Bernico uses the example of the GameBoy “b” button to give him extended powers in his Pokémon game, a fact that was relayed to him by a school friend. It was only on researching this in forums later that he discovered that the “b” key had no effects on the game outcome. He expected it to work therefore it did. This is a process of reification, where the behaviour of a machine reinforces the idea that a ritual is having an effect.

I’m reminded of a similar situation from my own childhood. Our home computer was a Sinclair ZX Spectrum, a relatively low-spec, entry-level device. Programs were stored and distributed on analog cassette tapes, and played back through a cassette player as an audio signal. These chirps and beeps were then converted from frequencies into bits. Tape drop out, tracking misalignments and warp made this storage medium notoriously susceptible to loading error.

My favourite game of all time was Jet Set Willy, so my cassette was well worn making loading it unreliable. As a joke, I told my older brother that the Spectrum didn’t like being watched when it was loading and in order to load a game successfully one had to close one’s eyes for the full three minutes that it took to load. To my disbelief and his delight, this actually worked. Not only that time, but subsequent times too. I appeared to have created a magic ritual that directly influenced the behaviour of a piece of digital equipment.

Relating the development of the telegraph as described by Sconce (2009), I was surprised to read that the phenomena of table rapping, spiritualism is a relatively new cultural artefact, dating back to the mid-1800s. The histories of the “electro-magnetic” and spiritual telegraph shared a confluence. The spiritualists saw the boundary between the electromagnetic and the phantasmagorical as porous and coterminous. After all, what difference between the raps on a table to signify a spectral presence, and the dot-dash of morse to similarly embody the disembodied?

Electricity at this time is seen as entangled within the spirit realm; witness the intriguing “spirit battery” (Sconce, 2009, p. 29). This was a magnetised rope grounded in a bucket of water that seems to follow the logic of an earthed circuit. It’s difficult nowadays with the ubiquity of electricity to understand how miraculous electricity must have seemed at the time, so no wonder that it took on an aura of the spiritual.

Later on, Bernico illustrates the use of EMF Readers – used by plumbers to detect pipes and electrical wiring behind walls – as a device to sense paranormal activity. In fact, a cursory search on eBay brings up listings for a variety of ghost hunting devices. I was most taken by the Rem Pod Bear KII EMF Meter (Fig. 2), a ghost detector in the form of a teddy bear whose paws light up to indicate the presence of spirits. The mechanics are housed within a plush toy with the rationale that it’s more appealing to the ghost of a child. The device is apocryphal in the sense that it functions as an EMF detector, yet the interpretation of these readings weaves a narrative that supports the beliefs of the user:

“Humans have a huge capacity to apply meaning over the top of unstructured and chaotic events. Whatever is produced from the machine will necessarily be correlated into the paranormal investigator’s scheme of cultural understanding. (Bernico, 2019 p. 10)

Whereas the EMF detector is a passive detector, other devices classed as Instrumental Transcommunications offer the possibilities of dialogic communication. This includes analogue devices such as dowsing pendulums, ouija boards and electronic, such as the Spirit Box and the Paranormal Puck. The former is an AM/FM radio unit, with an attached microphone for asking messages that sweeps through bandwidths listening for voices in the radio aether. The latter is a multi-sensory unit (ionisation, temperature, humidity etc) that connects via Bluetooth to one’s smartphone. What makes these units noteworthy is the technological paradigms that connect them to two respective eras. In the first case, it’s clearly at home in the realm of the radio ham of the mid to late 20th century. The latter updates this as a smart device, giving the user the power to send messages into the spirit realm in the same way one would communicate via WhatsApp or Twitter. If Apple is using the language of devices that work automagically, why would that magical technology not also be pressed into service to speak on the etheric plane?

It’s as if there’s a drive that attempts to repurpose the latest technological discoveries, not as revealing the mechanistic, reproducible, ordered logic of the world, but instead showing that the spiritual realm is just within our grasp. The technical appearance of these devices, the semiotics of dials and gauges, legitimises the experience of spectral phenomena. Steven Connor makes the point that “All machines are contingently imaginary because all machines need to be imagined.” (2017, quoted in Bernico, 2019, p. 11). This imaginary drive is also present in the users and appropriators of these technologies, using the objectivity of devices to support and confirm their own beliefs.

Perhaps one could draw a taxonomy of devices: those that aesthetically belong to the same phantasmagorical world, like crystal balls, black mirrors, ouija boards, and those that are squarely situated within the ordinary, technical and objective. Witness the use of CCTV as an aesthetic trope in modern ghost stories.

I wonder if there is a democratising force at work here? Instead of being gifted with second sight, being the seventh son of a seventh son, or being initiated into a secret society, all one needs is an FM radio. Like Apple’s computing for the rest of us, this is a window into the spiritual world for the rest of us.

There appears to be a dual dynamic at work here – one that encourages further investigation. Firstly that as more of the curtain of the visible world is pulled back, the more we need to see that there’s an abyss of the unknown behind it, rather than a brick wall.

Secondly, there seems to be a vestige of a previous age’s caution, of delving too deeply into the nature of the universe, lest it unleashes powerful, malign forces that we can’t control. This is a well-trodden theme in horror fiction where unsuspecting teens summon a demon through a Ouija board, or the counter trope of the hubristic, sceptical scientist prodding the etheric hornet’s nest to prove that spirits don’t exist.

References

Bernico, M (2019) Apocryphal Media: An Archaeology of Mediated Paranormal Presence. continentcontinent.cc 8.1–2

Connor, S (2017) Dream Machines. London: Open Humanities Press

Sconce, J. (2009) Haunted media: electronic presence from telegraphy to television. Durham: Duke Univ. Press.

Figures

Figure 1. projectzme (2012) ZX Spectrum loading screen [screenshot/GIF] Available at: https://www.theverge.com/2012/8/23/3262382/5-tech-things-i-wish-the-younger-generation-had-endured (Accessed: 12 March 2021)

Figure 2. ghost_hunting_gear (2021) Rem Pod Bear KII EMF Detector [screenshot] Available at: https://www.ebay.co.uk/usr/ghost_hunting_gear (Accessed: 12 March 2021)

After my detour to the Mithraeum, I made my way NE to the possible source of the Walbrook. This is the former Holy Well, now Holywell Lane. It’s an unpromising and busy stretch of one way road. One one side is a monotonous and anonymous office building; opposite is a former multi-storey car park (“Meyer Bros Parking System”). It’s now the American Car Wash (Hand Wash & Vacuum).

There’s a neat mirroring of the American mission to claim the moon, and the name of this car wash.

Water gushes across the path, sudsy and oily from coiled hoses – rather than from any subterranean spring.

At this point I start to record the digital traces of my journey. Firstly I’m recording the GPS waypoints of my journey (using Runkeeper), taking audio snapshots (when there’s something interesting to hear – water sounds, snatches of dialect, intriguing ambient audio etc). I’m also taking snapshots of the WiFi soup around me. I’m doing this in a fairly adhoc way: just looking for names to appear in my available access points list on my phone, then screenshot. It would be nice to find a better way to track them – to triangulate them to reveal an overlapping radius in 2D space. It feels at the moment as if I’m just glancing the edges of them as I move into their radii.

Like the underground rivers, these are just another way of mapping a space, but non-physically. I like how the names reveal a whole layer of narratives, and the ubiquitous Foxtons estate agents. There’s an emerging story here about the arbitrary value assigned to topology. The language of real estate that seeks to grant significance (and therefore greater perceived value) to one chunk of land/property over another. Where we might seek stories to give meaning to our environment, real estate seeks to mine even the most tiny and tenuous detail in order to associate stories with yet another bland, luxury build. Stories have value, and stories create value. A postcode – a string of numbers, an arbitrary unit of definition – could mean an extra nought on the price of an apartment.

Do the people that live in these blocks (if people actually live in them, and they’re not just glorified Monopoly pieces for overseas investors to leave fallow) really care that Shakespeare once had a theatre here? Why should our cultural heritage be left up to property developers? On the hoarding outside the construction site of the to-be-built The Stage (a new prestige development on Curtain Road) lists its performing arts space as a mere afterthought, last billing below the “boutique outlets”. We can read a message loud and clear about the importance of culture in this venture.

There were two theatres in this area in Shakespeare’s time: The Curtain and The Theatre.

The second listed item – “public realm” – is another curious bit of phrasing. Certainly something worth looking into as part of my investigations; pseudo public spaces, namely those that give the appearance of public space but are really policed and funded by private corporations. From the Guardian report of 2017: “public access to pseudo-public spaces remains at the discretion of landowners who are allowed to draw up their own rules for “acceptable behaviour” on their sites and alter them at will. They are not obliged to make these rules public.”

Again there’s a parallel thread here about control; control of the general population and control of water/natural forces. Bending movements of people and nature to fit within boundaries, around infrastructure.

I follow the route down Appold street. I’m not sure what I’m looking for. I’ve thought about experiencing this as a piece of performance – trying to see my surrounding anew as if I was a lunar explorer. Guided by the hidden river. One thought I had was to undertake the walk in a hired spacesuit costume…but that’s a little on the nose.

Another thought is to use the Wifi signals a form of digital dowsing. There are not enough rules in place yet to make the exercise truly algorithmic, and therefore more interesting. I feel that psychogeography needs rules, otherwise it’s just walking without aim.

An update on the WiFi soup at this point of the route reveals the following:

• AireAmigos
• BAMM
• BAMM Guest
• Creature London
• Creature London Guest
• CSLOR077
• Defected
• Defected Guest
• Depop
• Depop Guest
• DIRECT-JpM288x Series
• Girgentic
• Raw
• Sonitus-Systems-1011668
• TP-LINK_2.4GHz_2E8AA7
• Virgin Media
• VM2403945
• Other…

Naming…the way we define a pocket of space, radio space in this instance. In branding we call it “placemaking” and setting up our wireless router gives us dominion over our own bubble of space. There are anecdotes of residents naming their networks “STEAL SOMEONE ELSE’S BROADBAND”, but nothing that creative here. It’s corporate or it’s the garbled IT-speak that expresses itself in a knot of letters, numbers and underscores.

The road follows the underlying river southwards. Even though it’s buried beneath me, it exerts an influence on successive urban planning like a magnetic field.

Every now and then I notice these theodolite targets – this one made by Site Engineering Surveys Ltd (“Our Business Is About Measurement”). A survey before my survey…

Disappointedly, I later discover that Worship Street (where I now stand) isn’t connected to an underground bull-slaughtering cult, but is most likely a corruption of Worsop, and named for an Elizabethan merchant tailor John Worsop.

I followed the route down through Broadgate Circus, the terraced steps reminiscent of the amphitheatre at Pompeii. What will be left of this place, and will future sightseers enjoy a reconstructed “Broadgate Experience” replete with excavated artefacts – acrylic nails, McFlurry cups, fidget spinners and sushi soy sauce dispensers in the shape of a tiny plastic fish?

At this point I’ve lost the route of the Walbrook. If I had any dowsing ability, then at this point I’ve severed connection to the underground river. It may have long submerged beneath the street, but its course would have influenced the shape of the streets and city around it, time like the layers of palimpsest onion skin, echoing forward through time, the street names and awkward changes of direction a topological Chinese whisper.

The map I’ve made is confusing and vague (note to self, make better, more detailed map for next time), and I realise that I’m now trying to guide myself by intuition and getting disorientated. I head south towards London Wall and Old Broad Street, through the crowds at Liverpool Street.

My battery is getting perilously low. Soon I’ll have no way of recording my digital spoor trail, or even touching in on Oyster to get home. From my notes I see that the Walbrook meets a tributary from Aldgate end of Middlesex Street – and Blomfield Street, where it receives a second tributary that originates under the Barbican centre and runs across Finsbury Circus. I can see that is south of where I am and so I head Thames-ward.

Walking west along London Wall, passing the bottom of Finsbury Circus, I photographed this structure. I only know this from looking at the latlong EXIF data. I have no other notes and have no recollection of taking it (I wonder if there’s another project here about false memory and the automatic nature of taking photos but not “seeing”?)

At first I think that it’s one of those obelisks the Victorians were obsessed with, but on second glance it appears to be the central column of a new build. Are such structures the sites of future mythical imagination, as sites such as Avebury are now – its alterity providing a finger hold for mythical retconning. It’s certainly imposing, and its bland vertical faces offering no human-scale clues as to how it could be interacted with. The sentinel cranes around it are like antenna, not broadcasting radio waves, but an idea of prosperity, progress. Interestingly, the word crane comes from its resemblance to the bird, a species with a rich mythology. It was said by Pliny the Elder that one crane would stand guard with a stone in its mouth while the others slept, so if it fell asleep the stone would fall and wake it. I often hold my breath whilst walking under the swing of a crane, anxious that the heavy concrete counterweight might fall from its jib to the pavement beneath. The very first cranes were the shadoof (Arabic, شادوف) a device for lifting water from one river to another.

I make it as far as the remains of St Alphege Cripplegate by London Wall, the bricks and stones of which are an efflorescence of the old city. I pass a new build with a confusing mash of levels, stairs and reflecting pools and waiting at the centre, appropriately, is a Minotaur. I don’t make it out of the underground maze of the Walbrook with my phone alive. As I shoot the bull, my phone finally gives up the ghost; the minotaur has won.

Returning to the original idea of urban discovery as parallel space travel, I later research some of the failed missions prior to the successful moon surveys. NASA’s Surveyor 4 lunar lander (referenced in the diagram at the top of this post) is a good analogy. It was launched in July 1967 as a scout mission (much like mine) to determine the suitability of Sinus Medii (Middle Bay) as a landing site for Apollo 11. However, contact was lost 2.5 minutes before projected touchdown, possibly due to an exploding retrorocket (rather than a dead phone battery).

Luckily I was able to retrieve the GPS/KML data in order to trace my route (and possibly do something interesting with in Processing).

Luckily though, I was next to the Museum of London, which had an exhibition about the growth of the city through the ages, guided along by the Thames. I also pressed my sketchbook into service as a recording device whilst continuing the route (with a hazy recollection of where I was going, as my projected route was foolishly only on my phone).

According to my less than clear notes, I made my way past Bank to Cannon Street, whilst looking out for the London Stone. This is another sentinel stone about we know very little, but around which have formed various myths, ascribed magical properties and rituals. One of these is an annual inspection by the Worshipful Company of Masons and the Worshipful Company of Spectacle Makers, during which a representative of each visits and verifies the existence of the stone and report back to the Mayor.

To mark the first mission, I created this photolithograph of Holywell Lane with the hand car wash, fiducial markers and car wash worker/astronaut in protective clothing.

Further experiments & thoughts

• Am I to follow a predetermined route, or is it a performance with rules to follow? Like digital dowsing?
• Am I “in character”
• Do I need to be there in person? Can it be a remote survey?
• What does the relationship between natural forces (the river) and the man made infrastructure around it say about control of nature?
• Is there a parallel story about the control of population?
• Other ways to represent the route could include taking pollution samples/swabs from the area (walls, path, hand rails, air pollution); taking sound recordings/noise readings; LIDAR, DEM etc; magnetic readings, piezo pickups.
• Create a device or app to auto sample the surroundings without user intervention – like a slit scan or logging device.
• Need to be better equipped next time: portable chargers, better maps, sound recorder, sustenance.

I started my surveys of the lost rivers with the shortest, Walbrook. This forms a rough right angle through Shoreditch (the name a possible evolution of Sewer Ditch) down to the Thames via London Wall. The source is believed to be Holywell Lane (i.e. the Holy Well) near Curtain Road.

It seemed appropriate to begin here as the Walbrook is centred on the original Roman settlement that would later become London.

I began with a slight detour en route to the reconstructed Temple of Mithras. Building works in 1954 uncovered the remains of this site, believed to be a place of worship for the cult of Mithras. This was a cult of tauroctony in which followers would ritually slaughter a bull – bathing in its blood was thought to convey virility. The temple was relocated to the nearby Temple Court at Queen Victoria Street, but the reconstruction was criticised for its inaccuracies. In 2010, the original site was purchased by Bloomberg, and the temple restored as The Mithraeum to its original location – 7 metres below their new European headquarters at 12 Walbrook, EC4.

As you descend from street level, you encounter an interactive display in a darkened lobby with touch screens to explore the collection.

I see the presence of these underground, cosmological symbols as a parallel to my own project; making sense of my own connection to the wider universe, looking for clues beneath the surface.

Shadowy figures are projected on the walls as narration plays. Although the reference is totally anatopic and anachronistic, it reminds me of Plato’s shadows on the cave wall. How do we re/construct reality and history? Neatly package up the visceral experience of the past to make the point that we’re somehow beyond such simple superstitions? In Technic & Magic (Bloomsbury, 2018) Campagna writes of how we ascribe a belief in a flat earth to the ancients, all the better to claim superiority of scientific measurement over experience them and reinforce the hegemony of what he calls “technic” (the ontologically reductive mode that the modern world operates within). Yet we humans experience the world as flat, not spherical. This sphericity reduces the universe to an archipelago of limited, closed spheres. A primitive belief in a flat earth with a boundary temptingly offers a glimpse of an unknown world beyond the edge.

The actual experience is atmospheric – the temple is filled with mist and slices of projected light create volumetric “walls”. An ominous soundtrack of chanting plays.

But despite atmosphere and stage-managed spookiness, we are knowingly outside the experience. Our modern day rituals are neat and ordered: opening times, queuing, leg day at the gym, bus timetables etc. Together with the snaking line of parents and sightseers, I dutifully file around the outside then funnelled towards the exit. No gift shop though which makes the experience feel a bit more sacred.

Onward to follow the route proper of the Walbrook…

First things first, this is for all practical intents a reflective process journal where I can record thoughts, experiments, visual research, ongoing projects. It’s a diary, a sketchbook, a piece of string tied around the thumb. I don’t expect it to make sense, to join up neatly or to look pretty. I don’t even expect anyone to read it but the discipline of working in full view, without the harbour wall of my arm shielding my scribblings, is a new thing for me.

Primarily, I’ll be using this blog to record my progress on The Lost Rivers of the Moon, an idea I’ve been turning over in my head for a while now. Now it’s time to break the surface and bring it into being.

This project started during the making of another project, the spells, which was a sort of metaphysical exploration of objects, chemistry and superstition. I’d been collecting waters from the Thames (in London where I live now) and the Nene (a river that passed by my childhood home) with the intention of incorporating them in a still life for the series. The image never became of anything (file that away for later!) but thinking about the connection between water, memory, myth made me think of the influence of the moon on the tides. I was originally going to express this as part of The Spells by overprinting two maps, one of the Thames, one of the Moon’s surface, but it seemed as if there was something more interesting to investigate there…

Although the Thames is the most obvious body of water in the capital, it is fed by five major rivers; mostly hidden, lost or diverted. Although no longer visible for much of their length, their existence is evidenced in the topography of streets and buildings, and the names of the roads, pubs, churches and stations they pass by. The Fleet running down through Clerkenwell is possibly the most recognised, followed by south London’s Effra River. Added to these are the slightly less familiar Westbourne, Tyburn and Walbrook, and a myriad of tributaries and waterways; canals, brooks, creeks, streams, ditches, ponds and lakes.

The Moon too has its own mythical bodies of water: 22 maria (Latin: sea) and one Oceanus Procellarum – vast basalt plains of igneous rock that appeared as dark seas viewed from the Earth. These are joined by 20 lacus (Latin: lakes), 11 sinus (bays) and three paludes (marshes).

Two distant planetary cousins, each with their own fluvial mythology. One earthly with an ancient network of water now buried; and one lunar with a surface traversed by water that never was. These coincident maps propose a third in-between landscape to explore…