Kristen Gallerneaux, High Static, Dead Lines: Sonic Spectres & the Object Hereafter, Strange Attractor Press, 2018.
http://kristengallerneaux.com/
A literary mix tape that explores the entwined boundaries between sound, material culture, landscape and esoteric belief.
Trees rigged up to the wireless radio heavens. A fax machine used to decode the language of hurricanes. A broadcast ghost that hijacked a television station to terrorize a city. A failed computer factory in the desert with a slap-back echo resounding into ruin.
In High Static, Dead Lines, media historian and artist Kristen Gallerneaux weaves a literary mix tape that explores the entwined boundaries between sound, material culture, landscape, and esoteric belief. Essays and fictocritical interludes are arranged to evoke a network of ley lines for the “sonic spectre” to travel through―a hypothetical presence that manifests itself as an invisible layer of noise alongside the conventional histories of technological artifacts.
The objects and stories within span from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day, touching upon military, communications, and cultural history. A connective thread is the recurring presence of sound―audible, self-generative, and remembered―charting the contentious sonic histories of paranormal culture.
A media archeologist and folklorist, Gallerneaux probes the inherent physicality of sound, tracing the ghostly lives of technologically constructed doppelgangers. --The Wire
High Static, Dead Lines is one of the most imaginative books to contend with sound in recent memory. -4columns
There seems to be a consistent interest over the last decade in “hauntology” (as Derrida called it) and media over time, periodically re-emerging in art: “Awake Are Only The Spirits” exhibition at HMKV, a paper on futurists’ haunting practices, Kluitenberg’s influential “Book of Imaginary Media”, and the recent Blume exhibition at Centre Pompidou, just to name a few. We can definitely count this book in, with a specific focus on audio, probably the most esoteric medium available. Gallerneaux, who is Curator of Communications and Information Technology at The Henry Ford Museum in Detroit, writes a “literary mix tape” about stories of inexplicable sounds consistently infesting specific systems. She combines rigour with non-linear writing, with subjects ranging from Muzak invention to the Psycho-phone playing records while we sleep, to Votrax Type ’N Talk text-to-speech synthesizer, to 50s plans for an “ingestible radio”, to name only a few of the transmitting devices and experiments described and (dis)connected by the author. The esoteric and paranormal dimension has a lot to do with the “invisible but perceivable”, which is mostly what we unconsciously perceive aside from our digital devices. And this book is brilliantly providing a path to experience, walking on the blurry line among sounds, machines and human perceptions.
http://neural.it/2019/02/kristen-gallerneaux-high-static-dead-lines-sonic-spectres-the-object-hereafter/
To begin engaging with Kristen Gallerneaux's book, High Static, Dead Lines: Sonic Spectres and the Object Hereafter, recall the final scene from the 1981 American action film Raiders of the Lost Ark by Steven Spielberg. A worker wheels a wooden crate, containing the Ark of the Covenant, into a city-sized warehouse filled with thousands of other crates, their contents and purposes unknown, all consigned to forgotten storage. Imagine someone opening those crates and describing and linking their varied contents. High Static, Dead Lines, does this by exploring the entwined boundaries between sound, material culture, landscape, and esoteric belief in the form of a literary mix tape of curatorial reporting, media spectres, and personal experience, primarily with hauntings.
Gallerneaux is an artist, curator, and sonic researcher holding a Ph.D. in Art Practice & Media History, an MA in Folklore, and an MFA in Art. She is the Curator of Communication and Information Technology at The Henry Ford Museum in Detroit, Michigan, where she works with one of the largest historical technology collections in North America. She is also "obsessed with the history of anomalous experiences" (152), the space where technological innovation meets speculative thinking (191), and turning up old pasts, giving them legs, and letting them run rampant in the present (242). Gallerneaux introduces a number of technological objects held in the Henry Ford Museum storage room, each ostensibly designed to "mediate fantastical thoughts, attempt contact, and measure things we couldn't see" (62). Brief essays concern, among other topics, trees rigged up to the wireless radio heavens. A fax machine used to decode the language of hurricanes. A radio pill that broadcasts the status of one's intestinal tract while passing through. A radio photo continuous transmission machine. Location-specific low humming sounds heard absent any obvious sound source. The Moog prototype. Prison radios. A salt mine under the city of Detroit, Michigan. The advent of magnetic tape recording. Hijacking television transmissions.
Gallerneaux's focus is on technological developments from the mid- nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when new forms of communication like the telegraph, phonograph, and telephone permanently altered the relationships between belief, reproduction, and creativity. These technologies closed distances on the personal level, but simultaneously opened creative speculation about how these technologies might facilitate communication with the beyond.
A common theme is sound and pathways for the sonic specter, a hypothetical presence, an invisible layer of noise alongside conventional histories of technological artifacts. The recurring presence of sound is audible, self-generative, and remembered. "When we record sound, we store time, archiving our impermanence. When we are haunted by voices that stand outside of the exactly here and now [her emphasis], it is because we are being touched from a distance [her emphasis]" (64). This distance, however, is made short by the "interlocking strata of meanings imprinted upon a vast archive of physical media formats and devices" (64). These devices touch upon military, communications, or cultural history, becoming "part of the quintessential American experience, sufficiently alienating—making strange—what had only just begun to seem familiar" (64).
As with an audio mix tape, one must listen through the choices made by the creator, and suss out connections and meanings. High Static, Dead Lines, as a literary mix tape, presents similar challenges as its entwined explorations mirror the strange phenomena described. The essays, object studies, and autobiographical asides promote a series of networks.
The first network, Dead Lines, provides an approach to hauntings. The second, Up There, segues into extraterrestrial radio and atmospheric explorations. Network three, Frequencies, follows sound waves into multiple contexts and their use as quasi-fictional lifelines. In network four, Broadcasts, ghosts of pure media manifest through interruptions and textual, free-form séances. Network five, Playing the Spectre, examines the collision [collusion?] between creativity, performance, and the sonic spectre. In the final network, Anchors, the sonic specter is linked to the natural and built environment.
Gallerneaux acknowledges the potential of ridicule from scientific communities as she attempts to investigate the "root materialism and causal factors of physical manifestations and objects 'touched' by the supernatural" (15) but remains steadfast in her interest "in exploring the boundaries between the trifecta of material culture, sound, and belief. I value the voice of the object, the thing [her emphasis], above all else, and prefer to give space for its natural narratives to escape. In choosing to listen, as a subject, one almost becomes as ghostly as the thing itself [her emphasis]. One is not supposed to wholly absorb oneself in or become 'contaminated' by his or her research. But I am not the first, nor will I be the last" (15-16).
Because of its historical, curatorial, and cultural curiosity, High Static, Dead Lines: Sonic Specters and the Object Hereafter is an interesting and insightful read for media historians, parapsychologists, sound artists, and anyone interested in technological materiality. Those of you experienced with hauntings may enjoy Gallerneaux's personal experiences as well. - John F. Barber
www.leonardo.info/review/2019/01/review-of-high-static-dead-lines-sonic-specters-and-the-object-hereafter
In 1924, as Mars drew near Earth’s orbit, Charles Francis Jenkins, an American pioneer of early cinema with his Phantoscope and one of the inventors of television, teamed up with Dr. David Todd for an attempt to “listen to Mars”. The whole country collaborated in the experiment. A military-imposed radio silence ensured that Jenkin’s Radio Camera, an apparatus that could picturize sound produced by radio phenomena, had a chance to detect signals from Martians trying to communicate with us. The US Naval Observatory cooperated too by sending an antenna 3,000 meters above ground in a dirigible pointed to Mars. After 3 days of recordings, the film was developed, the dots and dashes on the image were analyzed but Jenkins had to conclude that they didn’t constitute a message from outerspace.
Photo: Music Trade Review, via International Arcade Museum Library
Still in the 1920s, psychologist Walter Van Dyke Bingham worked with Thomas Edison to study the effects that music has on the moods of human beings. His “Mood Music” study became the basis of a marketing campaign to sell phonographs to customers on the idea of holding social ‘mood changing parties’. The New Edison, the Phonograph with a soul was born!
In 1932, inventor A. B. Saliger patented a device he called Automatic Time-Controlled Suggestion Machine. The machine, more commonly known under the name Psycho-phone was a kind of phonograph which played recordings during sleep. Saliger made a fortune promising his clients that the messages would enter their unconscious and have a powerful influence on their behavior and help them be more successful in life and in love.
Kristen Gallerneaux‘s book is a fascinating exploration of the ‘shadow world’ of communication devices. High Static, Dead Lines weaves together the histories of media and material culture with superstitions, conspiracies, quests for ghosts and the exploitation of our misunderstanding of communication technologies.
The real walks hand in hand with the dubious and the mysterious. One moment you learn about the invention of muzak, the swallowable radio, the woman who set the record for high altitude communication and the urban legend of the mass burial of unsold Atari video game cartridges. Next, a fridge throws a cabbage at a little girl, Poltergeists are all around you and devices are inhabited with spiritual resonance.
“Finding ways to allow our media to haunt us is crucial to understanding it,” writes the author. Gallerneaux reminds us that it’s ok to be irrational when confronted with new technologies. She doesn’t seem to pass any judgement whatsoever on the appeal that the supernatural might have on perfectly balanced minds. We might look with amusement at the historical examples of human gullibility described in the book but i doubt we are much wiser today. The inner functions of our devices are getting more opaque with each new model and the power communication technologies have over our lives is more mystifying than ever.
I can’t recommend enough that you check out Nicolas Nova‘s contribution to the 2017 edition of the Mapping festival if you’re interested in that topic:
I have two minor criticisms. The first one is that i wish the book were illustrated with photos of the devices and the experiments (when available). The second is that the texts don’t follow a clear chronology nor logic. Now i do realize that this is part of its charm and that the non-narrative strategy leaves space for imagination to expand beyond the pages but i sometimes found it challenging to follow the narrative.
Kristen Gallerneaux is a writer, folklorist, and artist. She has published on topics as diverse as mathematics in midcentury design, the visual history of telepathy research, the world's first mouse pad, and car audio bass battles in Miami. She is also Curator of Communications and Information Technology at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan, where she continues to build upon one of the largest historic technology collections in North America. - we-make-money-not-art.com/high-static-dead-lines-a-book-about-the-spooky-resonances-of-communication-technology/
There is a sound coming from the radio. We used to have radios in our homes, now most of us do not. At sixteen, I would sit in my room late at night listening to Coast to Coast AM—a show concerned with government conspiracy, UFO sightings, and the astral plane. It was, at times, absurd, surreal, and strangely affecting. People deal with the trauma of late capitalism in all kinds of ways, and some of them funnel it into highly idiosyncratic belief systems about ancient lizard people who live inside the hollow earth. The show felt as though it came from a world just adjacent to my own, a world the radio accidentally tuned into through some combination of technology and magic. Clarke’s third law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
What the show did for me, though, was attune me more acutely to the possibilities of the strange in the world. I watch the skies at night for UFOs as much as stars. I investigate strange sounds in my house in the dark. Though I have cultivated this practice carefully, I find myself a rank amateur when compared with Kristen Gallerneaux. The curator of communication and IT at The Henry Ford Museum—which means, among other things, she oversees a vast warehouse of the strange—Gallerneaux is also the author of High Static Dead Lines.
Subtitled Sonic Spectres and the Object Hereafter (though less theory-heavy than that subtitle implies), the book of essays ranges across fields—music, technology, history, archaeology. The individual essays mine secrets “locked within the tangled guts of object history,” as Gallerneaux writes. In between the essays are interludes that the jacket copy describes as “ficto-criticism.” These sections are about a girl named K. and conform significantly to what is known of the author’s own biography, blurring the line further between the real and the unreal. Throughout the book, footnotes make reference to hauntings, paranormal happenings, or folk beliefs, haunting the text.
The book is a catalogue of overheard séances, TV broadcast hijackings, haunted pianos, and fetches (a ghost of oneself that slips out of time as a portent of death). Gallerneaux considers the first laser, the Votrax, and the Moog synthesizer. This interplay of objects and phenomena is at the core of the book. As is sound. Unsurprisingly so, considering that the first séances of the spiritualist movement in the U.S. were productions of sound.
But the book does not stake its ground in any particular object philosophy, instead, following the objects where they lead to. Gallerneaux positions herself as neither skeptic nor believer in the supernatural, but, like Fox Mulder, someone who wants to believe. And what she believes in is “the voice of the object, the thing, above all else.”
These voices are spectres and Gallerneaux’s text is a hauntological one, in that—per a quote she pulls from Mark Fisher—“hauntology [is] the agency of the virtual, with the spectre understood not as anything supernatural, but as that which acts without (physically) existing.”
There is an episode of The Twilight Zone that goes like this: an old woman lives alone and starts receiving strange phone calls. The calls frighten her, but like many frightening things, they excite her, too. She investigates the source of the calls and finds they are coming from a phone line that has gone down and left the wire resting on the grave of a former lover. The physical (electric line) connects her to the metaphysical (whatever plane of existence her lover resides on). This episode presumably completed its production sometime in mid-1963. On the evening it was to air, however, it was pre-empted by the assassination of John F. Kennedy. This is hauntological. It is hauntological, too, when we watch archival news footage from that day.
Haunting is the point. Gallerneaux writes that “finding ways to allow our media to haunt us is crucial to understanding it.” The resonances – the revenants – of our past still haunt us. As Gallerneaux points out, the radio was once thought to be a tool for utopian democratization. Now, it is a nearly obsolete object in the North American home. But you can go on YouTube right now and listen to Orson Welles’s infamous War of the Worlds broadcast. You may already have.
In one of the ficto-criticisms, Gallerneaux tells the story of K., on the porch one summer evening with her grandfather during a storm. The storm rises and, just above the looming tower of the town’s glass factory, a ball of lighting forms. A huge ball that stuns everyone into silence and keeps them that way for, as the lightning dives into the earth, it fries the telephone wires of the whole town.
Phone wires, like radios, are becoming less and less needed, but now that our phones beam messages through the air, we may see an uptick in calls from the beyond. Or, more simply, Facebook may put a “memory” on your feed that includes a picture of someone who has died.
Marx famously wrote that “all that is solid melts into air”—Gallerneaux recognizes that, even after objects and people disappear, the air is filled with ghosts.- Ian Maxton
https://brevity.wordpress.com/2019/07/26/high-static-dead-lines/
THE LONG WALK EP by Yaki_Pony
"I’d like to address my friends in the beyond." The Long Walk is composed of the melancholy microhistories of place. Of attempting to find the keynote of a night walk in Detroit. Of a slew of sonic memories, growing up near the site of a fire-raising poltergeist case. Of a portentous dream dreamt in a troubled house. And a remix of paranormal piano interference, recorded from inside a suitcase. Original field recordings of silence taken at historically haunted sites, coaxed into becoming noise again: The Baldoon Mystery, The Detroit Public Library, The Windsor Hum. Sound gutted from the likes of The Stone Tape, tumbling into the residual geological dimension—and from Carnival of Soul’s deep-water car swallow. These tracks are mass accumulations of “charged” aural history, intended for the purposes of manifestation—and a holding back of the same.
GET IT HERE: https://yakipony.bandcamp.com/album/the-long-walk
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