Haunted Media

me·di·um n. pl. me·di·a or me·di·ums

1. An intervening substance for transmitting or producing an effect, vehicle 2. pl. media A means or agency for communicating or diffusing information, news etc to the public, such as newspapers, magazines, radio, or television. 3. pl. media. An object or device, such as a disk, on which data is stored. 4. A person thought to have the power to communicate with the spirits of the dead or with agents of another world or dimension. 5. A surrounding environment or substance in which something functions and thrives. 6. A specific kind of artistic technique or means of expression as determined by the materials used or the creative methods involved

Technology is uncanny: familiar but also foreign. A recent Channel 4 programme “Living with the Dead” suggested that in an increasingly technological world we don’t understand everyday processes which are driven by technology so everything becomes unknown to us. In the nineteenth century it was possible to work out how the machines around you worked, but now, divorced from the means of production, the majority of us don’t understand how computers, mobile phones, or most technology involving microchips works. The programme suggested that this technological ignorance makes us more vulnerable to paranormal explanations and these supernatural rationalisations are inextricably linked with the technologies themselves.

This isn’t a new association - the connection between new media and the paranormal is long established. From medieval associations of the camera obscura with the occult (documented by images of devils dancing in beam of light) and photography’s ostensible use to document the dead in spirit photographs, through to the invention of the telegraph, radio, television and computers, new media has consistently been associated with supernatural phenomena.

At our current point in time, when analogue media are being superseded by digital, both old and new electronic media are seen as potential conduits for supernatural or fantastical messages. The amorphous spaces between analogue channels of communication and broadcast have been interpreted as potential sites for supernatural messages. This ambiguous zone is one which has been investigated by filmmakers and artists , and has been seen in many films from Videodrome and Poltergeist (TV) to Frequency (Radio) and artworks such as Susan Hiller’s Belshazzar’s Feast and Tony Oursler’s The Influence Machine. The uncanny potential of these media is set against that of digital media which offer alternate channels and broadcast possibilities for interventions of the spiritual, which are seen in internet work such as Thomson & Craighead’s E-Poltergeist, and Nick Crowe’s The New Medium which posit cyberspace as vast etheric netherworld.

Ether, although impossible to analyse has always had a semi scientific, semi mystical connotation; ‘the vehicle for both matter and spirit”1. We are now perhaps more likely to use the term to refer to the internet, an unknowable technological other where which to most is as logically inexplicable as ether. In this it relates directly to the perceptions of the telegraph – “the Victorian Internet “2 - in the 1800s. Morse’s electronic telegraph, was taken as a model for spiritual telegraphy or seances which “gave voice to previously ‘invisible’ beings, be they ghosts or women” 3, who predominated as mediums. Like Donna Haraway’s conception of Virtual Reality, it provided an important electric space that “disassociated the gendered body from the patriarchal realm of ideas and made possible new form of political and utopian expression”4. The subsequent development of wireless allowed users to hear actual voices from the ether and had the power to disperse consciousness across the universe in the same way that the internet is seen to have done more recently, creating an interstitial space for disembodied communication.

It is this other where, filled with a rich mix of potential communication and banal junk mail which is referred to in Thomson & Craighead’s works Obituary & E Poltergeist: “The electronic ether is the space of global media vectors. It is created and used by governmental, military and commercial broadcasting and data gathering organisations alike while simultaneously binding millions across the globe into a an illusion of nearly familial proximity and intimacy. … Thomson and Craighead explore the layers of emotional experience that are emerging from this vapour of intimacy, fear, power and structured paranoia. In Obituary, they cast a sympathetic yet unflinching eye on a seance, site par extraordinaire for the ghosts of the electronic netherworld to cross the boundaries that separate them from the living.” 5 The internet work E Poltergeist presents the ghost in the machine as a lost soul, a wilful cyberspirit who interferes with your web browser and sends fractured messages or narrative fragments through search engine results which can be explored to locate connections in diverse parts of the web.

Susan Collins’ Spectrascope also uses internet technology to attempt to harness / transmit the paranormal, in a similar way to parapsychology’s attempts to verify supernatural phenomena and numerous DIY ghostwatching sites (www.ghostwatch.net). The piece presents images from a haunted pub (www.carbrookhall.co.uk) which are transmitted pixel by pixel to the gallery live via internet. The previous night is still visible on the screen the next day, and the odd changes in light and fluctuations and inevitable 'ghosts in the machine' create a sense of suspense. The Spectrascope also creates ‘the fear frequency'. This is a frequency of 19hz which is just below the range of hearing, but which can distort vision (including spectral images), cause discomfort, dizziness, fear and even panic attacks and has been found at sites of apparently haunted locations. Reversing the usual process of parapsychological field research, the spectrascope offers up the technology itself as the space of haunting.

As Jeffrey Sconce notes, TV was seen to create an ‘uncanny interactive zone’ between screen and reality, in which the supernatural could reside. The aesthetic of liveness rather than film’s photographic illusion encouraged this, threatening to absorb the viewer into a static no-mans-land as it does to Carol Ann in Poltergeist. He also cites the opposite fear - of TV’s simulacrum displacing the real world - offering a postmodern world of electric surfaces with no depth, like ghosts, or a splitting of personality between screen and reality.

This fear is echoed in Lindsay Seers piece Then There Were Three, in which an animated, two headed ventriloquist dummy watches his image on a screen. The work is based on the possible identity crisis the invention of television caused the dummy who was John Logie Baird’s first transmission subject; causing in him a kind of doubling or possession, whereby he came to believe that he was alive. The piece is doubly uncanny. It evokes two of Freud’s cited sources of the feeling: ‘Doubts whether an apparently animate being is really alive; or conversely, whether a lifeless object might not be in fact animate'6 (examples being waxwork figures, dolls and automata ) and the idea of the double. “Despite ventriloquism’s history of necromancy and possession he had always been the form/the container for the disembodied spirit, now suddenly that container had lost its boundary. Struck dumb by his translation into image in the new medium of TV (‘seeing by wireless’) he suffered from the age-old problem of the ventriloquist – lack of definition as to who was the puppet and who the puppet master. Those confusions of over identification with a constructed other; an actor; a puppet, evident at its origins, set the playing field for the far-reaching and colossal affect of television on the subject.” (Lindsay Seers)

Susan Hiller’s influential installation Belshazzar’s Feast evokes the uncanny associations of domestic technology and the video component was in fact broadcast by Channel 4 to homes across the UK in 1986. Again, according to Freud, we find things to be uncanny (unheimlich) when they are familiar to us (heimlich or “belonging to the home") yet also somehow foreign or disturbing. In a domestic setting a TV screen shows images of flickering flames originally shot at a guy Fawkes bonfire. The images are accompanied by a soundtrack comprising reports of foreign beings seen on television screens after the close of transmission, improvisational singing, and a description of the Bible story of Belshazzar's Feast and the Rembrandt painting of the story. Susan Hiller states: “Nowadays we watch television, fall asleep, and dream in front of the set as people used to do by their firesides. In this video piece, I'm considering the TV set as a substitute for the ancient hearth and the TV screen as a potential vehicle of reverie replacing the flames. Some modern television reveries are collective. Some are experienced as intrusion, disturbances, messages, even warnings, just as in an old tale like Belshazzar's Feast, which tells how a society's transgression of divine law was punished, advance warning of this came in the form of mysterious projections that thus became 'transmissions', messages that might appear on TV in our own living rooms.” 7

Patrick Ward ‘s Reception is a piece consisting of over 30 shots taken from feature films, in which TV monitors display ‘snow’ – a broken image from a video tape, a bad reception of a broadcast, or no signal at all. “The shots are taken from points in films where a unknown force is trying to communicate with a character through a TV screen or used as a plot device to signal something is about to happen or its aftermath. This quality, referred to as snow, signifies a space that is forever present and full of potential.” (Patrick Ward) Resembling early image-processed video works which experimented with horizontal drift and magnetic deflection of the image, the work implies an element of external interference which, allied with an ambient soundtrack, becomes unsettling portent of events unfolding in an unseen narrative.

Scanner’s work Breakthrough is a development of his work with Mike Kelley Esprits de Paris in which recordings were made of spaces with ghostly associations. The work explores the idea that certain spaces can become impregnated with physical emanation of the thoughts and lives of those living within them. It also references Konstantin Raudive‘s recordings of empty locations which yield mysterious voices speaking in strange languages and syntaxes which were open to diverse interpretation: “For my work with these cellular interceptions I was zooming in on the spaces in-between - between language and understanding, between the digital fall out of binaries and zeros, between the redundant and undesired flotsam and jetsam of environmental acoustic space. … [This produced] a series of acoustic recordings in each of the locations, sometimes with the microphone itself connected but switched off, which allowed me to explore a form of ‘audio mirage’ that can emerge from prolonged listening to an identical recording, where you almost begin to hear things not actually recorded on the original tape or disc. … A space will thus be orchestrated in which the audience can experience the essence of these voices from beyond, a densely orchestrated hiss of information. “ (Scanner) The responsibility for the decoding of this information is placed with the listener who may choose to identify traces of meaning or not.

S Mark Gubb undertakes this decoding of what may or may not be communication within sound recordings. The work looks at the cultural phenomenon of backward messages in albums, more specifically rock albums, again engaging with the idea of the paranormal using technology to engage with the human world. Various classic rock albums, including those such as ‘Blizzard of Oz’ by Ozzy Osbourne and ‘Stained Class’ by Judas Priest, which were the subject of court cases following teenage suicides and accusations of message masking, are reversed and trawled for possible messages. The piece presents the messages which have been construed by the artist, charted against contemporaneous events in the year the albums were produced. The work again references EVP – electronic voice phenomenon, popularised by Raudive’s experiments with tape recorders and radio which purportedly yielded messages from otherworldly transmitters. The fact that these voices ‘ speak rapidly, in a mixture of languages, in a definite rhythm, within which neologisms abound’ was no hindrance to the decoding of, often nonsensical, messages such as ‘Atnes heilbuti’ - ‘Bring a Halibut’8. The difficulties to be surmounted to receive the messages is perhaps an indication of the desire to create patterns - our willingness to interpret often vague messages to fit our own purpose.

This willingness to interpret paranormal explanations from phenomena has been explored by Dr.Susan Blackmore, who has recently abandoned a 30 year career of parapsychological research. She uses the parapsychological terms ‘sheep’ and ‘goats’ for believers and non- believers in the paranormal, both of which are in essentially the same position:

Sheep: I believe in the paranormal and believe that future experiments will prove its validity vs Goats: I do not believe in the paranormal and I believe that future experiments will debunk it

Both of which are positions of faith, as one can never debunk all experiments as there will always be more in future. The resolution to this quandary is to have an open mind, but, as Susan Blackmore states : “human beings are not built to have open minds. If they try to have open minds they experience ‘cognitive dissonance’(a term coined by Leon Festinger). He argued that people strive to make their beliefs and actions consistent and when there is inconsistency they experience this unpleasant state of ‘cognitive dissonance’, and they then use lots of ploys to reduce it.” 9

Perhaps the association of media and the paranormal is one of these ploys. But the artworks in this exhibition work to keep one in a state of cognitive dissonance – keeping an open mind - oscillating between belief and disbelief (or at least suspending disbelief), poised between submitting to illusion and recognising the surface, between known and unknown realities.

7. medium .Something, such as an intermediate course of action, that occupies a position or represents a condition midway between extremes.

1 Oliver Lodge (whose position was typical of the mid-1800s as a revered scientist paving the way to the theory of relativity, whilst simultaneously a supporter of the Society for Psychical Research), quoted by Marina Warner in 'Ourself Behind Ourself - concealed...': Ethereal whispers from the dark side” available at http://www.tonyoursler.com/tonyourslerv2/main.html

2 Tom Standage’s term and the title of his book: The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century's On-Line Pioneers ( London: Pheonix, 1999)

3 Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2000), p.14

4 ibid

5 Pauline van Mourik Broekman writing at www.thomson-craighead.net/docs/obitf.html

6 Sigmund Freud, "The Uncanny," in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. & trs. James Strachey, vol. XVII (London: Hogarth, 1953), pp. 219-252.

7 Quote taken from from Susan Hiller, Tate Gallery, Liverpool: 1996. Copyright 1996 Tate Gallery and Rebecca Dimling Cochran

8 Quoted in Haunted Media p.88

9 www.susanblackmore.co.uk/articles/si87.html

Site Gallery gratefully acknowledges the permission of author Jeffrey Sconce to use the title Haunted Media for this exhibition.