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 proposed possibility of communication with the dead.
A path opens out along a darkened hallway. You move forward unsure of what you will encounter.
Iain Forsyth & 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 an audience's senses perform from within an experiment in subliminal messaging, the artists dissect what it means to feel, experience and to potentially believe, during moments highly charged by the promise of possibility. On the 14th of September 2006, in the same Small Concert Hall, the artists conducted their first experiment in Silent Sound on an audience of 300 people.
A dimly lit chamber looms at the end of your journey. The atmosphere is filled with a sense of heavy anticipation.
The soundtrack played in the gallery is an ambisonic recording of Silent Sound's performance at the St. George's Hall. Our hearing's complex sensitivity allows us to perceive the three-dimensional nature of our surroundings, deciphering the direction from which sounds originate as well as physically feeling sounds through vibration. Reproductions of sound in the mainstream can be limited, removing the information needed for the listener to feel the spatial aspect in which a recording is made. The capability of ambisonic recording to capture sound in 3-D, in terms of both it's direction and timing, enable us to gain a sense of the live performance in it's experiential and spatial entirety.
You are waiting.
Within Silent Sound's experiment in the potential of subliminal messaging. You are at once an implicated element of the performance and no longer the passive viewer; the mind of the audience now becomes the site of the art-work. The advances of subliminal technology are such that a machine so designed can embed words within a piece of music, exploiting the notion that the subconscious is able to receive and process information which the conscious mind is unaware of. There is much evidence to suggest that an individual's behaviour can be profoundly affected by information or suggestion received below the threshold of liminality, with particular success in the minds of those knowingly put in contact with that suggestion.
Music begins to play and you are consumed.
Forsyth & Pollard will maintain the secret of their message and not disclose it to any other save their closest conspirators. Throughout the project the artists have worked closely with Doctor of Psychology, Ciarán O'Keeffe and Jason Pierce, aka J. Spaceman of the band Spiritualized and formerly Spacemen 3. 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. Pierce is the composer of the instrumental score, which forms the musical foundation of Silent Sound. His arrangement explores 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.
The edges of the room begin to fade as you listen to the sounds that surround you.
For the most part the attendees of the Davenport's experiments were at a loss to quantify their experience and at the suggestive prompting of the Brothers' assistant the Reverend Ferguson'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. However during their séance on the 14th of February 1865, at St. George's Hall, it had become apparent to the audience that the brothers could escape from the rope bonds that were used to hold them in place within their spirit cabinet, thus allowing them to move freely inside. Dissatisfied at this revelation, the audience sought recompense and tore the cabinet to the ground, proclaiming the entire affair a fraud. Reverend Ferguson halted the proceedings, declaring the bonds to be unreasonably tight. In doing so the Reverend tacitly admitted that without possibility of escape the brothers could not in fact manipulate the instruments.
You may have heard a great many things about how you will feel and you are deciding which you might believe and which you might not.
The showmanship of the 19th Century Spiritualist relied heavily upon an understanding of the senses; none more so than hearing. The vast advances communication heralded by Samuel Morse's invention of Morse code in 1844, had extended the senses and formed new understandings of our physical existence that had previously never been believed possible. The invention of the telephone by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876 and the phonograph one year later by Thomas Edison had separated sound from its producer in terms of its physical location in the speaker 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? Edison himself certainly thought so. Spiritualism's desire to align itself with these electromagnetic sciences began to site the séance as a sensory space within which this 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.
The message is there now in the ether.
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.
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 & Pollard have made their experiment in Silent Sound.
And here at the beginning, do you feel different?
Ilsa Colsell, September 2006