In 1935 a stenographer at the bedside of the mortally wounded gangster Dutch Schultz documented the patient’s delerious last words in the hope that it might give the police information regarding the gang’s criminal activities. In 1971, Konstantīns Raudive’s Unhörbares wird hörbar (1968) was translated into its English language equivalent: Breakthrough. Breakthrough documented Raudive’s research into, what he took to be, the voices of the dead recorded on magnetic tape, what is referred to as EVP. Both of these activities became of interested to author William S. Burroughs who had been introduced to potential creative use of the tape recorder by the painter Brion Gysin to replicate the cut-up experiments they had been exploring with written text. Rather than use tape recorders to create art, Burroughs took the activity to be “not an art proposition at all” and considered it a tool of sinister and potentially paranormal significance. In this presentation I suggest the idea that electronic voice phenomena, the belief that unexplained voices (usually of the dead) appear on audio recordings, can be appropriated into arts discourse and considered as the basis for a strategy of listening to audial practices. I propose a way of listening that acknowledges the idea of ghost voices in noise as an important interpretive strategy across audial art disciplines, demonstrating a process of interpretive feedback between work and listener.

Mark Jackson is a PhD student in the Sound Arts department of London College of Communication and a member of CRiSAP (Creative Research into Sound Arts Practice). His PhD research is a consideration of ’space’ in the work of William S. Burroughs and its potential adaptation as a theoretical model for audial arts discourse. In particular his research centres around Burroughs’ literature and audio-visual experiments of the 1960s and early 1970s. Mark is also project co-ordinator for IMT gallery where his is curating Dead Fingers Talk: The Tape Experiments of William S. Burroughs, an ambitious forthcoming exhibition presenting two unreleased tape experiments by Burroughs from the mid 1960s alongside responses by 23 artists, musicians, writers, composers and curators.

Building on my earlier work ´Lovers, Liars and Laughter´ and its investigation into the different readings of an ´Inverted Mask´, I am currently looking at depictions of the White Face as a visual trope with many incantations and invocations echoing across time and space.
Just as remnants from mystical figures – such as ghosts, mimes, death masks, Mephistopheles – are present in everyday street encounters, we experience the presence of the white face in different imagery, connecting traces of our subconscious with phantoms, symbolic images and figures from all times. Accordingly, I see my current research as a form of sighting, archiving and re-disseminating photographic images that are in many ways ´haunted´ by themselves. I am particularly interested in what I call ´photographic latency´, describing an imaginary composite made of the image and the viewer´s encounter with it.

Wiebke Leister is a German artist and writer living in London. She studied photography at the University in Essen and holds a PhD from the Royal College of Art in London. She lectures on the MA Photography programme at the London College of Communication and at the University of Applied Sciences in Bielefeld. As well as writing for magazines and organizing conferences, she has exhibited and published her work internationally, receiving several awards. Her research investigates the nature of photographic portraiture beyond the limits of individual likeness – currently focussing on representations of faciality, including the laughing, mocking or kissing mouth in relation to its facial canvas. She is a Research Associate of the Photography and the Archive Research Centre at the University of the Arts London, which commissioned her recent publication ´Lovers, Liars and Laughter´, launched with a performance at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in November 2008 and displayed as an outdoors installation at the Elephant and Castle roundabout during the summer of 2009. Recent academic publications include ´Performing Laughter´ (in: About Performance #8, University of Sydney, June 2008) and the forthcoming ´Mona Lisa on a Bad Day´ (in: Journal of Photography and Culture, Berg, Summer 2010).