Anne Walsh and Chris Kubick

The collaborative duo composed of Anne Walsh and Chris Kubick are best known for their ongoing series Art after Death, in which they interview dead artists through conducting conversations with professional spirit mediums in front of the work of the deceased artist. The resulting series of audio CDs, Conversations with the Countess of Castiglione, Yves Klein Speaks! and Visits with Joseph Cornell, are a kind of portraiture, but one in which the artist’s role is as navigators of a complex set of layered, cultural, biographical, critical, and paranormal histories.

Spirit Array, 2005, takes a vast collection of Hollywood sound effects, catalogs the sounds in a database, and arranges them in sequences (or arrays) using software written by the artists. Simultaneously a live feed of the file names, such as “Squeak Open,” “Ghost Town Wind,” or “Resampled Mutant Mom,” seemingly direct from the program code, rapidly scrolls by in a video projection. The artists ask us “what sonic representations are required by our visual culture in its representations of real and imagined experience?” The paranormal has always been imagined in the uncanny relations between sound and technology: spirit rappings, voice trumpets, EVP. Walsh and Kubick’s sound collection, however, is composed of sounds created to remind us of haunted or other paranormal experiences. The resulting installation offers us a history, however random, of our own fascination with an auditory haunting of popular culture.

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