Press coverage: The Influence Machine

The Evening Standard, 25 October 2000:
“There are strange forces at work in out technology. Progress hasn’t made us immune to weirdness; it’s just changed the scenery. Beyond the pages of the Fortean Times, people find demons dancing in front of their computer screens, or floating through the white noise on the TV, sending signals to their hearing aids or spewing out missives from possessed hard drives.

“Down in Soho, at the time of year when we celebrate dead saints, evil spirits and the season of darkness, something similar is going on. Large human heads hover in the air, disembodied and pale. They appear in the trees, in balls of smoke and on the buildings like lost souls looking for an exit. One face pulls out ectoplasm from his mouth. A giant fist looms out of the darkness and starts knocking on the side of a building.

“This is not a nightmare. It is The Influence Machine.” (Simon Grant)

Contemporary Visual Arts, Issue 31, November 2000:
“Tony Oursler’s uncanny video projections have been doing the circuit for some years now. Animated faces projected onto ‘pseudo figures' (crude dolls), inanimate orbs and into glass jars show the artist’s fascination with defects in the human psyche and mental illnesses such as Multiple Personality Disorder. Exaggerated features weep, groan, scream and babble at the audience. Yet unsurprisingly for an artist who has used video as a main medium for many years, Oursler also has an abiding interest in television (and in the consequence of our daily soak in its waters). How appropriate, then, that he should have come across ‘The Influence Machine’, the 1919 essay by Viennese lawyer Tausk which examined schizophrenia and the fragmented psyche. Tausk’s ruminations deeply impressed Sigmund Freud, but it is the essay’s title which has lived on: shortly after the onset of broadcasting, The Influence Machine was coined as a description of television.

“Soho Square is an appropriate venue for Oursler’s project of the same name (John Logie Baird made the first live TV demonstration just a few yards away, and despite its central location the Square remains bizarrely dark at night). Though Oursler’s piece is heavily influenced by son et lumiere works, there is no logical narrative progression. Instead he will confront us with video and sound fragments, all dotted around the square simultaneously. Rather than dolls, it’s the trees, buildings, and – as was suggested at the time of going to press – clouds that will act as screens for Oursler’s disquieting projected faces." (DF)

G2, 7 November 2000:
“The dead are coming through. We’ve been trying to connect with the other side for centuries and finally we’ve made it. It wasn’t the crystals, oiuja boards and hexes that did it, but good old technology. The ghosts are definitely in the machine: in the Morse code signals tapped out on the telegraph wires, in the bubbling static on the old valve radio; in that disappearing dot when you switch off the TV."

The Times, 10 November 2000:
"The ghostliness of Baird’s explorations is evoked at the very centre of Soho Square, where the darkened windows of the tilting, half-timbered summer house are illuminated only by a solitary source of light within. The doors are closed. But if you stand beside the building, voices seem to float out of the walls and compete for your attention.

“They need to be compelling. Oursler has created some formidable competition for them nearby, projecting a mysterious profile on to the trunk of a slender tree. We are tempted to approach and listen, like voyeurs spellbound by an essentially private, even illicit, spectacle.

“The Influence Machine is concerned with essence rather than solidity. Over on the west side of the garden. illuminated chemical smoke pours out of machines accompanied by the voice of a medium. ‘Oh, the noise, the noise, the noise is killing me,’ he cries, before pleading: ‘Mommy, Mommy, I’m here. Don’t leave me.’

“But he should not worry. Oursler has created an arresting psychodrama in the heart of Soho, and we find ourselves lingering among the phantasms for as long as they last.” (Richard Cork)

The Daily Telegraph, 6 November 2000:
“As the projections glide across buildings, come and go in puffs of smoke, or drift from tree to tree through the last remaining leaves of autumn, they chatter away dementedly to each other. ‘A little girl can talk to the dead with a wire,’ proclaims one. ‘I’m not a talking head, I’m not even here,’ says another.

“The work is an extension of the sound-and-video sculpture that Oursler exhibited at the Lisson Gallery in north London during the mid-Nineties. Deranged dummy faces or heads created through light projecting onto rounded forms of plain cloth would blink and stare. Popping out of suitcases or peering from beneath mattresses, some would harangue the viewer with an aggressive schizophrenia. They were all part of the artist’s preoccupations with demonic possession and the effects of media saturation on mental stability, and they brought him some notoriety and commercial success.” (Colin Gleadell)