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.
