Expo '74 2019

Visit the Summerland installation:

It is a séance, taking the form of a conversation between Kate Fox and Samuel Morse, incarnating their voices in streams of clicks through the medium of the telegraph. All sounds heard in this piece are derived from the writings of Morse, and transcripts of Fox’s communications with the Summer Land. They speak in their own idioms: Morse, in the progenitor of the binary codes whose descendants now penetrate the ether around us; and Fox, whose voice is inaptly resynthesized using a technology most unsuited to the purpose. Thus the elusive promise of communication, and the inevitably faulty nature of any medium, is built into the very attempt to make the telegraph sounders speak. Nevertheless, the psychic and electromagnetic forces we can summon from the ether can still evoke the dimly-seen ghost, the sudden chill, the unnerving rap of unseen knuckles on the medium’s table.


Summerland is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature. Custom hardware by James Lo. Additional thanks to David Linton, Amanda Remus, and the Society for Psychic Research.