Leslie Sharpe

Leslie Sharpe’s multimedia work is viewed by means of wireless technologies and mobile devices. Passing SG7777, relies upon the mutability of data. Four Bluetooth-enabled devices pass a narrative based upon the signal “lost” by Guglielmo Marconi during his first transatlantic wireless communication in Newfoundland in 1901, the sinking of the Titanic a decade later, ghost tales, and sensor ghosts. Reminiscent of its previous history of passing from station to station, and trying to recall the spaces of transference over Cape Cod, Signal Hill, and the Atlantic, the ghost signal drifts from device to device through wireless transference and encounters other signals being transmitted. A crackle is produced in the air over the Atlantic, a buzz of dataforms that have memory of place and event: early spaces of transmission; lives paused in time, frozen in icy waters; utopian thrills at transatlantic passage of bodies and data. . . .
At the opening event, in a kind of séance, Sharpe will pass files, sounds, and images to people stationed at three other Bluetooth-enabled devices. The stories interweave, transform, and migrate during the course of the exhibition as visitors join the narrative by receiving data on their own Bluetooth devices (PDA, cellphone, etc.), able to be altered and passed on to others. Sharpe’s project forefronts the signal itself as a subject. Her data, in the form of textual, auditory, and visual fragments that can move from place to place via their own wireless networks, is variable, changes with user experience, and is uncomfortable with fixed form. But the signal seems to take on a life of its own—invisible yet in motion, intangible yet full of sensory emissions.

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