Channeling babble: Susan Hiller’s Channels

written after visiting Everything At Once, November 2017

I STAND ALONE in a black-walled room in 180 Strand, a solitary figure before a wall of televisions. The screens offer little in the way of visual entertainment, though. Some are bright blue or darkly fuzzed, others crackle with white noise. All 104 televisions resemble the kind that populated my nineties childhood: hulking affairs, clunky with the promise of the future. But these screens, neatly stacked squares of blue like a Roman mosaic, have lost their power to transmit. Analog dinosaurs in a digital age, they are obsolete.

A foreign voice punctures the static susurration, and another and another, until the empty room fills with a disembodied global chorus. Then the voices fade away, leaving a single speaker. He describes a near-death experience as an oscilloscope image on a screen corresponds to his words. Other narrators tackle the paranormal subject: a sixth former in a car accident, a man with a sore throat at a football match. Though the experiences differ they share common themes and phrases, from weightlessness to visions of long-dead uncles and that inevitable tunnel of bright light. After a few narratives, the voices multiply up to teeming chatter again, before succumbing to the relative silence of white noise.