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The remote series III: Remote future control access

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Christina Kubisch at the Hoover Dam, Nevada(Peter Kutin)
Christina Kubisch recording

Today we almost forget that digital communication is not only based on invisible wireless transfer using electromagnetic waves, but includes extensive material infrastructure. At the turn of the twentieth century, Serbian American inventor Nikola Tesla designed early radio controlled devices with the aim of transferring energy around the globe without wires. In order to realize his goal, he still used enormous heavy coils, oscillators, and tall metal towers.

Tesla invented and patented the first telephone amplifier in 1882 in Budapest. Without knowing about its origin, sound artist Christina Kubisch was investigating electrical fields in the 1970s, and used a simple telephone amplifier with incorporated small coils to listen to the sounds in her installations. She then developed specially-built headphones that receive electromagnetic signals from the environment and convert them into sound using the same process of electro-magnetic induction. With these headphones, she later developed a series of Electrical Walks, which allow users to listen to the usually hidden sounds generated by electromagnetic fields that surround us in urban settings.

On a visit to the Tesla Museum in Kosice, Slovakia in 2012, Kubisch listened with her special induction headphones to the Tesla machines – essentially using Tesla's technology to investigate his own devices - and was fascinated; she heard a thunderstorm of electromagnetic noise, and was inspired to create a piece about electrical remoteness. Tesla wanted to reach the most remote places of the earth with electrical energy. But nothing is remote anymore.

Christina Kubisch profileIn Remote Future Control Access, electromagnetic signals change gradually from the sounds of analogue machines to contemporary fields of urban lighting infrastructure, security systems, power lines, banks, subways, airports, power stations, and finally to the electrical signals of digital communication. From the sound of magnetic fields recorded in an old Austrian train station, to active Tesla devices; the composition ends with the sounds of a luminous advertising hoarding, recorded in 2015 in a new shopping centre in Las Vegas.

Remote Future Control Access is the third episode in a five-part collaboration, The Remote Series, curated by Anna Friz and Konrad Korabiewski for the artist collective and curatorial platform Skálar | Sound Art | Experimental Music. As Skálar originates in the small town of Seyðisfjörður on the north east coast of Iceland, remoteness describes the experience of existing outside of the geographical and cultural centres of power, but also the experience of distance, however minute or vast, in time or in space.

Christina Kubisch belongs to the first generation of sound artists. Trained as a visual artist and composer, she has artistically developed such specialized techniques as magnetic induction to realize her sound works. Kubisch's approach is a synthesis of arts, or the exploration of acoustic space and the dimension of time in the visual arts, as well as a redefinition of relationships between material and form in music. She has presented her work worldwide since 1974, and ran the department of Sonic Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts, Saarbrücken from 1994-2013.

Credits

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Slovakia, Ambient