ReMorse – installation (video)
Unspoken Words by Randeep Ramesh
In ReMorse, Donald Harding explores the role of communicating without speaking by using the story of US Air Force Commander Jeremiah Denton. Held in a north Vietnamese prison, Denton’s captors hoped to score a propaganda victory with a staged interview but instead the haunting images of a man blinking a covert message of “Torture” conveyed a truth that could not be imprisoned.
Harding’s intent is not to retell Denton’s stirring story but to explore how we communicate and why. By reviving Morse code, one of the first digital languages which died in 1999, the artist illustrates that knowledge isn’t lost because a language is lost. It is lost because the way of life is lost. In a sense the progress that spawned Morse devoured it – cyberspace rendered its dots and dashes redundant.
Of course Morse code’s departure from use was a transformation long ready and struggling to happen. Its end was entirely predictable – the final link in a chain of factors that began just a few decades ago. However when a language dies, so does a little bit of history. The homogenizing effect of our lives means that by the end of the century we are likely to lose half the world’s tongues. Morse code’s demise was a message in itself – that no mode of communication can be guaranteed everlasting life.
But the need to communicate – to agree, disagree, to be in continuous contact and litigation with others – is essential to being human. Shakepeare’s King Lear asked “who is it that can tell me who I am?” – a question that implies the answer is moot. Permanently unresolvable and constantly open to re-assessment and renegotiation, the human condition needs language – much more than simple words – to wrestle with its existence.
By editing Denton’s footage Harding smuggles into his eyes the poignant final valediction delivered in Morse, C-A-L-L-I-N-G A-L-L T-H-I-S I-S O-U-R L-A-S-T C-R-Y B-E-F-O-R-E O-U-R E-T-E-R-N-A-L S-I-L-E-N-C-E. Harding himself calls his work a “lament for the loss of the cipher that allowed Denton to communicate his plight”. But it is also an exploration of why we keep languages alive – and the answer is that they are an irreplaceable part of our common human heritage.
Harding explores the rupturing of communication between intent and execution via a declassified 1960s newsreel.
A U.S. Air Force Commander shot down in North Vietnam and held as a prisoner of war, Jeremiah Denton gained notoriety for bravely bluffing his captors during a staged television interview in which he was forced to speak out against the war and claim that he was being treated well. Feigning sensitivity to the lights, Denton cooperated with the North Vietnamese whilst surreptitiously blinking in Morse code to spell out a covert communiqué: T-O-R-T-U-R-E.
In housing ReMorse, Donald Harding has constructed a completely blacked-out space, dislocating the visual and the aural and inviting viewers to edge closer to the sound and light emanating from tiny holes in the opposite wall, which conceals a television. Using this series of deliberate communication ruptures as a catalyst – on both his behalf and on behalf of Jeremiah Denton – Harding has altered the original newsreel footage to allow Denton to recite the typically poetic final message transmitted by the French Navy when Morse code was finally abandoned in 1999:
C-A-L-L-I-N-G-A-L-L-T-H-I-S-I-S-O-U-R-L-A-S-T-C-R-Y-
B-E-F-O-R-E-O-U-R-E-T-E-R-N-A-L-S-I-L-E-N-C-E.
In aiming to emphasise the layers of meaning which underpin our communication systems, Harding cleverly repositions the history of twentieth century communication in order to question how languages and codes both help and hinder our common understanding. In both their initial subject matter and their poetic reimagining, each work also exhibits a yearning for an optimistic world in which communication might exist less as a tool for escaping oppression and, perhaps, more as an exemplar of our pursuit of personal liberty and heightened sense of common understanding.