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Above. South Hill Park, Berkshire, England. Interior view.
This image was collected at the rate of a pixel every second via the internet
in vertical bands.
It depicts the 21 hours and 20 mins (approx.) leading up to Monday 12th
September at 14.21pm
Catalogue essay for
The Blur of The Otherworldly: Contemporary Art, Technology and the Paranormal
by Jane Marsching
The Spectrascope, 2005
British artist, Susan Collins has worked in electronic media for almost
two decades, creating interdisciplinary projects in a wide range of media
including sound, internet, robotic, video and interactive installation,
often in site specific public locations. Curious about the perceptual
glitches between the real and the artificial, Collins latest piece, The
Spectrascope, is an installation in which we watch an apparent haunting
of a haunted manor house, South Hill Park in Berkshire, England, infamous
for ghost sightings.
An image of an ornate chandelier hanging over a grand balcony is captured
by a digital video camera installed in the manor for the duration of the
exhibition and transmitted to the US via the internet. What we are actually
seeing is an image constructed pixel by pixel; every second one pixel
at a time from top left to bottom right is replaced. The screen, which
is 320 x 240 pixels or 76,800 seconds, shows us just under one day of
pixels in one extended timelapse image of the site.
The piece echoes parapsychologists’ technological investigations
of haunted sites, but the emphasis on data collection is taken to an absurd
level. Details like people passing in front of the webcam are registered
infinitesimally. The technology itself finds the spirits haunting the
manor in the form of variations in image from the passing of time as people
pass through the space or day turns to night.
What we are left with is an evanescent compiled image of time, redolent
with an uncanny sense of the presence of something, be it ghosts or real
people, in the manor. The image is on the borderline between signal and
noise, an uncomfortable space where our perceptions are heightened as
we seek to determine what is interference and what is real, what is random
and what is intentional, what is a spectre and what is lived.
All images © susan collins 2005-8