Unseen Light

Our current project Unseen Light emerges from a collection of over 90 hours of séance tapes, purchased from a deceased estate. These high quality reel-to-reel tapes were intimately recorded by a New Zealand family in Auckland, and later Australia, between 1958 and 1972. 

The voices are both one and many. The channeller variously receives, re-voices and connects with people and conscious states beyond the material living. The séances included regular visitations from deceased relatives, doctors, scientists, spirit guides and singing children, with personal descriptions of life ‘in the spaceways’.

This was the era when space exploration and technological advances in satellite communication triggered renewed interest in voice communication with other worlds. As satellites were being launched into orbit, live TV communications became possible across the globe and radio telescopes listened for alien transmissions. Medical scans revealed hidden structures in the brain and body. As people of that era witnessed rapid technological change, many believed that scientific advances would inevitably also connect living humans with spirit worlds beyond our own.

Credits
Filming, editing and sound design: Sonia Leber & David Chesworth
Colour grading: Peter Hatzipavlis

The work in progress was presented in the form of a prologue to the artwork at the Ventriloquy performance program at West Space, Melbourne, co-presented by Gertrude Contemporary and Liquid Architecture. The performance was titled: Unseen Light: Prologue (Split open the atom in ourselves), 2019, performance with archival reel-to-reel tapes, 20 minutes.

The project has been supported by Creative Victoria and Multisonics 

Images by the artists
Performance images by Keelan O'Hehir/Liquid Architecture