Undergraduate Project curated whilst Education development Manager at Site Gallery
See http://www.sitegallery.org/education/view.php?id=67
Jan - Apr 2004
Research and development project with undergraduate students exploring the connections between technology, art and the paranormal
What do we dematerialise into on the web? Are there derelict sites of the web, ripe for hauntings? In this electronic nothingness where do the traces linger, reform, multiply? Is technology a tool for capturing ghosts? Is everything coloured with a patina of its past inhabitants and histories? Are images only dead skin? Is dust the ghost of ourselves? Are projectors ghost detectors? Where is memory and experience located? Is subliminal messaging a kind of possession? Apparitions, revisitations, traces, echoes, flashes from the past. Are ghosts the afterimages of life, of individuals burnt into the fabric of the world? Hypnosis. Seeing differently. Seeing slower. What kind of a message can be picked up in the photographic blink? Ghosts in the machine, millennium bugs and computer viruses. Are we the real electronic ghosts? What function does the television play? Is it the unwanted visitor, unwittingly invited over the threshold? Is it a conduit for the supernatural, a channel for spiritual voices? What happens in the gaps of transmission? Does it establish an electrical static, the fear frequency, the 19Hz, or does it eradicate possibilities with its constant vibrations? What is the nature of ‘liveness’ on the web and TV? Does it establish doubles, doppelgangers, or an evil twinning to occur? Time travel, walking through walls, travelling along wires? Pepper’s Ghost. Magic lanterns, Hollywood Cinema. Ghostbusters. Has the supernatural been sanitised? Where is the ectoplasm and luminous paint?
Project Information: Spectral Electrical is the third in a line of innovative undergraduate projects at Site Gallery, bringing together students from 4 regional universities to share ideas, collaborate and make new work. Following the successes of quark antiquark and Hey Presto, Spectral Electrical examines new approaches for working in collaboration with undergraduate students. Between January and May 2004 students from Fine Art and Film & Video at Nottingham Trent, Sheffield Hallam, Derby, and Lincoln University (Hull School of Art & Design) took part in a project exploring the connections between art, technology and the paranormal, in conjunction with the exhibition, Haunted Media. The resulting work was screened on the projection window at Site Gallery over the weekend 28 May – 1 June.
The project took the form of discussions, presentations and a production period for making new work. Online spaces provided a focus throughout this project: in the form of the Spectral Electrical forum for discussion and sharing ideas; as a space to create and display work; and as contested locations through which to question and explore the connections between technology and the paranormal. Throughout the project the forum has been a crucial space for discussion, sharing ideas and posing questions for debate. The discussions have included topics from online communities and loneliness; to subliminal messaging and after images; from Buddhism & vibrations; to ideas around telegrams, fake websites, & online mediums.
