A literary mix tape that explores the entwined boundaries between sound, material culture, landscape and esoteric belief.
Trees rigged up to the wireless radio heavens. A fax machine used to decode the language of hurricanes. A broadcast ghost that hijacked a television station to terrorize a city. A failed computer factory in the desert with a slap-back echo resounding into ruin.
In High Static, Dead Lines, media historian and artist Kristen Gallerneaux weaves a literary mix tape that explores the entwined boundaries between sound, material culture, landscape, and esoteric belief. Essays and fictocritical interludes are arranged to evoke a network of ley lines for the “sonic spectre” to travel through—a hypothetical presence that manifests itself as an invisible layer of noise alongside the conventional histories of technological artifacts.
The objects and stories within span from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day, touching upon military, communications, and cultural history. A connective thread is the recurring presence of sound—audible, self-generative, and remembered—charting the contentious sonic histories of paranormal culture.
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Kristen Gallerneaux is a writer, folklorist, and artist. She has published on topics as diverse as mathematics in midcentury design, the visual history of telepathy research, the world’s first mouse pad, and car audio bass battles in Miami. She is also Curator of Communications and Information Technology at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan, where she continues to build upon one of the largest historic technology collections in North America.
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Strange Attractor Press, 2018
Kristen Gallerneaux is an artist, curator, and sonic researcher holding a Ph.D. in Art Practice & Media History from UC San Diego, an MA in Folklore, and an MFA in Art. She is also the Curator of Communication and Information Technology at The Henry Ford Museum in Detroit, Michigan, where she continues to build upon one of the largest historical technology collections in North America.
She has written for the Barbican Center, ARTnews, and the Quietus. She has published on wide-ranging topics like mathematics in midcentury design, the visual history of telepathy research, the world’s first computer mousepad, and car audio bass battles in Miami. Her forthcoming book, "High Static, Dead Lines: Sonic Spectres and the Object Hereafter," will be released in Summer 2018 via Strange Attractor Press and distributed by MIT Press in the US.
In 2018, she appeared as a Future Thought speaker and premiered a short film about the mysterious sonic phenomena "The Hum," at Moogfest: A Synthesis of Art & Technology. In 2017, she spoke about the history of the Votrax text-to-speech synthesizer and taught a Muzak-remixing workshop at Pop Kultur Berlin. In 2016, she spoke at Moogfest and at Unsound Krakow: Dislocation.
Forewordby Dave Tompkins
Paperback
130mm x 205mm
320pp, fully illustrated in black and white
ISBN: 9781907222665
