Transmission
Listen to the silence. It's dense with noise, static, history and memory. Potential. The ether is full of sound, reverberating around us. Some of it at a frequency so low that you'll never hear it, although you may physically feel its presence. Some sounds are yet to reach you, others you've already heard and now they're simply travelling further away on an endless voyage out into the ether.
Gugliemo Marconi, the ‘father of radio', believed that sounds never really die, the signal just becomes weaker. He spent the last years of his life working on a listening device so sensitive that he hoped one day he'd be able to hear Jesus delivering the Sermon on the Mount. Your perception of acoustic space is dependent not only on scientific principles but also on how you sense and feel sound. Your physiological modelling means that you do, physically, feel sound via the vibrations transmitted through your body. You also sense sound, through a learnt understanding of how objects exist in space, motion, gravity, speed and distance. Electricity comes from other planets.
Thomas Alva Edison, inventor of the phonograph, electric lightbulb and the microphone, believed that we never really die, but that our soul is made up of indestructible particles that retain our full memory and personality. He spent the last years of his life working on a device that could detect these units and allow the living to communicate with the dead. Maybe he was onto something. Maybe he was crazy.
In the last years of his life Sir Oliver Lodge, first Professor of Physics in Liverpool, placed a sealed document into the custody of the Society for Psychical Research, claiming that after his own death he would communicate with someone living to reveal the contents of the document and prove beyond doubt the existence of an afterlife. Lodge suggested that the ‘spiritual' realm existed in the ether - the same invisible realm as radio signals - but at a much higher frequency. A radio receiver channels these normally invisible phenomena, sorting the signals into something meaningful. But how do you sort out the other frequencies? Could it indeed be possible to channel the past, to superimpose a previous event over this present time? Do rooms remember?
The concept of channelling has been part of the human story since our very beginning, taking many different forms in different times and cultures; the medium, shaman, prophet, teacher, savant, fortune-teller, guru, visionary, witch doctor, soothsayer, priest, healer, mystic, oracle, schizophrenic, saint, master and fraudster. The medium gives voice to the message. The message gives voice to the medium. The signal needs to be carried. The truth doesn't matter.
Remember. We never met. We never spoke. We never fell in love.