Susan Collins

British artist Susan Collins has worked in electronic media for almost two decades, creating interdisciplinary projects in a wide range of media, including sound, Internet, robotic, video, and interactive installation, often in site-specific public locations. Curious about the perceptual glitches between the real and the artificial, Collins, in her latest piece, The Spectrascope, 2005, is an installation in which we watch an apparent haunting of a haunted manor house, South Hill Park in Berkshire, England, infamous for ghost sightings. An image of an ornate chandelier hanging over a grand balcony is captured by a digital video camera installed in the manor for the duration of the exhibition and transmitted to the US via the internet. What we are actually seeing is an image constructed pixel by pixel; every second one pixel at a time from top left to bottom right is replaced. The screen, which is 320 x 240 pixels or 76,800 seconds, shows us just under a day of pixels in one extended timelapse image of the site.

The piece echoes parapsychologists’ technological investigations of haunted sites, but the emphasis on data collection is taken to an absurd level. The image is on the borderline between signal and noise, an uncomfortable space where our perceptions are heightened as we seek to determine what is interference and what is real, what is random and what is intentional, what is a specter and what is lived.

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