Donald Harding
TRANSCODE

One can say of language that it is potentially the only human home, the only dwelling place that cannot be hostile to man. John Berger

These two video installations combine audio and video elements with equal emphasis, exploring issues of language and communication. The works take as their starting point archive material of audio/visual “events” of the mid-C20th and re-interpret these events and their meanings using contemporary digital processes.

MLK

Political speeches have an intellectual and emotional capacity to inspire action. Leaders crystallise the demands of a movement with their oration, inspiring their followers to act. Is it the musicality in the voice of the orator that gives political speech its emotional force? Can certain elements be isolated, the meaning from the music, the voice from the politics?

Harding trans-codes Martin Luther King’s famous speech and renders it into a piece of music. The audio of the speech is processed into a musical instrument digital interface (MIDI) file and then this trans-coded data is arranged into a musical score played by eight stringed instruments from violin to double bass.

Stripped of its literal sense, the oration of the civil rights leader becomes an aural abstraction of the original and the viewer is compelled to find new meaning in his words and in the film of the event itself.

ReMorse

The theme of communication and coding is explored through a declassified 60’s newsreel of an American POW held in a North Vietnamese prison.

In July 1965, Air-Force Commander Jeremiah Denton was shot down and captured by the North Vietnamese army. He spent more than seven years in prison surviving terrible conditions and bouts of sustained torture. During his imprisonment, a television interview staged by his captors was meant to be a propaganda broadcast against the war. However, throughout the interview, while responding to questions and feigning sensitivity to the lights, Denton blinked his eyes in Morse code, repeatedly spelling out a covert message: "T-O-R-T-U-R-E". The film was broadcast on American television in May 1966.

Morse was one of the earliest digital languages. It was a vital mode of communication for the military and other services. It was also the international standard for maritime communication - only discontinued in 1999. As it prepared to end its use, the French navy transmitted its final message, a valediction:

C-A-L-L-I-N-G-A-L-L-T-H-I-S-I-S-O-U-R-L-A-S-T-C-R-Y-B-E-F-O-R-E-O-U-R-E-T-E-R-N-A-L-S-I-L-E-N-C-E

The prisoner’s blinking eyes are re-edited by the artist to spell out this same Morse code message forming a lament for the loss of the cipher that allowed Denton to communicate his plight.

In both these pieces Harding sets off a dislocation between our visual and aural senses, provoking us to uncover further layers of meaning in the language and code we use for communication.

Donald Harding is an artist and documentary filmmaker who lives in London.

Exhibition Open: 2nd – 25th July 2010, Thurs-Sun 12pm-6pm

Gallery: The Empire – Vyner St
(Entrance on 33a Wadeson St) 2,
London E2 9DR
07518 806 889

Union Films
Foskett Mews
London E8 2BZ
www.unionfilms.com
020 7254 0044