Marconi's Ghosts
D.Fyans
Marconi, pioneer of radio once hypothesized that soundwaves, once generated, never die, that they fade, but continue to resonate indefinitely through the universe.
Sound, light, duration are all waves comprising of frequnecy and amplitude and these make up the mediums in which we work and experience the world around us. Memory, like a stone dropped into a pond, continues to ripple outwards, the time, the place, the location of significant events imprint within our psyche. Even events which we have no direct connection with connect. We catch the emotional wave as it rolls around the world causing our own personal landscape to become submerged before it passes and pulls ever outwards leaving us to assess the damage done and the changes we need to make to our own personal infrastructures.
As humans, I don't think we can truly separate ourselves from the global network of waves. We can look at the world as an ecosystem, an ocean in which a stormfront on the other side of the planet still has an impact on our own seas. It is impossible in this day and age to not be affected by world events as, through spreading social awareness and media, we are all in effect, global citizens. Events in the Middle East are no longer a couple of column inches in a newspaper. We can view social change, the spirit of nations as and when it happens, unfolding tweet by blog by headline by News24 feed. It is an inspiring age to live in. We are capable of being moved by the first hand accounts of people on the front line in, wherever comes next in the latest strand of civil 'unrest', looking for changes to corrupt systems. We can research the history, politics and outrages of time at the click of a button. We can, by informing ourselves, broaden our citizenship, form a true opinion of the world we live in and adapt and evolve to become more human. No longer constrained by the Ministry of Information of the country and the political slant of the outlet that is reporting to us.
Everything in our universe is vibrating on some molecular level and inspiration is never far away, waiting to trigger a resonance. Words, sitting latent on the page of a book only become active when we observe them. A single phrase can set in motion a continuous wave. A modulation that first connects on some preternatural subconscious level, then over time, within creative space, forms into a structure which we then somehow force into the real world. Inspired thought manifesting itself as corporeal matter through our art.
Our lives can be viewed as interconnected sequences of events which, like Marconi's signals, continue to move through everything, never dying, resonating away in the universe around us. If we think about it, we can still hear the band playing the hymn August as the Titanic sinks, somewhere out in space, september 11th is happening , somewhere further out Kennedy has just been assasinated, and beyond that, maybe the original spark that started everything is still vibrating away, waiting to be received by long range antennae and inspire us to make works which may in turn inspire others. Standing Waves, resonating under their own perpetual energy.