An Essay on Painting - Disinformation and The Origin of Painting

"The Origin of Painting" is an electromagnetic sound, luminous graffiti and shadow wall, autodestructive portraiture and experimental painting installation, created and exhibited by the art and music group Disinformation. This exhibit is a highly interactive and enjoyable sound and light installation, that enables visitors to photograph their own projected shadows, to a soundtrack of live (and surprisingly musical) electromagnetic noise. The installation also enables (gallery and workshop) visitors to draw with light directly onto the surface of the painting - producing graffiti, abstracts, portraits etc which are
literally incandescent.

Disinformation "The Origin of Painting" as seen below, featured live at Wrexham Arts Centre.

For those who may not be familiar, Disinformation is a project that began life in 1995, pioneering the use of (natural and man-made) electromagnetic noise from the sun, live mains electricity, lightning, industrial and IT hardware, rapid transport systems, laboratory equipment, astrophysics phenomena and magnetic storms etc as the raw material of CDs, LPs, live concerts, DJ sets, pure research, and art installations.

After a period of initial reading, Disinformation began releasing material that was commercially published the record company Ash International - "Ghost Shells" / "Data Storm" (Ash 2.7 LP 1996), "Stargate" / "National Grid" / "Theophany" (Ash 3.2 LP 1996), "R&D" (Ash 2.9 CD 1996) and "R&D2" (Ash 9.2 CD 1997). Most of these releases were recorded using Very Low Frequency radio equipment, and (bearing in mind that man-made phenonema are ultimately just as much part of "nature" as anything else) were conceived (not entirely sarcastically) as electromagnetic equivalents of more conventional wildlife recordings. Sleevenotes for "R&D" (1996) summarise ideas that underpinned this period of Disinformation's development...

"Tuning down into the lowest reaches of the radio spectrum, particularly in night's shadow of the solar wind, the listener enters a world of diverse phenomena, opening an acoustic window on a world alive with electrical activity. VLF whistlers from lightning and thermonuclear EMP ricochet along field lines of the magnetosphere, bouncing between hemispheres of the globe; storms crackle: biostatics whisper, hiss and sigh: televisions scream: pylons and power loops drone and roar: military signals, the musical pulses of navigation systems, timecodes, and coded data broadcast deep beneath the sea. Time and space divided, live 'vivisection' of particle physics, voices, map lines, weapons, mirrors hidden by the illusion of quiet."

The "Antiphony" (Ash 3.4 2xCD 1997) and "Al Jabr" (Ash 4.3 CD 1999) collaborations, and "Sense Data and Perception" (Iris Light 031CD 2005) and Strange Attractor vs Disinformation "Circuit Blasting" (Adaadat 19 CD 2007) projects extrapolated these ideas in more traditionally musical directions.

Disinformation first performed versions of "National Grid" live at Blast First's club Disobey and at The Royal College of Art in 1996, and exhibited "National Grid" live at The Museum of Installation in London in July 1997. During The MOI show, artist Hayley Newman performed "A Shot in the Dark" - dancing in a luminous suit lit by photographic flash guns. Adapting this idea (with Hayley's consent), Disinformation combined ideas from "Artificial Lightning" (a track on "R&D2" inspired by the writings of legendary MIT electrical engineer Harold Edgerton), with a colour scheme inspired by The MOI performance, and a timing mechanism designed by electrical engineer Tim Register.

A scratch / demo "Artificial Lightning" installation was put together for literally a few tens of pounds, and remained unexhibited until the idea was resourced by The Hayward Gallery for their "Sonic Boom" exhibition in April 2000 (where it appeared alongside work by Mariko Mori, Angela Bulloch, Brian Eno, Christian Marclay and others, with Disinformation's work having a strong and totally unacknowledged influence on later works by fellow "Sonic Boom" exhibitors Scanner, Project DARK, Ryoji Ikeda and particularly Christina Kubisch).

For all subsequent exhibitions, the installation has been retitled after "The Maid of Corinth, or The Origin of Painting" depicted by the painter Joseph "Wright of Derby" in 1782 (Paul Mellon Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington, USA). Joseph Wright depicted a theme (explored by many other "classical" painters) suggested to him by the myth described in William Hayley's poem "An Essay on Painting", in which a woman sketched around the outline of the shadow cast by her departing lover in lamp light against a wall... "Inspired by love, the soft Corinthian maid, Her graceful lover's sleeping form portray'd..." (William Hayley 1778).

Although the Disinformation exhibit is ALOT of fun, the resemblance of its imagery to silhouettes left by the atomic flashes at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the image of mortality that visitors see reflected in the act of separating from their fading shadows, cause "The Origin of Painting" to function as an active contemporary equivalent of traditional Vanitas painting. Sci-Fi author Jeff Noon wrote in The Independent - "people are fascinated by this work - it brings a shiver, a sudden recognition of death, as though we have seen or heard our own ghost". The Financial Times described the Disinformation exhibit as "actively thrilling". "The Origin of Painting" was described as "visually stunning... daunting yet engaging" by Rachel Dybiec in The Metro newspaper. Jessica Lack wrote in The Guardian that "Disinformation combine scientific nous with poetic lyricism to create some of the most beautiful installations around". Paul Clarke wrote in The Metro describing Disinformation as "the black-ops unit of the avant garde".

"The Origin of Painting" has been exhibited at Fabrica (Brighton), The Huddersfield Art Gallery, Nederlands Instituuut voor Mediakunst / Montevideo (Amsterdam), the Sonar festival, CCCB (Barcelona), Wrexham Arts Centre, The Mac (Birmingham), South Hill Park (Bracknell), Q Gallery (Derby), Saltburn Artists Projects (Teeside), Quay Arts (Isle of Wight), The Ashcroft Arts Centre (Fareham), in a Festival of Light organised by Home Live Arts and Moti Roti (London), on The Brunswick Centre housing estate in Kings Cross (London), in The Wembley Public Art Programme (London), for “The Art of Permanence and Change” (in a disused railway tunnel under Sydenham Hill Woods, London), in an MTV Awards after-show party at Palau Sant Jordi (the Olympic Stadium in Barcelona), and formed the centrepiece of an Arts Council funded UK
national touring exhibition.

This exhibit also inspired the production "Luminous" by experimental choreographer Saburo Teshigawara (on which Disinformation worked with the Japanese dance company Karas), and a spin-off entitled "Anti Matter" ("A Portrait of an Artist Consumed by his own Shadow") - a Disinformation video inspired by ideas of the physicist Paul Dirac.

Disinformation Bibliography...

1. Angus Carlyle "100% Pylon" pp. 68-83, "Themepark" 2 (Themepark, London 2000)
2. David Toop and Fiona Bradley "Sonic Boom" (exhibition catalogue) pp. 26-29 (Hayward Gallery 2000)
3. Minoru Hatanaka and Takeo Nozaki "Sound Art Ð Sound as Media" (exhibition catalogue) pp. 70-73 (NTT ICC Tokyo 2000)
4. Alfred Birnbaum, Simon Schaffer and Adam Lowe "Noise" (exhibition catalogue) pp. 33-36 (Kettle's Yard / Wellcome Trust / Cambridge University Press 2000)
5. Andrew Lambirth "Art and Science - Thoughts Towards a New Unity" in "The Rumble" (exhibition catalogue) pp. 12-13 (The Royal Society of British Sculptors 2001)
6. Joe Banks " Rorschach Audio - Ghost Voices and Perceptual Creativity" in "Leonardo Music Journal" volume 11, pp. 77 - 83(The MIT Press, 2001)
7. Brian Dillon "Listening for the Enemy" pp. 68-71, "Cabinet" 12 (Cabinet, New York 2003)
8. Richard Humphreys "Disinformation - Art of Darkness" pp. 31-35 in "The Analysis of Beauty" (Arts Council National Touring Programme exhibition catalogue 2003)
9. Nicholas de Oliveira, Nicola Oxley, Michael Petry "Installation Art in the New Millennium" p. 157 (Thames and Hudson 2003)
10. Joe Banks " Rorschach Audio - Art and Illusion for Sound" in "Strange Attractor Journal" volume 1, pp. 124 - 159 (Strange Attractor Press 2004 )
11. David Toop "Haunted Weather" pp. 48-49 (Serpent's Tail 2004)
12. Rasa Smite, Daina Salina, Armin Medosch "Waves" (exhibition catalogue) pp. 48-49 (Latvian National Museum of Art, 2006)