Les Æthers is a space constructed by Claire Williams and Dvora Levy to collect and reactivate practices of the invisible found in the archives of experimental and occult sciences of the 19th and 20th century. This abundant matter goes through the prisms of their individual and collective practices: documental installations, non narrative fiction, esoteric electronic circuits, occult sensors…
We could say that in our industrial societies, science acts as a monopole of our relations to the invisible. Physics, chemistry, biology and certainly psychology, create “legal” representations of what we do not perceive directly by the senses. But affirming this is denying the profusion of other technics of the invisible, of wich the flow never tarnishes, but constantly changes in terms of form. Even though the traditions are again and always imported from somewhere else (India, Siberia, Central Africa…) The Æthers seeks to retrace other linages by plunging into the history of our industrial societies. A context in which these practices are shaped by being in friction with the sciences and technics that have produced our world saturated by waves.
Because from the middle of the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th century, the exchanges were numerous between the emerging experimental sciences and the practices we hold today as non scientific. Their wouldn’t have been any telephone, telegraph or radio if their hadn’t been communications of spirits and mediums. On each side of the border that we trace as science and non science, the researchers of the invisible were animated by the same ambition: revealing a world imperceptible to humans. And getting there meant sharing concepts, instruments, institutions, relations, dinners… For certain, these new territories became spaces of experimentations and freedom out of a system of exclusion of class or gender. In this wide ensemble, we fond many women, another relationship to the body, a more qualitative than quantitative approach, collectives, multiple worlds that activate themselves…
Among other techniques, The Æthers looks at the Occult chemistry investigations experimented by two Theosophists at the end of the 19th century; Kirilian photography imagined by a couple of Russian inventors in the 1930’s; the Kozyrev mirrors made by Siberian doctors in the 1990’s; shifting developed by young teenagers at the first confinement and largely spread on social media. These specific technics resonate with a broader group of practices of the invisible documented in the archives of The Æthers: spiritism, instrumental transcommunication, photography of thoughts, vision at a distance, materialization of ectoplasm’s, mass radio telepathy, radionics…
So far, Les Æthers has taken different artistic forms according to the invitations received: online archival database tools, semi speculative texts printed with UV sensitive inks or backlit engraved glass, artworks taking the shape of kaleidoscope boxes scrolling videos from the online community's of shifters, stories of shifting travels emanating from a glass windows, subliminal sounds, instruments and occult devices reactivated, a sound performance of texts and archives of spirit seances, mediumistic and extraterrestrial communications
Winter 2022
we lectured
at Gaité Lyrique
Summer 2022
we played Electromagnetic sounds, queer alphabets and extraterrestrial conversation
on TECHOTSUKUMOGAMI
Spring 2022
we showed Cosmic Foam traditions No.1
we set up a talk
in Constant
Winter 2020
we show Ondoscope and Appareils
in different places
For a while
we have been creating the Ethereal Archive
You can contact us at
aethers.art@nubo.coop
This project has been supported by the Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles and Constant vzw.
