Electrical Storms

1992 – The 9th Biennale of Sydney, “The Boundary Rider” The Bond Store Sydney Australia.

An Electro-acoustic installation comprised of two custom built electrostatic sound systems designed to play back the sound from a live custom built antenna tuned to the VLF (very Low Frequency) part of the Radio spectrum and a recording made with the same antenna from New Mexico in 1992.

The VLF offers an experience of electrical turbulence in the atmosphere which expresses self mostly as very high frequency sounds known as spherics and whistlers. It characteristically hears the radio bursts being given off by lighting as they bounce around the earth and the effects of solar flares. The electrostatic sound system provided a a high energy, high voltage, speaker system that was biased to high frequency sounds, physically flat and almost transparent. You can see through the speakers so they became an invisible framework for this invisible activity. The concept of the electrical storm was effectively expanded to incorporate the nature of the objects that comprise the work as well as forming the subject of the work. This framing of invisible activity invited people to speculate on the nature of the electrical and electromagnetic as natural phenomena.