TONY OURSLER
The Influence Machine

1 - 12 November 2000
Soho Square, London W1

Soho Square at night. Disembodied heads and dislocated sounds switch on and off. In the heart of London’s media world, leading American video artist Tony Oursler created a spectral son-et-lumière for our image-saturated age.

Oursler conceived The Influence Machine for Soho Square as a kind of ‘psycho-landscape’. Delving deep into the history of the media, he looked into historic shows which invoked the ‘spirit’ of the site such as the phantasmagoria of the late 18th century, as well as the beliefs and superstitions which haunted the media throughout the 20th century. The ghosts of key figures in media history such as television pioneer John Logie Baird and the Fox Sisters, who made telegraphic contact with the spirit world in the mid-19th century, roamed the square at night.

From the telephone to the television to the internet, the ‘influence machines’ of the modern media have been tools of communication. But they’ve also been conduits for voices from the other side. Just yards from where Logie Baird made his first public experiments in the 1920s (a room above Bar Italia in Frith Street), The Influence Machine was a fractured multi-media landscape of spectres, sounds and light. The ghosts escaped the machine…


The Influence Machine was developed with the Public Art Fund in New York. It was presented in Madison Square Park from 19 -31 October 2000.

Tony Oursler
Based in New York, Tony Oursler is one of the pioneers of new media art. Since the mid-1970s he has used video technology to simulate and expose the predicaments of contemporary consciousness – its emotions, desires and pathologies. Oursler has gradually liberated video from the constraints of the box – with projections onto figures and effigies and with The Influence Machine, into the urban environment.

Oursler’s ‘Talking heads’ and ‘Talking lights’ have inhabited the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.