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At the base of living
is belief And here at the end, do you feel different? In 1865, Victorian Spiritualists, The Davenport Brothers performed a séance on stage in the small concert hall of the St. George’s Hall, Liverpool. From inside a ‘spirit cabinet’ the brothers, securely tied, would invoke Spirits from their ethereal resting place - to create a cacophony of noise with a selection of musical instruments - so as to amaze the congregated audience with the possibility of communication with the dead. A silver sound-proofed cabinet stands on the stage in front of you. Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard’s Silent Sound is a re-enactment not of The Davenports’ séances, but of the potential of belief inherent within the human mind. By making the audience’s senses perform from within an experiment in subliminal messaging, the artists will dissect what it means to feel, experience and to potentially believe, during moments highly charged by the promise of possibility. Facing each other, two performers sit inside. The Davenport brothers were reported to have had a psychic bond, which allowed them to converse without audible trace. Maintaining a ‘sphinx-like’ quality throughout the demonstrations the Davenports’ assistants, the Reverend Ferguson and Mr William Marion Fay, would instead direct the audience in the proceedings of the evening. For the most part the attendees of these experiments were at a loss to quantify their experience and at the suggestive prompting of Reverend Fay’s introductory lecture in Spiritualism, they could see nothing other than paranormal activity in explanation of what had unfolded before them. So fervent was their desire to believe that the brothers need say nothing further to encourage them. A man has just left the stage to your right. He has just told you what will happen now. In the authentication or reassurance of the true nature of an event, you might say that collusion and assistance are necessary. The Spiritualist Medium could be considered a conspirator with the dead. The Davenports had their gentlemen assistants. Silent Sound in turn needs its conspirators. Throughout the project the artists have worked closely with Doctor of Psychology, Ciáran O’Keeffe. Dr. O’Keeffe is a well respected specialist in the study of paranormal cognition; the mind’s capability to transcend normative routes of accruing knowledge of its surroundings by receiving and engaging with information discerned from outside of our known senses. O’Keeffe will lead you in an introduction to your experience on this occasion. You are waiting. You are sitting beside some people you recognise. You have seen them somewhere or perhaps even met them somewhere before. But you don’t really know them. They are waiting. During the Davenport’s séance on the 14th of February 1865, at St. George’s Hall, the audience, dissatisfied with the brothers’ performance, sought recompense and tore the cabinet to the ground, proclaiming the entire affair a fraud. It had become apparent to the audience that the Davenports could escape from the rope bonds that held them in place within their spirit cabinet, allowing them to move freely inside. At each performance members of the audience would be invited to tie the brothers securely inside their cabinet. However, on this occasion Reverend Ferguson halted the proceedings, declaring the bonds to be unreasonably tight. It was a tacit admission that without possibility of escape the brothers could not in fact manipulate the instruments. The lights will go down and you will be in silence together. Alone. The potency of the personal experience within and of an artwork - undergone and absorbed in the presence of others - stands at the core of Forsyth and Pollard’s live re-enactments. In the encountering of an artwork the relatively recent linguistic shift toward an audience rather than a viewer, proposes the acknowledgement of a process contained in such an encounter. Within Silent Sound’s experiment in the potential of subliminal messaging, the audience is at once an implicated element of the performance and no longer the passive viewer. The performers will pronounce their message over and over again. Their continuous, repeated words will fall from their mouths, word by sentence by word into cables and wires that will in turn fall into the Silent Sound machine that also sits on the stage in front of you. The artists have thus far maintained the secret of their message and they will not disclose it to any other at any time save their closest conspirators. The advances of subliminal technology are such that a machine so designed can embed words within a piece of music. Silent sound technology exploits the notion that the subconscious is able to receive and process information which the conscious mind is unaware of. Information or suggestion received below this threshold of liminality can stimulate a prescribed physical response which can then bypass the cognisant mind. There is much evidence to suggest that an individual’s behaviour can be profoundly affected by contact with subliminally suggested motivation – with particular success in the minds of those knowingly put in contact with that suggestion. You are uncomfortable. You are sitting too close to that person you do not know. The showmanship of the 19th Century Spiritualist relied heavily upon an understanding of the senses. None more so than the auditory realm, suddenly recognised as an extraordinary sense to be investigated and augmented - one with enormous potential for heightened communicative powers. The vast advances in acoustic technologies and in particular the new era of communication heralded by Samuel Morse’s invention of Morse code in 1844, had extended these senses and formed new understandings of our physical existence that had previously never been believed possible. Human hearing had until this point been perceived as the naïve sense, basic and unrefined, passive. Conversely the eye was the cognitive, active, digesting organ of the static, persistent or formed world. Sound was seen as the ‘medium of experience and intuition’ , locating the subject within a particular moment, ever cognisant of its temporal nature and exteriority to the body. In effect the experience of sound had become synonymous with actuality or truth in its inherently affirming immediacy. Their breath sounds too loud and their arm touches yours. The Efferent nerves deep in your inner ear have the capability to suppress lower, inconsequential sounds within a noisy environment and to amplify or enhance quieter sounds within a still environment. With this small physiological discovery, and many others of far reaching profundity, the auditory realm opened out to inspire a realisation that sound could exist beyond the confines of the moment of its propagation. It could also be transmitted untold distances, using the medium of electricity, in itself an almost magical thing. The invention of the telephone by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876 had separated sound from its producer in terms of its physicality in the larynx as well as the location of the owner of that voice. Additionally the invention of the phonograph one year later by Thomas Edison further removed sound from the locality of its producer and, more shockingly still, removed it from the boundaries of the time it was created. If it were now possible to speak to or hear someone far removed from us through the medium of miraculous electricity, or ‘over the ether’, should it not be possible to speak to those who have passed onto another realm?
The stage is the same stage on which the Davenports stood and the place in which you sit has witnessed many things before. Edison believed that the human spirit and body were made from what he called Life Units , that during our lifetime maintained and remembered the imprint of our personalities as well as our memories. Most importantly, in sharing a similarity to matter, these units did not degrade but were merely dissipated on our physical death. Thus he believed that given the invention of a device sensitive enough he could then read the units and so view the memories of the dead. There is whispering around you in the audience. The perceived persistence of the spirit in energy form had intrigued the popular imagination. By the middle of the 19th Century it was accepted that thoughts within the brain were also manifest as electricity, a seemingly logical extrapolation of this fact led scientist Baron von Reichenbach to experiment with the idea that mesmerism or ‘hypnotic magnetism’ could in some way result in telekinesis or telepathy. Spiritualism’s desire to align itself with these electromagnetic sciences began to site the séance as a sensory space within which the ethereal realm could be explored and tested with the same intent and endeavour as practised by the scientist. The proceedings of the séances were consequently greatly influenced by the sciences that they sought to emulate. This shift can be seen markedly in the change of method from the physical possession or full manifestations of the Medium - inwardly taking on the Spirits’ personality - to that of direct voice phenomena, where sound or speech would occur at a distance from the Medium , where he or she became the connection to the spiritual world and not its embodiment. ‘The phantasmal body of the spiritualist is a transmissive or connective medium; it is experienced in terms not of the relationship between interiority and exteriority but in terms of the passage between them’. The Medium thus became a dispassionate switchboard operator connecting distant realms. You have been encouraged to expect a great many things and you are deciding which you might believe and which you might not. Within our emotional response to the world there is a fundamental psychological necessity for unequivocal, personal belief that is real. True emotion and thus true belief is a function of our psyche, which on occasion is evoked to alter the world in which we live. As Spiritualist Society so desperately begged for the possibility of communication with the spirit world, there were persons more than happy to meet such demand. It was the visceral experience, the direct assault on the emotions, of the unaccountable sights and sounds offered within the Spiritualist séance that appeared to be key to the plausibility of an afterlife and with it the popularly-desired reassurance of the soul’s continuation - all made possible by the unrelenting religious belief of its supporters. But where many convinced Spiritualists conducted their experiments with a genuine desire to bridge the void between the living and the dead, others were not so scrupulous. With its inherent necessity for darkness and cloaked secrecy, Spiritualism could only ever be as trustworthy as its practitioners. The prevalent atmosphere was one of a confused milieu of the sincerely convinced, the cynical opportunist, the naïve, the theatrical, the credulous and the seekers of novelty. The popularity of Spiritualism in the Eighteen hundreds and its subsequent rise in popularity in the years immediately succeeding the Great War, is testament to a fundamental human desire to make sense of mortality and the perceived physical separation of mind and body at the point of death. The musicians now strike up their score. In collusion with Forsyth, Pollard and O’Keeffe, Jason Pierce, aka J. Spaceman of the band Spiritualized and formerly Spacemen 3, has devised an original instrumental score, which will be the musical foundation in which the subliminal message reaches out to the audience. Pierce’s arrangement will explore the boundaries either side of the audible frequency range and draws from all four conspirators’ combined knowledge of traditional music theory, dramaturgy, psychology and a carefully understood awareness of the emotional experience of the listener. Built into the composition of the piece, rhythms and melodies mimicking the sonic pattern of Forsyth and Pollard’s spoken message will encourage the subconscious in absorbing the subliminal message being transmitted. The message is there now, in the ether. The scientific experiments that tried to make contact with the deceased in the 19th Century agreed on the necessity of increased amplification of or sensitivity to the surrounding ether. Here in the 21st Century, electronic voice phenomena is a popularly held belief that if recorded and listened to with close scrutiny, our surroundings are filled with dislocated voices of the deceased who want to make contact with the living. Similarly, contemporary scientific advances in the understanding of acoustics point to discoveries that an atmosphere can maintain the energy of a past event and that a room’s structure can determine a physical sensation and perception of space. Perhaps it will reach you. Our fundamental difficulty as emotional beings to accept the final nature of death gave the 19th Century, enveloped and excited by the advances within acoustic science, an unprecedented moment of emotive possibility. It is from the dissection and understanding of that possibility and the deft enabling of such heightened experience that Forsyth and Pollard have made their experiment in Silent Sound. And here at the beginning, do you feel different?
1 Jim Steinmeyer, Hiding the Elephant, (London,
Heinemann, 2004).
At the base of living
is belief This text originally appeared
in the Silent Sound programme
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