Values for a New Age

The installation ‘Values For a New Age’, produced for the exhibition ‘Con Art’, explores the investigation of observable phenomena by science and pseudoscience through the development of an interactive artefact. Funded as a research project by the Arts Council England, the piece combined new digital technology and traditional (sham) séance trickery to create an interactive exhibit in which the reliability of the viewer’s own observations are put into question. Through this disjunction between the exhibit’s deceptive use of evidence and the immediate experience of the viewer, the work problematises the very notion of empirical research. It thus highlights how, rather than the idea of ‘progress’ in empirical science and technology replacing the role of ‘magic’ in modern society, the use of visual technology (whether in terms of big budget special effects, or instantaneous domestic digitality) actually trades on the sense of awe and the uncanny previously engendered by mystical and ‘magical’ phenomena. The research for ‘Values For a New Age’ included archive research into the history of parapsychology and its relationship to mystical readings of ‘new technologies’, as well as practical/mechanical research for the production of the piece, which included investigation and experimentation with magnetism, motors, small scale concealed engineering, as well as sensor and CCTV rigs. This research provided the basis for the lecture ‘Hey Presto’, given by Hollington and Kyprianou as part of The Site Gallery’s education program, and was also the basis for the paper ‘Technology and the Uncanny’ presented at the Electronic Visualisation and the Arts Conference, London 2007 (published in the conference proceedings). The work was commissioned by The Site Gallery and was given extensive media coverage on the BBC Radio 4 ‘Front Row’ show, and in Art Monthly, The Times, The Guardian and Artists Newsletter