Disinformation, The Rapture, 2022 (video extract from installation at Cable Depot, London)

There are three levels at which one might look at The Rapture installation, exhibited at Cable Depot by the art and sound project Disinformation. You can just walk into it as an unmediated experience. You can tease out the references to understand more of what you are seeing. Or you can set The Rapture into the much broader context of Disinformation research and artworks, conducted over a period of nearly thirty years.

I

So, let’s just walk in: a dark room, one wall filled with a woman’s face on a short loop, the expression calm, the action slowed, flames billowing around the subject’s head in the form of a burning halo. Is this an evocation of an ancient cave: darkness, fire, the production of an image with iconic power? Do the flames relate to the rapture – calm outside, yet with burning passion? We’re surrounded by eerie music. Is there a connection between sound and image? What of the significance of the imagery, and why fire? There’s something other-worldly about the combination. One might think of the endlessly repeating moment as one of transition, the soul leaving the body … That suggests that the figure is meditating on mortality, and it’s a short step from that to remember how every work of art has an element of self-portraiture built in, joining the tradition of artists contemplating the inevitability of their own passing – from the Vanitas of golden age Dutch still lives, to Goya’s Black Paintings, to late Picasso’s characterisation of the aged artist, to Warhol in his fright wig. Even with little information to go on, then, there’s plenty going on, plenty in which to bask, on which to speculate. Simply as a jumping-off point, this is compelling and rich, and maybe some viewers will be content to stop there.

II

But let us go on. The image we see is a loop of the actress Yoshiko Tsuruoka, one tiny fragment from the film of Yukio Mishima’s story Yūkoku (‘Patriotism’, aka ‘The Rite of Love and Death’). So that reinforces the engagement with mortality, and the fire as adversity behind the serenity, or vice versa. The meditative aspect is consistent with linking fire imagery to the symbolism of flaming auras in Buddhism, Hinduism and in Islam. Disinformation producer Joe Banks cites a resemblance to portrayals of the Buddhist deity Batō Kannon, a (male) manifestation of – or attendant to – the (female) ‘goddess of mercy and compassion’ Kannon, and of ‘the Prophet and angels, depicted with burning halos, in the epic Mirâj Nâmeh … of the Persian poet Mir Haydar’. On a more recent political level, we might also think of the epochal self-immolation of the Vietnamese monk Thich Quảng Dúc in 1963, and subsequent anti-war protestors.

Disinformation, *Fire in the Eye*, 2004 (original photograph by Joe Banks)

What is this video ‘fire’? It’s actually a live effect that is generated by setting up a system of video feedback, whereby, conventionally, a video camera depicts itself, producing a kind of corridor of optic noise, an effect famously exploited in 1963 through the opening credits of Doctor Who. Among artists, Nam June Paik and Steina and Woody Vasulka also exploited video feedback in the 1960’s. Here however the effect is generated alongside the original footage as it plays, by linking input and output not through visual space but instead through direct electrical connections. The process sounds simple enough, but finessing the desired results is an extremely delicate matter that can take days of incremental adjustment. There are many cases in which electrical processes simulate natural phenomena, and it may be no accident that video feedback can be induced to produce patterns which resemble fire. In algorithmic terms the two may be mathematically analogous, and in this way, The Rapture operates as what game designers would call a ‘physics engine’ that simulates properties of real fire.

As for the sound, this is generated by a means highly appropriate to its being shown here. It relates to the speech encryption techniques devised for secure communication between the so-called ‘red telephones’ in Downing Street and Washington during World War II. Signals were translated down undersea cables that may well have rolled out of the Cable Depot in Woolwich. The encrypted speech, which sounds like the sea, as an elemental counter-balance to the visible fire, proves to be both another technological production and to relate to personal history. Various audio clips are being played on top of each other, but their origin is a poem, written and read by Joe’s grandfather, Geoffrey Grigson, who worked for the BBC Monitoring Service during World War II.

Bringing those elements together, I was reminded of pareidolia: the basis of the Rorschach Test is our tendency to read familiar images into random patterns – animals into clouds etc. Here the moving ‘fire’ looks so much like fire that it seems to have moved beyond pareidolia to representation. In contrast, the encrypted words really don’t suggest language at all, unless you listen to the earliest stages of the recording process – yet there they are, then: the reverse of pareidolia, in this case distorted to the point of nearly total abstraction. All of which touches on Ernst Gombrich’s discussion of how we project our expectations onto art (in his classic ‘Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation’, 1960). And that’s no coincidence: Gombrich worked for the BBC Monitoring Service alongside Joe’s grandfather, and Joe’s influential research project Rorschach Audio – Art and Illusion for Sound finds parallels for Gombrich’s arguments about visual art, by exploring Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP) – sounds found on electronic recordings that are interpreted as spirit or ghost voices – in contemporary sound art practice.

III

Disinformation launched in 1995, originally as – in Joe’s words – ‘a highly esoteric sound art project with roots in acid, ambient and punk influenced noise music’, and has since crossed boundaries between visual art, music and pure research. Disinformation’s first release was a radio recording of discharges from lightning in an electrical storm, followed by recordings of electromagnetic interference and noise from mains electricity, the sun, from trains and photographic flash guns etc. Disinformation went on to perform widely by mixing multiple pre-recorded sources with live radio noise, video projections and sometimes live musicians. Disinformation also used similar sources to create gallery installations. In 2000 the interactive exhibit The Origin of Painting allowed visitors to photograph their projected shadows onto a huge phosphorescent green surface, so painting themselves into poses that were facilitated by the warning sound made by the flash getting ready to fire. This suggests, as the title indicates, the earliest paintings being made by drawing around shadows on the wall. That process was later reversed. Footage from The Origin of Painting exhibits was played backwards and used as the basis for the video artwork Anti-Matter, 2002, in which a subject walks forwards, and then, on contact with their own shadow, disappears, annihilated by an explosive flash of light and sound. That, as described in the video credits, is ‘a portrait of an artist consumed by his own shadow’.

Technically, The Rapture follows on from Ammonite, 2009, arguably the first time video feedback was employed as a form of specifically representational art. Against the backdrop of abstract uses, applying the effect figuratively is both unusual and something of a provocation to expectations. Fine tuning the feedback to make an ammonite appear speaks to how their fossils act as time capsules, and also how they are regarded in Hindu culture as naturally occurring signs, as anthropomorphic images of the Gods.

Disinformation, *Ammonite*, 2009 (installation photograph by Julie Hill, 2018)

That superficial gloss across three decades may give a sense of the wider practice into which a fully informed consideration of The Rapture might be placed. The striking initial impression, and the combination of sources, have substantial depth behind them. That brief overview also serves to illustrate three points. First, there’s a great deal of research and technical exploration behind Disinformation productions. Second, that’s typically put to use in unusual ways, at a kilter to the norms for the media. And, third, this work generates conversations across time and cultures: what’s semi-automatically produced here and now echoes other places and times, setting up a ghostly sense of connection. All of those typical characteristics are present here. Appropriately to its themes of psychological transcendence, of mortality, and of love, The Rapture can be read as a retrospective summation of much of a life’s work.

Disinformation: The Rapture runs 7 June - 31 July 2022 at Cable Depot

8 Submarine Cable Depot, London SE18 5NX - Private View Friday 17 June 6-10pm

REVIEW: LEVELS OF (DIS)INFORMATION