EVP
Electronic Voice Phenomenon is the alleged communication by spirits through electronic devices. When I was asked to contribute a piece to the Pop Montreal special event called Voices From Beyond: The EVP Project, curated by Kier-La Janisse, I spent more than a few hours down the internet rabbit hole of documented EVP cases. I love the one about the apparatus called the Spiricom where the spirit of a deceased physics professor transmits verbal instructions on how to improve the apparatus but then sidetracks into a conversation about carrots and sauerkraut.
For my piece, I decided to do something with an old radio I own which I always thought had some kind of extra-ordinary connection to the past. I discovered the model was from 1949 and imagined it had the power to somehow tap into that year, transmitting fragmented bits of audio-visual feedback from a conversation between two ill-fated lovers. The installation looked something like this:
And the film, with the grace of my go-to source for archival footage, archive.org, went something like this: