Warblers

work by Kara Uzelman and Jeffrey Allport, at AKA Gallery, Saskatoon, SK.

By John G. Hampton

AKA Gallery’s recent summer exhibition, Warblers, debuts the first collaborative installation by Nokomis-based artists and partners Kara Uzelman and Jeffery Allport. Allport, an accomplished sound artist who extracts uncanny acoustic anomalies from familiar places; and Uzelman, an internationally exhibited visual artist known primarily for her experimental archeology, come together to produce an ethereal aural archeology of information theory through the lens of small-town prairie life.

 

The exhibition presents the aura of a prairie field, sparsely populated, but occasionally flecked with debris hobbled together by some absent inhabitant. The construction speaks to an economy of availability, using objects found in fields, and discarded technologies repurposed for esoteric wanderings. In the far corner sits a vacant campsite made from the loose assembly of some stools with a bench, a lawn chair and a bucket. In the middle of the room a jug of beer has been left brewing.^[1] Closer still, sits an anthropomorphic structure constructed from rolling pins, hockey sticks, salad forks and other detritus, haphazardly assembled like a utility pole made by the inhabitants of Wicker Man’s Summerisle, or Burning Man’s Black Rock City.

The first encounter with the exhibition, however, is an aural one. When walking into the gallery, the room buzzes with the beautifully ambient abstractness of an electro-organic clearing in a field. Like an acoustically immersive animatronic museum diorama, the exhibit washes you in mechanically mediated sounds from nature. The croaking of frogs bubbles and crackles out of a tinny cassette player mounted to the wall. Subtle white noise drawn from an old tractor radio rattles out of a cymbal turned into a speaker. And the hum of domestic AC electrical current is amplified on the skin of a snare drum. This ticking, squealing and murmuring speaks equally to the language of electronic interference and that of a natural landscape. Similarly, the titular “Warblers” could refer either to the modulated reeling of a cassette spool, or the similarly sounding songs of the Canadian Warbler (a bird that is common to the southern prairies that the artists inhabit).

The electronic/organic ambiguity of this acoustic environment is oddly comforting. The abstractness of the sounds of nature and technology conjure the nostalgic presence of an indistinct landscape. There is an honesty in the use of humming, whirring and rattling to represent the sounds of nature rather than a community of identifiable creatures. This honesty is not exclusively on account of the omnipresence of the hum of technology in our daily lives, but also speaks to the foreignness of the forgotten language of nature. Being, myself, able to identify only a few common insects by sound alone, the rolling of static on cymbal-speaker sounds as authentically natural as the field recording of frogs in a marsh. The language of the natural which used to be so crucial to human survival has, in most cases, faded into obsolescence like a disused signal.

In his recent book, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood, James Gleick sets up a narrative where information evolves as a constant presence that moves through different physical shells and ethereal languages like a hermit crab. He traces this informational migration from the “talking drums” of West Africa (which mimicked spoken language to communicate over great distances), to contemporary experiments in quantum entanglement (which attempt to sympathetically link subatomic particles separated by vast distances, to behave as if they were one). Uzelman and Allport map a similar trajectory as does Gleick, but where The Information focused on human-made information, Warblers explores the information carried through the air that surrounds us, through its compression and expansion and the electromagnetic radiation that permeates it (both visible and invisible).

The sculptures in Warblers represent various methods for pulling information out of the air. The Wickerman/utility pole mentioned earlier is given more context by a small slide viewer hidden behind it that depicts a semaphore telegraph. Invented and named by Claude Chappe in the Eighteen hundreds “les télégraphes,” which translates into “far writers,” have a similar shape to this make-shift utility pole, augmented with a series of pulleys, gears and mechanical arms. These devices transmitted a visual code of ninety eight characters corresponding to messages in a closely guarded codex. Like an early pictographic game of “telephone” these messages would be transmitted from one telegraph to the next down a chain connected only by sight.^[2] While traveling Europe, Uzelman saw many of these relics peppered across the landscape, where they lie in disuse, marking a communications network that has ceased to be tapped into, and as such has lost its language.

While the signals of the semaphore telegraph travelled over the visible range of the electromagnetic spectrum (sight), in North America, the more familiar form of technologically transmitted information over the air is the radio. The radio appears in multiple forms in Warblers, yet never decodes nor transmits an identifiable human-made signal. For example, their ‘expanded radio’ intercepts human generated signals that are interfered with by natural electromagnetic noise. The power source on this radio is sent through a chain of recent artifacts dug from a field: a pot, a hammer, a copper coil wrapped around a beer bottle, and an abstract form made from tinfoil. These objects are arranged like an archeological display, but they lack any accompanying narrative that would ascribe them a particular history. The narrative contained in the artifacts is left for the viewer to unravel, like an alien species receiving our radio signals indiscriminately alongside those of our planet (which would sound similar to the sounds coming from the expanded radio).

The signals transmitted by our planet, which appear as interference in the expanded radio, can be more directly intercepted through a device called a very low frequency (VLF) radio—the schematics for which are etched into the gallery wall opposite the semaphore telegraph. A VLF radio picks up the electromagnetic radiation emitted by our planet. It can be tuned to pick up an aural translation of phenomena such as lightning or aurora borealis, and indeed nearly every object and event emits its own signature signal. Electromagnetic radiation is the information of ether; it is the language of all that we see and much of what we don’t. These signals render the world, “a conductor of acoustical resonance,”^[3] and the VLF radio is its receiver.

During the birth of the field of Information Theory at the fin de siecle, it was proposed that the ‘bit’ (as a measurement of information) is one of the primary particles from which our world is constructed, “more fundamental than matter itself.”^[4] Technologies for the transmission of information continually fade into obsolescence, and their languages become incomprehensible as a result, but the information within them remains active. Devices and languages eventually lose their immediate practical usage and become languages of specialization, fashion, cultural histories, or novelties for fetishists of obsolescence. Warblers, however, does not rehash a ‘new aesthetic’ that fetishizes retro-future digital vision, but instead refracts the electromagnetic spectrum like a crystal refracts light, splitting it into recognizable frequencies across a band of extraphysical omnipresent hums of information. Uzelman and Allport’s installation renders visible that which is not, extracting the current from archeological excavations, pulling it out of the air, out of cymbals, out of unreliable batteries and transistors, finding the lost information or the mistranslated, the obsolete and the encrypted. Warblers expands the apparent serenity and stillness of the prairie field, showing not only its physical life, but also the unseen informational life that buzzes within and around it. Uzleman and Allport harvest information and artifacts from the ether and the earth on a collaborative archeological dig with the viewer, who also must piece together a fractured cultural narrative, finding the familiar and the foreign in the terrestrial sounds and objects put on display.

 

John G. Hampton is an artist and curator from Regina, SK. He is a member of the artist collective Turner Prize* and is the curator at large for Neutral Ground Contemporary Art Forum. He currently live in Toronto where he is pursuing his Masters in Visual Studies from the University of Toronto. 

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