Joe Banks, Rorschach Audio: Art and Illusion for Sound, Disinformation/ Strange Attractor Press, 2012
The earliest form of sound recording technology was not a machine but was written language…
What are the connections between Leonardo da Vinci and Dick Whittington, between the BBC Monitoring Service and punk band The Clash, between wartime military intelligence work, visual arts theory, battle management systems, Spiritualism, radio and recording technology and criminal witness testimony?
What role do JG Ballard, Osama bin Laden, William Burroughs, Jean Cocteau, Richard Dawkins, Jean Genet, Adolf Hitler, William Hogarth, Victor Hugo, Joe Meek, Pope Pius XII, Primo Levi, proto-Surrealist writer Raymond Roussel, teenage criminal Derek Bentley, Sigmund Freud and crystallographer Louis Albert Necker play in the disentangling of mysteries of human perception?
Rorschach Audio is a work of contemporary cultural scholarship and an exploration of the art and science of psychoacoustic ambiguities. Part detective story, part artistic and cultural critique, Rorschach Audio lifts the lid on an array of fascinating and under-examined perceptual and political phenomena.
Rorschach Audio is essential reading for everyone interested in air-traffic control, anechoic chambers, artificial oxygen carriers, audio art, bell-ringing, cocktail parties, cognitive science, communications interference, compost, the death penalty, Electronic Voice Phenomena, evangelism, evolutionary biology, experimental music, ghosts, the historiography of art, illusions of sound and illusions of language, lip-reading jokes, nuclear blast craters, predictive texting, singing hair, sonic archives, sound design, steam trains, tinnitus, the Turing Test, Victorian blood painting, visual depth and space perception, ultrasonic visual music, ventriloquism, voices and warehouse fires and robberies.
Read more about Rorschach Audio at the RA web site
To Wage War With Ghosts: Joe Banks Of Disinformation Interviewed
Jamie Sutcliffe talks to sound artist and author
Joe Banks (aka Disinformation) about his new book Rorschach Audio, a
history of Electronic Voice Phenomena and other distortions of aural
perception
Joe Banks's new book, Rorschach Audio: Art & Illusion for Sound, is a wonderfully argued, eccentric and impassioned interrogation of aural perception. It is a book that lays its intentions bare from the outset, taking to task the unusual 'discipline' of Electronic Voice Phenomena research - a field of study that purports to be capable of documenting the voices of the dead. Having masqueraded as a legitimate science since the early sixties - with enthusiastic researchers claiming to have captured the voices of everyone from Mahatma Gandhi to Heinrich Himmler's Masseur - Banks takes a sober stance on the supposed messages of the deceased and asks the more urgent question of what these recordings say about the living persons who make and interpret them.
The cultural scope of the book is dizzying, incorporating an intimidating range of wonderfully niche anecdotes, experiments and eccentricities. From the wordplay of proto-surrealist author Raymond Roussel, to the entrepreneurial development of spectral technologies by American 'inventor' George Meek, Banks has pulled together a great range of resources that animate questions surrounding the interrelationship of sound, technology, perception and belief. He took some time aside from his recording project, Disinformation, to answer some questions on wartime military surveillance technologies, the development of sound art, and Jean Genet's infamous misperception of love.
You recast the art historian E.H. Gombrich in a very niche role: his 'other life' as a clandestine, wartime advisor to the BBC Monitoring Service. There is a great romance and mystery implicit in that, but it also seems to be a way of re-calibrating his ideas. Could you explain something of Gombrich's activities at that time, and how your biographical focus informed the Rorschach Audio project?
Joe Banks: During WW2, before writing his books The Story of Art and Art & Illusion, Gombrich was employed by the BBC Monitoring Service, listening to the kind of communications chatter memorably described by Primo Levi as "the radiophonic Babel of war".
The Monitoring Service was funded by the War and Foreign Offices, to provide political intelligence for the armed forces, for MI6 and for Winston Churchill. As observed by Antony Gormley, the only thing Britain has to thank Nazism for is for the wave of immigration that Britain experienced in the 1930s, and the Monitoring Service drew heavily on refugees who escaped Europe to seek asylum in the UK, employing some extraordinary characters including E.H. Gombrich and the Spanish anti-fascist Arturo Barea, who wrote the book which is known in English as The Clash.
One thing that's interested me is what David Cronenberg referred to as "the effects of exposure to violence on the nervous system"; the kind of hyper-acuity that I think people must have experienced during the Blackout. In situations of threat people evolve mechanisms of defensive listening, and projects like the BBC Monitoring Service and coastal Sound Mirrors can be seen as manifestations of that process. In my case, I have a relationship to electronic music and to sound art that was influenced by growing-up next to the RAF base near my grandad's place. So early memories, particularly of darkness and dreams, are strongly associated with this hypnotic, musical drone of military transport planes, in comparison with the kind of sound-world people experienced during WW2. There's something incredibly compelling about those kinds of hypnagogic experiences, and there are strong parallels in the experiences of wartime radio listening described by Primo Levi and evoked by Jean Cocteau in his film Orphée.
In terms of how this all links up with Art & Illusion, Gombrich came from a highly educated Viennese family, but, rather than using education and language as instruments of power, he chose to use them as instruments of demystification. It's been said that when Gombrich came to the UK, art history was primarily concerned with connoisseurship - that is, in the negative sense, as a cultural weapon, to shore-up the perceived superiority of a fairly narrow circle of art collectors and patrons. The view of art that Gombrich promoted was one in which creative and aesthetic faculties extend from basic processes of perception; the same processes that produce illusions of vision and illusions of sound, and these faculties are shared by everyone.
Rorschach Audio also celebrates the artist William Hogarth, who fought similar battles in what he called his "War with the Connoisseurs"; some of the issues Gombrich addressed are as relevant now as they were in Hogarth's day. More specifically, Gombrich made no bones about the fact that the ideas about perception expressed in Art & Illusion were influenced by ideas about the interpretation of sound that he developed during WW2. Rorschach Audio didn't discover that link, however what it did do was point out how important those ideas could be to contemporary sound art. This is particularly relevant in the context of applying Gombrich's ideas about the psychology of 'projection' to demystifying the so-called Electronic Voice Phenomena recordings, that have been championed by an amazing number of leading sound (and even visual) artists.
EVP is a belief system, a bit like the UFO movement, that represents distorted radio chatter as 'scientific' evidence of supernatural activity; the first half of the Rorschach Audio book is dedicated to critically analysing EVP.
In a recently published presentation (On Sound Art, originally delivered in 2002) the artist Susan Hiller proposes a kind of synchronicity between the emergence of John Cage's exploration of silence and the Electronic Voice Phenomena research conducted by Konstantin Raudive in the 1950s. It's a position that emphasizes the mysterious, supernatural mesmerism of recorded silence. As a preliminary sketch for a formative moment in the history of sound art practice it's fairly weighted toward the mystical. Your book however, seems born of a certain frustration with sound artists' interest in EVP; what kind of milieu gave rise to the Rorschach Audio project?
JB: Just to clarify a bit more of the background, EVP research stems from the belief that radio and tape-recording technology (etc.) can be used to record not just supernatural activity, but to record the voices of ghosts specifically. John Cage's famous 'silent' composition '4'33"' was composed in 1952 and his book Silence was published in 1961; however, according to Raudive's book Breakthrough, Raudive didn't take an interest in what would later be termed EVP research until 1964, didn't publish in German until 1968, and didn't publish in English until 1971. So, if there was any synchronicity between Cage and Raudive, it had little to do with chronology.
Susan Hiller did give an interview to Gavin Jantjes in 1998, which is quoted in Rorschach Audio. In that interview she talks about Raudive's EVP work in terms of "supernatural beings... mysterious powers... lands of the dead [and] fabulous monsters" and relates "arguments around the position of the feminine within art practice" to the "irrational, anarchic and untheorised" - which, as the book points out, is quite hard to reconcile with Raudive theorising his own research as objective and scientific, and quite hard to reconcile with the patriarchal nature of Raudive's Roman Catholicism.
As I think the book also demonstrates, the main cultural event that EVP research was linked to was Nazism. Raudive himself stated that his friend and alleged ghost-contact Margarete Petrautzki was a former employee of the Hitler Youth, while EVP researcher Friedrich Jürgenson claimed to have been friends with - and to have recorded the ghost of - Himmler's masseur Felix Kersten. While I'm definitely not accusing EVP researchers of having been Nazi sympathisers, if Raudive and Jürgenson were haunted by anything, that certainly included unresolved trauma caused by contact with Nazism. Their recordings are littered with alleged contacts with the ghosts of leading Nazis, to the extent that Raudive stated that EVP recordings "by Hitler or about him could fill a separate book".
As for the Rorschach Audio project, in the same year that I put together the first LPs and CDs for the sound art project Disinformation, I also read a Scientific American article which described a recording of ambiguous voice sounds made by psychoacoustics expert Diana Deutsch. The recording consists of short syllables which are rapidly repeated, in such a way that the sounds are initially perceived as being meaningless, before listeners start (using Gombrich's terminology) to project sometimes quite vivid illusions of meaning onto the jumble of noise.
As for the broader milieu that gave rise to Rorschach Audio, I was stunned by the attitude that many people took and still take towards EVP. There are dozens of artists who seem to have fallen hook, line and sinker for EVP research. However, it rapidly became apparent that a critical discourse could provide an excellent vehicle for demonstrating important lessons about the perception of sound, about the philosophy and working-methods that determine whether research is scientific or not, and about the nature of relationships between art and science, and it's been my great pleasure to have been involved in that work ever since.
One of the book's essays, 'L'Amour/La Mort', derives its name from an infamous misperception of speech by the French author, activist and filmmaker Jean Genet. It provides the grounds for a discussion of word play, homophonic games and their role in the construction of literary identities, citing examples from the lives and works of well-known authors Yukio Mishima, Raymond Roussel and James Joyce. There's a tendency to read these instances as betrayals of their authors' desires and complexes, something deeply interior. But you also speak of the experiences of two other authors that were unknown to me, Geoffrey Grigson and Indu K. Mallah, whose perceptions of sound emanating from their immediate environments seem to elucidate something of the worlds of industry and mechanization they found themselves surrounded by...
JB: In the case of the Genet and Mishima references, I videotaped the Genet interview off the TV when it was originally broadcast; in both cases the specific material, while not unknown, has attracted surprisingly little attention. The interviewer asks Jean Genet about 'L'Amour', Genet says he heard the sound 'La Mort', and this time the analogy I made is not to the illusory forms seen in Rorschach ink-blot tests, but to the perceptual inversions seen when people observe the illusion discovered by Swiss crystallographer Louis Albert Necker. In 'Saint Genet' Jean-Paul Sartre quotes Jean Genet as saying his fixation with love and death stemmed from a heterosexual relationship - from a childhood crush Genet had on a girl who died, which is interesting not least as a paradox in light of Genet's importance in gay counterculture. The other example is the back-story behind Yukio Mishima not actually being Yukio Mishima's real name, which, without wishing to introduce a plot-spoiler, is absolutely fascinating.
One of the arguments that a number of sound art curators and critics etc. have put forward to counter earlier Rorschach Audio publications, was the claim that challenging the factual integrity of EVP research was somehow missing the point: instead of being the scientists they wanted to be seen as, EVP researchers are in fact artists and poets. Using an argument from Sartre, the book's response is to question whether or not EVP researchers were, as artists and poets, actually any good - as Sartre pointed out "anyone can write bad verses".
With regard to those sorts of problems, Geoffrey Grigson was described by the historian Jeremy Archer as an "extremely able and erudite critic, editor, writer and poet" for whom "the truth was important and, if people were upset as a consequence, then so be it". The more specific relevance here however, is that he worked for the BBC Monitoring Service, wrote about a Cornish miller recalling illusions produced by the sound of rotating mill-wheels, and compiled an anthology which includes the poem 'London Bells' - "Oranges and Lemons, Say the bells of St Clements". Gombrich cites a sound illusion described by no less than Leonardo da Vinci, in which the great man described spoken names emerging from church-bells.
Diana Deutsch responded to my quoting da Vinci in an article I sent her, saying Leonardo might have been particularly susceptible to such illusions because of his extreme creativity; while that's certainly true, what the bells and mill-wheels demonstrate is the extent to which the capacity to form such illusions is shared by all people as an important part of normal perception.
As a case in point, another illusion that E.H. Gombrich described is the tendency of old-fashioned trains to sound as though they were producing music - "it isn't easy once you hear your train rattling Carmen to make it change to the Blue Danube. I don't think Gombrich was a big fan of noise music, but maybe, in his own way, he didn't realise he was a fan of noise music? Such perceptions are the basis for much of the imagery in Indu Mallah's book Shadows in Dream Time. In view of my interests, it's hard to resist the temptation to describe Shadows In Dream Time as wonderful, but it was inspired by a profound tragedy, so I guess it would be more appropriate to describe the book as simply excellent.
The idea that a kind of technological mise-en-scene has been employed to support the scientific validity of EVP research brings to mind films like Nigel Kneale's The Stone Tape or Robert Wise's The Haunting, in which the supposedly rational parameters of scientific investigation reveal something of the vulnerability, impressionability or instability of their test subjects or operators. How might techniques play out in your own work as Disinformation, coercing or guiding the responses of listeners and viewers with sound and image?
JB: Mise-en-scene is a very nice way of putting it. First, most obviously, the book argues that the misinterpretation of stray radio chatter as personally meaningful voices results from audio illusions, equivalent to the interpretation of symmetrical ink-blots, although there's a lot more interesting detail that's less self-evident than that central metaphor. Second, the book develops the case about illusions of sound into an argument about illusions of language, although, for reasons of space, that's not explored at length, however that's highly relevant to philosophy and to art and music criticism. Third, while the misunderstanding of audio illusions has been promoted in evangelical and, most recently, Islamophobic smear-campaigns, also in historically important legal cases, in the case of EVP the book also argues that ghost-voice researchers support illusions of sound with equivalent visual illusions, using the superficial appearance of certain types of technology - tape recorders, radios, oscilloscopes etc - to create the illusion that their experiments are scientific. In that way, the book argues that EVP researchers try to conjure illusions of science, which are in reality closer to stage-magic than to real science, and, considered as a form of stage-craft, as with traditional séances, in that context the term mise-en-scene makes absolutely perfect sense. Just as the book explores the distinction between sensation and perception, there's also a distinction between technology and science. Sensation is about raw data, perception is about meaning; technology is a product, science is a method.
As it happens, The Stone Tape is an old favourite of Mark Pilkington (of Strange Attractor Press), who I guess you could describe as - if I was the director - this book's producer. Several Disinformation works are to do with anthropomorphism and technology. During WW2 German soldiers reported hearing ghosts of artillery shells whistling through headphones as they tried to intercept messages from British Army field telephones - the basis for the Disinformation track 'Ghost Shells' (which got over 49,000 hits before it was pulled from YouTube). During WW2 the RAF referred to unidentified radar traces, as... well there's a Disinformation video called 'Angel'. The difference between those experiences and EVP is that no-one tried to fool anyone into thinking those ghosts and angels were manifestations of dead people.
Rorschach Audio and the Cemetery of Sound - Electronic Voice Phenomena and Sonic Archives
Joe Banks
"Jamaica?", "No, she went of her own free will" 1
Just as our ancestors perceived thunder as "Theophany" - "The Voice of God", in much the same way, similarly anthropomorphic misperceptions of sounds of wind are probably the most primal manifestation of what is commonly perceived as the memetically archetypal sound of a ghost (the ghost of film and folklore, which drifts across rooms, clothed in transparent white sheets, moaning and wailing). It seems reasonable to speculate that relationships between anthropomorphism, religion, superstition and bereavement may be as old as human perception itself. In certain circumstances, the ability of people to project human-like characteristics onto sounds like wailing wind may be just as deeply embedded as the instinct for forming social groups around the warmth of a glowing fire, so perhaps it's not surprising that a direct equivalent to the former tendency still expresses itself in societies whose culture has only been influenced by scientific thought for a relatively short period.
The title of this article is derived from an earlier text called "Rorschach Audio", which was written in 1999 for the sleevenotes of a CD called "The Ghost Orchid", subtitled "An Introduction to Electronic Voice Phenomena" 2 (and "Rorschach Audio" articles and lectures etc have been continually revised, republished and demonstrated to the public ever since). For those who may not be aware, Electronic Voice Phenomena are a class of allegedly "mysterious" vocal recordings, and while several explanations have been proposed to explain the origin of these sounds, the majority of EVP researchers believe that their recordings constitute evidence of contact with the afterlife. In other words most EVP researchers believe that it is possible, using various radio and electrical engineering techniques, to literally record the voices of ghosts.
Although clear precursors exist in Victorian and early 20th century Spiritualism, the EVP movement proper did not begin until the late 1950s when a Swedish painter called Friedrich Jurgenson found human voices intruding on tape recordings he made of his voice and of birdsong. Convinced that these recordings represented messages from aliens, and then from (amongst others) his dead mother, Jurgenson temporarily abandoned his artistic career to concentrate on these experiments. In 1960 he started recording similar voices with a domestic radio set, and published the books "Voices from Space" 3 , "Voice Transmissions with the Deceased" 4 and "Radio and Microphone Contact with the Dead" 5 (in Swedish and German). From 1968 onwards Jurgenson cemented an increasingly close relationship with the Vatican, filming religious documentaries, and executing portrait commissions for Pope Paul VI 6 . Apparently Jurgenson believed that the audible phenomena "were produced by his highly developed aural and visual senses caused by his artistic prowess" 7 .
Having encountered Jurgenson's work, a Latvian psychologist and fellow Roman Catholic called Konstantin Raudive took up the cause of EVP research, using equally simple apparatus to amass an archive of (in his own estimation) "roughly 72,000" recordings of voices, voices which (as Raudive, Jurgenson and virtually all other EVP enthusiasts believe) respond personally to questions asked of them by the EVP researchers. Raudive's book "Breakthrough" 8 sought to promote the view that EVP research was some kind of important discovery, and through its publication in English, Raudive accessed an international readership, becoming the leading light in a worldwide EVP movement which continues to investigate this subject up to the present day. In 2002 just 60 tapes from Raudive's massive archive were taken into the collection of the UK National Sound Archive, housed within the British Library in London 9 , and extracts from Jurgenson's archive were exhibited at the ZKM museum in Germany in 2004 10 .
In fact more than enough EVP recordings are already available on CD and on-line to satisfy the curiosity of most listeners. These recordings typically consist of very indistinct, very distorted and very short bursts of voice and/or sound, rendered almost inaudible by intense background noise. Virtually all EVP researchers recommend that people listen to these recordings intently and repeatedly, in order to be able to make sense of their (alleged) meanings. As "evidence" of supernatural phenomena, subjectively most EVP recordings come across as risible to the point of insulting listeners' intelligence, very few come across as genuinely un-nerving. Despite this, the obvious appeal of any suggestion that departed loved-ones may still be alive means that EVP maintains a persistent fan-base. Much as I empathise with that underlying motive, those fans do not (for the sake of record) include this author. My attitude turned from hostility to genuine interest however after realising that EVP recordings are in fact evidence of psychological (rather than supernatural) phenomena.
To summarise this project to date, the existing "Rorschach Audio" publications 2 11 12 13 14 describe how, irrespective of their original broadcast frequencies, a huge range of electronic transmissions share a tendency to demodulate onto (and become audible though) the amplifying circuits of radio receivers and tape recorders etc, producing what are often referred to by engineers as "stray" voices. "Rorschach Audio" lectures also include psychoacoustics demonstrations which enable audiences to personally experience just how listeners are able to mould these stray voices into what can sometimes be perceived as fragments of intelligible speech (and it is these more scientific aspects of the phenomena which are the focus of the earlier "Rorschach Audio" papers).
The process by which the mind can perceive illusions of meaningful speech in ambiguous acoustic sense-data is not inherently much more complex (or mysterious) than the process exploited by the old PG Wodehouse joke (quoted above). Illusory mishearings are most convincing however when (as is virtually mandatory with EVP research) sound recordings are listened to repeatedly, over and over again. In much the same way, illusory speech can also emerge when listening to the repetition of mechanical and animal sounds. The poet Geoffrey Grigson wrote that "one of the last millers in the neighbourhood of Pelynt" (the village where he grew up in Cornwall) told him "that the millstone clacked "for profit, for profit, for profit" when it was revolving fast, changing sadly and slowly to "no profit, no profit, no profit" when the water was turned off and the pace declined" 15 . Geoffrey (who was my grandad) was also a respected naturalist, and my mum and auntie report his contention that ornithologists sometimes hear features that resemble human voices in calls repeated by birds - apparently the Yellowhammer's song resembles "a little bit of bread and no cheese", while one type of pigeon sings "my feet are bleeeeeding Betty". "Rorschach Audio" is unusual in stressing that such mishearings are manifestations of normal rather than anomalous psychology - as a case in point, Geoffrey also edited an anthology called "The Cherry Orchard", which includes a poem constructed from mishearings that are legendary in vernacular London folklore...
"Bulls eyes and targets,
Say the bells of St. Margarets.
Brickbats and tiles,
Say the bells of St. Giles.
Oranges and lemons,
Say the bells of St. Clements.
Two sticks and an apple,
Say the bells at Whitechapel..." 16
If readers can forgive a short lapse into autobiography, this imagery is all the more resonant because my other grandad - William Banks, grew up in a tenement in Sydney Street, Whitechapel, in London's East End (witnessing for instance the famous shootout between police and anarchists from his bedroom window). Geoffrey Grigson however also worked during WW2 for The BBC Monitoring Service, editing "Digests" of intelligence that the service transcribed from listening to what Primo Levi referred to as "the radiophonic Babel of war" 17 . These reports were sent to The War Office, Downing Street, The Foreign Office and Military Intelligence 18 . The BBC listening supervisor was a refugee called Ernst Gombrich, who circulated an internal memo to advise on how best to transcribe speech from repeatedly listening to the Monitoring Service's (poor quality) wax-cylinder recordings of foreign radio broadcasts. Gombrich summarised his thoughts as "the story of the signaller who misheard the urgent message "Send reinforcements, am going to advance" as "Send three and four pence, am going to a dance"."
Ernst Gombrich's memo described "projection" as "the mechanism by which we read familiar shapes into clouds, or melodies into the monotonous rattle of a train". As with Geoffrey Grigson's millstone and birdsongs, Gombrich's memo states that "in a similar way we can read speech into a medley of noises", drawing a comparison with the fact that "Leonardo da Vinci advised young painters to practice their imagination by looking at cracked walls and reading fantastic scenes into strange patches". Gombrich went on to become the world's foremost postwar arts theorist, with the ideas he had outlined during WW2 reappearing as central features of his masterpiece "Art and Illusion" 19 . Particularly in context of debate about the emergent field of sound art, it is extremely important to stress how it is "Rorschach Audio" that has emphasised the influence that Gombrich's wartime intelligence work with sound had on one of the most important works of visual arts theory ever published.
In "Art and Illusion" Gombrich quotes Leonardo da Vinci's advice at length - "You should look at certain walls stained with damp, or at stones of uneven colour. If you have to invent some backgrounds you will be able to see in these the likeness of divine landscapes, adorned with mountains, ruins, rocks, woods, plains, hills and valleys... In such walls the same thing happens as in the sound of bells, in whose stroke you may find every named word you can imagine". The illusions of sound that Leonardo recalled were of course virtually identical to those described by "London Bells".
If the examples above help illustrate how the mind can project illusory voices into ambiguous sounds, then the process by which stray voices are further perceived by EVP enthusiasts as having specifically personal meanings is no more unusual. A similar process takes place when newspaper readers perceive random information in Horoscopes as being personally relevant. Equivalent phenomena are explored in that masterpiece of Surrealist art cinema, "Orpheus" by Jean Cocteau 20 . "Rorschach Audio" itself has had plenty of influence on contemporary art - not least in the conjunction made by "Rorschach Audio" between Cocteau's film and EVP reappearing in PR material for "Celestial Radio" by artists Zoe Walker and Neil Bromwich 21 , in "Audible Babel" by curator David Briers 22 , and heavily influencing the International Necronautical Society - an art project by Tom McCarthy, Ken Hollings, Anthony Auerbach and others
23 . To reiterate, the dialogue in Cocteau's film suggests that coded radio messages "inspired by the BBC broadcasts of the occupation" were transmitted from the metaphysical underworld - Orpheus asks Heurtebise "Where could they be coming from? No other station broadcasts them. I feel certain they are addressed to me personally".
Electronic Voice Phenomena themes have also been taken up by (amongst many others) artists Tony Oursler, Carsten Holler and Leif Elggren, and EVP research has been relentlessly promoted by Carl Michael von Hausswolff, who exhibited EVP related artworks at Modern Art (Oxford), Farbfabriken (Stockholm) and Schirn Kunsthalle (Frankfurt) etc, and who instigated the exhibition of Jurgenson's archive at ZKM. Three decades after the publication of Raudive's original book, Robin Rimbaud (aka Scanner) incorporated Raudive's concept, his methodology, and even Raudive's title into a Scanner exhibit at Site Gallery (Sheffield) called (with no apparent sense of irony) "Breakthrough" 24 . Just in case there was any doubt, CM von Hausswolff stated that "of course I believe in EVP - it's fantastic!" 25 .
According to "Audible Babel" by David Briers, the final investigation that Raudive conducted was into "The Case of the Budgerigar" 26 , described in Raudive's last book, which details Raudive's "bizarre account" of cassette recordings of a bird called Putzi, who was "alleged to have functioned as a mediumistic channel for its deceased owner"! The Putzi episode more than any other suggests that Raudive was, in the words of one (unusually direct) commentator, almost certainly a "bona-fide nut"; and any argument that, despite the obvious common-sense objections, the essence of appreciating EVP lies in sensitivity to its "aesthetics" (as opposed to sensitivity to minor details like its truth) can be countered by pointing out that presumably (for people who like that kind of thing) there must also be something "aesthetic" about exploiting the bereaved.
Toby Oakes stated in The Bulletin of the National Sound Archive that (in the NSA) "we deal with the voices of the dead every day, but our subjects tend to have been alive at the time of recording", and spoke of EVP as "puzzling evidence" and of Raudive accepting Jurgenson's claims "uncritically" 27 . Speaking personally, it may be old fashioned or idealistic for this author to suggest that an important role of the arts might be to encourage the development of critical intelligence. From cognitive science and from perceptual and computational creativity perspectives, psychoacoustic phenomena can be fascinating, but it's still hard to understand why anyone might wish to celebrate or emulate researchers who tried to dupe people into believing that domestic appliances engage us in conversation, or whose intellect led them to believe that budgies convey messages to the bereaved from the beyond. One reason why EVP research may still appeal to artists however is because there aren't many ideas floating around in sound art, and because (as American EVP researcher Lisa Butler was keen to stress) recording EVP voices is simply "easy for anyone to do" 28 .
References
- PG Wodehouse "Uncle Dynamite" 1948
- Joe Banks "Rorschach Audio" sleevenotes in "The Ghost Orchid" Ash International / PARC CD1 1999
- Friedrich Jurgenson "Rosterna Fran Rymden" Saxon & Lindstrom 1964
- Friedrich Jurgenson "Sprechfunk Mit Verstorbenen" Hermann Bauer 1967
- Friedrich Jurgenson "Radio och Mikrofonkontakt med de Doda" Nybloms 1968
- CM von Hausswolff "1485.0 kHz" in "Cabinet" magazine Winter 2000
- Quoted from sleevenotes to "Friedrich Jurgenson: The Studio for Audioscopic Research" CD, Ash International / PARC CD3 2000
- Konstantin Raudive "Breakthrough" Colin Smythe 1971
- Toby Oakes "Recording the Paranormal" in "Playback" 28 ("The Bulletin of the National Sound Archive") Winter 2002
- "Phonorama" exhibition at ZKM, Karlsruhe, Sept 2004 to Jan 2005, curated by Brigitte Felderer
- Joe Banks "Rorschach Audio: A Lecture at The Royal Society of British Sculptors" in "Diffusion" 8, Sonic Arts Network 2000
- Joe Banks "Rorschach Audio: Ghost Voices and Perceptual Creativity" in "Leonardo Music Journal" 11, The MIT Press 2001
- Joe Banks "Rorschach Audio: Art and Illusion for Sound" in "Strange Attractor Journal" 1, Strange Attractor Press 2004
- Joe Banks "Audio Rorschach" in "Earshot" 5, UKISC / Goldsmiths College, University of London 2008
- Geoffrey Grigson "Freedom of the Parish" Phoenix House 1954
- Geoffrey Grigson (editor) "The Cherry Orchard" Phoenix House 1959
- Primo Levi "The Periodic Table" Abacus 1986
- Olive Renier and Vladimir Rubinstein "Assigned to Listen" BBC 1986
- E.H. Gombrich "Art and Illusion" Phaidon 1959
- Carol Martin-Sperry (translator) "Cocteau" Viking 1972
- Zoe Walker and Neil Bromwich "Celestial Radio" (poster) Firstsite Gallery / Commissions East 2004
- David Briers "Audible Babel" in Clare Charnley and Katrin Kivimaa (editors) "So Communication" Estonian Academy of Art 2007
- Tom McCarthy "Calling All Agents", Arts Council / Institute of Contemporary Arts 2003 (this "Report to the International Necronautical Society" also documents contributions from Jane Lewty, Heath Bunting, John Cussans, Zinovy Zinik, Manu Luksch, Mukul Patel and Cerith Wyn Evans)
- Robin Rimbaud "Breakthrough" in "Haunted Media" at Site Gallery, Sheffield, exhibition curated by Jeanine Griffin and Carol Maund
- Interview in "Sound Projector" 10, 2002
- Konstantin Raudive "Der Fall Wellensittich" Otto Reichl Verlag 1975 (published posthumously) quoted in David Briers, op.cit.
- Toby Oakes "Recording the Paranormal" op.cit.
- AA-EVP co-director Lisa Butler interviewed in Jim Moret (presenter) "Hearing is Believing" (documentary) Universal Pictures 2005
“I love the dead before they rise, no farewells, no goodbyes.” Alice Cooper’s “I Love The Dead” is surely the definitive romantic ode to the dearly departed, but he was by no means the first to spend his time romanticising those now six feet under.
took
off their religious vestments and instead cloaked themselves in
quasi-scientific clothing that would have been every bit as
preposterous, were it not actually pernicious for its perversion of the
scientific method
Rorschach Audio examines the very nature of how human beings interpret sense data and then construct a world view from it
Another
strand of enjoyably ludicrous ‘scientific era spiritualism’ is the
so-called Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP) movement, which believes that
strange voices and shapes caught on recordings by modern technologies
of reproduction – tape, radio broadcast, television, video recordings –
are actually transmitted from the afterlife, that such recordings
constitute nothing less than evidence of life after death. And it is the
analysis of EVP that forms the central core of Rorschach Audio: Art & Illusion for Sound, Joe Banks’ fascinating and compact study of spiritualism, human perception, art and the workings of the human mind.
Although early founders of the medium (no pun intended) of radio such as Edison and Marconi
had already half-believed that it might allow contact with ‘the other
side’, the EVP movement really began in the late 1950s when
archaeologist, philosopher and former Papal portrait painter Friedrich Jürgenson
discovered what he took to be disembodied voices from the afterlife
captured in field recordings that he had made both of himself and of
birdsong. The baton laid down by Jürgenson in his subsequent 1964
publication Voices from Space was swiftly and enthusiastically taken up by Konstantins Raudive, a Latvian parapsychologist and former student of Carl Jung,
whose obsessive recordings of EVP are estimated to amount to over
100,000 hours. Although his early efforts were somewhat unimpressive,
Raudive’s breakthrough moment came when he was listening to a recording
one night and clearly heard a female voice saying “Va dormir, Margarete” (“Go to sleep, Margaret”), which he took to be a profound and moving comment on the recently deceased Margarete Petrautzki.
Whether one chooses to draw a straight line between Raudive’s emotional
state and the voices he heard, or to ascribe their origins genuinely to
another dimension, what is not in doubt is that Raudive’s own 1971 book
Breakthrough, which was accompanied by recordings of his
‘Raudive voices’, became a key touchstones of the EVP movement; the
latter also became a particular favourite of ambient and sound artists
seeking to make hay by using and sampling the voices’ unsettling lo-fi
spookiness.
Anyone who ever listened to The Police singing “So Lonely” and thought it was about BBC broadcaster Sue Lawley
And
it is this point that Banks uses as the jumping off point for a
fascinating exploration not, as might be expected, of whether EVP is
‘genuine’ or not (he spears the patently unscientific poppycock of EVP
on a sharp scalpel within the first few pages), but of how the creative
listening inherent in EVP-based interpretation of sound is a profoundly
revealing of human perception and creativity. Taking exploratory
digressions into a fascinating myriad of subjects including the work of EH Gombrich
monitoring German transmissions at the BBC World Service during World
War II (it was Gombrich that first informed Churchill that Hitler was
dead based on his interpretation of the unscheduled transmission of a Bruckner symphony), Jean Cocteau, Victor Hugo, William Burroughs, sound experiments and visual trompe l’oeil, Rorschach Audio examines the very nature of how human beings interpret sense data and then construct a world view from it, and how the important threads of creative connectivity attendant with this are shot through the arts and sciences.
Anyone who ever listened to The Police singing “So Lonely” and thought it was about BBC broadcaster Sue Lawley, or who only heard “She’s So Popular” when Kate Bush sang the intro to Peter Gabriel’s “Games Without Frontiers” (‘Jeux Sans Frontières’ as
they say in France) has, in Banks’ very common-sensical and democratic
interpretation, already struck off down a path towards creative
expression, and in the warp and weft of these diverse and captivating
threads, Banks attempts to find the locus (solus) for all
manner of perceptual and psychological phenomena. And any narrative that
accomplishes such a laudable and ambitious aim whilst taking in both
nutty Holloway Road sound genius Joe Meek and deeply eccentric and influential proto-Surrealist and caravanist Raymond Roussel (“My fame will outshine that of Victor Hugo or Napoleon”) is surely walking the walk as well as talking the (disembodied) talk.There are a couple of small flies in the de luxe Givenchy Rorschach Audio ointment – being a collection of four related articles some judicious editing might have tightened up a couple of examples of minorly irritating repetition, and the lazy characterisation of Aleister Crowley as a “Satanist” seems uncharacteristic of a researcher of Banks’ obvious talent and ability – but these are, in total, very small beans within such an impressive grande project.
Packaged in a satisfying 10 x 4.5in format, and bearing a cover that might have oozed out of HR Giger’s head in a quiet moment, Rorschach Audio: Art & Illusion for Sound slips perfectly into an inside jacket pocket. Sit on a park bench, immerse yourself in Banks’ entrancing narrative and use it to ruminate on John Cage’s gnomic maxim: “There is no noise, only sound.”- David Solomons
Joe Banks: Rorschach Audio. EVP, Psychoacoustics and Auditory Illusions
The so-called Rorschach ink-blot test is a psychodiagnostic method for the analysis of personality named after its inventor: Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach (1884-1922).
During the test, the patient is asked to interpret a series of ten
cards with symmetrical colored blots. According to advocates of this
diagnostic method, different subjective responses to these ambiguous
images – if appropriately registered
and analyzed – would reveal the personality profile of the examined
subject, as well as any psychiatric diseases or though disorder.
It’s from this complex and debated methodology that the title Rorschach Audio. Art & Illusion for Sound takes its cue. Rorschach Audio is the latest book by Joe Banks, perhaps better known for his artistic projects, signed, since 1995, with the name Disinformation.
The result of more than a decade of research, the book starts from a
trenchant critique of artistic uses and scientific claims of EVP – Electronic Voice Phenomena, but expands its scope to address the wider issues of auditory illusions, psychoacoustic ambiguities, and misperceptions of sound stimuli.
The central thesis of the book is that it is the mind to project
illusory, familiar, and subjective meanings into ambiguous, undefined
and unknown sounds, similarly to what happens in the visual field with
the Rorschach ink-blots.
Electronic Voice Phenomena, since the invention of
the phonograph, have drew attention and curiosity of artists, scientists
and scholars, starting from Thomas Alva Edison and culminating with Friedrich Jürgenson – and his famous treatise Sprechfunk Mit Verstorbenen, 1967 [1] – and with psychologist Konstantin Raudive – author of several publications including Breakthrough, his 1971 book featuring hundreds of recordings [2].
Sometimes interpreted as paranormal phenomena of spiritualist matrix
that would allow contact with the afterlife, EVP are ambiguous and
unknown voices appearing in sound recordings on magnetic tape, radio
reception or amplification through electronic instrumentation.
It is precisely this ambiguity and the
fascination connected to the slippages between science and occultism
that are at the origins of the widespread use of these voices in
contemporary music practice, starting at least in 2002, when Sub Rosa released The Voices of the Dead: a selection of tracks from Raudive’s archive including remixes by artists such as Carl Michael von Hausswolff, Lee Ronaldo, Scanner and David Toop.
Even in contemporary art, many artists have been inspired by EVP
research, abandoning any para-scientific commitment to embrace, instead,
its evocative and enigmatic potential or playing on the oscillation
between scientific methodologies and irrational thought, as in the
fascinating Magic Lantern by Susan Hiller (1987) [3].
Rorschach Audio is made up of
thematic chapters, developed from initially separated essays and
lectures: the result is a circular structure in which the internal
references proliferate and argumentative paths often intersect. The
first chapter focuses on EVP and leads them back to perceptual processes
and subjective acoustic projections, fully drawing on a number of
interdisciplinary references: from neurological and psychological
studies (the so-called “McGurk Effect”, the “Cocktail Party Effect”, the
“Picket Fence Effect”, and so on), to the theory of perception; from
studies of radio communications during the Second World War up to Ernst HJ Gombrich‘s Art and Illusion (and his participation to the BBC Monitoring Service during that conflict). The second chapter, entitled Burning an Illusion, aims at retracing what the author calls “the social history of EVP”[4]
by tracking them down through literary and historical references and by
investigating the cultural reception of pseudo-scientific
interpretations of this phenomenon from Edison, through Spiritism and
devoting wide space to Jurgenson, Raudive and William Burroughs.
The third chapter looks at the relationships between artistic research
and EVP, between literature and mishearings, with quotes from, among
others, Raymond Roussel, Isidore Isou and Jean Genet.
The final chapter, instead, focuses on the correspondences between
auditory and visual illusions and, more generally, on the theme of
“mis-perception” and its aesthetic potential.
Those who are looking for a scientific
and academic treatise on psychoacoustics, as well as those who are
looking for a thorough investigation on the use of EVP and acoustic
illusions in contemporary art and music from an art-historical
perspective, will not find it in this book. Rorschach Audio
offers, instead, a plethora of literary, scientific and cultural
anecdotes, experiments and associations that revolve around the
fascinating relationships between sound technologies, acoustics and
psychology of perception.
Joe Banks presented Rorschach Audio at the panel Acoustic Ambiguities, held at the ICA-Institute of Contemporary Arts on September 15, and at The Voice Symposium at the Science Museum’s Dana Centre in London
on November 16, among other venues. Starting from these occasions, I
addressed some of the central issues of his research with him.
Elena Biserna: The book
seems strictly linked to your artistic practice, starting from your
first projects using radio noise in the mid-1990s. Where does your
interest in radio transmissions, EVP and acoustic illusions stem from?
Joe Banks: To answer your question, I started an electronic music and sound art project called Disinformation,
doing the initial research and experimenting with test recordings in
1995, and publishing the first Disinformation LPs and CDs through the
record company Ash International, the sister label of Touch Records, in 1996. At that time the core idea was essentially to market radio science recordings
– recordings of electromagnetic interference produced by lightning,
electric storms, the solar wind and live mains electricity etc – as
though they were electronic equivalents of wild-life recordings. The
project sought to adapt an aesthetic that – in relation to the temporal
and compositional aspects of wild-life recording – drew from the
conventions associated with that field, but using what was, especially
at that time, such unconventional subject matter to – philosophically
speaking – uncover some of the more sentimental and anthropomorphic
ideas typically associated with the consumption and with the aesthetics
of nature recordings. In practice, many of the early tracks, on the Ghost Shells EP, the Stargate LP and R&D CDs etc., were unadulterated field recordings, while products like the Antiphony and Al-Jabr remix CDs used radio noise as raw material for musical manipulations. Soon after Disinformation crossed-over into the field of installation art, exhibiting the first National Grid sound installation in London in 1997.
One problem encountered making
recordings of, for instance, naturally occurring electromagnetic noise,
is the amount of communications chatter – human voices – that intrude
onto the antennas used to record electric storms etc. on the so-called VLF (Very Low Frequency) radio band.
VLF radio is dominated by interference from lightning and mains
electricity, so isn’t much used for communications and broadcast radio.
VLF receivers that are however deliberately designed to pick-up
naturally-occurring radio phenomena operate at the same, albeit
electromagnetic rather than acoustic, frequencies as human hearing, and
signals from Long, Medium and Short-Wave bands can also demodulate onto
VLF antennas, producing stray voices. In context of the EVP movement,
the recording equipment used by EVP researchers picks up these stray
voices, when for instance microphone cables act as antennas, channelling
VLF signals into the amplifying circuits of the recording devices,
which, in this way, function as primitive radios. What’s extraordinary
about the EVP movement is that voices that emerge as by-products of a
relatively straightforward engineering problem have been interpreted as
being evidence of ghosts.
In the earliest days of Disinformation –
put bluntly – my interest in the EVP movement was almost zero. However,
in 1998 I was asked to speak alongside the recording artist Robin Rimbaud at an event The Wire magazine were planning at The Lux Centre in London. The Wire
suggested Robin wanted to speak about EVP, so I suggested tackling EVP
in light of a scientific American article which described a recording of
ambiguous voice sounds made by psychoacoustics expert Diana Deutsch.
Her recording consists of jumbled syllables which are repeated in such a
way that the sounds are initially perceived as meaningless, before
listeners start to project sometimes quite vivid illusions of
recognisable words onto the sounds. It seemed obvious that the mechanism
which enabled EVP enthusiasts to project perceptions of alleged ghostly
activity onto distorted speech sounds was the same mechanism
demonstrated by Diana Deutsch’s recording – with an obvious analogy
being to how people perceive images of angels, bats, demons, faces etc.
in psychoanalysts’ famous Rorschach ink-blot tests. The Wire
talks went ahead that December, but Robin dropped the idea of talking
about EVP. However, in 1999 Ash International co-produced a CD of EVP
recordings called The Ghost Orchid, so I developed this idea as the first Rorschach Audio article, which appeared in the sleeve-notes for that CD.
It should be stressed, however, that while the Rorschach Audio book is, as described, linked to an artistic practice, it’s not about that practice. Although the two projects do overlap, Disinformation is primarily an art project, Rorschach Audio is primarily a research project, and the scope of that research is very broad.
Elena Biserna: Let’s
talk about this scope. Although EVP has been at the centre of
pseudo-scientific researches and artistic projects, it can be thought as
a niche subject. In your book you argue, instead, that an in depth
analysis and critique of EVP and, most of all, EVP supernatural
“beliefs” may have a wider scope and attract a more general interest.
Can you explain why?
Joe Banks: The starting point of Rorschach Audio is the project’s attempts to show that EVP research is a form of Spiritualism,
and not, in any real sense, a form of scientific research, and to show
that the meanings some listeners project onto EVP voices stem from
illusions of sound. So, in that respect at least – although the book
goes into a lot more detail than most critiques of EVP – the book is not
absolutely unique. Though I say so myself, where the book is much more
innovative and much more relevant, is in challenging the
tendency to think of both Spiritualist beliefs and of illusions
generally as being or as resulting from anomalous psychology.
While that description is obviously fair to an extent, what became
apparent as a result of working through this project was the degree to
which the perceptual mistakes which can lead us to mis-perceive sounds
as audio illusions are not anomalous, but are instead produced by the
same mechanisms of perception that enable to us perceive reality.
As you say, EVP itself is a niche
subject, but the actual mechanisms that produce EVP, and which indeed
produce almost all other auditory and visual illusions, are, firstly,
shared by everyone and are, secondly, aspects of normal perception. It’s
because of that paradox that the book is most relevant, as the
ramifications of those facts are genuinely quite profound.
At the risk of introducing a bit of a
plot-spoiler: the book argues that EVP researchers are in essence
conducting psychology experiments, which they themselves have
misunderstood, and shows that the comparison between psychology
experiments and EVP proves valid not just in the case of the Diana
Deutsch recording, but also in the case of other psychology experiments
and other aspects of EVP. The book argues that the ability to
misinterpret EVP as ghost voices stems from the mind’s reliance on
projective, imaginative and interpolative faculties, from the mind’s
ability to actively make stuff up and to fill-in and smooth-over
perceptual interruptions and gaps, and that those faculties emerged as
the result of a natural evolutionary process, in order to help us make
sense of a complex and noisy world. The book tries to show that the
mental processes which generate what we perceive as illusions are the
same processes that generate what we experience as reality. So, while it
can be shown that much of what we perceive as reality is therefore
partly illusory, the paradox is that the illusions the mind generates to
help describe our world are, for most everyday practical purposes,
reliable and accurate respresentations of reality.
It might sound a bit far-fetched to
reach those kind of conclusions from studying something as eccentric as
EVP. However, where the argument really becomes convincing is when the
basic hunch about perceptual guesswork is confirmed by comparing
projective audio illusions with other illusions – particularly a visual
illusion known as the Kinetic Depth Effect – and with blind-spot phenomena.
As you may know, a surprisingly large section within the visual field
is actually blind, and the mind compensates for that by copying
information from areas surrounding those blind-spots, then pasting that
information over the blind-spots to fill-in the gaps. The mind creates
the illusion of a complete visual field so quickly and smoothly that
we’re almost never aware of the fact that some of what our eyes see is
partly imaginary. There are strong analogies between that process and
certain audio illusions. What those interpolative faculties show is that
illusions aren’t just perceptual anomalies, audio-visual gimmicks, or
the kind of experiences that only take place in psychology labs or in
conjuring tricks. What they show is that these faculties are necessary
and important parts of normal perception, which the mind needs to be
able to make sense of and to help us navigate through the real world
safely and quickly.
So, having established that the
misperception of EVP as ghost voices stems from illusions of sound, the
book then develops a much broader over-view of what illusions tell us about perception generally.
What’s really unique about EVP specifically, however, is that public
misunderstanding of these processes has first been actively promoted,
and second that, through that promotion, those misunderstandings have
been turned into what amounts to an organised belief system.
Elena Biserna: In
regards to artistic uses of EVP, I would say that, actually, I am less
interested in the “reality” or “supernatural nature” of these voices and
sounds, than in the ways they are used by artists and in their
evocative potential. But, more in general, what are, in your opinion,
the aesthetic possibilities of acoustic illusions and mis-hearings?
Joe Banks: The reason the book carries the subtitle Art & Illusion for Sound
is because an important discussion of the role that projective
processes play in hearing was documented in an internal memorandum
circulated within the BBC Monitoring Service during World War II. Primo Levi talked about “the radiophonic Babel of war” and the Monitoring Service
was the BBC department tasked with recording political and military
intelligence from overseas broadcasts, preparing reports for Winston
Churchill and for MI6. My grandfather worked for the BBC Monitoring
Service, and the author of the memo in question was my grandad’s
colleague, the post-war art historian E.H. Gombrich, who later wrote the book Art & Illusion. Rorschach Audio
emphasises a historiographic anomaly that was previously overlooked by
visual arts and sound art theorists, which is the influence that wartime
intelligence with sound had on one of the most important works of visual arts theory ever published, namely Art & Illusion. In a nutshell, what E.H. Gombrich and, for instance, the psychologist Richard Gregory concluded is that perception
itself is an active and inherently creative process, and that
perceptual creativity and artistic creativity are expressions of the
same underlying mental faculty. This has important
ramifications for debate about inclusivity and the democratisation of
art, about concepts of high art versus popular culture and about the
liberation of creativity etc.
To answer your question more directly, the book describes an absolute battery of examples in which acoustic illusions and mishearings have been put to artistic use. There are wonderful examples from popular culture, some fascinating uses in Japanese and Indian literature. However the most systematic artistic use of audio illusions I’ve come across was by the French science-fiction author Raymond Roussel,
whose work, quite apart from being excellent in its own right, had an
enormous impact on visual art, on early Surrealism in particular. The
aesthetic possibilities are almost certainly… endless.
Elena Biserna: While reading the book, I was struck by a statement on the relationship between art and science:
you argue that “while art is not necessarily science, science is always
art” and, later on, that, ideally, artists should not only learn from
scientific research, but also contribute to science. Could you talk
about this, also in relation to your artistic work?
Joe Banks: The original quote comes from a booklet I wrote for an exhibition at The Royal British Society of Sculptors
in 2001. To put the quote in context, the idea that perception itself
is an active and creative process can be traced back at least as far as
the notion of “perceptual hypotheses”, which Richard Gregory derived from the work of the physiologist Hermann Helmholtz.
What the term “perceptual hypotheses” refers to is the mind making use
of, and relying on, what in plain language can simply be called
intelligent guesswork. Where there’s a comparison to be made between the
creativity involved in perception and the creativity involved in art,
there’s also a comparison to be made between the formation of perceptual
hypotheses and the formation of hypotheses in science. In fact the
ideas E.H. Gombrich developed in Art & Illusion weren’t
just influenced by his knowledge of illusion and of perception, they
were also influenced by his knowledge of information theory and by his
friendship with the scientific philosopher Karl Popper.
So, anyway, perception is a process in
which the mind, with incredible speed, makes informed guesses about the
world, and then tests and either accepts, rejects or modifies those
guesses as they’re proven or disproven by further interactions with the
world. Likewise, science is also a process, albeit a much slower
process, in which the mind makes informed guesses about the world, and
then tests and accepts, rejects or modifies those hypotheses in response
to further interactions with the environment. In that sense, perception
is not only a process that can be considered to be artistic, perception
can also be thought of as being a form of measurement, as being
scientific, as being a form of research.
In that sense, and also just
intuitively, personally it always seemed obvious that the level of
creativity and of philosophical insight involved in scientific and
technological research and development often exceeds that involved in
contemporary art. Also, it seemed clear that much technical R&D work
is as, if not more, aesthetically rewarding than a lot of contemporary
art. As a case in point, works like Diana Deutsch’s voice recordings are
examples that easily beat most contemporary artists at their own game.
Other examples include the awesome UK coastal air-defence Sound Mirrors
celebrated in the Antiphony video installation and CD cover photography that Barry Hale and Julian Hills produced for Disinformation in 1997. As I said, Rorschach Audio is mostly a research project, however Rorschach Audio sound-works have been exhibited at Goldsmiths College and Usurp Art Gallery, and commissioned by MUU Helsinki and by Palais de Tokyo.
However in terms of written research, particularly the later chapters
of the book move on from simply trying to promote public understanding
of scientific psychology and scientific methodology etc., to actively
trying to prove the link between perceptual illusions and evolutionary
biology.
The Disinformation artworks that most successfully interrogate the ideas explored by the book, however, are probably the video and oscilloscope works that create visual illusions, and then use those visual illusions to try to illustrate and to illuminate certain narratives. Spellbound is a video portrait of nuclear scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer,
that very slowly articulates St Jerome’s axiom that “eyes, without
speaking, confess the secrets of the heart”. In terms of direct
contributions to science, The Analysis of Beauty
is another installation, that uses patterns on the screen of a
laboratory oscilloscope to articulate an idea of the 18th century artist
William Hogarth in light of modern observations about the structure of DNA.
This exhibit works pretty well as a technical demonstration of Kinetic Depth Effects: in The Analysis of Beauty perceptual
hypotheses can be seen, literally forming, contradicting each other,
disappearing and re-forming. While it’s axiomatic from the field of
stage-magic that all performances and artworks take place inside the
minds of the people experiencing them, The Analysis of Beauty proves this point by constantly changing inside the minds of people experiencing it.
Notes:
[1] Friedrich Jürgenson, Sprechfunk Mit Verstorbenen(Freiburg: Hermann Bauer KG 1967).
[2] Konstantin Raudive, Breakthrough: An Amazing Experiment in Electronic Communication with the Dead (Colin Smythe, 1971).
[3] Given the nature of this short
article, we should refer to other texts for a broader analysis of the
relationship between contemporary art and EVP. A recent article by
Jelena Miskin is a good introduction and addresses, in particular, the
long research by CM von Hausswolff (that led also to the Friedrich
Jürgenson Foundation and to the conservation of the Jürgenson’s archive
at ZKM – Zentrum Für Kunst und Media in Karlsruhe: Jelena Miskin,
“Electronic Voice Phenomena”, Diorama, 3 (2012), available online on UnDo.net: http://www.undo.net/it/magazines/1351152569.
[4] Joe Banks, Rorschach Audio. Art & Illusion for Sound (London: Strange Attractor Press, 2012), vi.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.