14 DAY TRIAL // The field of photography is often riddled with images depicting sunsets, clouds and other boring imagery which have become a cliché that most artists are striving to avoid.
But once in a while an artist comes with an innovative, creative project that blows everyone’s mind away. It’s often individuals who know how to blend the artistic and scientific dimension, coming up with the most amazing scenarios.
It’s the case of researcher and artist Luis Hernan who took something that is currently part of our everyday life and turned it into a haunting depiction of color and awesomeness.
Hernan calls his project “a creative exploration of wireless spectres” and what the artist has done here is a illuminate the invisible infrastructure of wireless networks that are today always present around us.
The process of snapping these photographs is quite eerie in itself because Hernan claims he managed to create the images by employing the technique of long-exposure photography, along with something that he calls a “Kirilian device.”
Here is where things start to get really interesting because the term Kirilian photography is often associated with paranormal activity.
Ghost myth enthusiasts might be familiar with the fact that Kirilian photography is often used to make visible things that aren't picked up by the naked eye like an electrical discharge.
Hernan’s Kirilian device has been employed during this project to reveal the invisible wireless network levitating all around us every day. Actually, the paranormal-sounding device is an instrument used to scan local wireless networks and translate their signal into color LEDs (pretty ingenious, huh?).
The device is intelligent enough to move itself through space and pick up various signals and change coloring in the process.
Hernan then tracks the movement of the device with a long-exposure camera which registers wireless signals on film in the form of ghostly figures made up of multicolored lights.
“I believe our interaction with this landscape of electromagnetic signals can be characterized in the same terms as that with ghosts and spectra.”
“They both are paradoxical entities, whose untypical substance allows them to be an invisible presence,” explains Hernan on his Digital Ethereal project page.
This is a beautiful reference connecting the modern world of technology to the deceptive gates of the paranormal.
Hernan is currently engaging in finishing his PhD at the Newcastle University in the UK in the field of Architecture and Interaction Design. If this project has peaked your interest about the paranormal Kirlian Device, the artist has released a free Android app version of it, which was showed at an exhibition. Check it out in the video below.
