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.
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