Shortwave Radio Transmissions

Colour photographs by Helen Verbanz and vlf audio recording by Don Hill, (www.appropriate-entertainment.com) taken at Radio Canada International's shortwave radio transmission centre, on the salt-marshes at Sackville, New Brunswick)

"If humans had radio antennas instead of ears, we would hear a remarkable symphony of strange noises coming from our own planet. Scientists call them tweeks, whistlers and sferics. They sound like background music from a flamboyant science fiction film, but this is not science fiction. Earth's natural radio emissions are real and, although we're mostly unaware of them, they are around us all the time." -- excerpt from a NASA website

The photographs play on the nature of time; a compliment to the soundtrack of vlf (very low frequency) recordings originating at these spots which snap, crackels and pop up with life that is seemingly out of this world, but very much a part of it.

The VLF antennae captures an alternate universe of transmuted forces. Still or slow-motion photography – by the very act of 'bearing witness' – alters the process of information traveling at the speed of light. The diptychs of image & sound give face and voice to the realm of the imaginal, a locale which questions the nature and provenance of the human imagination.

The planet's atmosphere is increasingly perturbed by transmission of signals – the dits and dots and bits and bytes of public and personal digital devices – more and more frequency ripples around the planet. Questions arise concerning the environmental and social implications of all this "dream technology". How does the modern build-up of "sound power" affect our experience of ordinary reality?