Spectres of the Spectrum

Craig Baldwin is a film-maker who really does deserve the lables wayward and radical for a change. In his work, the dominant boundaries between art and commerce, between image production in the public and private sector, between politics and aesthetics disappear. He uses a broad range of images: photos, documentary archive footage, features, scientific films, videos and animation. Spectres of the Spectrum, S.O.S. for short, is set in the year 2007 in a crater outside Las Vegas caused by a nuclear explosion. BooBoo, a young woman with telepathic powers, travels back in time with the aid of a solar eclipse to save the earth from a threatening electro-magnetic ‘pulse’. She uses a secret message that her grandmother left in the airwaves. Her father Yogi meanwhile contacts other technological outlaws with a revolutionary fervour. Their aim is to break corporate control, the power of government and multinationals in the middle of the previous century, in other words, the ‘New Electro-magnetic Order’. With elliptic cutting of fiction and archive material, television, video and interviews, Baldwin sketches no less than an alternative history of the twentieth century. He calls his own film, on which he worked for five years, an ‘energized, activist science-fantasy collage-allegory on autonomous resistance to the globalization of the telecommunications industry’.