Sonia Leber and David Chesworth
Sonia Leber & David Chesworth
Unseen Light : Prologue (Split open the atom in ourselves), 2019.
Performance with archival reel-to-reel tapes, var. 20 minutes.
Courtesy the artists. This project has been supported by Creative Victoria
Sonia Leber & David Chesworth’s current project Unseen Light emerges from a collection of over 90 hours of séance tapes, purchased from a deceased estate. These high quality reel-to-reel tapes were intimately recorded by a New Zealand family in Auckland, and later Australia, between 1958 and 1972.
The performance for Ventriloquy is in the form of a Prologue, presenting the actuality materials of some of the séances, but not in the final form of the work. The voices are both one and many. The channeller, or ‘The Little Instrument’ as she in known, variously receives, re-voices and connects with people and conscious states beyond the material living. The séances included regular visitations from deceased relatives, doctors, scientists, spirit guides and singing children, with personal descriptions of life ‘in the spaceways’.
This was the era when space exploration and technological advances in satellite communication triggered renewed interest in voice communication with other worlds. As satellites were being launched into orbit, live TV communications became possible across the globe, radio telescopes listened for alien transmissions, and medical scans revealed hidden structures in the brain and body. As people of that era witnessed rapid technological change, many believed that scientific advances would inevitably also connect living humans with spirit worlds beyond our own.
The Unseen Light project explores how the ephemeral resides within physical objects and technologies – tapes, LP records, radiograms and film reels – archival objects that are portals to imaginative spaces.
The listening space is haunted by both the distant acousmatic voices and sound by-products introduced by the recording technologies as the tapes stutter and reveal print-through effects and colour. Their combined effect conjures another kind of séance experience.
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Voices include:
Gabriel Star Light ‘we need to rededicate our atoms’
Arthur Conan Doyle ‘invisible pictures will be placed around our lounge’
Lotus Blossom ‘Comes from inner worlds of Venus, she is pure light.’
Maori protectors
Rudolph Steiner ‘It takes courage to stand apart’
Great opera singer ‘she wants to sing through your voice’
The Tibetan ‘we shall join the masters in Shangri-La’
Beings on meteorites
Keith ‘I had a feeling I was going to pass’
Dr John ‘colour treatments to come’
Murdo MacDonald-Bayne
Resonitar ‘a space being from Saturn’
Khalil Ghibran ‘will teach us painting’