Chronic Illness of Mysterious Origin III

Friday 12th Feb 

Join us for an evening of experimental ritual performances, vocal contaminations, noise, ceremonial electronicks and esoteric post-industrial techno-primitivism which will take place within an exploratory environment, forming in the depths of The Dungeons of Polymorphous Pan on Holloway Road London.

Full address will be released soon, check here for updates:
https://www.facebook.com/events/160736174297009/

Acts:

Jose Macabra
http://soundcloud.com/josemacabra

Martin Palmer and Angela Edwards
http://xenogenetic.net/
http://www.angelacarolinedwardsart.com/

Douglas Park
http://douglasism.blogspot.co.uk/

CAO
http://www.soundcloud.com/cao-6
http://www.cao-music.net/

Richard Crow & Carmelo Bene
http://soundthreshold.org/season2_session3.htm

KALLA
https://www.facebook.com/kallanoise/?ref=aymt_homepage_panel

Neo Fung
http://neofung.tumblr.com/

House of Health
https://www.facebook.com/houseofhealthcollective/?pnref=lhc

Astaroth
https://soundcloud.com/astaroth29
https://vimeo.com/129025026

The Flesh Gallery (video installation)
https://vimeo.com/150777402

Exhibition: The Book of Evil Spirits, Chiara Fumai

28 January - 23 April 2016
Private view Wednesday, 27 January, 6-9pm

waterside contemporary

2 Clunbury Str, N1 6TT London, United Kingdom

waterside contemporary is pleased to present The Book of Evil Spirits, an expanded video installation by Chiara Fumai, and the artist’s first solo exhibition at the gallery.

The Book brings together a number of characters whose narratives Fumai has embodied in her performative practice to date. In creating this catalogue, Fumai enlisted the help of Eusapia Palladino, a 19th century internationally renowned psychic and medium whose séances were attended with conviction by the likes of Nicholas II of Russia, and Nobel-laureates Marie and Pierre Curie.

Participation in the séance requires a departure from the rational and the conscious; by calling on a medium - and becoming one herself – the artist bypasses cultural structures, and her own narrative method itself. Fumai has borrowed from an array of historical characters, often women in history who from marginal positions gained recognition for voicing their dissent. They have included the writer and activist Ulrike Meinhof, bearded lady Annie Jones, philosopher Carla Lonzi, and indeed Palladino, the artist’s muse. Fumai allows herself to become ‘possessed’ by them, and under the comfortable guise of re-enactment, hijacks their narratives for her own purpose.

In The Book, Palladino convenes the spirits of Fumai’s motley crew of evil spirits – activists, terrorists, freak-show performers, philosophers, all at one point alter-egos of Fumai herself – who collectively represent the fears of a bourgeois society. The artist’s camp parody is itself obscured by knowing anachronism and occasional bursts of uncontrollable stage violence.

The events are observed and narrated by the French scientist Camille Flammarion, Palladino’s contemporary and a scholar of mediumship, who takes turns with himself in affirming and discrediting what he sees. This place of misunderstanding and fragmentation is at the crux of Fumai’s production: presented with the sitting are various paraphernalia relating to the ghosts and the medium herself – a spirit board, collages of automatic writing, an anonymous message of warning spelt out in International Sign alphabet. ABCDEFGHIJLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ Arrivederci.

Chiara Fumai (1978, Italy), lives and ‘unworks’ in Milan. Recent one-woman-shows include Der Hexenhammer at Museion, Bolzano, 2015; With Love from $inister at A Palazzo, Brescia; I Did Not Say or Mean 'Warning' at Fondazione Querini Stampalia, 2013.

Her recent group exhibitions and performances have been presented at David Roberts Art Foundation, Contour Mechelen, CA2M Madrid, 2015; Whitechapel Galley, De Appel Amsterdam, Nottingham Contemporary, Fiorucci Art Trust, London, 2014; MUSAC, 2013; dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel, 2012; Nomas Foundation, 2011.

more here

Exhibititon: Intellectual Barbarians: The Kibbo Kift Kindred

10 October 2015 – 13 March 2016

This archive display features rare woodcarvings, furniture, ceremonial dress designs and photographs of the English organisation The Kibbo Kift Kindred (1920-1932).

Formed by the artist, writer and pacifist John Hargrave after becoming disillusioned with the Boy Scout movement, the Kibbo Kift philosophy was based on a shared appreciation of nature and handicraft, as well as a commitment to world peace. Though small in number, notable members of the group included suffragettes, scientists and the novelist H.G.Wells. A 1929 exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery was a way of spreading their ideas, and this display reveals their remarkable aesthetic drawn from ancient Egyptian, Anglo-Saxon, Celtic and Native American crafts, dress and language.

Through revealing photographs and footage of the group on parades and camping trips, this display presents not only a forgotten moment in British social movements but a futuristic vision which continues to resonate today.

Whitechapel Gallery
77-82 Whitechapel High St
London
E1 7QX

more here

A magical glimpse into the Tudor imagination: Lost library of John Dee to be revealed

Treasured books from the lost Library of Tudor polymath John Dee will be revealed in a special exhibition at the Royal College of Physicians Museum in January 2016

No figure from the Tudor world better exemplifies the diverse and apparently contradictory intellectual and social preoccupations of the period than John Dee.

At once deeply religious and fastidiously superstitious, Dee was a scholar of mathematics and magic, a keen historian and courtier and tutor to Elizabeth I and a polymath whose interests included astronomy, astrology, exploration, the occult, alchemy, spying and imperialism.

Little wonder this extraordinary man has continually fascinated and served as inspiration to artists from Shakespeare and Ben Johnson to Derek Jarman and Damon Albarn.

Now, the intriguing and mysterious Dee, who survived the machinations of the late Tudor period only to die in poverty in 1608/9, is to be revealed to the public through his remarkable personal library for the first time in history.

Read more here 

Royal College of Physicians Museum info here

Event: The EVP Sessions

The EVP Sessions
Saturday 14th November

Start time: 8pm
Tickets: £11
Book online

Shoreditch Town Hall
380 Old Street
London EC1V 9LT
Website: shoreditchtownhall.com

Electronic Voice Phenomena returns with a series of electrifying live sessions featuring the very best in hauntology, spoken word, glitch noise and performance. The EVP Sessions takes its inspiration from Konstantin Raudive’s notorious Breakthrough experiments of the 1970s, in which he divined voices-from-beyond in electronic noise. Enter the labyrinthine basement of Shoreditch Town Hall and experience a “mind-boggling”, “perplexingly good” avant-garde cabaret of human, ghostly and machine voices.

Featuring

EX-EASTER ISLAND HEAD
LAURA BURNS, TIM MURRAY-BROWNE & JAN LEE
ROWAN EVANS & MAISIE NEWMAN / DUNCAN GATES
LUKE JORDAN / GARETH DAMIAN MARTIN / NICK MURRAY
NATHAN PENLINGTON / JOANNE SCOTT
ANTOSH WOJCIK / NICOLA WOODHAM

with special guest
S J Fowler

Full programme of works: http://www.electronicvoicephenomena.net/index.php/shoreditch-town-hall-london/

https://www.facebook.com/events/1639973726274802/

Event: Chronic Illness of Mysterious Origin

Chronic Illness of Mysterious Origin

Saturday 10th October, 
 
The Dungeons of Polymorphous Pan, Holloway Road, London

19:30-22:00 

https://www.facebook.com/events/907740049263314/

Join us for an evening of experimental ritual performances, noise, ceremonial electronicks and esoteric post-industrial techno-primitivism which will take place within an exploratory environment, forming in the depths of The Dungeons of Polymorphous Pan in Holloway.

Please RSVP and we'll send the address.

Acts

Neofung and Cao
"Trans-Trance Vol. II. Intra-telluric Transplant"

Following from wasteland embodiment act “Trans-trance”, a performance that proposed savage physiological strategies to incorporate nature into the city environment, re-appropriating base-materiality through the transformation of the performer into an urban-feral agent, “Intratelluric Transplant” seeks to reframe the act within the space of an underground realm, evoking the symbolism of the telluric interior of the earth. Here, the act executed by the urban-feral character will serve as a rite for the opening of a new abstract space: the entrails of the wasteland, the intimacy of the wasteland. A transplant onto a different symbolic realm would take place as the performers oscillate between the opening of new possibilities of rooting and uprooting, and the mute encounter with groundlessness.

http://neofung.tumblr.com/

http://www.cao-music.net/
http://www.soundcloud.com/cao-6

Luke Jordan
"Unclean Spirits: A Transformative Lecture"

An absurdist action installation of ritual uncleanness, invoking the visual and sonic informe.

Within, cacophony, biotic painting and sculptures of detritus and rot, occur in an affective flux.

Functioning between the urge to communicate and its failure; feedback, spoken words and unintelligible vocalisations are channeled and distorted through sculptural objects within the environment, further obscuring any rational meaning therein. The objects animated and possessed by the disembodied voice, and materials interacting with and manipulated by the body become transformed in an assemblage of the human and non-human, each taking on aspects of the other.

http://lukerichardjordan.blogspot.co.uk/

Richard Crow (Institution of Rot)
“Live De-composition with desiring assemblages for Les Hommes n’en sauront Rien (Of This Men shall know Nothing), 1923, oil on canvas, 31 5/8 x 25 1/8 (80.5 x 64 cm) by Max Ernst (1891-1976)”

The back of the picture is inscribed with a mysterious and enigmatic prose poem (Ernst only confirmed in 1970 that the poem was written by himself), which can be translated as follows:

OF THIS MEN SHALL KNOW NOTHING

The Crescent (yellow and like a parachute) prevents the little whistle falling to the ground. The whistle, because people are taking notice of it, thinks it is climbing to the Sun. | The Sun is divided into two so that it can spin better. | The model is stretched out in a dreaming pose. The right leg is bent (a pleasant exact movement). | The hand hides the earth. Through this movement the earth takes on the importance of a sexual organ. | The Moon runs through its phases and eclipses with the utmost speed. | The picture is curious because of its symmetry. The two sexes balance each another.

Ernst’s occult symbolism (depicting the sun, the moon, rays and human organs) can be related directly back to Daniel Paul Schreber’s Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken (Memoirs of my Nervous illness) 1911. Crow has been obsessively working with this text from as early as 1992, the year he opened up the Institution of Rot.

THE INSTITUTION OF ROT (A SHORT HISTORY OF DECAY)

In history as in nature, the rotten is the laboratory of life. Karl Marx

The wonderful Schreber...ought to have been made a professor of psychiatry and director of a mental hospital. Sigmund Freud

There are many aberrant 'histories/herstories/heresies' of the IOR, therefore you may not recognise/identify yourself with what is written below.

Speak (and listen) according to the madness that seduces you.

The Institution of Rot (IOR) was founded by artist Richard Crow and writer Nick Couldry in 1992 as part of London’s Secret Spaces. Situated in a Victorian House in Finsbury Park, North London, Richard Crow's working and living space, the IOR has been (from 1992 - 1996) an active artist-run space dedicated to performance, audio works and site-specific installations. Rooted in a mindset of do-it-yourself production and collaboration, the IOR significantly contributed to the extraordinary dynamism of London’s artist-run spaces phenomenon of the 90's.

IOR’s specific concerns (and obsessions) were the privacy of the human body and its public transformations (ingestion, expulsion, cleansing, confessions, rituals and taboos).

From 2002 (until July 2009) the space of the IOR remained 'open' as a point of contact for international collaborations and occasional (unofficial) artists’ residencies in partnership with the curator in residence Lucia Farinati.

At present the ‘remains’ of the IOR constitute a ‘living archive’ – a kind of uneasy hauntology of recordings, objects, texts and images, people and places.


RICHARD CROW/INSTITUTION OF ROT

http://www.soundthreshold.org/season2_session3.htm
https://soundcloud.com/richard-crow

Staging Disorder Exhibition, words by Debika Ray

An exhibition of photography depicts the eerie, artificial towns used to train the police and military for conflict

Photographs of the fake buildings, streets and interiors created to train police and miltary forces to deal with conflict situations are on display in an exhibition that began this week.
Staging Disorder at the London College of Communication includes images from seven series of photographs that examine a unique type of architecture where form is predicated on fear rather than function.
Among these are photographs by Sarah Pickering of the locations used to train officers in the British police who deal with terrorism, riots and protests. The largest of these, where she shot most of her images, is Denton, a series of large-scale backdrops and fake streets that simulate a stark, mid-sized city – complete with a football stadium, a nightclub and a Tube station. The apparent order and cleanliness of the set is in sharp contrast to the inherent chaos of the scenarios for which the officers are training.
Claudio Hils’ Red Land Blue Land was shot at training grounds for German troops in Senne, North Rhine-Westphalia. During manoeuvres, the term “Red Land” means enemy territory and “Blue Land” denotes friendly areas. Traces of military activity, such as targets in the shape of people, emphasise the emptiness and lifelessness of the terrain.
Oliver Chanarin and Adam Broomberg photographed Chicago, a fake Arab town in the Negev desert built by the Israeli Defense Force for urban combat training. Its history has mirrored the story of the conflict with Palestine: During the war in Lebanon, its streets were filled with abandoned cars, imitating areas of Beirut; during the first and second intifada, its concrete walls were covered with Arabic graffiti reminiscent of Gaza city and an area was built to simulate the refugee camps of the occupied territories; during the first Gulf war, American special forces had their first taste of the Middle East in the artificial town.

Staging Disorder runs until 12 March and the LCC in Elephant and Castle, London

Witches and Wicked Bodies at The British Museum

This exhibition will examine the portrayal of witches and witchcraft in art from the Renaissance to the end of the 19th century. It will feature prints and drawings by artists including Dürer, Goya, Delacroix, Burne-Jones and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, alongside classical Greek vessels and Renaissance maiolica.

Efforts to understand and interpret seemingly malevolent deeds – as well apportion blame for them and elicit confessions through hideous acts of torture – have had a place in society since classical antiquity and Biblical times. Men, women and children have all been accused of sorcery. The magus, or wise practitioner of ‘natural magic’ or occult ‘sciences’, has traditionally been male, but the majority of those accused and punished for witchcraft, especially since the Reformation, have been women. They are shown as monstrous hags with devil-worshipping followers. They represent an inversion of a well-ordered society and the natural world.

The focus of the exhibition is on prints and drawings from the British Museum’s collection, alongside a few loans from the V&A, the Ashmolean, Tate Britain and the British Library. Witches fly on broomsticks or backwards on dragons or beasts, as in Albrecht Dürer’s Witch Riding backwards on a Goat of 1501, or Hans Baldung’s Witches’ Sabbath from 1510. They are often depicted within cave-like kitchens surrounded by demons, performing evil spells, or raising the dead within magic circles, as in the powerful work of Salvator Rosa, Jacques de Gheyn and Jan van der Velde.

Francisco de Goya turned the subject of witches into an art form all of its own, whereby grotesque women conducting hideous activities on animals and children were represented in strikingly beautiful aquatint etchings. Goya used them as a way of satirising divisive social, political and religious issues of his day. Witches were also shown as bewitching seductresses intent on ensnaring their male victims, seen in the wonderful etching by Giovanni Battista Castiglione of Circe, who turned Odysseus’ companions into beasts.

During the Romantic period, Henry Fuseli’s Weird Sisters from Macbeth influenced generations of theatre-goers, and illustrations of Goethe’s Faust were popularised by Eugène Delacroix. By the end of the 19th century, hideous old hags with distended breasts and snakes for hair were mostly replaced by sexualised and mysteriously exotic sirens of feminine evil, seen in the exhibition in the work of Edward Burne-Jones, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Odilon Redon.

The exhibition will also include several classical Greek vessels and examples of Renaissance maiolica to emphasise the importance of the subject in the decorative arts.

25 September 2014 – 11 January 2015

Free 

Room 90

More here

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

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

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

In search of perfect sound – introducing Britain’s largest horn loudspeaker

A long black metal tube, slightly tapered and almost 9-foot-long lay on a row of filing cabinets at Blythe House, the Science Museum’s storage facility. The object was pointed out by John Liffen, the Museum’s Curator of Communications, who guided me during a research visit of the collections in 2008. It was all that remained of a mighty horn loudspeaker that was demonstrated in the Museum during the 1930s, John explained. A demolition accident had almost totally destroyed it in 1949.
Now the tube assumed a more fascinating form, like a fossil or a dinosaur bone as we delved into audio archeology.

The story of the horn, researched in great detail by John, sparked an interest in me. Four years later in 2012, on being appointed as the Museum’s first-ever sound artist-in residence, I was given a wonderful opportunity to initiate its reconstruction.

The exponential horn loudspeaker was designed in 1929 by the Museum’s curator of  ‘Electrical Communication’ R. P. G. Denman who also personally built a radio receiver to run in tandem with it. The purpose of this new sound system was to provide the public with demonstrations of the highest quality broadcast sound that was obtainable at the time. Denman saw it as setting a benchmark for audio quality, his aim was, in his words “to provide a standard by which commercial apparatus could be judged”.

The horn measured 27 feet (8.23m) in length with a cross section that curved exponentially from 1 ^1/16 inches (27mm) to a massive 7-foot-1-inch square (2.16m sq.) at the horn mouth. The science and theory of how horns propagate sound had only begun to emerge in the mid-1920s. It was found that a horn with an exponential shape was the most effective means of converting the sound energy from high pressure, low velocity vibrations produced at the narrow end of the horn, into low pressure, high velocity vibrations at its mouth, then radiated into the outside air. However, in order to reproduce the lowest sounding frequencies, this type of horn has to be very long with a correspondingly large opening.

More here

and here

Mind Maps: Stories from Psychology

 Science Museum, London, UK

10 December 2013 - 26 October 2014

Free admission

Mind Maps: Stories from Psychology, explores how mental health conditions have been diagnosed and treated over the past 250 years.

Divided into four episodes between 1780 and 2014, this exhibition looks at key breakthroughs in scientists’ understanding of the mind and the tools and methods of treatment that have been developed, from Mesmerism to Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT) and Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) bringing visitors up to date with the latest cutting edge research and its applications.

Bringing together psychology, other related sciences, medicine and human stories, the exhibition is illustrated through a rich array of historical and contemporary objects, artworks and archive images.

More here

The Crystal World Exhibition by Martin Howse, Ryan Jordan and Jonathan Kemp (2012)

Something of the universe’s unruliness, its filthy playful accident is rather more manifest in The Crystal World exhibition by Martin Howse, Ryan Jordan and Jonathan Kemp recently on at the Space White Building. Titled after J.G. Ballard’s novel of encroaching strangeness, here the earth is transformed into a gigantic grunge chemistry set. The chemist Dmitri Mendeleev famously found the final proportions of the periodic table in a dream after much intense work of experiment and calculation, and something similar is going on here. The exhibition proposes intense links between matter, abstraction and the fantastic, the combination of computation, accident and intuition. In the periodic table, matter proceeds along two axes with a gradually changing set of qualities arranged by atomic weight and atomic number, (a quality added later following work by Henry Moseley) changing in terms of conductivity, malleability, the ability to react with or combine with other materials and so on. The whole table, with each change arising from the accretion of one electron at a time, formulates, at a certain scale of analysis, all of the abundant expressivity of matter arising from what Mendeleev called the invisible world of chemical atoms.

Read more here

Article by Martin Howse and Jonathan Kemp here

wiki here

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.

More here

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.

More here

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.

More here

(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.

Read more here

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.

Read more here

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.

Read more here