Tuesday, 4 January 2011

Witness

I watched The Fourth Kind the other day, a film that supposedly features 'true footage' of evidence of the paranormal involvement of 'aliens'. personally i don't really let myself believe in 'sightings' and 'abductions' but i am very interested how the media and hype can influence how people interpret what they may of previously disregarded as nothing.

I came across this piece of work by Susan Hiller.
I really like the use of voice within work, especially on mass, a tangled overlapping wave of speech.

"There are people who are prepared to believe almost anything. There are those who hear voices from the other side, believing that there are messages for us in the ether. Others believe they have seen flying saucers, and have encountered beings from distant planets. Extra-sensory perceptions and paranormal powers may be unproven, but someone somewhere is working on them. The collective unconscious is big in some quarters. Some poor souls even think that art can redeem us.
Who is to say what goes on in an artist's mind? Studios are always haunted, by someone or other, or some unbidden thing. The persistence of unproven or improbable beliefs has provided the material for much of Susan Hiller's work. There is, thankfully, more to her art than the spooky or the deluded. Much of her thinking is focused on the creativity of the human mind itself, the tricks it plays, the sometimes curious ways in which it reveals itself through its preoccupations. This, naturally enough, includes the activity of making art itself." Adrian Searle (writing for the Guardian May 2004)

The curious ways in which the human mind reveals itself through its preoccupations.

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