A flicker of spirit-forms: Susan Hiller's Channels

written after visiting Everything At Once, November 2017

I am alone in a black-walled room in 180 Strand, a solitary figure before a wall of televisions. The screens aren’t offering much in the way of visual entertainment, though. Some are bright blue or darkly fuzzed, others crackle with white noise. All 104 televisions resemble the kind found throughout my nineties childhood: hulking affairs, clunky with the promise of the future. But these screens, neatly stacked squares of blue like a Roman mosaic or artfully-tiled bathroom, have lost their power to transmit. Analog dinosaurs in a digital age, they are now obsolete.

A foreign voice punctures the static susurration, and then another and another, until the empty room fills with a disembodied global chorus. After a few moments the voices slowly die away to leave a single speaker. He’s describing a near-death experience, an oscilloscope image on one of the screens corresponding to his words. Other narrators tackle the paranormal subject one at a time: a sixth former in a car accident, a man with a sore throat at a football match. Though the experiences differ they share common themes and phrases, from a sense of weightlessness to visions of long-dead uncles and the inevitable tunnel of bright light. After a few narratives, the voices multiply again, building up to teeming chatter before succumbing to the relative silence of white noise.

This circularity of sound, from static to babble to single voice and back again, forms a rhythmic pattern that reminds me of a wavelength, an image which perhaps sums up the themes of the installation. Susan Hiller’s Channels (2013), shown as part of 180 Strand’s late-2017 exhibition Everything At Once, continues to unravel what much of her art is interested in: the distance between the technological and the bodily, the scientific and the spiritual. Through this piece she asks questions about how we absorb information, how we convey experiences - including irrational ones - and how technology mediates this communication.

These questions are partly explored by the relationship between the movements of Channels’ television screens and the way the viewer experiences the piece. The undulation of noise that shapes Hiller’s installation is a communal background movement to the individual movements on each screen, introducing an interplay between the collective and the independent, the common and the anomalous. Together, though at different paces, the screens flick through barren channels, searching fruitlessly for a signal, a constant collective action spiked by isolated voices. Phrases describing the speakers' near-death experiences often match my own physical experience of the installation. One narrator remarks on the shift from ‘stillness’ to noise, while another recounts feeling disembodied, devoid of tactile sense, as if he was ‘a thought-form … a spirit-form even’. In this dark space I too experience fluctuation and disembodiment, relying solely on my ears to figure out what’s happening, my visual capacities reduced to the static fuzz on the screens.

Appearing to produce sound and not image, a confusion of function emphasised by the contrasting clarity of intermittent single voices, Channels’ screens underscore analog’s outmoded status in the digital age. Technological progress has rendered the televisions redundant from their primary purpose. This is made explicit by the arrangement of the televisions, piled like goods in the high street electronics stores of yore - I think of the secondhand washing-machine shop that spills its wares onto a street corner in my gran’s rural village - but piled tidily, revealing a care and nostalgia for a technology which once epitomised the promise and power of the future.

Channels confronts the death of analog with accounts of near-death experiences: both produce the same blank gaze into the future. The piece elevates the supernatural and the technological to the same plane. The televisions and the oral narratives both deal with promises of the future, yet neither are able to fully articulate what might come next. The non-functioning analog television fails in its promise, while the near-death experiences are deemed implausible by modern society. In using analog television sets to broadcast near-death experiences, Hiller highlights the anomalousness of such encounters. They don’t fit into the narrative of the modern world, one that's ordered by science and technology. But she doesn’t condemn psychic accounts to the trash heap, either. By lifting near-death experiences to the same status as technological advancement, Hiller points out that just as technological networks endure and progress, spiritual networks do not fade from society either.

When I enter the installation I straight-away think of Cildo Meireles’ Babel (2001), currently on show in the Tate Modern. Like Babel, a replica of the Tower of Babel built with radio sets that modernise as the tower grows, Channels is immediately contemporary but also a historic artefact, celebrating two strands of time at once. Both works comment on mass production, the collective versus the individual, the hopes and fears produced by technology’s impact on society, and how technology moves through time. Yet while Babel soars into space, a tunnel of voices guided towards the heavens, Channels uses recent nostalgia to plunge into the future. Meireles’ radio sets are tuned into live radio stations: they’re still able to perform their correct function, as if technology has the upper hand and controls the direction and output of individual voices and experiences. Time has been less kind to Hiller’s televisions, however. Defunct, their incongruent ability to channel the voices of those who claim to have seen into the future questions what unites society: technology, or something more spiritual.

Fake plastic shoes: on walking to Westfield

You aren't meant to walk to Westfield. That is made clear by the abundance of multi-lane roads and hulking metal, the sweeping layout, the pedestrian-unfriendly scale of the place. I've grown to love these kinds of vistas - blame a summer spent skirting the underbellies of American cities - but they're an acquired taste, not meant for the urban peripatetic viewer. Industrial Stratford on a bleak rain-laden Sunday is tough to romanticise.

You aren't meant to walk to Westfield. To be honest, I don't think I'm meant to come to Westfield in the first place. I'm not the intended visitor: I buy all my clothes secondhand, pare down my possessions on a monthly basis, hate polyester, don't own a television, read a lot instead. And the (corporate chain) cafes in Westfield harbour no readers. Perhaps because in this vast complex there are hundreds of stores, but only one that sells books.

Westfield is a locum of rampant consumerism, but it's pretty good at self-disguise. Cinematic shopfronts dramatise buying things into a kind of epic glamour. A polished vision of purity temporarily strips visitors of any knots in their lives. All is simple and fixable! Happiness just a purchase away! Not content with merely promoting the mindless consumption of things as a solution to gnarly modernity, the sanitised mall also hides its inevitable detritus: the waste and pollution and underpaid staff and dodgy ethics and systematic unfairness. Everywhere smells of fake plastic shoes.

You aren't meant to walk to Westfield. You're meant to be shipped in unawares, delivered by car or tube straight into the mouth of the mall so that you bypass the urban wilderness outside. That's what's particularly creepy, I think (aside from the irony that the pedestrian-unfriendly 'urban wilderness' was designed as part of the London 2012 Olympics campaign aiming to celebrate physical movement). The mall and its tube-fed transportation erase all sense of time and place. Road and rail encourage smooth transition into a realm that possesses no weather, no seasons, no natural light, no time, no face.

When I enter Westfield that wet Sunday morning most of the shops are still closed. Only a few souls roam the wide bleached walkways. It feels unearthly, futuristic even, so that when the sound system inexplicably emits Bruce Springsteen's I'm On Fire, a song that so personally embodies what it is to be alive, the empty space transforms his lusty wails into a plaintive, ghostly cry of the past.

California sunglasses

I was halfway up Broadway when I realised my sunglasses weren't on my head, nor were they in my bag. I’d already been walking twenty minutes but I turned back for the bar. I had no choice: they'd become my ‘California sunglasses', bought for $2.99 in Berkeley back in February and worn almost every day since. I was hopelessly attached. 

The evening sun was pure and lucent in the way that only the financial district on a Sunday can be: light draped across stately buildings, stone tinged pink, windows rutilant in the sky’s blue wash. Back at the bar - an upmarket faux-Irish watering hole on Water St, the kind of place that bursts with bankers and brokers at 5pm on a weekday - the floor's sawdust was scuffed to the sides, a folk band playing where we'd sat. None of the bartenders could find the glasses, and yet I'd been so sure, in the perfect light, that I’d retrieve them. 

The loss threw me abruptly out of sorts: I had to gape back tears: and I am not sure why, exactly, except that I'd worn the sunglasses almost every day that year. Peeling at the nose, lenses smudged, but you could spot them in nearly every photograph of me, from Berkeley to Vancouver to Nevada to New York. Instead of a final evening pleasantly drifting through the city sun, I marched back up Broadway for a replacement pair. The next morning I would begin a month’s bleached travels west and south, and I couldn't be without sunglasses. 

All the evening’s hours had slipped away, and there was nothing in the grocery store I felt like eating, and I was grumpy about the unexpected loss.

Yet it wasn’t the glasses or the money, exactly, that I cared about, but the severing of another tie to Berkeley. To lose the sunglasses was to make physical the loss of Berkeley in my life. And it also articulated something I hadn’t been completely aware of until this final evening: how emotionally tough I was finding it to leave New York. Aftershocks from leaving Berkeley, maybe, but I’d been so damn content in this east coast city. Leaving wasn’t easing the heaving in my vines. 

And in leaving places that I loved, in losing two cities, lovely ones, I was beginning to realise that tiny choices I made now might have greater, often unpredictable consequences. Consequences so beyond my control, in fact, that they probably deserved about as much concern as a pair of cheap and wayward sunglasses.