Launch event for Mark Fisher's Ghosts of My Life

Launch event for Mark Fisher's new book, Ghosts of My Life. This collection of writings on Zero Books by the author of the acclaimed Capitalist Realism, argues that we are haunted by futures that failed to happen.

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Luke Jordan - Spirit Trumpet (2014)

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Francis Giacobetti: Portraits of Francis Bacon

2003-06-10 - 2003-07-05

This exhibition is the fruit of a unique adventure, The History of Art written in the present, springing from the remarkable meeting between two crazy men - one a painter, the other a photographer. It is the result of a never before seen telescoping of two worlds, two lives, two techniques and two generations, which at first glance appear to be poles apart.
This exhibition is the eye of Bacon through the eye of Giacobetti, a truly loving meeting of minds.

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Book: Immaterial Bodies: Affect, Embodiment, Mediation, by Lisa Blackman

In this unique contribution, Blackman focuses upon the affective capacities of bodies, human and non-human as well as addressing the challenges of the affective turn within the social sciences. Fresh and convincing, this book uncovers the paradoxes and tensions in work in affect studies by focusing on practices and experiences, including voice hearing, suggestion, hypnosis, telepathy, the placebo effect, rhythm and related phenomena. Questioning the traditional idea of mind over matter, as well as discussing the danger of setting up a false distinction between the two, this book makes for an invaluable addition within cultural theory and the recent turn to affect.

In a powerful and engaging matter, Blackman discusses the immaterial body across the neurosciences, physiology, media and cultural studies, body studies, artwork, performance, psychology and psychoanalysis. Interdisciplinary in its core, this book is a must for everyone seeking a dynamic and thought provoking analysis of culture and communication today.

Ken Hollings - Spirit Horns

I recently had the pleasure of spending an intriguing afternoon with EVP researcher and recording artist Michael Esposito at the amazing studio of the composer Aleksander Kolkowski. Regular readers of this blog may recall that Michael was responsible with Carl Michael von Hausswolff for issuing The Ghosts of Effingham: a set of EVP recordings inscribed onto an Edison wax cylinder which also glowed in the dark. An enthused researcher of the machine's ability to reproduce sound, Aleksander’s creations include Mechanical Landscape with Bird – an extraordinary work for canaries, ‘serinette’, cylinder players and string quartet playing Stroh violins, Stroh viola and Stroh ‘Japanese Fiddle’. His work has also been featured in The Wire.

On a visit to London from his home in Chicago, Michael had already made an arrangement with Aleks to run an EVP recording session at the studio, which is an Aladdin’s cave of working cylinder players, amplifying horns for gramophones and radios, antique musical instruments, sheet music, pictures and shelves full of books and old recordings.

Part one

Part two

Electronic Voice Pheneomena

Electronic Voice Pheneomena is an experimental literature and new media project for 2013, exploring contemporary approaches to sound, voice, technology and writing, brought to you by Mercy and Penned in the Margins.

The EVP programme takes its inspiration from Konstantin Raudive’s notorious ‘Breakthrough’ experiments of the 1970s, where he divined voices-from-beyond in electronic noise. Themes of otherness, the profane and divine join with new approaches to writing and performing on this website built around our platform of new commissioned works.

The commissions are based on the premise that both artists and audiences of inter-media art join in a process of divination, belief and association similar to that employed by those finding ghost messages in early tape recordings. This thinkspace links to the paranormal, while also suggesting ways for properly contemporary performance and writing to form connections across electronic interface, human and spiritual other.

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Aura Satz - Spiral Sound Coil

Continuing her work as artist in residence at the Ear Institute, UCL London, Aura will develop a new intimate, immersive sound sculpture that will create a physical and psychoacoustic sonic experience whereby visitors will be encouraged to place their head inside the sculpture itself. Like a giant hearing trumpet or an automaton ear, the horn appears to tune into the vast library of past sounds that is the air. The multi-channel soundtrack outputs in a spiral sequence, thus echoing the rotating technology of wax cylinder sound recordings. Similarly, the narrative voicover explores the idea of memory being like a wax cylinder, a 'mystic writing-pad' of sorts, a blank slate onto which memories leave their trace and personal history is recorded.

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(Gregor Schneider) Bleak Houses by Deborah Ripley

Upon entering Die Familie Schneider, visitors walk down a narrow, darkened hallway to a series of doors and a staircase. One door leads to a cramped kitchen where a woman dressed in brown and wearing rubber gloves is robotically washing a dish. Behind her is a grimy little sitting room devoid of decoration except for a curious, small 19th century landscape painting leaning against the wall. Back out in the hall and up the staircase are two more doors. One leads to a brightly lit bathroom, in which a man, behind the shower curtain, is masturbating, breathing heavily, apparently oblivious to visitors observation. The other door leads to a seedy, motel-like bedroom with a fake white fur bedspread and mirrored wardrobe doors. The air is oppressively hot and smells sickly. Slumped beside the bed is either a child or a small adult -- it is difficult to tell because the person is hidden beneath a plastic garbage bag. There is a sense that some unspeakable crime has been committed here. From the inside, the room appears to have no windows, even though windows are visible from the street. Clearly this is a secret inner room that Schneider has constructed.

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Piranesi, and his enduring influence by Jonathan Jones

The reason these images have such a dark vitality is not that they are protests or satires, however. Piranesi is more than half in love with his prisons. They are a place his imagination can wander, and at the same time an impossible place - the prints contain spatial paradoxes, including a staircase that exists on two planes simultaneously. It is a place without limits or contexts: Piranesi's prison interiors have no outer walls, and each vista is cut off only by the frame of the image itself. The spaces are so big, so continuous, that they may not even be interiors; this may be a city that has grown into a world, where interior and exterior are no longer definable. There are views through arches of almost recognisable Roman sights - the colonnade of St Peter's. But there is nothing to tell us that these mark terminal points of the prison. Instead, they are incorporated into it.

If inside and outside no longer exist, up and down are what create the sense of power beyond description. While prisoners undergo mysterious torments, luckier souls pass by on parapets or bridges that have no logic or necessity. Piranesi argued that architecture should indulge in grotesque ornament; the architecture of his prisons is redundant, it is not functional, it relishes itself. There is a perverse freedom to this that makes it easy to understand why Edgar Allan Poe was a fan - Poe's story The Pit and the Pendulum is a transcription of the world of Piranesi's carceri. The awful thing about Piranesi's punishments is that you don't quite know how they work, or what the thinking could be behind them. A wheel with spikes around its circumference; a post with more spikes; a kind of chandelier suspended from a beam, which on closer inspection looks like it might be ringed with meathooks; pulleys, one of which raises and lowers a basket big enough to contain a person into a huge marble vat...

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Mike Kelley & David Askevold - The Poltergeist (1978)

The Ectoplasm series is linked to a project made in association with artist David Askevold in 1978, titled “The Poltergeist.”  David and I shared an interest in the aesthetics of the occult which led us to make a series of photographic works that addressed that history.  We did not work collaboratively, though we had numerous discussions about the project as it was developed.  Each artist’s works were produced independently, but with the intention that they should be seen simultaneously to inflect the reading of the other.  My portion of the project includes faux spiritualist photographs of a “medium” (myself) exuding the mysterious ethereal substance ectoplasm.  The photos mimic the look of period spiritualist photography from the early part of the 20^th century; they are grouped with texts and drawings (also presented photographically) that relate to this theme.  David assisted me in the photo shoot and one of the photos (of a sock monkey wrapped in gauze) ended up being used in his half of the project.  Only four of the ectoplasm images were included in “The Poltergeist;” the photos selected for this exhibition include never-before-printed images.

From  http://mikekelley.com/

Donald Weber - Post Atomic, 5. Fukushima Exclusion Zone

Life After Zero Hour Inside the Exclusion Zone, Fukushima, Japan

Just a few weeks ago, close to 50,000 people lived on a coastal plain, in the Fukushima Prefecture of Japan. Today, you’d be lucky to see a few dozen people, still clinging to the idea of normality in a radioactive “zone of exclusion.”

That first morning in March, as the Fukushima-Daiichi Nuclear Plant was nearing a nuclear meltdown, the authorities evacuated the towns and villages surrounding the facility and created a 40-kilometer Exclusion Zone around it. The 50,000 residents had fifteen minutes to leave, and never returned.

The dozen villages and towns in this death zone were chillingly deserted, as if time had ceased to pass since the moment the earthquake struck. It was like an episode of Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone crossed with The Day After—an apocalyptic vision of life in the nuclear age.

I was the first journalist to wander into these “zones of exclusion” just days after the disaster at Fukushima was unfolding. The people I met, those who chose to stay, all expressed the same sentiment, that I would come back, not to forget them. Their government had abandoned them, will I?

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Donald Weber - Post Atomic, 2. Stalker

The people most affected by the explosion of Reactor Number Four on the morning of April 26,1986, soon learned that the event known as Chernobyl was predicted by a feature film made seven years earlier. Stalker, by Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky, explored the limits of our technical explanatory power against the backdrop of a mysterious force that can only be approached on foot, by forest “stalkers” who have learned to accept its risky gifts.

The portentous coincidence that links these two isolated small towns – one, the infamous home of a nuclear disaster, the other, a fictional source for metaphysical speculation – is the subject of this photographic project, ” Stalker.” Today, real stalkers live inside the official 30-kilometre Exclusion Zone in Chernobyl and secretly strip the dead city of its valuables, while avoiding the security forces – and the ghosts of the ruptured past. 

This story documents their twilight existence as scavengers of our newest Lost Civilization. 

As stalkers, these homeless men and women who wander the Zone, take over abandoned apartments and village homes, looting and stripping them of the remaining valuables, we see a terrible future revealed. The most precious commodity is bulk metal, stripped of its function ­ copper, aluminum and chrome, which they collect and sell to distributors in Kiev and beyond. Our grand technical vision, the city as pure laboratory, quickly recedes into the hunting and gathering primitivism of a future stone age. 

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Ryan Jordan - DIY Hypnosis and Hallucination Machines Workshop

This workshop will focus on building simple hardware synths and controlling lights with 555 timer circuits. Once the circuit has been built the participant will then construct a wearable set of goggles which will focus the lights directly into their eyes. The rate the lights flicker and the frequency of audio are synchronised and controlled by the participant so they are able to fine tune the device in order to reveal some unusual visual patterns. For example, you may see psychedelic patterns when the rate of the light approaches flicker fusion, or perceive circular motion when the position of the lights are offset from one another.

Saturday 10th May 2014 

13:00 - 18:00 [workshop]

19:00 - 20:00 [public performance: open to all] 

nnnnn, Unit 73a, Regent Studios, 8 Andrews Road, Hackney, London, E8 4QN 

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Bawdy Technologies and the Birth of Ectoplasm by L. Anne Delagdo

Absurd though it appeared, ectoplasm seemed to redefine the boundaries of the next great scientific frontier. Dr. Gustave Geley, a French physician and psychical researcher, viewed this paranormal production as evidence of an evolutionary development of human organic capacities and believed that this development heralded a revolution in scientific thought. The physical attributes of ectoplasm seemed to vary as much as those who produced it. According to psychical researcher G. C. Barnard, Geley described ectoplasm as being “very variable in appearance, being sometimes vaporous, sometimes a plastic paste, sometimes a bundle of fine threads, or a membrane with swellings or fringes, or a fine fabric-like tissue”. It was sometimes incandescent and sometimes opaque. The color of the material varied but was usually white. Geley believed that the material was “capable of both evolution and involution, and is thus a living substance” but noted that it was unlikely that it ever separated from the medium’s body...  

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BBC Radio 4, Out of the Ordinary ep 2, Can the dead talk to us? Jolyon Jenkins looks into EVP - alleged voices from the far side.

Jolyon Jenkins reports on the world of electronic voice phenomena (EVP) - the community of people who believe that the dead can speak to us through radio transmissions and white noise. The technique was introduced to the English speaking world by a mysterious Latvian, Dr Konstantin Raudive, who travelled to Britain in 1969 with recordings of Hitler, Churchill and Stalin speaking from beyond the grave. The method is now a mainstay of paranormal investigators. Jolyon unearths tapes from 40 years ago made at a key séance held by Dr Raudive in Gerrards Cross. Raudive eventually came to believe that a budgerigar called Putzi was passing on messages from a dead 14 year old girl. Jolyon speaks to EVP current practitioners, and to a man who believes that his recordings of animal noises also contain messages.

The claims are improbable, but they tell us interesting things about human perception: about our ability to construct meaning from meaningless sound, and about how our brains naturally fill in the gaps where information is incomplete. Optical illusions are well known, but we are equally prone to being fooled by audio illusions. Sound artist Joe Banks suggests that, while EVP researchers may be carrying out parapsychology experiments, they are unwittingly doing conventional psychology experiments.

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Enfield Poltergeist voice recording

quote

I begin to wonder which is I. Am I the white figure, or am I the one in the chair? ... It is my face which is being wet with the tears which these good women are shedding so plentifully,  how can it be? It is a horrible feeling, thus losing hold of one’s identity.

Madame d’Esperance, shadow land: or, light from the other side

Leif Elggren & his characters

Leif Elggren talks about Queen Christina, Charles XII and Emanuel Swedenborg at the opening of his solo exhibition "MOVEMENTS IN THE DUST"

Psychogeophysics

Psychogeography can be defined as an examination of the total effects of geography and place on the individual.

Psychogeophysics expands this artistic research to embrace geophysics, defined as the quantitative observation of the earth's physical properties, and its interaction with local signal ecologies.

Psychogeophysics proposes a series of interdisciplinary public experiments and workshops excavating the spectral city and examining the precise effects of geophysical/spectral ecologies on the individual through pseudo-scientific measurement and mapping, algorithmic walking and the construction of (experimental) situations.

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Jule Eisenbud collection on Ted Serios and thoughtographic photography

Originating mainly from the 1960s during the years of Dr. Jule Eisenbud's experimentation on psychic photographer Ted Serios, the digital collection provides an introduction to the psychic phenomenon 'thoughtography'. Serios possessed an apparent ability to place images on film with his mind using psychic energy that continues to baffle researchers and critics to this day. Ample numbers of these psychic photographs, or 'thoughtographs,' produced through extensive experimentation with Eisenbud, illustrate Serios's paranormal ability.

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quote

  ...we have actually touched the borderland where matter and force seem to merge into one another, the shadow realm between the Known and the Unknown which for me has always had peculiar temptations.

Sir William Crookes, nature (journal)

Book: Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media into the Twenty-first Century, by Marina Warner

Phantasmagoria explores ideas of spirit and soul since the Enlightenment; it traces metaphors that have traditionally conveyed the presence of immaterial forces, and reveals how such pagan and Christian imagery about ethereal beings is embedded in a logic of the imagination, clothing spirits in the languages of air, clouds, light and shadow, glass, and ether itself. Moving from Wax to Film, the book discusses key questions of imagination and cognition, and probes the perceived distinctions between fantasy and deception; it uncovers a host of spirit forms - angels, ghosts, fairies, revenants, and zombies - that are still actively present in contemporary culture. It reveals how their transformations over time illuminate changing idea about the self. Phantasmagoria also tells the accompanying story about the means used to communicate such ideas, and relates how the new technologies of the Victorian era were applied to figuring the invisible and the impalpable, and how magic lanterns (the phantasmagoria shows themselves), radio, photography and then moving pictures spread ideas about spirit forces. As the story unfolds, the book features many eminent scientists and philosophers who applied their considerable energies to the question of other worlds and other states of mind: they staged trance seances in which mediums produced spirit phenomena, including ectoplasm. Phantasmagoria shows how this often surprising story connects with some of the important scientific discoveries of a fertile age, in psychology and physics, and continues to influence contemporary experience.

PARC the paraphysic research cooperative

PARC was established in Autumn 1998. As a cooperative effort, PARC consists of many members who willingly contribute to the project or concept under development. The results of this are then archived, documented, and then finally published- cf our first release, "The Ghost Orchid". We are constantly looking for new and interesting forms of acoustic indifference, whether it be paranormal, or just abnormal. In 1999 we published our first CD which investigated research into the paranormal phenomena known as EVP (Electronic Voice Phenomena). Developed out of a healthy interest in all matters paranormal, The Ghost Orchid was the first project that allowed us to make contact with some of the most renowned researchers involved in the recording of EVP.

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The Ghost Orchid - An Introduction to EVP

The ParaPsychic Acoustic Research Cooperative [PARC], in association with Ash International, is proud to present the first ever fully comprehensive investigation into the paranormal phenomenon of EVP, otherwise known as Electronic Voice Phenomenon. Without doubt EVP falls into the category of the paranormal alongside other unexplained mysteries such as ufology, life after death & poltergeist activity. The listener is guided through a collection of strange and mysterious voices that have appeared without explanation onto the tapes of EVP researchers. Included with the CD is a 24 page booklet containing commissioned articles which cover the conflicting views surrounding the EVP. Actual voice samples are reproduced here for the first time on compact disc: Polyglot Voices, Public Service Broadcasting, Interruptions across the airwaves, Singing Voices, Instant Response Voices, and the extraordinary Alien Voices. The CD also includes a commentary by the artist Leif Elggren (in English), and recordings of the work of Raymond Cass, England’s leading EVP researcher, and original member of the Fortean Group, and the Latvian EVP researcher, Dr. Konstanin Raudive.

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Kristen Roos - Ghost Station (2007)

Lower Bay Station, which has been out of use since 1968 (Toronto’s ghost station) is used as a vessel to contain sounds that are within and below the threshold of human hearing – infrasound and tactile sound – where sound is felt rather than heard. Low frequencies created by cars and subways are contributors to the cacophony of infrasonic noise that exists deep below the rumbling of the city. These tactile sounds have also been associated with paranormal activity and ghost sightings.

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The "Haunt" project

The “Haunt” Project: An attempt to build a “haunted” room by manipulating complex electromagnetic fields and infrasound

Christopher C. French, Usman Haque, Rosie Bunton-Stasyshyn  & Rob Davis

Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit, Department of Psychology, Goldsmiths College

Abstract: Recent research has suggested that a number of environmental factors may be associated with a tendency for susceptible individuals to report mildly anomalous sensations typically associated with “haunted” locations, including a sense of presence, feeling dizzy, inexplicable smells, and so on. Factors that may be associated with such sensations include fluctuations in the electromagnetic field and the presence of infrasound. A review of such work is presented, followed by the results of the “Haunt” project in which an attempt was made to construct an artificial “haunted” room by systematically varying such environmental factors...

Download full paper here 

Media Mediums

The research project Media Mediums (1) is focused on the history of transmission at a distance and includes two objects of study : Firstly, a long series of technical objects, machines and devices, both implemented and speculative, which have as a foundational principle the transportation of information, and secondly, much more mysterious and less well-known phenomena such as telepathy, telekinesis or teleportation.

On first glance, these two objects might seem to be in total opposition with one another. One situated within the extreme rationalism of technical or industrial contexts, anchored within the rigor of scientific method and its theoretical and applied fields : physics, chemistry, electro-magnetics, etc. The other gravitates towards the inexplicable, “aberrant phenomena that when held up to our cultural background of accepted truths... go against common sense and institutionalized (scientific or religious) knowledge” (2), lining up on the side of the occult, spiritualism, and the paranormal.

The prefix “tele-”, or “at a distance”, paradoxically tends to link these two fields, to create lines of communication between them. But this proximity is not only lexical. For example, at the end of the 19th century the word “television” was synonym to clairvoyance in spiritist circles. “Clairvoyants were capable of transcending space and time. They could describe ancient edifices or objects with so much precision and detail that it was as if they beheld the place or the object before their very eyes” (3). Yet at the same moment, “television” was but one of dozens of words used in technical fields populating the imagination with a horizon of objects to come.

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Ethereal Body: The Quest for Ectoplasm by Marina Warner

Materialization was the word used in the circles of psychical researchers to describe a phenomenon that first became common in séances in the 1870s: the summoning of spirit presences in the form of objects and of bodies, or of traces of objects and bodies—touches to the cheek or hands of the sitters, slaps or caresses or breezes as of something passing, sometimes fingerprints or other marks, the sounds of bells ringing or ethereal music, apported flowers and other gifts from the spirits, and, above all, ectoplasmic manifestations...

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GHost

As a visual arts and creative research project GHost takes on and explores the conceit of guests, hosts and ghosts, both metaphorically and practically, in its activities. Functioning in its capacity as a supporting platform (or host) GHost aims to enable invited guests to visually and conceptually manifest and interrogate the idea of the ghost.

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Sarah Angliss - Infrasonic

I initiated and led Infrasonic,  project which was awarded funding from the SciArt Consortium. To delve into the curious world of infrasound, I put together a team of experimental psychologists, acoustic consultants, composers, a visual artist and a pianist. Our aim was explore some tantalising claims about infrasound and put them under scientific scrutiny. Of particular interest were its reputed emotional effects. Infrasound is used in sacred music, for instance during cathedral organ recitals, and there is debate about why it’s used. Some people say it adds a sense of awe to the music – it puts a shiver down your spine. Others say that giant infrasonic organ pipes are nothing more than ‘an expensive way to make a draught’. Stranger still, infrasound has also been detected at some ostensibly haunted sites (see Vic Tandy, 1998) where it may also be making people feel very uneasy.

According to Tandy, even when infrasound comes from a mundane source, such as a faulty ceiling fan, it can give people such strange sensations, it might lead them to think they’ve been haunted. This was enough information to encourage us all to unleash infrasound on an audience.

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