(This post discusses an event, link here.)
When neuroscientists- and, it must be said, pseudoscientists- Stanley Koren and Michael Persinger developed a helmet (the “God helmet”) that would expose the temporal lobe to weak magnetic fields, they purported that test subjects encountered what they termed a “sensed presence”. What they claimed their subjects experienced depended on their suggestibility and background, but ranged from ghosts, to demons, to god himself. Such magnetic influence, they believed, manifested a detached self, a magnetic Other.
While the experiment itself was absolutely hokum, it serves as a productive analogy to the role of the virtual, digital in contemporary life. The digital is in every way mediated by our neurology and perception, yet it is unmistakably outside our self-identity. Unlike other social influences, it is encountered at an individual level, removed from all others and somehow also removed from ourselves. It thus exists in our every conscious moment, acting on us and manipulating us in ways we cannot account for. In this sense, we are the object of a digital subject. We receive and it transmits.
_…-``-…_ is a typographically intensive audiovisual concert from musical artists Moon Relay and visual artists Anthony Barratt and Espen Friberg. The music, a combination of post-krautrock repetition, sound collage and sampling, as well as softer, post-rock-tinged pieces, is all performed from within a fortress of CRT monitors and televisions. From the screens, a barrage of patterns and color fields flicker and strobe in harmony with the music.
The music follows in a recent tradition of bands exploring the intersection of noisy krautrock and dance music. Where krautrock is traditionally a somewhat modernist reaction to industrialization and mechanization, this style of music transfers this mechanical quality to the libidinal impulses of dance music. This effectively dramatizes the instrumentalization of the libido into a mechanism of economy. Meanwhile, sweeping samples and effects intrude on the almost-meditative state the repetition induces, furthering a sense of alienation from oneself and one’s impulses. This effect is enhanced by the television sets, as the patterns and lights act in unison upon the viewer. The word “television” itself means something along the lines of “remote view”, but in this instance, the viewer is the one remotely viewed, evaluated and manipulated by the detached, digital self. The presence of the television screens as an external agent is in this regard similar to Canadian video artist Tasman Richardson’s work Firing Squad, which similarly positions an aggressive deluge of CRT noise cut into rhythmic patterns.
In this sense, it is ironic that despite the fraudulent nature of the “God helmet”, the electromagnetic influence of screens and data can be felt at the deepest levels of our identity. It comes from us, is never entirely us, and its influence is nonetheless inescapable.