From the perspective of the private sector and local tech/startup companies, the MAL offers a range of past solutions for present problems and it also offers these companies a compelling argument against planned obsolescence as many of the machines in the lab (such as the Altair 8800b) are over thirty five years old and not only function perfectly, but also make possible certain modes of interaction and creation that are not possible with contemporary digital computers.

Read more here

Inside the Paris Home of a Founding Father of Electronic Music, by Joseph Nechvatal

PARIS — Pierre Henry, aged father of electronic music, lives in a small house that also serves as his studio, in the twelfth arrondissement of Paris. I recently went there with a small group of people to hear one of his magnificent musique concrète
concerts that he performs live from his studio mixing board. It was an incredible and rare experience, similar in audio effect to his Intérieur/extérieur CD that contains the concert series Pierre Henry chez lui (“Pierre Henry at his place”) organized by the Festival d’Automne in Paris in 1996.

Speakers had been intricately placed throughout the different floors of the small house, and we took up seated positions among them so as to better get immersive satisfaction from this master’s mind-blowing art music. Comfortably seated, my eyes could not but help but wander over the walls, many of which were covered in Henry’s artworks, rather complex assemblages of existing objects and images. The art on the walls matched the structural conditions of his music perfectly, as it too is an art that is assembled from recorded sounds and noises, woven together into a (somewhat) coherent flowing whole. This is an art of sound montage and mixing. A lot of mixing: take for example Henry’s “La dixième symphonie de Beethoven” (1979–1988), where he mixes together some extracts from nine symphonies of the German composer.

Read more here

Thursday 14 August 2014

Jean Perdrizet - Deus ex machina

Historians of twentieth-century science have not recorded the name of Jean Perdrizet (1907-1975) for posterity. Perdrizet was originally a deputy civil engineer with the Bridges and Highways department before mental health issues forced him out of his career. He proved a fascinating figure for the many speculative thinkers and scientists he met, describing himself as an inventor and tirelessly striving to awaken human consciousness. Like all great thinkers, he did so by exploring beyond the limits laid down by fields of research.

Perdrizet worked with subtle shifts of reality, transgressing primary utilitarian functionality and living in a mental realm devoted to his mother and the unmarried machines he tasked with enchanting the world. In many ways, his work is reminiscent of Camille Flammarion for the way it reaches beyond the earthly realm, Raymond Roussel, for embracing the poetry of machinery, and Marcel Duchamp for exploring the aesthetics of movement. He submitted his designs to leading scientific institutions such as NASA, the French National Centre for Scientific Research, and the Nobel Prize committee, each invention an invitation to rethink the limits of physics by providing the code to another world. Inventions such as the Selenite Adam robots — humanity’s ambassadors to the cosmos —_and his machines for communicating with ghosts and sidereal esperanto, designed to facilitate communication with extra-terrestrials, all proclaimed the abolition of death. Perdrizet died in 1975, three days after his mother.

More here

French site here

Thursday 7 August 2014

Johann Konrad Dippel, 1673–1734, by E. E. Aynsley and W. A. Campbell

DURING the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries there flourished a school of medical chemistry known as Iatrochemistry, the main object of which was to search for new medicines rather than to seek to turn base metals into gold.

Throughout this period numerous accounts were written about the wonderful curative properties of various chemical substances, usually metals and their derivatives, and gold, mercury, and antimony were each claimed to be the long sought after panacea.

At about the end of the Iatrochemical period there appeared a drug having a foetid smell and an unpleasant taste called Dippel's Animal Oil, for which its discoverer, Johann Konrad Dippel, claimed the properties of a universal medicine. This drug was included in the pharmacopoeias right up to the beginning of the nineteenth century, and the purpose of the present study is to show what manner of man Dippel was, and in what circumstances his assertion was made.

Read more here

wikipedia page here

also:

Investigating the ‘Real Frankenstein Potential’ of Johann Conrad Dippel, Pt. 1
By Mike A. Zuber here

Soap on a bone, by strangeremains

From 1786-1787 the graves in Paris’ Cemetery of Innocents (Cimetière des Saints-Innocents) were dug up to move the bones to the abandoned mines beneath the City of Lights, what would become the famous Paris Catacombs.  Fourcroy and Thouret, French scientists who supervised the exhumation and studied the decomposing bodies, found a waxy gray substance covering some of the children’s remains.  They called it adipocere, from the Latin adeps (fat) and cere (wax).

Adipocere, also known as corpse wax or the fat of graveyards, is a product of decomposition that turns body fat into a soap-like substance.  Corpse wax forms through a process called saponification and tends to develop when body fat is exposed to anaerobic bacteria in a warm, damp, alkaline environment, either in soil or water.  Grave wax has a soft, greasy gray appearance when it starts to form, and as it ages the wax hardens and turns brittle.  Saponification will stop the decay process in its tracks by encasing the body in this waxy material, turning it into a “soap mummy.”

Read more here

Wednesday 6 August 2014

The Art of Micronations: Rebellion through Creative Land Conquests, by Meg van Huygen

Once the domain of only the most determined of oddballs, micronations are a more common phenomenon since the advent of the internet. These days, you don't even need a physical territory to declare yourself a head of state — you only need a website — and even if you do have a property to claim, a populace of fellow oddballs to be your country's citizens is a lot easier to come by when you have access to the whole world's supply.

The difference between a nation and a micronation is a small but important one: A micronation is one that's not officially recognized by world governments. Also, a mcironation is usually, but not strictly, a secession from an established nation. Beyond that, there are two general conventions that define the conditions of statehood: The Montevideo Convention requires a) a territory, b) a permanent population, c) a government, and d) the facility to enter into discussions with other states, while the constitutive theory of statehood adds a fifth criterion: the recognition of the rest of the world as a separate state, which disqualifies the vast majority of micronations.

Either way, if we're counting virtual space, i.e., on the internet, all of this is a lot easier to attain and document online than it used to be. But back in the day, it took some hardcore chutzpah, creativity, and organizational skills to pull this feat off — emphasis on the creativity. It's no surprise, then, that so many of the first micronations were established by artists. Here are a few of the most original ones we've come across.

More here

also:

The Weirdest Micronations That Have Ever Existed, by Vincze Miklós here

Infiltrating London: subterranean exploration in the british capital, by Darmon Richter

London is a complicated place. It is a melting pot of cultures and races, a nexus for trade and travel, which archaeologists believe to have been occupied for more than 6,000 years. With every passing age, with each new society that has laid a claim to this settlement on the Thames Estuary, London’s roots have grown deeper and deeper into the soil of England.

The result today is a multifaceted and wholly organic entity, one in which Roman ruins rub shoulders with Victorian ice wells, between historic catacombs and contemporary rail tracks. London's layers spread out deep, far, and wide beneath the limited surface space. Beneath the paved streets is a tangled labyrinth of storm drains and sewers, subterranean rivers, the booming network of underground train tunnels, a warren of wartime bunkers, and deep level shelter facilities. Then, beneath that, there are areas of new bore. Even now London’s roots are searching deeper still, pushing further into the Earth’s crust to make room for high-speed rail connections and advanced data delivery conduits.

It should be no surprise then that London is something of a mecca for urban explorers. However, London is not Eastern Europe, where regime changes have left many underground facilities obsolete, their bulkhead doors hanging open and inviting to those who would dare to peek beneath the surface. This is not Australia, where explorers are discouraged from entering the extensive storm drain networks largely for their own benefit, on account of the many deadly creatures which thrive in these dank and disconnected places.

In a city of 8.3 million people, there is limited room for abandonment. London moves quickly, and there is little time to forget. Almost every inch of London’s subterranean realm still serves a purpose — from cable runs to data storage vaults — and those that don’t are simply waiting to be allotted new roles in the substructure of the capital.

More here

Phantom Airwaves (Michael Esposito)

Michael Andrew Esposito was born in Gary, Indiana in 1964. He is a descendant of Alfred Vail who invented the Morse Code and several early telegraph devices with his partner Samuel Morse. The invention of the telegraph sparked the spiritualist movement of the middle 1800s and the telegraph was used in spirit communication. Another ancestor, Jonathan Harned Vail was office manager and assistant to Thomas Edison. Edison, in his later years attempted to develop a device for communicating with the dead. Michael studied communication theory at Purdue University, University of Notre Dame, American University in Cairo, Egypt and Governor's State University. During the Gulf War Michael was a Psy-ops officer in Iraq.

Over the years, under the Phantom Airwaves institution, Michael has participated in hundreds of paranormal investigations all over the world. He has conducted extensive research at many active locations and has developed a great deal of unique theory and devised many unique experiments within the field of EVP. Focusing primarily on EVP research, he has collected tens of thousands EVPs and video. He has had numerous television, radio and newspaper appearances.

Working extensively with EVP's relationship to experimental music, Michael combines EVP with field recording and related frequency tones of research sites. Michael is currently published by Touch Music[MCPS] UK.

More here