Sonic Psychogeography and Orbital Viewing
“[…] As a specific extension of the activities within the broader body of Makrolab research, the performative situations named Wardenclyffe accompanied the first station in Kassel in 1997. Makrolab operates outside the spectacle, in physically remote, non-urban spaces, it is a place of a production of knowledge and an archive of acquired data, whereas Wardenclyffe performative situations were realised within a more formal and representational frame, presenting the results of the research done within Makrolab. A sound and video performance, lasting several hours, acted out together with electronic musicians and sound avant-gardists (Aljosa Abrahamsberg, a Slovene sound artist, and the founders of the German post-techno music label Raster Noton, Olaf Bender, Frank Bretschneider and Carsten Nicolai), took place in the lab itself, combining in real time the documented sound material of the three months’ telecommunications research with sampling from the frequency generators and broadcasting talks of the performance crew with radio operators from Eastern Europe. The sound and the video that were produced live have been broadcast on the Internet, thus bringing the source of Wardenclyffe’s inspiration, Nikola Tesla’s never realised ‘world telegraphy’ project, into a partial, symbolic completion. Tesla’s visionary plan of an integrated, interconnecting planetary communications network, was embodied in the world’s first transmission station, Wardenclyffe Tower, on the north shore of Long Island. Soon after being erected, between 1901-03, the plans for finishing the Tower had to be scrapped and the Tower destroyed for lack of money needed to complete the project. But Tesla was certain that it could have been the beginning of the unification of the globe by the flux of electrical energy that would traverse the world with the flows of language, images and money (7). He managed to transform Edison’s notion of electricity as a consumer commodity into a phenomenon of potentially re-directed energy in which “everything was transcodable and which could instantaneously intervene anywhere, even to literally occupy the full body of the earth and atmosphere” (8).” From Sonic Psychogeography and Orbital Viewing by Nataša Petrešin [PDF],
One Response
[…] features.” From Coded Utopia: Makrolab, or the art of transition by Brian Holmes [PDF]. Related. Sep 18, 17:07 Trackback […]