Sounds Like...
by James Sey
The Space Age lasted barely 25 years, from Gargarin's first flight in 1961 to the first Apollo splashdown not shown on TV in 1975, a consequence of the public's loss of interest - the brute-force ballistic technology is basically 19th century� while advanced late 20th century technologies are invisible and electronic: computers, microwave data links� are the stuff of which our dreams are made. Perhaps space travel is forever doomed because it� recapitulates primitive stages in the growth of our nervous systems� - a forced return to infantile dependency. Only intelligent machines may one day grasp the joys of space travel, seeing the� space flights as immense geometric symphonies. - J.G. Ballard
But those immense geometric symphonies won't be a waltz by Strauss. It is becoming more and more apparent that these invisible technologies find their most complete realisation in sound technology, in the cult of the wavelength.
The physical conquering of outer space through the ballistic propulsion of the phallic rocket is, as Ballard points out, infantile. Baudrillard agrees, in his remark that the best we can come up with in relation to space travel is the sending into orbit of a 'two-room apartment with kitchen and bath' - the 'space shuttle'.
This is much too literal for the twenty-first century, much too banal, this vain attempt to finally conquer space and time. In all the efforts to do so, to build faster and faster engines, to create new scientific paradigms about how we experience time and space, we are driven by a curious assumption - that we are beings of light.
All our technological efforts are geared towards reducing time to instantaneity and space to absolute presence. And, paradoxically, our paradigm for doing so is that of vision. Photography and the cinema were the technological vehicles for changing fundamentally our relation to visual perspective, and thus the psychology of our point of view.
At the same time they have fundamentally changed the privileged relation to light, vision and spirituality society gave to artists. These technologies of light hold out the promise of self-present instantaneity - for they have unravelled the quirk in our perception that, according to Bergson, leads us to unconsciously create time-based narratives out of the succession of moments which constitutes our being. Light is thus not invisible, it is illuminating. It shows both ourselves and the workings of our perception - it reveals.
But, since this technological trajectory has existed for over a century, from A Journey to the Moon to super slo-mo and monofilament cameras, without revealing how we are to think of a future outside of the cul-de-sac of reducing time and space through the operation of light, what is left for Art?
Two things: the body (again and always), and the wavelength without light - the sound frequency.
Pure frequency, without information, pure sound, still holds out the promise of the sacred aura that Benjamin understood would disappear with technologies of reproduced vision. It is apprehensible, but not comprehensible - it resonates in our cells and allows us to share the experience of it with inanimate things - with entire cities. As a simple carrier it is truly invisible, masking a sensory dimension of our existence that forms a context for all else - even the deaf feel resonance.
When Robin Rimbaud, a.k.a. Scanner, thought of recording the unheard frequencies of mobile phone conversations in the city's atmosphere through an off-the-shelf radio transceiver, he was able to gather up in a simple electronic net some of those electronic realities and play them back to us as a child would when trying to grasp the relation to the Other.
In those recordings it was now possible to understand how the city speaks. But the fact of the wavelength is not that speech, not that sign system. It is pure medium.
When Orson Welles, in the 1930s, took that same speech in his dramatic radio broadcast of War of the Worlds as reality radio, properly disembodied, he pulled down the stars for the people who listened, they assumed the truth of the story, and the social fabric of modern America for an instant fell apart.
When the mad inventor Nikolai Tesla wished to turn the entire planet into a great satellite dish - a cosmic transceiver - he wished to demonstrate the notion that interplanetary resonance was the only medium to facilitate human evolution. It's a short step to alien communication, but communication is not the issue.
At the forgotten ends of the audible frequency spectrum are ionospheric phenomena, which some think natural, and some think manufactured. The regular, keening pulse of 'whistler' signals is among these. Whether or not the whistler broadcasts are time-delayed spy messages, or messages from another galaxy, the fact remains that we can capture and re-use them - and this is still unrecognised as a last frontier for aesthetic endeavour.
Sound art in these contexts is a misnomer. The rediscovery, redirection and reapplication of frequencies are nothing short of a last frontier for human culture, not another message, not simply more information. Indeed, seen as an avant-garde, it could be that sound is the aesthetic without representation - since there is no visual object or use of language. Can any other medium hope to achieve as much, without relapsing into the infantilism of technology? What do your dreams sound like?
James Sey has researched, lectured and published extensively on issues around the body, technology and media, especially film and digital media.
