SEMAPHORE

Our recent project, Witness: A Psychic Collaboration, is an effort to psychically amplify our powers of communication through the techniques and training of diverse influences including fringe government research and spiritualist communities. The project enabled us to infiltrate one another’s psyche, as a means of increasing communication, perhaps to quell a loneliness in an age of hyper–connectivity. While it is possible to be in contact across large distances, people report to be increasingly unhappy. They often describe a constant loneliness or anxiety attributed to the electronic information age. In our first collaborative project, we turned to remote viewing as a logical extension of our desire for personal communication.

The writer and media-theorist Clive Thompson discusses new Internet technologies, such as Facebook updates and Twitter streams, as a form of digital intimacy. Thompson writes about these streams of often-insignificant information as a sort of Internet extra-sensory perception, enabling us to know more about the people in our lives than we would otherwise. Most of us do not share the mundane details of our everyday lives, yet with these technologies, the details are broadcast publicly in short bursts, from our mobile devices as they happen.  The temptation is to dismiss this information for lack of substance, but we argue that these small moments build a larger narrative over time, as well as increase our ambient awareness of the activities of others. We are further interested in the tension between the information that we willingly place in public on social networks and our resistance to government surveillance that would record similar daily activities.

To explore this new technology, we wish to dig deeper into the past, to explore previous methods of message transmission that laid the framework for understanding this new technology and the manner in which we communicate. We have begun using Semaphore flags, which transmit messages one character at a time across distances based on the positioning of two flags in the hands of a sender. Twitter messages, known as Tweets, are limited to 140 characters and we have begun transmitting this information one character at a time across distance, which is recorded and translated by the other. The painstaking process forces us to slow down and removes the ease with which these mundane details are broadcast.

With this project, we will continue working to translate the latest social network communication into these archaic forms to undermine the ease and ubiquity of the instant communication model. As performance, we will appropriate information from Twitter and Facebook, and then “broadcast” it in semaphore flag code in selected public sites. These messages will be signaled and repeated at predetermined times, while inviting the public to send Tweets and Status Updates to our online accounts, controlling the content of the messages. These performances will also be recorded as photographs and video to be included in future gallery exhibitions of our collaborative work.

- Nate Larson & Marni Shindelman

We are currently seeking venues to realize this project. Please contact us to book this project for your exhibition space or performance venue.