brain tumour helmets with microwaves
If you like living under power lines and using a mobile phone, then Ian Haig's helmets are for you. Don one of these and you supposedly gain access to frequencies usually beyond the threshold of human brainwave activity. Indeed, listen hard, and you may even hear one of those entities trapped in between worlds, or rather, in between bandwidths.
The helmets are fitted with antennae and headphones. As you walk around the gallery filled with TV sets and aerials of all kinds, you move in and out of zones of clear reception wherein some entity from the nether regions of radio-bandwidth beckons you. It manifests as a slow, intermittent contorted voice first of all, imploring you to recompose its being via your own brainwaves, as if the two frequencies might mingle and free the being into signal strength. The surrounding monitors seem to record the activity at these points of contact, rendering the ebb and flow of electromagnetic life around you. Yet what is it that would be set free here? There are a few clues in other media treatments like Crossing Over with John Edwards, where the host runs errands on our behalf to another half-world of spirits, the results televised around the globe. Or John Carpenter's The Prince of Darkness in which TV signals received while we sleep contain messages about the future. The message is clear, there is life on another frequency, it is simply a matter of how to tune in.
And that is the risk here, as elsewhere. In its most prosaic form, it is the risk of brain tumours from using mobile phones. But considered in its bio-technical aspect, it is also about modifying