The Chronotopes are a series of monuments; objects or technical apparatus that imbue, construct and/or propagate temporal conditions and are deployed through spatial and landscape practices. These monuments inhabit and activate sensibilities at the intersections of a plurality of landscapes: human and nonhuman, geological and technological, linear and nonlinear, actual and virtual.

The Chronotopes is an engagement with Hertzian space, a space that emerges from our interaction with electromagnetic waves through the use of electronic devices. An invisible landscape, Hertzian space is nonetheless physical and material, mediating analogue and digital communication, and is subject to control, regulation and militarisation. Equally, Hertzian space is unstable and climatic, and can behave erratically with transmissions being eroded, excluded or leaking to contaminate and intrude into the unintended. A planet-spanning landscape that is stratified and classified by Hertzian frequencies, the monuments of The Chronotopes intervene in the 3-30 KHz range – Very Low Frequency (VLF) – to engage in a space which is highly militarised and resonates with a geological capacity.

Following the development of a do-it-yourself VLF antenna and receiver, an experimental radiographic survey of several stone circles and megalithic sites in Northern Ireland was undertaken. With the antenna carried on a backpack, the surveying became an active performance and affective navigation for the human body through invisible nonhuman Hertzian space. The antenna was deployed as a dowsing or divining rod, ‘tuning in’ to the dynamic electromagnetic fields which swept through the arrangements of standing stones, the surveyor dancing and reeling to follow the sonorous turns of tweaks and chirps. Affecting a ritualistic encounter, new alignments were explored at the intersection of the two technological landscapes – the Hertzian and the Neolithic – to simulate new mythic imaginaries.

The monuments assembled for The Chronotopes include artefacts, wall text, acoustic works and further documentation of the VLF landscape survey. Audio from these field recordings was subsequently developed as part of the sound installation for the exhibition. Collectively, these objects, materials and concepts simulate new and speculative alignments of the monument(al). Antagonising at the scales of the Anthropocene where the human is implicated as a geological agent, these technical apparatus manifest affective alignments at a planetary resolution.