Audioscopic Research Archive

The Audioscopic Research Archive (2004) created by the Swedish painter, opera singer and researcher Friedrich Jürgenson (1903–1987) is on loan from the ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe. It will be on display from 1 to 30 October in the foyer of the German Federal Cultural Foundation in Halle (Saale). Compiled by the Swedish artist Carl Michael von Hausswolff, the archive contains Jürgenson’s research materials on transcommunication, which examine radio as a medium for communicating with the beyond. In 1959 Jürgenson discovered the Electronic Voice Phenomenon (EVP). By using radio carrier waves he was later able to recover the great many multi-lingual and often barely comprehensible voices that he interpreted to come from deceased persons.

Along with the five-meter long glass archive shelf containing countless audiotapes and notes, the documentary film Die Brücke zur Unsterblichkeit [The Bridge to Immortality; 1987] directed by Rolf Olsen will be shown. The film explains the Swedish researcher’s discovery through interview footage with Jürgenson and his predecessors.

At a conference on EVP held in Koblenz, Germany in 1977, Jürgenson spoke of the necessity of a “revolution of consciousness” in regards to his research, which was difficult to grasp. After World War II his ground-breaking discovery was both a point of departure and wake-up call for a tolerant and loving co-existence beyond the boundaries of time and space.