The Substation/​ Hidden Door Journal, Ranch Pressing/​ Registrations/

Part exhibition, part séance, part print room: a factory for the uncanny.

Ticketed public programs:

• Saturday 3 October, 4–6pm
• Saturday 10 October, 4–6pm

PRESENTED BY THE SUBSTATION & MELBOURNE FRINGE

Registrations unfolds across two Saturdays and an exhibition at The Substation as both public program and publishing experiment: Issue 3 of Hidden Door Journal, produced by Ranch Pressing in real time and under pressure.

Part exhibition, part séance, part print room, the project treats performance as inscription — something registered, duplicated, transmitted, worn into matter. Sounds, gestures, voices and their residue become transcripts, proofs, annotations, copies: published as they occur, before they disappear.

Set within the industrial architecture of The Substation, Registrations is a factory for the uncanny. Dead air. Corroded transmissions. Signal noise. Across performances and durational acts of reproduction, the program turns toward conditions increasingly difficult to ignore: mortality, necropolitics, disappearance, survival, return. Life and death are not treated as beginning or endpoint, but as atmosphere, infrastructure, afterlife.

Radiotherapy recordings, suburban séance tapes, sonic residues and spirit duplications—analogue publishing as real-time feed, repetitive labour, insistence against loss. To register something is to sense, but also to make a copy. The copy is the trace that outlives the event and begins a life of its own.

A joint project between Hidden Door Journal and Ranch Pressing.

Traces from the exhibition will remain open to the public from Wed–Sat, 11am–5pm following the ticketed public programs until 17 October.

CONTRIBUTING ARTISTS

Saturday 3 October, 4–6pm

• 4pm: Jonnine Nokes, Joel Stern, and Melanie Evans: Living with brain tumours, the three artists bring their practices in experimental music and art into contact with recordings, medical scans, clinical documentation, memories and altered states of consciousness arising from their conditions and treatment.
• 5pm: David Chesworth and Sonia Leber: Artist duo will present a new performance, featuring sound collected from over 90 hours of actuality séance tapes recorded by a family in Auckland and Australia, between 1958 and 1972.

Saturday 10 October, 4-6pm

• 4pm: Karina Utomo: Extreme metal vocalist, multi-modal artist, and beekeeper
• 5pm: Sam Dunscombe: Clarinettist, composer, electronic musician, and recording engineer working at the intersection of experimental music, audio engineering, and spectralism.

EDITORS

• Lewis Gittus is a Naarm/Melbourne-based composer, artist, and writer whose practice spans music, installation, video, and text. Recent works have explored connections between Gothic romantic literature of the late eighteenth century and contemporary electro-acoustic practice.
• Sarah Jones is a publisher and horticulturalist living and working on Wadawurrung Country (Australia). Sarah is co-founder and editor of Ranch Pressing, an independent, micropress interested in art/poetry books and sustainability.
• Joel Stern is an artist, curator and researcher based in Naarm/Melbourne who has been involved in experimental music and sonic art for more than two decades. He is co-lead on the Machine Listening project with Sean Dockray and James Parker — a platform for collaborative research and artistic experimentation, focused on the political and aesthetic dimensions of the computation of sound and speech.
• Sarah Walker is a Naarm/Melbourne-based writer, artist and researcher. She uses comedy and surprise to create generous encounters with tensions around anxiety and future fear. Find her at sarahwalker.work

WARNINGS

Both public programs contain darkness and loud noises. The public program on Saturday 3 October contains medical procedures and discussion of death and cancer.

ISBN — 978-1-7640847-7-2