2004, 26th Bienal de Sao Paulo - Image Smugglers in a free Territory, National Representation Australia, Sao Paulo, Brazil, 2005 Artspace, Sydney, Australia, 2006 Waves The 8th International Festival for New Media Culture ART+COMMUNICATION, Riga, Latvia, 2006 (in)visible sounds, Montevideo, The Dutch Institute for Time based Art, Amsterdam, Netherlands., 2007 V2 Zone, Act Interact, The Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei, Taiwan, 2008 Waves – The Art of the Electromagnetic Society, PHOENIX Halle Dortmund, Germany.
Defiantly unstable, the noise over Purple Rain’s pristine mountain glitches, the transmission pumping through the ether at a rate backed by the combined transmission channel feed of thousands of watts. TV, like the mountain’s avalanche, metaphorically flexes its considerable power. Over and above its stable core of this bedrock image, the avalanche pours, triggered by fluctuations in the local analogue television broadcasts. The image of a woman’s face, a ‘talking head’ which characterizes so much of TV, occasionally breaks in, as does a softer snowstorm driven in from one side.
The driver/selector of this avalanche and its glitches is live: suspended antennas provide the fluctuating ‘data-power’ of input of signals to the triggers. Thus, the foregrounding input is less image content than power – the inherent power that Shelley interrogated in “Mt Blanc.”
There is a correlation to be drawn between the invisible forces of Nature’s mystic ‘natural’ power and the pumping of thousands of watts through the frequencies of the electromagnetosphere. What manifests is intimately connected with unseen powers, the disturbance of the avalanche or digital ‘snow’ testament to forces of Nature which otherwise remain unseen, ‘serenely’ obscured. We never tap directly into the powers summed up in the mountain image but rather to the subsidiary harnessing of signals on carrier waves. Purple Rain amplifies and reveals the noise transmissions, normally silenced in TV and allows them to dominate in order to yield a physical experience of the electromagnetic force behind the broadcast image.
Anne Finegan