Mischa Langley’s first solo exhibition, Séance Machine, opening September 20th at Kaleidoscope Gallery, captures the performance of a new ritual envisioned by the artist in pursuance of what they have termed a sacred electromagnetic. Séance Machine contains audiovisual recording of the original live performance of the ritual at a Brooklyn cemetery on June 30th 2024, as well as an installation of the unique analogue electronic technology developed for it. In the performance two artists, one operating in the medium of sound (TT Britt) and the other in movement (Val Franco), create a closed feedback loop with the use of a data driven physical linkage (designed by Langley) . A large magnetic field generator induces the ground to create its own magnetic fields. Franco wears a device that detects when they pass over a grave by monitoring the strength of magnetic fields emanating from underground and generating a unique signal in response. This signal is then carried by wire through a copper and concrete altar to Britt, who uses it to craft a live soundscape. An interexpressive relation forms between the two as each responds extemporaneously to the other’s creative gestures. By making the presence and activity of magnetic fields (as well as subterranean geography) tangible via electromagnetic seance, Langley and their collaborators remind us of the array of forces shaping physical reality outside of our perception. Graveyards are often thought of as still and inert landscapes riddled with shallow, sealed cavities, but to Langley they have always “felt very full, not hollow or empty at all.” Not only does participation in the seance engender a broader awareness of physical reality, it also leads one to question the notion of death as a state of inertia, revealing how the dead bear a continual influence upon the living and vice-versa. The relation between the living and the dead is therefore theorized here as analogous to the relationship between sound and motion within the piece, that is, dynamic and actively responsive to changing conditions. As ablutions are performed with water and the offering of incense with flame and smoke, Langley incorporates copper as an elemental symbol for their ritual due to its frequent use as a conductor of electricity, undergirding much of the material infrastructure facilitating digital imagination. As one of two metals used to make bronze, copper was also strongly linked to the Bronze Age as a whole. It was used to make the sacred sickles of preRoman druids as well as divination mirrors from ancient Greece. Copper synthesizes the ancient and sacral with the modern and scientific in a unified symbol. Inscribed upon the metal are quotations from a diverse selection of religious texts, rites, and art, including The Conference of the Birds by Sufi poet Farid ud-Din Attar and Ecclesiastes 3:4: “there is … a time to mourn and a time to dance’. The design of the altar itself (concrete and monolithic with smooth, flat surfaces and symmetrical curves) is influenced by structures from antiquity as well as Brutalist architecture, the prominence of which began to wane in the 1980s, coinciding with the rise of digital technology and a shift toward artists representing futurity with evocations of weightlessness and immateriality. The materials of Langley’s machine cum altar represent a geologic scale of time incomprehensible to human consciousness, resulting in the mystic enchantment of electricity and magnetic fields, that is, a sacred electromagnetic. Drawing inspiration from philosopher Francois J. Bonnet, Séance Machine critiques distinctions between the categories of “sense” (pre-analytic, immediate, somatic) and “perception” (rational, discriminating, grammatically conveyable). By giving form to sense beyond perception in the enactment of a sacred rite, the audience (or congregation) is invited to broaden their thinking beyond the categories of “superstition” and “science”— beyond, for that matter, any neat categorization at all. – Amber Later