THE WHITE NOISE GHOST
Channel: Richard Horvath
Date: 2019-04-16

The White Noise Ghost began as an experiment of glitching movie clips. Simply uploading the results was not an option because I like to marry playfulness with found footage and a theme, but finding a narrative which was vaguely consistent with glitching proved to be elusive.

My interest in the glitch process began in the years after graduating from art school. I watched the occasional late night movie on a badly tuned black and white television that suffered from ghosting and various interference artefacts and out of curiosity I placed a camera in front of the TV and took a snapshot of any scene that caught my attention. Some of these frames were collaged with processed photocopies to produce photographic stencils for screen printing which was my preferred medium at the time. There is a very brief insertion of one of those stills into this video, much like a subliminal message from the past.

The ghostliness of an image several times removed from the reality of the film studio, where it began its life, and the distortion caused by the subsequent transmission has always held a fascination for me, particularly the question about the point at which the degradation has caused the loss of any original meaning it once had. Similarly the disembodied voices amongst the short wave radio static, the reports about TV signals escaping the terrestrial environment, the mystery of The Buzzer, a transmitter thought to be for military purposes and the experiments by Latvian psychologist attempting to contact the dead seemed to have a strange parallel analogy to the ghostly glitched images.

The video soundtrack is usually a casualty of glitching with a tool like Avidemux and video artists generally substitute it with music. I’ve chosen to retain it — even with the annoying pops and clicks — together with the undamaged and unsynchronised original. The result has a pleasing resemblance to those ghostly, disembodied voices and sounds produced by The Buzzer or Raudive’s dead.

The footage used in White Noise Ghost was:
Blood Feast … Herschell Gordon Lewis, 1963
Driller Killer … Abel Ferrara 1979
The Curse of the Swamp Creature … Larry Buchanan 1966
Messiah of Evil … Willard Huyck & Gloria Katz 1973
Impact … Arthur Rubin 1949