A proposed exhibition installation designed by interdisciplinary visual artist B.A. Van Sise and sound designer Veronica Lancaster, The Electric Output explores translations of both media and time. The exhibition utilizes color photographs from the archives of each individual organization using a proprietary process that converts digital visual media to digital sound media, modifying the historicity of the images from their original intent and meaning into a different, and modern, format.
The exhibition would change in each potential exhibiting institution, to highlight works in their own collections.
Historical photographs- here shown using governmental propaganda photographs from the Library of Congress- are made modern by their digitization, but that digitization results in a format of binary symbols beyond the creators' command, nothing more than 1s and 0s, and are through this process made into files that can be played as either digital photographs or digital audio.
In their new form, they offer a new 21st century reading of the images that, like the photographs themselves, has been rendered dissonant by time, while providing exhibiting institutions a way to both highlight their collections and demonstrate an evolving eye towards them.
Locomotives over the ash pit at the roundhouse and coaling station at the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad yards -Chicago, Ill. - Jack Delano
Dr. Schreiber of San Augustine giving a typhoid inoculation at a rural school, San Augustine County, Texas - John Vachon
Instructor explaining the operation of a parachute to student pilots, Meacham field, Fort Worth, Tex. - Arthur Rothstein
In the roundhouse at a yard of the Chicago and Northwestern railroad -Chicago, Ill.- Jack Delano