Haunting Time

Irradiated zones – such as Chernobyl and Fukushima – can be considered haunted landscapes, where environmental trauma and temporal dislocation create the conditions for ghosts. 'Zones of exclusion' trouble the boundaries between life and death, presence and absence – and collapse our conventional understandings of time. Focusing on Jacob Kirkegaard's 4 Rooms (2006), an audio work produced within Chernobyl's abandoned spaces, this paper explores sound and performance as a mode of spectral mediation.

Kirkegaard's method of 'sonic time layering', inspired by Alvin Lucier's 'I Am Sitting in a Room' (1971), repeatedly re-recorded empty interiors (Church, Auditorium, Swimming Pool and Gymnasium) allowing latent resonances to emerge as drones and overtones. Kirkegaard's production of sonorous strata evokes the spectral dimension of sound – its ambiguity and historical association with haunting – repositioning the recording process as a performative act of invocation. Engaging with concepts of 'haunted media' (Jeffrey Sconce (2000) Haunted Media, Durham, NC: Duke University Press), electronic voice phenomena (EVP), and the cultural mythologies of sound as a conduit for the dead, 4 Rooms inhabits the threshold between human absence and environmental presence.

The work also gestures towards nuclear trauma, with all of its temporal and material complexities. Radiation, as an invisible and persistent hyperobject (Tim Morton (2013) Hyperobjects, Minnesota, MN: University of Minnesota Press), resists sensory apprehension while leaving vibrant and deadly landscapes of contamination. Kirkegaard's recordings transform this insidious materiality into a sonic experience, suggesting that sound can transmit spatial, historical and affective traces of catastrophe. In this way, 4 Rooms confronts enduring nuclear ghosts, not as literal spirits, but as remnants of human and nonhuman histories carried forward in the form of contaminated environments. Through an exploration of the intersection of aurality, performance and post-nuclear landscape, this paper considers the way in which artistic practices have engaged with lingering trauma, with the fragility of memory, and with the haunting of temporality itself.