(Catalogue Text for exhibition Brain Tumour Helmets with microwaves, 2002)
by Brian Oblivion
The TV series Crossing over with medium John Edward, would have to be the only show on TV, where the stars are dead, where the bodiless voices transmitted into Edward’s brain are then beamed into a million homes.
The disembodied voice of something caught in the spectrum of electromagnetic waves and TV signals, an emergency beacon repeating a lost transmissions, atoms bouncing around the ether, are attempting to break through to say….something. Just to let you know that the family Labrador is resting in peace with your grandfather on the other side. From Uri Geller to Doris Stokes, this is supernatural TV.
Aliens have always looked to our TV transmissions for a better understanding of us, through fifty-year old distorted re-runs of I love Lucy and My Three Sons, believing that all humans look like Fred McMurry.
These days cheap real estate is found under giant electrical pylon towers and mobile phone antennas that dominate houses bathed in lustrous fluorescent light, the arcing crack of electricity outside making it impossible to sleep at night. A billion mobile phones tuned into a million brain tumours waiting to erupt and transform the planet, unclassifiable biological effects transforming and mutating the human body into something else. A new improved species, maybe with antennas growing out of our craniums.
Our bodies have always been chunks of biological technology that we lug around with us, our heads are becoming antennas our brains radio and TV stations. All those mobile phones and microwaves are making it difficult for homing pigeons to find their way back to their roost. The air is thick with interference and electrical static. Magnetic storms caused by eruptions on the sun, the dead communicating through TV transmissions and electromagnetic soup as thick as a Jack the Ripper London fog , noise for the sake of noise, as pure unadulterated interference engulfs you.