1. Sender- channel- receiver. Noise.
2. Media and the uncanny. Vampyroteutis. The vampire was not count Dracula.
"As if to resusciate eccentric notions such as Charles Babbage's Victorian-era theory that the air is a vast library, inscribed with the sonic impressions of every sound ever uttered, or Guglielmo Marconi's conviction that sounds enjoy eternal if ever-diminishing life in the earth's atmosphere, a growing number of academic studies adress the problem of sonic history through detective work, a verbal reconstruction by auscultation of the lost sound embedded within a wide variety of sources."
"Virginia Woolf...was half convinced that this problem of the vanished auditory past would be resolved in time, by a technological invention of even greater sensitivity than the phonograph. "Instead of remembering there a scene and there a sound", she wrote, "I shall fit a plug into the wall and listen in to the past. I shall turn up August 1890. I feel that strong emotion must leave its trace..." *
I keep this in mind thinking about the house in Sollefteå (Amatörteatern), where I am planning my hauntological research for the project "Spiritual Telegraph". The idea was born during the hours I spent there in July 2012, getting ready for a concert on Svanö at Cisternen. It was the sound I heard, the source of which I was unable to identify. I cannot find better words to describe the feeling : "Out of deep dreamless sleep I was woken, startled by a hollow resonance, a sudden impact of wood on wood. Was the sound an isolated auditory event within my consciousness- a moment of dream without narrative or duration- or was it a real sound of the physical world?" From Sinister Resonance...by David Tool
Later on I realised that it was the rocking chair in the left corner of the room. Nobody was sitting on it. What was the cause of its movement I don't know.
I talked about the house with Björn Eriksson, the sound artist and lecturer at Piteå musikhögskolan who lives there on the second floor, and he told me of its reputation of being haunted. It was a recreation centre for young soldiers (soldathem), doing their military service in the area. The activities were supervised by the church, to keep the youths protected from immorality of gambling, drinking and sex- the fact suggestive of the institutional control of the bodies through the panopticon of the church, the object of my investigation possibly an audiovisual archive of transgressions and discourses of power and control in which it was embedded.
I am referring to Foucauldian vocabulary and methodology to make a point that something got recorded in the walls of the house: that something is the object of knowledge, no matter how badly it fits into the frame of existing disciplines ( it could be totally discarded as nonsense.)
According to Stone Tape Theory ghosts are nothing but an activated playback of the energies recorded in the environment due to some traumatic and highly emotionally charged event .It works by the principle of resonance- if an emotionally distressed and unbalanced person is present in the room it may start the playback. The same approach I found in Haunted Media by Jeffrey Sconce: the whole environment is seen as a recording medium. The implication of it is that sounds don't disappear, they slowly dissolve and get absorbed into materials of the place that once hosted them.
The initial recording of the energies is a monument, as any archive is monumental. I would like to excavate some sounds of it, using Foucault's method of descent, not much digging into textual archives of the library and interviewing people as going down to the deep layers of sound in a very materialistic way: trying to activate a playback and making a recording. I was playing some music composed especially for the occasion in the room where the final recording is going to take place in order to evoke some activity. My next step would be playing some high frequency tones (outside of the audible range) on the tone generator from the 70s. I hope it works.
I wish there was a kind of device Edison dreamt of, giving the energetic entities of the past more refined methods of communication than ouija boards. One day it may be created- maybe a kind of plug to fulfil the prophetia of Virginia Wolf, and the seeds of that future device can be found in technologies of the past. That is one of my motives of recording on tape. The other one is the fact that an analogue recording is not selective, it captures the voice of the real with all disturbing noises and interferences. Besides, I see a strong parallelism with time itself, both linear and circular, unwinding with the events burnt on its surface.
Going down to the real from the higher levels of the symbolic and imaginary is a kind of fall from the Babylonian tower of the primacy of language to the grounds of what it is to be human or a descent from software to hardware , the virtual communication model of Vampyroteutis of Vilem Flusser to Friedrich Kittler's media materiality and logics of the machine .On one side Flusser, called the philosopher of the surface, due to his arguments for the code coming to us through the channels of communication, presented in his image of Vampyroteutis infernalis, a phantasmagoric mollusc changing the colour of its skin as means of communication, and on the other side Kittler with his famous "there is no software" and the logics of the machine we can see by getting inside it.
I am not taking sides, as in my project I am trying to capture the voices and images of the phantoms (the otherworldly as something of this world). They don't have to be meaningful, it may be silence, the very silence that infuses fear in people, it may be nothing but audiovisual noise, but while monitoring the material I will surely start detecting meaningful patterns in the movement of the pixels and textures. I already identified some in the preliminary tests.
Here is an extract from The Art of the Vampyroteutis by Anne Popiel.
Artists should now seek to overcome the disadvantages of their traditional media and create immaterial art that can be more directly transmitted to the brains of receivers. Analogous to the color-changing glands on the skin of the Vampyroteuthis, we can now communicate our life experiences via the color code of pixels on a television or computer screen.
This art can be manipulated by artists not physically as in the case of sculpture, painting or even computer hardware, but immaterially in the form of programs or software. “In this context,” Flusser reminds us, “ „soft‟ unquestionably refers to mollusks.”
His deliberately chosen zoological analogy affords an implied comparison between two methods of information transmission: the color code of pixels or chromatophores and the inherited genetic code. Flusser sexualizes the animal‟s glandular form of communication, describing Vampyroteuthian skin-art as the seduction and rape of the receiver of information by the sender.
There is a mystic practice in Tibet called tulpa- a ghostly manifestation of a thought- form produced by the mind. The same can be said about fictional characters- William S. Burroughs considered his tulpas, that is characters existing apart from the book. Fictions living their own life are called hyperstitions by Reza Negarestani, and the mind producing monstrous creatures that start populating real worlds is there in Flusser/Bec dialogue, which resulted in a hybridized fictional -scientific- philosophical text Vampyroteuthis, described by Louis Bec as "la concretion cephaopodique d'un dialogue".
First published in German in 1987, it was originally written in French and presented to Bec with a request for illustrations.
Il apparaît que le Vampyrotheutis Infernalis comme tous les autres Vampyromorpha d'ailleurs, est
une chimérisation émergeant des dessous troublants de l'amitié.
Qu'il est la concrétion céphalopodique d'un dialogue.
Qu'il est une chimérisation, non de l'assemblage ou du collage occasionnel, mais d'un bien curieux
clonage.
La présence de trois coeurs caractéristiques de cet organisme, ainsi que la ruse par laquelle il a su avaler
sa coquille au cours des siècles, pour passer de l'obscurité à la transparence, en donne la preuve.
The world of Vampyrotheuthis is a model of communication in the age of television and digital images- the information being passed by means of a colour code of pixels- the function of the glands of that creature always changing the colour of its skin.
Flusser proposes the world of the Vampyroteuthis as a model for human communication in the age of television, film, and digital images- a vision of material immateriality of new technologies.
Kittler creates his own portrait of a vampire as a bureaucrat in the essay "Arvet efter Dracula" (I was reading it in a Swedish translation)- a spy, interfacing the East and the West:
"Dracula, intill sin sista stund i ett dubbelansikte mellan öst och väst, var aldrig vampyren Dracula....Den som först satte likhetstecken mellan den despotiske territorialfursten och folktrons vampyr var en ungersk orientalist vars eget namn står att finna just före ordet "vampyr" i gamla uppslagsverk. Det är ingen tillfällighet...av "Bamberger", det efternamn som hans från Tyskland invandrade judiske farfar burit, blev "Vambery", en signifikantlek med vampyren.
Och äventyraren och professorn från Budapest...var faktiskt ett slags vampyr...en användbar spion åt imperiet....Arminius Vambery hade gjort vampyren Dracula möjlig."
Behind the myth created by an imperialistic tourist on an eavesdropping mission in Transsylvania in Bram Stoker's famous novel is a context of the cholera epidemic and the bloody history of crusades. Dracula in the novel operates like a kind of software, the existence of which Kittler denies on the level of the Real ( mjukvara kan bara härbargeras av systemet). That is why he casts no shadow.
("När betydelser reduceras till satser, satser till ord och ord till bokstäver, finns det inte heller någon mjukvara").
His model of non-programmable machines within a complex network resembling the organic structure of all nature works without any interface- it's a direct sender-receiver system of the kind Claude E. Shannon constructed. Software is a veil to obscure what is going on inside the machine or a puritan camouflage for an innocent user who imagines to have a control over it.
The message has to be captured, not only received, that's the most important thing and the strategies of the future, according to Kittler may concentrate on maximizing the connections within a system instead of making the channels transparent and facilitating the passage of information. ( Om icke programmerbara system och deras maximala kopplingsmöjligheter: Till följd av deras globala växelverkan kan sådana system, vare sig det är vågor eller levande väsen, visa prov på polynoma tillväxttal i fråga om sin komplexitet. Därför kan de bara beräknas av maskiner som själva inte behöver betala programmerbarhetens pris. Utan tvekan vore denna hypotetiska men bara alltför nödvändiga typ av maskin den rena hårdvaran: en apparat som arbetar bland idel fysiska apparater, hänvisad till samma begränsade resurser.Mjukvara i den vanliga bemärkelsen, det vill säga som en ständigt möjlig abstraktion, skulle inte längre finnas. Rutinerna i en sådan maskin måste, även om de fortfarande vore tillgängliga för algoritmisk nedskrivning, huvudsakligen arbeta på ett materiellt substrat, vars kopplingsmöjligheter tillät omstrutureringar av dess celler....En minimering av allt det brus som omöjligen kan elimineras är just det pris som datorindustrin får betala för strukturellt programmerbara maskiner. Den omvända strategin- det vill säga att maximera bruset- skulle inte blott leda tillbaka från IBM till Shannon, utan vore troligen också den enda vägen till den korpus av reella tal som tidigare kallades kaos.
s.278 Det finns ingen mjukvara ur Friedrich Kittler, Maskinskrifter, Essäer om Medier och Litteratur.
2. Inscription machines.
I already made some digital recordings of the room tone without/with my own voice reciting the alphabet- a game of spiritual telegraph ( analogue recordings are better, as they don't cut off frequencies, which is the point: to record everything, beyond the meaningful) . When I listened to my recordings afterwards (playback and interpretation are important) I could register response to letters FHP. It suggests to me "fritidshem" and "prästgård", swedish words meaning youth recreation center and presbytery,rectory,parsonage
The link to the recording on soundcloud: http://soundcloud.com/w-h-kumi-maru/fhp-spiritual-tel
When Jeffrey Sconce discusses the appearance of new telecommunication technologies of the 19th century in his book Haunted Media, he emphasizes the spookiness of the experience of hearing a human voice for the first time without seeing the person talking- it's what he calls a disembodied presence. He defines three main entry points into the fantastic that ironically comes to us through rational modernity: 1) disembodiment and leaving the body; 2) teleportation, or the electronic elsewhere; and 3) anthropomorphization of media technology. He goes even further, to the possibility of at least symbolic communication channel with the other side, suggested by electronic media, if there is something to be called the other side we normally cannot perceive by our senses, but can think of as a part of reality. His conclusion is that media by their nature are ghostly, they are the carriers of phantoms. Flusser was talking about a binary code coming to meet the viewer of a digital image, it functioning not as a stand-in for the place it is representing by direct reference, but through pixels,- to me it is suggestive of a phantom or a mirage).
Sounds lack the structure of reference, they are not signifiers or media for expression of a semantic context, and they are not bound to the sources that caused them. The link is severed and trying to make sense of what we hear, we have to leave the space and place ourselves in time, which is a shamanic technique. David Tool directly assigns the quality of mediumship to a listener: "Listening, as if to the dead, like a medium who deals only in history and what is lost, the ear attunes itself to distant signals, eavesdropping on ghosts and their chatter. Unable to write a solid history the listener accedes to the slippage of time.
...
Sound is a present absence; silence is an absent present. Or perhaps the reverse is better: sound is an absent presence; silence is a present absence? In this sense, sound is a sinister resonance- an association with irrationality and inexplicability, that which we both desire and dread. Listening, then, is a specimen of mediumship, a question of discerning and engaging with what lies beyond the world of forms...Silence is there to be broken, a caesura, a tensile, fragile state ..."
There are some people who already investigated the house and can account for some paranormal visual phenomena even captured in photographs- a girl and a soldier with a gun. I filmed there in November and I can definitely see a girl, both in stills and moving images- I made a rough sketch of the girl ( what I see is however my own experience, other people see different things there, but obviously some kind of activity going on)
and captured some sounds as well- the rocking chair I mentioned before. I was also dreaming about three young children I found in the house and carried out to leave to their mother.
To define the goal of the project and sum it all up... I'm on an archeological agenda, borrowing some of the working methods from Jussi Parrika's book What is Media Archeology? There is a chapter in it called Imaginary Media: Mapping Weird Objects. It is a departure from Foucault's Archeology of Knowledge and his understanding of an archive, with a focus on the object of knowledge- that something is recorded . "Media archeologies interested in the imaginary are interested in the actual as they are in the impossible.....The materiality of the archive is part of regulated, discursive serialisation that puts objects and statements into inseparable proximity. Yet, archeological analysis is able to map things that do not seem to have a material presence but that are for Foucault...always bound up with an institution that is not necessarily spatio-temporally localizable. Deleuze...referred to FoucauIt's methodology of archeology as the audiovisual archive because it articulates how the sayable and the visible are expressed and made possible " Imaginary media (outdated technology used today gains the status of imaginary media) are time-machines, allowing a travel through the networks of past discourses in which they are embedded.
Outdated media are also epistomological/inscription machines. To be extremely materialistic I choose tape. To record on tape is to perform an act parallel to inscription or the French for it "enregistrement"-I am referring to Deleuze and Guattari, using the term in a psychoanalytical context to explain the mechanisms of re-enactment of trauma- of some energies upon the body of the house. Recording itself is a disjunctive synthesis at work, Deleuzian terminology once again,- I was thinking of his flows of forces as the very foundation of possibility of making a contact with the deep layers of sonic history- taking discrete sonic events out of the flux they got dissolved into, like waves into the ocean.
If we leave phenomenology behind ,taking a strictly materialistic approach, then a recording can be understood as storage of patterns. " For Kittler (1999), this ability to record outside meaning- recording that does not record only meaningful language but all the noises of the body, all the quirks, slips, hesitations, sighs, grunts- is the ability furnished by the technical media of photography and, in the regime of voices, the phonograph. Technical media such as the phonograph records the Real, not the Symbolic, or even the Imaginary, as Kittler translates the Lacanian ideas of the tripartite structure of the psyche as part of media history. The persistent interest in the bodies of psychotics, or ghosts, is actually about technical media showing how they work as inscription-machines with the human body being merely a relay point for a wider discourse network, as Kittler argues. In such a material version, then, the weird bodies of modernity- insane and otherworldly- are less hallucinations than part of the material logic of discourse networks." (p 57, what is Media archeology?)
"...such media materialists as Kittler...have continuously emphasized the double bind between ghosts and technical media where, by making "speech immortal"..., the voices of the dead also become immortal, zombies. ...Talking about media zombies, in his fiction novel Locus Solus (1914) Raymond Roussel...conjures further, more imaginary media in the fabulation of Danton's revitalised head, which works as phonograph, uttering the voice of the dead man through powers of animal magnetism.
3. EVP
a) definition, history, EVP pioneers
b) recording
Electroacoustic phenomena we perceive can be explained by both the brain's capacity to make patterns in case of very focused listening, but also by what is called EVP: electronic voice phenomena. EVP are "spirit voices" that are said to manifest themselves on audio recordings. If there are personalities in another existence who wish to communicate, they are more comfortable expressing themselves through sound, manipulating white, chaotic noise to some order than they would have moving, for example, an upside-down glass around.
Perhaps the first time anyone reported hearing anomalous voices in an electronic recording was in June 1959. Friedrich Jurgenson (1903–1987), after playing back a recording of birdsong in the Swedish countryside, is said to have noticed the presence of a faint Norwegian voice talking about "birds at night". Jurgenson assumed this must have been a stray radiobroadcast, although there was no radio receiver at the remote location where the recording had been made. Whatever the cause, it prompted Jurgenson to make further recordings in his home.
According to Jurgenson, voices that were not present during the recording continued to be heard on playback. They were said to refer to him (and his dog) by their names and nicknames, predict an incoming telephone call (and name the caller, Jurgenson's wife), and respond to questions and comment on the people and conversation physically present and accountable for in the room.
Read more: http://www.monstropedia.org/index.php?title=Electronic_voice_phenomenon#ixzz2CqK4WXPS
Ingmar Bergman said once that images can travel through the air, maybe sounds can as well, and across the borders of time and space, even the ultimate border of life and death.
EVP is a subcategory of Instrumental transcommunication (ITC), a broader term for certain controversial means of communication with the afterlife; investigating communication through ordinary electronic devices such as telephones, television sets, radios, and computers. In the case of telephones; many people report to have received strange phone calls by someone claiming to be a relative or a colleague that has died. The voices can also manifest over the white noise between untuned stations on a radio.
Read more: http://www.monstropedia.org/index.php?title=Electronic_voice_phenomenon#ixzz2CqLOPjDV
From Leonard Lander's book Beyond the Dial :
"Since the groundbreaking research work well-conducted by the early pioneers of EVP such as Jurgenson and Raudive, advances in recording technology has enmanifested a myriad of new approaches and ever more sophisticated techniques. Analogue recording is better as it records every possible emission, while the digital cuts out certain frequencies. It has been shown that the discarnate entities often use higher frequencies of the audio spectrum to form into their speech.
Recording EVP
The quality, volume and durations of recordings are said to be increased by using a sound source placed within audible distance of the microphone during recording. Typically this would be a radio tuned to between stations so only white noise is audible; the theory being that this provides an acoustic basis for the voices to be constructed from, similar to vocoder technology. This need for background noise fits the alternative explanation that the white noise provides random sounds that may be interpreted as voices by people who expect or want to hear voices. This explanation is consistent with the theory that the entire "phenomenon" is an example of pareidolia, in which a vague or random stimulus is mistakenly perceived as recognizable (see the skeptic section). Voices are said to be known for being rapid, faint, and often spoken in grammatically unusual and simplified language—or even multiple languages during the same sentence. The interpretation of such recordings is often highly subjective and may differ from listener to listener; some listeners may hear nothing at all, while others report hearing specific phrases or sentences.
Read more: http://www.monstropedia.org/index.php?title=Electronic_voice_phenomenon#ixzz2CqT9myMQ
The basic recording method:
1 Banish oneself, the location of the experiment, and the equipment. Then pray for God's blessing, help and protection.
2 Set up the tape-recorder and microphone in a quiet place.
3 Tune the radio to a frequency either a) between two adjacent stations, resulting in static noise; b) close to, but not exactly on the centre frequency of a station; c) of a station transmitting in a language you do not speak or understand or d) tune (rapidly or slowly across the full frequency band from one end of the dial to the other during the experiment.
4 Set the recording level on the tape-recorder halfway between the lowest possible setting and the start of the red peak-scale.
....
The amplifier of the tape-recorder used should not run on mains-fed 210-240 v, but the battery-powered, and with a high impedance input. This greatly inscreases the audibility of the communications, as there is no microphone connected to this equipment.
It has been found out that if high frequencies are broadcast inside the recording room from an 1950s-era signal generator or oscillator at levels above the range of normal human hearing (20-20.000 Hz cycles-per-second) during EVP experiments, this can increase greatly the probability of entity contact....
Playback is even more important, a good amplifier is crucial. So is listening and interpretation.
People who are skeptical of paranormal phenomena insist that there are more plausible explanations for EVP. The Skeptic's Dictionary summarises a number of common observations on the subject: "While it is impossible to prove that all EVPs are due to natural phenomena, skeptics maintain that they are probably due to such things as interference from a nearby CB operator or cross modulation. Some of the 'voices' are most likely people creating meaning out of random noise, a kind of auditory pareidolia or apophenia.
Read more: http://www.monstropedia.org/index.php?title=Electronic_voice_phenomenon#ixzz2CqU2gNlD
When using language, humans are constantly sorting out noise, recognizing speech patterns and so on, all unconsciously. This highly specialized training can also make us pick up words that are not even there, just as it can make people hear something other than what was said.
Skeptics claim that these are the more plausible explanation, and that as long as it remains a possibility, we have no need to turn to speculation such as spirits, astral beings or psychokinesis. Many of the characteristics noted by EVP proponents themselves (such as Raudive, see below) fit the pareidolia hypothesis, namely that the voices speak fast, in a mixture of languages, with non-standard grammar, telegram-style sentences and are often inventing new words. This suggests that the words picked up by attentive listeners are in fact random and whatever meaning and order they seem to have is constructed by them (such as judging something to be meaningful neologism rather than nonsense). Another argument is that if other entities could change and properly arrange small magnetic charges in our computers and tapes, they would have no problem entering our chat rooms or sending us email. Such alterations would presumably be easier and the absence of such messages count against the premise behind EVP, that supernatural entities exist which affect our world through electromagnetism.
Read more: http://www.monstropedia.org/index.php?title=Electronic_voice_phenomenon#ixzz2CqV2vwHE
4. "Tape my head and mike my brain, stick that needle in my vein",... (sången från Thomas Pynchons Gravitationens regnbåge)
"Way back in the 1970s when wild boy author William S. Burroughs was using a three-radio Triangle-of-Evocation system to obtain voice messages from other dimensions for his special reports on manual typewriter, the sets which could pick up anything blasting out of different SW channels into his gunshot holes-in-the wall Tangiers hotel room (he says that shortwave is "the most interesting sound in the broadcast")
I found some peculiar and surprisingly beautiful tracks through a soundcloud friend - it was his late brother with the artist name Random Krel recording voices in his head (he was diagnozed with schizophrenia) or his head guests as he referred to them, remixed and rearranged by James- both of them are talented musicians. They reminded me of Burroughs tapes by Dj Spooky and he was actually "taping his head".
We discussed some strange audiovisual manifestations accounted for in Lander's Beyond the Dial and fictions living a life of their own and here is some of his thoughts I find very interesting and inspiring:
Someone once suggested to me, that the universe is such a vast and unfathomable place, that anything any human being can imagine, however horrendous or sublime, will exist at some time and place. I think it's akin to the notion that 'every thought is a prayer'. We're at such a point in history, that it's like skipping reincarnation as, speaking from experience, it's as though we live many lives in the course of a single lifespan. So I don't know; maybe fiction can't exsist without reality, and maybe ghosts wonder about their own exsistence, if they remember being alive as humans?
The same friend, from Lovecraft on hidden reality :
For some reason, I feel compelled to share a passage from a story called 'From Beyond', by H.P.Lovecraft. "What do we know, of the world and the universe about us? Our means of receiving impressions are absurdly few, and our notions of surrounding objects infinitely narrow. We see things only as we are constructed to see them, and can gain no idea of their absolute nature. With five feeble senses we pretend to comprehend the boundless complex cosmos, yet other beings with a wider, stronger, or different range of senses might not only see very differently the things we see, but might see and study whole worlds of matter, energy, and life which lie close at hand yet can never be detected with the senses we have."
5.Between the known world and the other.
Back to what is already done for the project and what is planned.The video I made so far is full of reflections. Reflection is a projection in space and time. So I see myself reflected in a window, located in another time-and-space, more ethereal, and can, by sympathy, contact beings and informations on that same dimension. I placed myself in their domain. I was also passing by, on the way back to Gothenburg from the village of Docksta- it's like staying between the stations of the radio, "the inbetweeness state between the known world and the other symbolised in real time". I know there is a sender ...
The audio (rhythmic patterns) is going to be translated with Morse code ( it's the frequencies of the letters that determine the combinations of short and long signals). Here are some useful links http://i.imgur.com/vvEsG.jpg,
http://morsecode.scphillips.com/jtranslator.html The material I got so far is the result of filtering, it sounds like muted speech, but the signals are not relevant for Morse. The only thing that can be done is transcribing rhythmic patterns of unprocessed recordings using a tabulated code.
I would like to present the project in a gallery space as a sound installation with visual elements: the tape played at a low volume in the darkness and videos projected on a half-transparent textile, sculpted into a shape, hanging from the ceiling; muted sounds and dim lights. The tape is not working in replay mode, the casette has to be turned-so some active participation is need. I also have some ideas about Morse translation in connection with what is going on in the installation space, as well as using Slinky- it's my friend's idea. I find it brilliant. Quoting James aka Bela Buttock:
I'm thinking about a Slinky. Do you know what I'm speaking of? It's "The Original Walking Spring Toy"
Anyway, my thought is to spread the Slinky across a room with each end clung unto a heavy magnet, like from the back of a couple old speakers, probably be that much better if the cones are intact. It would require a bigger room than I have here, and I'd be inclined to align it to the magnetic poles of the Earth, and suspend it from ceiling beams by smaller coil springs. If possible, I would use three identical microphones in a triangular pattern so each end as well as the center areas of the Slinky would be represented in the recording of whatever vibes or sounds may be picked-up accoustically, or elctro-acoustically. A haunted building like where you've worked would be ideal.
Some tracks made for the project:
the sound of the rocking chair http://soundcloud.com/w-h-kumi-maru/ic-c-005-5
room tone recordings filtered and mixed with electronic sounds
http://soundcloud.com/w-h-kumi-maru/evp-tv
And the video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBQZvJgZAhw&list=UUygf-IoiQT5ME9FuqXU3rVw&index=2&feature=plcp
"In the 1940s Shannon presented a formal model of technical communication that also involved the formalization of the components of a communicative system: sender, receiver and channel, as well as noise. Communication systems are noisy systems by definition...Even though noise is seen as coming from the outside and invading the mediating powers of a communicative act, it is still diagrammed as a integral part of the system....In this sense, conceptually, noise is a modality of modern communication systems that by definition deal with signals, not with signifying, meaningful signs...Technical media machines and channels transport, first of all, signals, which then for us humans are signs that can be interpreted, talked about, and debated."
Artists have always tried to reimagine the archive through the marginal and neglected by giving it a value... Noise is that kind of element, an unwanted intruder into communication channels. ("...the idea of an archive that does not so much collects facts as reveal conditions for their discovery, an archive whose peripheral objects become visible or audible to the extent that they conform to the archive's own protocol" (Spieker, quoted by Jussi Parikka in What is Media Architecture?)Foucault expanded the concept from the concrete physical places of storage of cultural data to the discourses that govern modes of thinking, acting and expression. Archives are modes of inscription of information and culture.
"As technologies took over and automated cultural activities and daily routines, they were increasingly imagined as living entities. The technological medium, the literal in-between, was acquiring qualities that porteayed it as uncanny and alive. Perhaps this was a reflection of how the new technologies had been seen since the mid nineteenth century; the communication systems were constructed as if autonomous, self-sustaining organisms, networks, and the technical principles governing the fast movement of messages were hidden from the human eye."
From What is Media Archeology? by Jussi Parikka.
Media as vehicles between our world and the world of the unseen and white noise as the breeding ground for strange voices confirm the idea that our world is analog ( the proofs being the assymetries found in elementary particles)and thus continuous, chaotic and profoundly mysterious. The arguments of quantum physicians for it being pointillistic, pixelated are valid on the phenomenological level, the way I understand them, the brain breaking everything into patterns as its cognition function.I was discussing the topic quite a lot with people who share my interest for/ love of mystery and white noise. Thomas Fauland ( his backround is both sound engineering and electronic music as well as some musicology studies) describes white noise as a material necessary for the existence of strange audio phenomena due to its acoustic properties:
"White Noise (in acoustics) is often used to tame other sounds. When thinking of tape recordings (which already contain a certain amount of Noise, Hiss and Hum) which were added external White Noise (via Microphone) I can imagine that the awareness of the listener could be increased and tightened because of the feeling that something could be hidden within all that noise.
Another explanation could be that the high frequency phenomenas are using the White Noise`s broad frequency spectrum to do something like modulation. Maybe those voices are all around us, all the time, but we can`t hear it because they are occuring in a too high frequency band for us to hear. White Noise / Noise could be the breeding ground on which the voices are able to "crawl" down to audible spectra.
White noise is special because it includes the whole frequency spectrum and ideally every frequency has the same amplitude which means every frequency is equal in volume. The human hearing focuses on the midrange spectrum where most of our voices are at home so I think listening to white noise can do tricks on you. Emphasizing those midrange frequencies keeps you off from hearing the lows and highs correctly which can maybe lead to some sort of movement. Which further maybe acts like a circle : You realize some sort of movement and focus your hearing on the lows or highs and then you are "caught" in the white noise. I am no expert in this, just thoughts.
We have bandpass filters in our ears which get more broadband with increasing frequency which is the reason why white noise sounds emphasized in the higher frequencies."
Colors of noise : http://soundcloud.com/h-h-7/boje-suma-6-kanala-stisani
translation key : 1 white, 2 pink, 3 red, 4 blue,
5 purple and 6 gray noise.
1 Bijela, 2 Ružičasta, 3 Crvena, 4 Plava, 5 Ljubičasta i 6 Siva.
My inspiration.
Sounds:
Robin Rimbaud aka Scanner http://soundcloud.com/scanner/colofon-compendium-redux
Chris Sharp..........aka Concretism http://soundcloud.com/concretism/night-terrors
hauntology hauntological retro analog analogue archive tape cassette film vhs betamax cold war civil defence old public information films britain british uk 1960s 1970s 1980s noise crackle grays thurrock essex england great britain uk
varispeed tape bouncing, field recording and self-sampling
Stone Tape Recordings, The Owl Service http://soundcloud.com/stonetaperecordings/the-owl-service-the-gardener
Martin Schlachter and Thomas Fauler- sm & tone fail http://soundcloud.com/sm_tonefail/sets/revelation-tude-the-series/
THE END Re-Cycling, Archeological activity, DNACOLLECTIVE netlabel, 44-86292
Field recordings, Chitarra, Manipolazione Sonora, Voce- Piaro Giocattola, Suoni, Disturbo
http://soundcloud.com/losdiscosenfantasmes/jefre-cantu-ledesma-speaking
Random Krel, Secrets of Life
http://www.soundclick.com/bands/page_songInfo.cfm?bandID=1212933&songID=11840069&showPlayer=true
BUBO TUCO TUMBO http://archive.org/stream/R.o.d.-H.c/ROD-HC#page/n21/mode/2up
http://boingboing.net/2012/10/12/hauntologists-mine-the-past-fo.html
Books and essays:
http://issuu.com/consciousdancer/docs/issue20/49 Kim Cascone, Subtle Listening.
David Toop. Sinister Resonance: The Mediumship of the Listener.
http://vf-readingart.blogspot.se/2012/02/junichiro-tanizaki-in-praise-of-shadows.html
http://www.okok.org.uk/MISC/BeyondTheDial_Screen.pdf
http://www.monstropedia.org/index.php?title=Electronic_voice_phenomenon
Raymond Roussel. Locus Solus.
http://www.lacan.com/zizhowto.html
Friedrich Kittler. Maskinskrifter. Essäer om medier och litteratur.
Jussi Parikka. What is Media Archeology?
Jussi Parikka. Insect Media.
Jeffrey Sconce. Haunted Media.
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