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Matthew Ostrowski 27-05-2021
The Summer Land: An inhabitable sphere or zone of spiritualized matter in space.
— Andrew Jackson Davis, 1867
Samuel Morse’s telegraph, available in 1844, was history’s first commonly available system of instantaneous communication. He saw this technology as a way of extending Anglo-Saxon military and business prowess across the world, keeping unruly foreigners in their place under the aegis of Protestant and capitalist dominion.
At the same time, the invisible but verifiable nature of electric forces as a means of communication stirred great interest in the potential existence of other forces which might offer means of contact with points further removed: the realms inhabited by departed spirits. This movement was born in 1848, when sisters Kate and Maggie Fox reported mysterious tapping sounds, which they attributed to the ghost of a murdered man buried in their house. Both sisters became professional mediums, their bodies acting as intermediaries between the two worlds.
Summerland is a séance, taking the form of a conversation between Kate Fox and Samuel Morse, incarnating their voices in streams of clicks through the medium of the telegraph. All sounds heard in this piece are derived from the writings of Morse, and transcripts of Fox’s communications with the Summer Land. They speak in their own idioms: Morse, in the progenitor of the binary codes whose descendants now penetrate the ether around us; and Fox, whose voice is inaptly resynthesized using a technology most unsuited to the purpose. Nevertheless, the psychic and electromagnetic forces we can summon from the ether can still evoke the dimly-seen ghost, the sudden chill, the unnerving rap of unseen knuckles on the medium’s table.
Matthew Ostrowski: , 27-05-2021, in: Archive of Digital Art The Summer Land: An inhabitable sphere or zone of spiritualized matter in space.
— Andrew Jackson Davis, 1867
Samuel Morse’s telegraph, available in 1844, was history’s first commonly available system of instantaneous communication. He saw this technology as a way of extending Anglo-Saxon military and business prowess across the world, keeping unruly foreigners in their place under the aegis of Protestant and capitalist dominion.
At the same time, the invisible but verifiable nature of electric forces as a means of communication stirred great interest in the potential existence of other forces which might offer means of contact with points further removed: the realms inhabited by departed spirits. This movement was born in 1848, when sisters Kate and Maggie Fox reported mysterious tapping sounds, which they attributed to the ghost of a murdered man buried in their house. Both sisters became professional mediums, their bodies acting as intermediaries between the two worlds.
Summerland is a séance, taking the form of a conversation between Kate Fox and Samuel Morse, incarnating their voices in streams of clicks through the medium of the telegraph. All sounds heard in this piece are derived from the writings of Morse, and transcripts of Fox’s communications with the Summer Land. They speak in their own idioms: Morse, in the progenitor of the binary codes whose descendants now penetrate the ether around us; and Fox, whose voice is inaptly resynthesized using a technology most unsuited to the purpose. Nevertheless, the psychic and electromagnetic forces we can summon from the ether can still evoke the dimly-seen ghost, the sudden chill, the unnerving rap of unseen knuckles on the medium’s table.
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