Electricity Arcs Both Ways From Heaven
Over the last ten years information about a rare form of optical
phenomena that flashes upward over thunderstorm clouds to an altitude
of nearly 100 kilometers has gradually been gathered by upper atmosphere
meteorologists. Known either as Red Sprites or Blue Jets depending
on their height and coloration, these lightning-like events last only
ten milliseconds at most, making them all but impossible to see with
the naked eye. Though reports of this kind of lightning go back more
than a century, it is only recently that the development of high-speed
photometer and video imaging techniques have allowed us to move these
events from the realm of anecdote to the arena of science, where their
more mysterious qualities can be slowly explained away.
Given that much is still not known about them, it is no surprise that
they have been given such descriptive names, though here they are
somewhat whimsical ones which suggest excessively nimble street gangs
rather than powerful electrical fields. The shaping of the unknown
to familiar forms is an old practice - the construction of constellations
to order the heavens and the legend of Hermes to explain the movement
of the sun are just two of the older celestially-related examples
- and the use of the radio telescope to enlarge and detail the known
universe seems only to compliment rather than eviscerate those familiar
stories.
Perhaps the fact that the Sprites and Jets emanate upward and away
from the earth and our frail electrochemical housings allows a friendly
mythology to be built around them. It stands quite apart from Franklin's
instant of bodily connection between electrical impulse and ground
that continues to define our cautious physical relationship to electricity
and its twin embodiments of the living universe and its attendant
natural danger. The legacy of that moment gives us both the defribulator
on one side and the electric chair on the other; human nature inevitably
requires that Mary Shelley create her monster to span the large gap
between the two. In the wake of these figures the rest of us fill
in the space between arc and discharge (the distance between growling
sky and earth) with machines to channel the impulse and stories to
go with and sometimes before them.
Given that this transitory life force descends from above and has
scant material form, the early narratives of electricity often included
references to magical medical or religious properties and connections
with the dead. Even as the electronic machines are brought into existence
that let us sense a world beyond the one proscribed by our senses
and the limitations of linear time and physical space (the scanning
electron microscopes, magnetic resonance imaging systems, radio telescopes,
personal biofeedback devices, satellite communications networks, but
to name a few), the rationalist impulses that permit the development
of these technologies scarcely interrupts the human proclivity for
inscribing meaning onto whatever is at hand. While we build and rebuild
the world around us, the electrical narrative is always present, permitting
us to remake the aether and jolt it - and ourselves - to life.
In Corporeal Sky, six San Francisco Bay Area artists investigate the
desire for a technologically mediated bodily connection with something
beyond the purely physical world. Though none of the artists specifically
reference the culture or activities of Silicon Valley, its geographic
proximity to them has an influence that shows up less in the circuit
boards of these pieces than it does in their contained notions of
real world space and electronic myth that the Valley tries to simultaneously
enhance and eliminate. The current California culture of rapidly shifting
digital aether and its clearly marked distinction between the worlds
inside and outside of the screen has remapped the topology of the
physical world with the expectations of the electronic one. As is
has done so, the physical space of the Bay Area has become more tactile
by virtue of its relation to its electronic space and by its overpopulation
of people servicing that space. While the myths of a new tomorrow
are rewritten every day in the Valley, those myths are essentially
the same ones that Edison was pursuing in his labs in Palo Alto a
century earlier. Countless technical innovators have followed Edison
to California in the intervening time and the (mostly forgotten) history
of those people and technologies floats just under the surface of
the new economy. The presence of that history of literal and metaphorical
re-invention is embodied in Corporeal Sky through the simulation of
real space in an electronic age and through the exploration of narratives
inscribed into technological systems whose history has been abbreviated
by happenstance or unsuitable match with the times.
The trail of the Franklin Moment is most prominently embodied here
in Paul DeMarinis' work. Part of a series of pieces which recall the
work of inventor Elisha Gray, the man who, among other things, lost
out to Alexander Graham Bell by five hours in filing the patent for
the telephone, "Still Life with Guitar" makes use of a strange
phenomenon by which skin contact with a slightly electrified surface
will cause mechanical vibrations to arise, resulting in audible sounds
wedded to mild electric shocks. DeMarinis notes that this effect creates
"a world in which touch and hearing are for a moment unified";
it's also a world in which body, aether, and the technological myth
are joined. In applying a touch to draw forth sounds from the otherwise
inanimate object, the viewer at once throws Dr. Frankenstein's switch
and serves as a hopeful receptor for the electrical unknown, thus
allowing themselves to channel a bit of voltage to hear the song of
the charged sky.
Ian Pollock and Janet Silk also reference the early days of electrical
control as articulated by Edison's "Spirit Catcher" as a
medium for communication with the dead. As crackly radio-abetted sound
appeared to be pulled from the aether, the hope that the hovering
spirits of deceased loved ones could be similarly tuned in was given
an electronic form. Here Pollock and Silk revive that hope with a
twist: the ostensible desire to communicate with the dead is reformulated
to reveal our wish that the masses of electricity and wire that we
wrap ourselves in could somehow order the world and in so doing make
sense of ourselves.
By using a copy of the first human electroencephalogram ever recorded
to generate tuneful data, Gail Wight plays off a notion of the music
of the spheres as she investigates a history of illuminating inner
space by way of scientific inquiry. The wave patterns recorded here
contain the same demand for understanding that send Franklin's kite
aloft, and the image of electricity jumping from head to paper presents
an optimistically reduced and simplified version of the unknown world.
Embodied here is the hope that the musical order found in the planets
could also be found in the chemical composition of the brain, once
again bringing sky to ground, and in that hope Wight shows how closely
the practices of storytelling and science parallel one another, even
and especially when the distinction between knowledge and noise remains
unclear.
E.G. Crichton uses the technology of voyeurism (the keyhole) to reveal
in sound notions of bodily presence and absence. As voices identify
internal organs, their conceptual presence but physical absence serves
to offer terrain of uneasy relations to the body as recorded and distended
by technological means of inscription. The view through that keyhole
also has a history that reaches back far beyond the glimpse of the
bolt-necked creature awaiting its charge: the desire to know what
is on the other side of the door or the sky is one that can only be
enhanced, not eliminated, by technological advance.
Much of Mary Tsiongas' work in the last few years has focused on divination
and other possible methods of ordering the world as a parallel to
scientific rationalism. In "Perilune Moon" this parallel
is drawn into clear relief by referencing the extrasensory perception
experiments performed by Edgar D. Mitchell while aboard NASA's Apollo
14 flight to the moon. By mentally projecting series of numbers to
earthbound receivers from space, Mitchell brings full circle the implications
of the Franklin Moment and the desires that caused it to happen. Here
Mitchell makes a Zeus-like substitution of himself in the role of
the lightning bolt and in doing so he becomes the human embodiment
of knowledge being cast from the sky. That this was done in secret
from the confines of NASA's highly rationalist universe only underscores
the ways that even highly reinforced systems of understanding will
always fail to address the complete range of desires to know the world
around and beyond us. In Tsiongas' piece the viewer literally sheds
light on this situation, but what is illuminated is the slippery track
between the gathering of information, the construction of knowledge,
and the effect that the latter has on the former.
The narratives that inform the works in Corporeal Sky have long, pre-electrical
histories. But somewhere between Ben Franklin and the Blue Jets those
narratives were reshaped to fit the world them as much as that world
was shaped by them. When that key-tethered kite went up it was to
harvest a bit of the uncontrolled world, to make it a more understandable
and possibly useful place; that targeted sky was even then as much
of an idea as it was a physical thing, one that required us to explain
and re-explain it. No wonder, then, that even as science reshapes
the Red Sprites to their own ends, their brief arcs up and away from
the earth draw familiar stories in their wakes - especially the one
about reaching out to touch something beyond the edge of our known
world.
Ed Osborn
October, 1999
