"We have also sound houses, where we practice and demonstrate all sounds and their generation...Divers instruments of music likewise to you unknown...likewise divers trembling and warblings of sounds, which in their original are entire...We have also divers strange and artificial echoes, reflecting the voice...We have ...also means to convey sounds in tubes and pipes, in strange lines and distances..." Francis Bacon's 'Bensalemians', dwellers of Atlantis, describing their music in New Atlantis (1626).
Strange Lines and Distances is a two channel installation focusing on Guglielmo Marconi’s first transatlantic radio broadcast. The work is inspired by Marconi’s belief that sound never completely diminishes it only grows incrementally weaker. Marconi believed that with a sensitive receiver he would be able to amplify the echoes of history. This installation revisits the original transmission sites to explore the hauntological aspects of radio and landscape looking for echoes and historical intimations of the past in the present.
Two channels are dedicated to the wireless sites; the left channel to the transmitter in Poldhu U.K. and the right channel to the receiver site in St. John’s Canada. The sound is created from site-specific shortwave, field recordings and archival material. Edited, mixed and mastered at the Visby International Centre for Composers Gotland, Sweden.