ghostly objects

A paranormal researcher and teenage spell caster abandoned her temporary work station. Her toolkits tell of hauntings and are themselves haunted, just as the radio was haunted even before radio existed.

In fact all technological objects and sounds still carry within them memories of the theories which brought them into life. They speak of collective imaginaries that we are not aware of in our daily interactions with technology. They can be decoded - or felt. In those eerie moments, when sound seems to carry a living presence. A spirit? Or the machine?

Throughout history, ghosts as expressions of the ephemeral and the invisible have been associated with technological modes of action that are too small for us to comprehend as material. Through media, through technological devices, spirits have been repeatedly attempted to be reached: through the telegraph, the radio, the tape recorder, the Television. Or rather, the spirits speak to us, using the specific functioning of such devices, latching on to radio waves and modulating background noise.

In the installation the history of radio ghosts can be explored through an audioguide that traces paths through the various circuits of media history and the adjacent speculations in the aether, about who was involved in the development of radio and electromagnetic transmission, and which ghosts and theories intervened along the way, when and how.

Featuring interviews with sound art practitioner and (sound) art historian John Harvey and musician and historian Carmel Raz, as well as the staff of the phonography museum Vienna, a contribution by John Facenfield and texts spoken by Liv LeMoyne, John Facenfield, Jamie Graham and Nick Willis