a silence that is not suppression (instead it is all there is) (2024)
essay included, in a slightly different form, in SNAPline, issue 2024.1
essay included, in a slightly different form, in SNAPline, issue 2024.1
PIA22929.tiff, NASA Mars rover Opportunity’s last transmitted image, taken on June 10, 2018, around 9:30 a.m. PDT (12:30 p.m. EDT). NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell/ASU
I.
White noise gives way to the SMPTE colour bars and the tone of a sine wave; then, a cut to silent and static-y grey, followed by a darker, uninterrupted shade—qualities familiar to any student of 1970s video art; quicksilver tinged cool by the CRT television monitor, without any pure black or white. The camera fades in on a woman removing a lithograph from the bed of an offset proofing press, before carrying the print to a vertical board for viewing.
A man with a thick beard and a Swiss accent introduces the clip we have just seen as the work of an artist who has taken a certain everyday object through a series of radical transformations. For the next hour this man and the artist carry on a dialogue surrounding her actions, starting from a moment of creative, and seemingly existential, crisis:
“I [thought my interests were] rather superficial, and I realized if I was going to truly express myself I had to really understand what interested me—not superficially, but on various levels. I began to think about it and I thought I’m always wondering what causes something to grow, something to evolve, something to change, ‘cause it’s something that we know so little about. We visually see it everyday as we walk down the street in the spring and see leaves grow on the tree, and yet the tree is growing, and it’s continual motion, and yet it’s such a quiet motion, you never see it. […] The human being is continually growing and changing and yet we can’t hear that change unless we had all sorts of machines that could record the sounds within our bodies; […] the fact that there is this evolution, a continual growth.”
Her interest in slow, continuous change causes the artist to draw the developments of human and animal embryos, then the life cycles of moths, and eventually the measuring devices, such as grids, which help quantify such metamorphoses. When these forms are constructed three-dimensionally and reflected into crumpled mylar, or subjected to various distortions via analog video synthesizer, the resulting imagery is suggestive of just how much can’t be measured against such standards. There is an incredible sincerity to the artist’s explanations of this process, unencumbered by artistic jargon or feigned certainty. The work itself does not convey her artistic journey illustratively, but there is no doubt that the enigmatic forms are both deeply felt and carefully considered.
The interlocutor asks a series of questions, pressing the artist about the purpose of her work, the validity of her search, to which she ultimately responds with a story: that while capitulating her fears in a doctor’s office—that perhaps she should have gone into a field like nursing where one saves lives—a nurse turns to interject that without art, perhaps life would not be worth saving. The camera cuts from close up to wide view of both interviewer and subject. The artist flashes a smile, and before the interviewer can respond, the camera quickly cuts to black, then thirteen seconds later to a field of visual noise, and then nine seconds later to the deep electrical blue indicative of missing video and audio signal. Blue light washes over the room, over the ‘wood grain’ of the formica tabletops, the arum plants, the pearl-snaps of my shirt.
II.
In this space between the content of the recorded tape and the end of the playback, I sit illuminated by the screen in the dark. I am reminded of an experience described by American poet Joan Retallack: between 1990 and 1992, Retallack interviewed the artist and composer John Cage, exploring with him and his frequent house-guests a broad range of topics encompassing music, visual art, and language. Between the recording and transcription of these taped conversations, Cage suffered the massive stroke that would kill him. “Each time I went over the transcriptions of our conversations, listening to everything all over again,” she writes, “I dreaded coming to the last of the tapes […] Cage is the last to speak. His words are followed by the sound of the recorder being switched off and then by a blankness that is a stark contrast to the noisy silence of pauses filled by the sounds of the loft. I found myself listening to the blank tape each time, not wanting to turn it off.”
The first motion picture, referred to as ‘The Roundhay Garden Scene,’ produced in October of 1888, captured the extended family of its director, Louis Le Prince, walking in the garden of his in-laws, Joseph and Sarah Whitley. Sarah would die ten days after the film was shot—the first ghost of the new medium. With each moment passing we move further away in time from Sarah Whitley, along with every other person ever recorded. It is easy to resurrect these dead, to pull up Youtube clips of movies shot over a century ago: fin de siècle star Sarah Bernhardt, aged 66, playing against age and gender as the 30 year old Prince Hamlet; a few seconds of a parrot filmed in the first natural-colour film process in 1902; a minute of the 114 year old Despina Manaki spinning yarn, the only known footage of a person born in the 18th century. We can invoke these ghosts at our leisure, any hour of the day or night, from the privacy of our homes, with nothing so much as a smartphone as crystal ball and WiFi as our ectoplasm. The most played tracks on our iTunes suggest a kind of transubstantiation—unfinished business passed on from the artist to us. It’s something that survives the chasms of time and technology; from the mechanical ear of the microphone, through the cutting arm of the record lathe into grooves of shellac, moulded and pressed into warm vinyl, copied onto tapes and CDs and compressed into MP3s played back through cheap headphones.
The tape recorder which facilitated Retallack’s recall provided a device to relive time spent with a person she could no longer access in the physical plane. For the duration of those tapes, John Cage was alive again, the technology of the tape player having dislodged their shared past into the present—where all history lives, after all. Even the quiet hiss of the blank tape, the hum of magnetic particles not aligned into sound by the head of her recorder, became activated by Cage’s presence; a spectral act very much in line with his compositions attuning listeners to the sounds that inhabit silence.
III.
We are entering a new world in which we are not only haunted by the ghosts in machines, but of them. I’m listening to Billie Holiday’s rendition of the melancholy standard “I’ll Be Seeing You.” Holiday recorded the song six times across her career; I’ve chosen the ‘live’ recording made sometime after midnight, November 11, 1955, during the second of two concerts she sang that evening at New York’s Carnegie Hall. She’s not at her strongest—a lifetime of drug and alcohol abuse was taking its inevitable toll—but there’s something about this take, more uptempo than her five studio versions, that endears me. It helps that she’s bookended (and occasionally interrupted) by the applause of a crowd I have to assume are now mostly ghosts too.
Maybe it was this version of “I’ll Be Seeing You” that NASA chose as its final transmission to the Mars rover Opportunity, when it was clear that it would not be awakening from a final sleep brought on by a planet-wide Martian maelstrom. Its last message home several months earlier had been “my battery is low and it’s getting cold.” Having outlived its mission lifespan by over 13 years, and outlasted its twin rover Spirit by seven, the employees who worked with the rover they nicknamed ‘Oppy’ were palpably emotional at the loss of the electronic being that for so long had been a part of their lives. There’s something odd—a strangely stretched empathy, something akin to love—involved in assembling the final playlist to send off a dead robot; the ghosts of Billie and her audience, and the compounded losses through time and media, beamed into space to play for metal ears that can no longer listen.
The rover sent three final photos on June 10, 2018. The storm that engulfed Mars had already begun to cover Oppy’s solar panels in a lethal layer of light-blocking dust, and the last image received was interrupted by a black bar, the rover failing to complete the transmission. They are grainy and only partially rendered, but in these poor images and empty spaces, like in the silence of John Cage, the silence of unrecorded tape, the growing time between us and those who are recorded—and those who are not—we understand how much these empty spaces can hold.
The photos are of patches of grey sky, electronic eyes attempting to look at the sun.
***
Through some detective work, I find the artist, living on an island, having moved on from art to stand-up comedy, and now lecturing on laughter to clients such as the Canadian Real Estate Association and the Government of Canada’s Human Resources division. I ask her to do an interview for this publication; an update to where she and the deceased Swiss typographer left off in 1975. I wait and don’t hear back; I write a meta-article about waiting to hear from people who don’t, or can’t, answer. Ashna, my editor, accepts this compromise, but insists that SNAPline can’t publish the photos I have of the artist’s work without her permission. I somehow doubt this artist who wanted to evoke the unheard sounds of cellular growth is litigious in nature, but it’s the principle I suppose… In case the artist has received my message, but doesn’t want to respond, I’m leaving her unnamed—an acknowledgement that one has the right to pull the curtain closed. And so I sit in the afternoon silence, activated by her work, and by the miles of tape continuing to unwind between us.
Out the window, finches land, vibrating the metal rod holding their feeder, a small woodpecker raps at a block of suet, sun-warmed ice drips from the eaves, a car accelerates two blocks over, and the clock on the kitchen backsplash continues its low and repeating tick. Sometimes in life there are no words.
— Luke Johnson, 2024
I.
White noise gives way to the SMPTE colour bars and the tone of a sine wave; then, a cut to silent and static-y grey, followed by a darker, uninterrupted shade—qualities familiar to any student of 1970s video art; quicksilver tinged cool by the CRT television monitor, without any pure black or white. The camera fades in on a woman removing a lithograph from the bed of an offset proofing press, before carrying the print to a vertical board for viewing.
A man with a thick beard and a Swiss accent introduces the clip we have just seen as the work of an artist who has taken a certain everyday object through a series of radical transformations. For the next hour this man and the artist carry on a dialogue surrounding her actions, starting from a moment of creative, and seemingly existential, crisis:
“I [thought my interests were] rather superficial, and I realized if I was going to truly express myself I had to really understand what interested me—not superficially, but on various levels. I began to think about it and I thought I’m always wondering what causes something to grow, something to evolve, something to change, ‘cause it’s something that we know so little about. We visually see it everyday as we walk down the street in the spring and see leaves grow on the tree, and yet the tree is growing, and it’s continual motion, and yet it’s such a quiet motion, you never see it. […] The human being is continually growing and changing and yet we can’t hear that change unless we had all sorts of machines that could record the sounds within our bodies; […] the fact that there is this evolution, a continual growth.”
Her interest in slow, continuous change causes the artist to draw the developments of human and animal embryos, then the life cycles of moths, and eventually the measuring devices, such as grids, which help quantify such metamorphoses. When these forms are constructed three-dimensionally and reflected into crumpled mylar, or subjected to various distortions via analog video synthesizer, the resulting imagery is suggestive of just how much can’t be measured against such standards. There is an incredible sincerity to the artist’s explanations of this process, unencumbered by artistic jargon or feigned certainty. The work itself does not convey her artistic journey illustratively, but there is no doubt that the enigmatic forms are both deeply felt and carefully considered.
The interlocutor asks a series of questions, pressing the artist about the purpose of her work, the validity of her search, to which she ultimately responds with a story: that while capitulating her fears in a doctor’s office—that perhaps she should have gone into a field like nursing where one saves lives—a nurse turns to interject that without art, perhaps life would not be worth saving. The camera cuts from close up to wide view of both interviewer and subject. The artist flashes a smile, and before the interviewer can respond, the camera quickly cuts to black, then thirteen seconds later to a field of visual noise, and then nine seconds later to the deep electrical blue indicative of missing video and audio signal. Blue light washes over the room, over the ‘wood grain’ of the formica tabletops, the arum plants, the pearl-snaps of my shirt.
II.
In this space between the content of the recorded tape and the end of the playback, I sit illuminated by the screen in the dark. I am reminded of an experience described by American poet Joan Retallack: between 1990 and 1992, Retallack interviewed the artist and composer John Cage, exploring with him and his frequent house-guests a broad range of topics encompassing music, visual art, and language. Between the recording and transcription of these taped conversations, Cage suffered the massive stroke that would kill him. “Each time I went over the transcriptions of our conversations, listening to everything all over again,” she writes, “I dreaded coming to the last of the tapes […] Cage is the last to speak. His words are followed by the sound of the recorder being switched off and then by a blankness that is a stark contrast to the noisy silence of pauses filled by the sounds of the loft. I found myself listening to the blank tape each time, not wanting to turn it off.”
The first motion picture, referred to as ‘The Roundhay Garden Scene,’ produced in October of 1888, captured the extended family of its director, Louis Le Prince, walking in the garden of his in-laws, Joseph and Sarah Whitley. Sarah would die ten days after the film was shot—the first ghost of the new medium. With each moment passing we move further away in time from Sarah Whitley, along with every other person ever recorded. It is easy to resurrect these dead, to pull up Youtube clips of movies shot over a century ago: fin de siècle star Sarah Bernhardt, aged 66, playing against age and gender as the 30 year old Prince Hamlet; a few seconds of a parrot filmed in the first natural-colour film process in 1902; a minute of the 114 year old Despina Manaki spinning yarn, the only known footage of a person born in the 18th century. We can invoke these ghosts at our leisure, any hour of the day or night, from the privacy of our homes, with nothing so much as a smartphone as crystal ball and WiFi as our ectoplasm. The most played tracks on our iTunes suggest a kind of transubstantiation—unfinished business passed on from the artist to us. It’s something that survives the chasms of time and technology; from the mechanical ear of the microphone, through the cutting arm of the record lathe into grooves of shellac, moulded and pressed into warm vinyl, copied onto tapes and CDs and compressed into MP3s played back through cheap headphones.
The tape recorder which facilitated Retallack’s recall provided a device to relive time spent with a person she could no longer access in the physical plane. For the duration of those tapes, John Cage was alive again, the technology of the tape player having dislodged their shared past into the present—where all history lives, after all. Even the quiet hiss of the blank tape, the hum of magnetic particles not aligned into sound by the head of her recorder, became activated by Cage’s presence; a spectral act very much in line with his compositions attuning listeners to the sounds that inhabit silence.
III.
We are entering a new world in which we are not only haunted by the ghosts in machines, but of them. I’m listening to Billie Holiday’s rendition of the melancholy standard “I’ll Be Seeing You.” Holiday recorded the song six times across her career; I’ve chosen the ‘live’ recording made sometime after midnight, November 11, 1955, during the second of two concerts she sang that evening at New York’s Carnegie Hall. She’s not at her strongest—a lifetime of drug and alcohol abuse was taking its inevitable toll—but there’s something about this take, more uptempo than her five studio versions, that endears me. It helps that she’s bookended (and occasionally interrupted) by the applause of a crowd I have to assume are now mostly ghosts too.
Maybe it was this version of “I’ll Be Seeing You” that NASA chose as its final transmission to the Mars rover Opportunity, when it was clear that it would not be awakening from a final sleep brought on by a planet-wide Martian maelstrom. Its last message home several months earlier had been “my battery is low and it’s getting cold.” Having outlived its mission lifespan by over 13 years, and outlasted its twin rover Spirit by seven, the employees who worked with the rover they nicknamed ‘Oppy’ were palpably emotional at the loss of the electronic being that for so long had been a part of their lives. There’s something odd—a strangely stretched empathy, something akin to love—involved in assembling the final playlist to send off a dead robot; the ghosts of Billie and her audience, and the compounded losses through time and media, beamed into space to play for metal ears that can no longer listen.
The rover sent three final photos on June 10, 2018. The storm that engulfed Mars had already begun to cover Oppy’s solar panels in a lethal layer of light-blocking dust, and the last image received was interrupted by a black bar, the rover failing to complete the transmission. They are grainy and only partially rendered, but in these poor images and empty spaces, like in the silence of John Cage, the silence of unrecorded tape, the growing time between us and those who are recorded—and those who are not—we understand how much these empty spaces can hold.
The photos are of patches of grey sky, electronic eyes attempting to look at the sun.
***
Through some detective work, I find the artist, living on an island, having moved on from art to stand-up comedy, and now lecturing on laughter to clients such as the Canadian Real Estate Association and the Government of Canada’s Human Resources division. I ask her to do an interview for this publication; an update to where she and the deceased Swiss typographer left off in 1975. I wait and don’t hear back; I write a meta-article about waiting to hear from people who don’t, or can’t, answer. Ashna, my editor, accepts this compromise, but insists that SNAPline can’t publish the photos I have of the artist’s work without her permission. I somehow doubt this artist who wanted to evoke the unheard sounds of cellular growth is litigious in nature, but it’s the principle I suppose… In case the artist has received my message, but doesn’t want to respond, I’m leaving her unnamed—an acknowledgement that one has the right to pull the curtain closed. And so I sit in the afternoon silence, activated by her work, and by the miles of tape continuing to unwind between us.
Out the window, finches land, vibrating the metal rod holding their feeder, a small woodpecker raps at a block of suet, sun-warmed ice drips from the eaves, a car accelerates two blocks over, and the clock on the kitchen backsplash continues its low and repeating tick. Sometimes in life there are no words.
— Luke Johnson, 2024
