Search
Close this search box.
Search
Close this search box.

KRISTEN GALLERNEAUX, strange sonic spectres haunting spaces around us

Text by Meritxell Rosell




Media historian and artist Kristen Gallerneaux is the Curator of Communications and Information Technology at The Henry Ford Museum (Detroit, USA), where she takes care of things like computers and also things like radios, televisions, and ‘things that have tubes and transistors.? The museum is one of the largest historical collections in North America.


Kristen’s universe, who was raised in a generations-long Spiritualist family, is surrounded by visionary architecture, local micro-histories of sinister small towns, ‘thing theory’, vernacular technoculture, aesthetic failure, contact magic, monster magazines, learning to weave, sound studies, and visual legends and legend trips, in her words. Through her writings, she has covered an extensive range of topics, such as the audible history of paranormal culture and the visual history of telepathy research.


CLOT Magazine got the chance to speak to Kristen during the 2016 edition of Unsound Festival: Dislocation (Kraków, Poland), where she gave the talk ‘Sonic Spectres’. There she told us about ‘the strange sonic spectres that haunt space around us, from the mysterious ‘hum’ reported in so many locations around the world to unusual structures with possibly occult or UFO provenance to old synthesizers, the picking up of noise from black holes.’


Late 2017 will be a busy time for Kristen. Her forthcoming book, High Static, Dead Lines, will be published by Strange Attractor Press in October, and her essay compilation Unsound/Undead will also be out in Fall on Univocal Press. On the other hand, and in tandem with her book High Static, Dead Lines, Kristen tells us via email that she is working on a video/analogue performance project blown out of sound waves, salt crystals forming, salt mining and local heavy industry.













Website: www.kristengallerneaux.com
(Photos courtesy of the artist)

This podcast was produced by CLOT Magazine and Stephen Mclaughlin (www.straightola.com) for Unsound Festival (www.unsound.pl) in collaboration with OFF Radio Krakow (www.off.radiokrakow.pl). 
On Key

Related Posts

​​Meakusma Festival, a passionate ode to 20 years of outlander music

From the visceral heart of London’s punk, noise, experimental, and DIY scenes, a unique biannual event series has emerged with force this year. Just days away from its third iteration (and the second in London), Sunday School, conceived by Dom Stevenson (aka YAWS), is set to return on August 26th at the iconic New River Studios in North London. The lineup packs a fierce array of bands and live acts featuring heavy hitters like Russell Haswell and Autumns, among many others.