*165 (hand-numbered) copies limited edition* "Registro de Piedra plays with the idea of place memory. I have heard a few stories of people spending the night in or near ancient ruins and witnessing strange sights and sounds. What some might call ghosts. Modern science has no way of explaining these apparitions, casting doubt on the authenticity of the experience. Other researchers have propounded the idea that these places may hold memories of past occurrences, and that under certain circumstances, these memories can be re-animated. This idea is sometimes referred to as the “stone tape theory”, and has featured in a few old books and even a British TV show. To this day no one knows what these sightings or hearings represent, if they are in fact genuine, and hard evidence is nonexistent. To add to the confusion, it’s relatively easy these days to fake a convincing ghost encounter on audio or video, so even if there were evidence it may have been faked.
One wonders if modern day ghost hunters would find anything at the sites featured here. I have a friend who takes photographs without looking at what he’s taking a photo of. Most of them are very interesting, harboring images of faces and weird clouds of light. In the same house where he took a lot of these photos, I made a floor rubbing which produced a collage of contorted faces. Are these just incidences of pareidolia, or is some other mechanism at play? This was an old plantation house which was said to be haunted, and I and another friend did see some odd things there. I don’t know if those things could’ve been recorded in any way. I think the pitfall in the “paranormal” viewpoint is it’s insistence on our technology’s ability to detect something, which is then used to support the viewer’s ideas. Thinking of these occurrences as “recordings” might be the wrong way to look at them. A misapplied frame of reference. What if the truth is much weirder than that?
Voices can be heard on registro de piedra, most of which I put there. At times it seems that voices I did not put there are heard. I believe this to be a case of audio pareidolia, brought about by the similarity in timbre and rhythm of the sounds to human speech. The layering of these sounds seems to have amplified the effect, conjuring up conversations we can’t quite hear, in a language we do not understand. I find it extremely funny that these are exactly the kind of sounds I had thought about as I began working on this project. In retrospect, not all that surprising though. I’m reasonably sure that I haven’t recorded any ghost voices here. What we’ve got here is a rough-hewn representation of the idea that it might be possible." - Jeph Jerman
