I_TONE aeriology : catelogue essay by Ann Finegan

This work hits the eye with a tone, an eye-tone, or its bandings. The spectrum of the human eye has a banded limit, which Hinterding describes as our I-tone. When we come into the world our eye is already pre-tuned, set to certain resonant frequencies of light, and around us is a world unmanifest, a stray world of static babel1. Through the tone of our eye we effectively screen much out; our eyes band us, b(l)ind us to densities sufficiently opaque to reflect their hues.

In the first instance, Hinterding changes the ratio of the spectator's organs of perception2 _ this articulate coil of windings is the artist's line. Part-sculpture, assuming volume, part drawing, determining a trace, the line is a wire into an electric field of which we are grosser condensations. With a prosthetic aid see can see, on our bandwidth, our I-tone, its invisibile productions.

Draw out a the copper thread of a conducting wire to a certain number of windings, and it begins to pick up, to manifest activity out of the ether. This coil is the vital part of the work. The oscilloscopes, which monitor it, are pure prosthetics, miking up the activity to the specular, the more spectacular. The action is in the line. Wind it, draw it, to a certain number _ enter Pythagorus and the mystery of mathematical configurations _ and a subtle electronic body presences out of absence. A certain configuration of matter and form, coiled matter, establishes the points of contact to activity we've only known through accidental or unwanted collisions with our technology _ the white noise or 'brokenheaven talk'3 of electronic ghosts on the radio, or telephonic phantasms _ charged particles of electric waste forming minor waves of hazard in the background all around us. The age of electronics hasn't banished the phantom but rather multiplied its spectral presence4, bringing us closer to the ghosts in new mediums of manifestation. We've learnt to see and hear more of them, more clearly, and more simply. You could say that this installation is an aid to locating them, or, more accurately, of producing them.

Limited to the eye-tone of the human species, this installation

manifests what the eye can't see. As such, it extends aeriology one (Artspace, New Zealand) in which the coil was hooked up to address the ear, organ of the direct, immediate link to understanding. The electric nothing was made to speak, however inaudibly, in a crackling on the line. In I-tone aeriology, it yields, instead, to sight, eidos, visibility, the making manifest of manifesting, the appearing of the idea of appearing. We're a culture more attuned to eye-seeing, to seeing with the externally of the image projected in the mind's eye than of hearing things in one's head. Being spoken through, having noises in your head, is a little too schizophrenic _ too much the ghost that is speaking inside of me _ aeriology one , beautiful in the simple lines of its semi-transparent sculptural form, was, in its incoherent sounds, more inside, more foreign and disconcerting. I-tone aeriology, as eidos, bringing external forms into the light, is a more comfortable means of dealing with what Heidegger called revealing or deconcealing.

While there is literally nothing to see _ no recognisable pictorial simulacrum's _ in this ghostdance of imaging the act of presencing presences. In the early electric age of the middle twentieth century Heidegger pondered the question of things _ of how it was that things came to speak, to yield their truth. For his examples, he took ancient temple stones, simple tools, dumb things, works of art as things. Hinterding is likewise engaged in finding the means to a deconcealing. Her medium, however, in the late electric age, is a subtle line which literally comes a-live, becoming productive. The coupling of form and matter is not to be easily dismissed as a hackneyed conceptual framework _ as it was, for example, by Heidegger, in its correlation of form with the rational and matter with the irrational. Nevertheless, Heidegger acknowledged the power of the form and matter coupling in the theory of representation: "representation has at its command a conceptual machinery that nothing is capable of withstanding"5 and sought to reverse its conceptual order. Heidegger specifically rejected that notions of form and matter, as specifications stemming from the art work, were then transferred back to the thing. Not wanting to impose upon the thing, he wanted to let it speak, the ancient stone of the temple to speak itself, and simply waited. He called it "waiting upon the thing... " for the happening of the work of art.

Lacan was, in many ways, more attuned than Heidegger to form-matter coupling in the electric age: "all this history of matter and form, what does it suggest but the old history of copulation"6. However, in this, his emphasis was not on the sexual, but on activity which extended into the realm of the micro-molecular, in respect of a productive jouissance. Borrowing from Maupassant's strange creature of the horla, Lacan came up with the notion of the hor-sexe, outside sex, which he described as the soul of copulation. Not bodily copulation per se, but a more ethereal version: "In effect, as long as the soul souls for the soul, there is no sex in this affair."8 There is something of Lacan's soul of copulation in Hinterding's installation: a single coil, hors-sexe, acts an antenna, souling for the souls of the subtle electric shadowland, which, picked up by the oscilloscsopes, are brought into the range of our eye.

Luce Irigaray reworked the essentials of Lacan's theory of sexuation: "all I can do with a body is work it. Make it produce, perhaps jouissance."7

Notes

1."Is the stays world moving mound or what static babel is this?" James Joyces, Finnegans Wake (1950 ed. London: Faber, 1980), p.499.

2. William Blake, Milton, ed. Kay Parhurst Easson and Roger R. Easson (London: Thames & Hudson, 1978), plate 28, 18-20..

3.James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, p.261.

4. Jacques Derrida, conversation in Ghostdance.

5. Heidegger, Origin of the Work of Art, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), p.27.

6.Jacques Lacan, Encore (Paris: Seuil, 1972), p.102

7.Luce Irigaray, Elemental Passions, translated by Joanne Collie & Judith Still (New York: Routledge, 1992), p.59.

8.Jacques Lacan, Encore, pp.78-80