I began to feel like a medium hearing, rather imperfectly, the voices of the dead

From Noise | Digital video | Work in progress | 2026

Life is a bit too complicated at the moment for sustained studio practice, but I'm intermittently working on an experimental re-edit of material gathered with Megan Calver during the making of The Signal and the Noise (2025). I'm focusing on extracts from a recording kindly released to us by Chrissie De Rivaz that was made by her late husband John in 1971. He was one of a group from STL Harlow who met with their colleague, the eminent scientist Alec Reeves, to discuss his psychic research - probably just weeks before he died.

Given the circumstances of its making (Reeves' illness and possibly medicated state, a busy hospital ward and a small crowd of close colleagues speaking in their own 'shorthand'), the recording is difficult to understand. It was most likely made with a low-quality portable cassette recorder and basic microphone, then recopied, and includes intrusive ambient sound, tape hiss, distortion and possibly some print-through from degrading tape. 

The fact Reeves' hospital-bed seminar arrives in the 21st century as a glitchy analogue recording is resonant. I am fascinated by Reeves' use of generated noise (eg using radium particles) for paranormal study as it was the very thing his ground-breaking scientific invention of pulse code modulation – or digital signalling – sought to eliminate.

As I set about the difficult process of transcribing the recording back in 2023, I began to feel like a medium hearing, rather imperfectly, the voices of the dead and trying to guess what they wanted to communicate. Indeed, there is a long-standing belief (from the days of Edison and Marconi onwards) that the communications media, through which we experience disembodied voices, might be 'haunted media'1, a place where the human and more-than-human can communicate. 

1Jeffrey Sconce 2020