la gioiosa macchina da guerra

Detection
Conceveid and directed by Martin Howse and Martin Kuentz

12-13 March 2011, h 11.30-19 @ Ausland
Workshop fee: 30 Euros
Subcriptions and info here: info.occultofest@googlemail.com

But… But what is detection if not confession?
[NIcholas Roeg’s Bad Timing, 1980]

The conditions of the sentience had been here, he imagined, fulfilledin the method of collocation of these stones –in the order of their arrangement, as well as in that of the many fungi which overspread them, and of the decayed trees which stood around –above all, in the long undisturbed endurance of this arrangement, and in its reduplication in the still waters of the tarn.
[Edgar Allen Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher, 1839]

A two day workshop exploring the work of EVP (Electronic Voice Phenomena) and ITC (Instrumental Trans Communication) practitioners such as Friedrich Juergenson, Konstantin Raudive and Klaus Schreiber under the twinned practical methodologies of excitation (pick your carrier) and paranoid detection (everyday forensics). Detection is rehearsed in its widest sense, as a “making sense of that which is”. The detection workshop points towards playful techniques for the investigation of materiality and message which are positioned to one definite side of scientific, economic or teleological examinations; this revealing is necessary. And finally, to ask the question, experimentally, of what exactly constitutes detection and the work of the detective?

1st day schedule
Examination of classical EVP techniques with an emphasis on light/provision of carrier and subsequent detection/recording, and on the practical repurposing of electronic detection hardware (radios, tape recorders, video machines).
A series of experimental platforms ranging across radio, ultrasonics, white noise, light and vibration will be constructed alongside a set of experimental apparatus for use during the following day’s excursion. A small overnight test situation also will be set up at a new location.

2st day schedule
Fieldtrip to an to-be-specified location for primary inscription and playback of the stone tape. Other activities will include geophony, amateur geo-forensics and the construction of ad-hoc seismometers, dowsing, excavation, and forensic enquiry.
The workshop will close with a public presentation/performance with willing workshop participants at Ausland.

That which participants could bring
Any form of recording or transcribing device (tape/HD recorder, camera, pencil, paper), materials for excitation and subsequent detection (for example, minerals), and dowsing rods/pendulums.