1998
site specific installation
A site specific installation in Henderson's warehouse, Dundee.
The audio one heard in the installation was created from recordings made at each of the haunted locations at an earlier time. The playback of these recordings is determined and controlled by the live data being received from the sensors at each of the haunted locations. The installation thus operated as an autonomous, organic entity, ‘feeding’ on, and being shaped by, the data from the remotely connected haunted locations.
The audio played back had been extracted and processed from ambient recordings made at the haunted locations a month previously. Some of this audio exhibited EVP phenomena. Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP) is the phenomena by which voices of seemingly unknown origin are recorded on to electromagnetically based recording materials. These mysterious voices are often attributed as communications from the departed. The, ‘spirit voices’, often emerge from recordings of white noise and most psychologists regard them as a form of auditory pareidolia. Another theory is that the electromagnetic materials are picking up traces of transmissions from across the radio spectrum - radio and television broadcasts, mobile phones, short wave communications, CB conversations, walkie talkies, baby monitors etc.
Sample from geist installation (stereo mix from 8 channel surround sound installation - 4mins 28sec)
Haunted locations are places of particular resonance (whether real or imagined). They are places of returns and of the replaying of time, of the overlapping of past and present. 'geist', links together the live and the recorded, connecting geographically disparate places to the past and present. Like ghosts, or the ghostly voices from EVP recordings, electronic and telephonic communications technologies inhabit the unseen. From the disembodied voice on the telephone to the real-time transmission of data, they connect us instantaneously across vast distances as our words and actions pass through an invisible, instantaneous, and intangible domain. 'geist' is a work about the simultaneous connection of the here, now, then and there. It is about recording and retrieving, playback and transmission, departing and returning. It is about slippages in time and space, uncertainty, belief and doubt, traces and places….being and not being.