Spectres of the Spectrum

Posted by admin on December 2nd, 2006 filed in openness

On thursday we had the second meeting of the open-audio group which is running on a fortnightly basis at polytechnic, a node within the Grow Your Own Media Lab network. This session was mostly used to introduce people to supercollider on emacs, with a quick demonstration of pdp.

Next door in the Star and Shadow the fantastic Spectres of the Spectrum was being shown, which some of us were lucky enough to catch. The film is part of what looks to be grand festival of film:

Electrical Activity:
Creative experiments with Lightning and Power

Spectres of the Spectrum seemed a perfect feature to open with, madness and eccentricity… the ambiguity and autonomy in power…

From the electrical-activity publicity:

“Spectres of the Spectrum is an eccentric history of modern media using found footage. “The telegraph annihilates the social imaginary,” an anonymous narrator declares, crediting Samuel Morse’s invention with inspiring an upsurge of both utopian fantasising and spiritualist table-rapping. Baldwin links new communication technology to occult concerns while grouping their inventors with contemporary “geek hackers”. A grand war pits the forces of electromagnetic control against those of electromagnetic liberation. Baldwin champions eccentric individualists Nikola Tesla and Philo T. Farnsworth over corporate moguls Thomas Edison and David Sarnoff.”