magnetic fanfiction (The Case of Miss – –)
2025
Video installation, 11:52 min, wooden emblem, handwritten letters,
photo collage: Things Into Existence, 2024

© eSeL.at - Joanna Pianka

Between 1820 and 1826, Friedrich Schlegel wrote an extensive diary about the magnetic treatments of Cäcilia P., Franziska Lesiowska, Marie Trojan and Marie Schmidt (or Marie Albrecht?): Over 300 pages of posthumously published magnetic fanfiction - 4 interchangeable role models of seers whose personal stories are as absent as their gazes. Schlegel used his meticulous records of his patients' trance visions to piece together a paranoid, detailed and mystical cosmology from various mythologies.
In 1834, Dr John Elliotson, a staunch supporter and advocate of the medical application of mesmerism, conducted an experiment on three hypnotised young women, which Michael Faraday witnessed. What Faraday observed was an apparent synchronisation or form of communication between the girls in trance. A communication not so much as an exchange of words, but similar to electrical signals sent back and forth between devices.
In the historical laboratory of mesmerism, telepathy and spiritualism, the nervous, hysterical, childish, colonised and non-male body becomes a technological tool to amplify signals and perceptions. People in trance see the inside of the body, make diagnoses for themselves and other patients or see into space - in each case deeper and further than the technology of their time is capable of.
They send signals via their brainwaves, via mental radio, and young mediums are possessed by spirits. Their bodies are carefully examined, photographed and electrical currents measured. Parapsychologists say that childish play attracts poltergeists, but it remains unclear who is actually playing what or whom.
In ‘The case of Miss -- --.’, it finally becomes possible to transmit thoughts technologically in a fictional act of hardware hacking. A pill from the 1960s, designed like a spy microphone to amplify data from the stomach, is hacked and allows the patient to broadcast the entirety of her nervous thoughts: a magnetic fanfiction of herself, live from the hospital room. Modulated in invisible spectrums, her paranoid cosmology is ready to be received by all those who emit a frequency to hear voices from the unseen spheres.



quoted from: Robert Brudenell Carter:
On the Pathology and Treatment of Hysteria, J. Churchill, London 1853




quoted from: T. M. Greenhow:
Medical Report of The Case of Miss H–– M––.,
Samuel Highley, London 1845

things into existence, 2024, photo collage upper middle: Poltergeist activity in Janet und Margaret Hodgson’s bedroom in Enfield, UK, photo: Graham Morris/The Mirror and as poster: „Mrs. Fish and the Misses Fox: The Original Mediums of the Mysterious Noises at Rochester Western, N.Y.“ Lithograph after a daguerreotype by Appleby, Rochester, NY upper right: TG Hamilton, Séance laboratory photo equipment, both banks, 1929–1930, Bild: Walter Meyer zu Erpen left: prepared ghost apparitions for a summoning of Jean-Martin Charcot, Thomas Edison, Michael Faraday, Oliver Lodge und Nikolas Tesla center: a magical order, dedicated to time magic? after the principle: haunt those who have haunted you!

quoted from: Maurice Grosse in the Enfield Poltergeist Tapes, in: Concordia/MetFilm: The Enfield Poltergeist, S1. E1 The Happenings, 00:24:10 – 00:24:30, UK 2023