Ghost Frequencies

Amidst ghosts of all stripes, the Polterzeitgeist cavorts, connects and commands constellation.  Cavorting even now within a flock of ghostings, ghost queries and frequencies in the nascent networked haunt known in common parlance as andreview.

Here, alongside varied spectral works by Ayni Raimondi, Cecile Wesolowski, Derek Franklin, Eddie Malone, Eliza Fernand, Erik Blad, Erin Perry, Hajara Quinn, India Radfar, Jared Israel Best, Jesse Malmed, Jovanna Tosello, Kristine Thompson, McIntyre Parker, Paul Wig, Polly Bresnick, Rachel Garber, Ryland Walker Knight, Scott Riley, Serrah Russell, Vandoren Wheeler and Yvonne Most, the Polterzeitgeist solicits new nodes for furthering an ambiguous, ambient, and atemporal asphyx.

Ghost of a Chance

Today is the day that analog broadcasts were slated to cease and indeed upwards of 700 stations will terminate such transmissions.

The total shutdown of this technocultural juggernaut will take place on June 12th, we are told, and let’s cross our fingers that is so. Giving pause to the possibilities still latent, on this most monumental occasion of forced obsolescence, for this is the beginning of the end of analog tv.

With the end of analog broadcasts, there will be a better chance of getting ghosts.  More broadly, access to the means of electronic cultural production will be enhanced with the innundation of abruptly obsolete television recievers in second-hand flows.  Swells of VCRs, recievers and other  transmission devices will fall into dis-use, to be retrieved and re-purposed and re-imagined by artists, anomalists and analog aficianados of all stripes.

Gravely, these utopian twinkles do not so much as tickle the tentacles of  the unfathomable and labyrinthine global e-waste market, nor  intend to be an endorsement of such shadowy and devestating affairs. Still, in hopes of countering the perceived obsolescence, sure to ensue, then an advocacy of new uses is to be amplified.

Until June, a ghost of a chance for ghosts as such activities are still relegated to the margins by (the soon fleeing)  commerical broadcasts.  Not much longer for these high-power signals, currently clogging the airwaves, to interfere with communiques from other worlds.

Ghost Stories

Applied blobsquatchery interferes with the production of obsolescence by way of an anamorphic perspective. Shaping the debate by losing form. Excess and noise become forms of camoflage, razzle-dazzle and creative prompt. “We can see the outmoded and obsolescent as a means to catch a glimpse of other possible worlds, to imagine how the world might be ‘otherwise,’” writes Michelle Henning in her essay New Lamps for Old: Photography, Obsolescence and Social Change.

Henning, following Evan Watkins’ studies, describes the production of obsolescence as an operation requiring “fields of equivalence.” This marketing maneuver coerces understanding of any given “new media” as the obvious and impending improvement. The DTV transition depends, in part, on conditioning the consumer into perceiving a value shift from analog to digital television systems. Digital television is being ushered in as a remediation of analog TV. Better picture, More selection. The persistent siren songs of home entertainment hype add an extra note: No more ghosts. The visual noise of static interference on analog TV screens, known as ‘ghosting’ — is a combination of neighboring electromagnetic fields and residual traces of cosmic radiation dating back 13 billion years! Ghost stories from the dawn of time, these residual media are denied existence along with the rest.

Metaphortean fields of equivalence stray from predominant linear models. Oscillating between errors inherent in (always already) obsolescent technologies and the new species and lost worlds accessible at interfaces of malfunction.

Fortean electronics including Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP), and Electronic Image Phenomena (EIP) rely on analog receivers to facilitate long distance visitations with other entities and worlds. Other electronic anomalists, such as Portland’s Pulse Emitter, are simply fascinated with the itineraries of electrons. Pulse Emitter pursues adventures in sonic fiction by way of modular synthesis. The random fluctuations of tv and radio ‘ghosts’ are a favored compositional element in this artist’s articulation of electronic sound

The end of analog broadcasts ensures the mass exodus of commercial programming to the digital realm, allowing cosmic accounts of the Big Bang to take center stage. In metaphortean circles, analog recievers will become a sort of wildlife preserve. Sanctuaries for research, the rabbit-eared relics will become treasured sites for observation and exploration of an eclectic electronic ecosystem.

Staged Accident

Y2K was the first digital tsunami. A bonafide glitch, originally designed as a fail-safe against computers with limited memory, it became fated to destabilize the world in the year 2000. Millennial fears were escalated in keeping with contemporary concerns of the information age, the dependence on (and vulnerability of) computerized global networks of banking, communications, utilities, manufacturing, etc garnering much attention. The “millennial bug” promised a catastrophic collapse of the world as we knew it. Diligent engineers worked towards resolving the glitch and creating a sustainable salve to systemic collapse. News outlets and premillenial dispensationalists did their part to exasperate anxiety about Y2K preparedness, encouraging stockpiles of food, fuel and ammunition.

Obsolescence, aided and abetted by fear-mongering media blurbs sky-rocketed, as certain doom was aligned with all manner of residual electronics. Computer electronics alert! We were instructed to be wary of microwaves, clock radios, VCRs, thermostats, alarm systems and garage door openers. Any computer controlled appliance, particularly those built prior to 1995, were potential horsemen of the apocalypse.

Ironically, the second coming of digital tsunami via the entangled infrastructures of the DTV transition has not been met with much mass media attention (sensational or reasonable.) Despite growing subscriptions to digital cable, an estimated 51 million Americans still rely on analog airwaves for televised information. And despite government vouchers for converter boxes and the promise of high-definition entertainment, there remain cataclysmic cavalcades of toxic e-waste, their numbers sure to spike post-DTV turnover.

The transition from analog-to-digital television is not a chance encounter with techno-apocalypse but rather a staged accident. In Bill Viola’s essay Sight Unseen: Enlightened Squirrels and Fatal Experiments, the artist writes about initiation rituals and rites of passage as staged accidents. Crisis situations that defamiliarize the initiate, and activate dormant instincts. The DTV transition is a variant on a custom designed ordeal, a finely tuned test of dedicated consumption. The flip of the DTV switch in early ’09 will prompt an ultimatum: purchase or perish!

Engineers are not diligently working on resolving this systemic infection because the global streams of electronic waste are in fact instrumental in a growing industry of electronics recycling. That this recycling is often carried out in a manner brutally detrimental to human and environmental health seems to be always already another matter. Unlike the feared Y2K tsunami, e-waste tsunamis are not hazardous to the flow of global capital and so they don’t warrant sensationalized sojourns into the “what ifs” of an analog Armageddon.