about the work

This Dream, This Frequency, 2006-08
Mary Walling Blackburn contacted American soldiers stationed in Iraq via MySpace and asked them to send her descriptions of their dreams. She then recorded an actor reading these brief texts interspersed with fragments of recorded dreams from ancient clay tablets from Mesopotamia. This Dream, This Frequency uses micro–radio transmitters to send the recordings out into different locations in San Francisco. Walkers or drivers tune in to the station and listen to the dream until they move out of range. Images from the dreaming minds of soldiers coalesce with those recorded thousands of years before in the same location, and the resulting text is fed into the electromagnetic spectrum, and apprehended on San Francisco’s sidewalks and streets.

about Mary Walling Blackburn

Mary Walling Blackburn was born in Orange, California. She currently lives next to a human waste tank in Brooklyn, New York. It is said that the tank is slated for a renovation and will potentially be transformed into a community swimming pool.

Her writing has been published in Aperture, Brooklyn Rail, Cabinet Magazine, CTHEORY, lastperformance.org, loudpaper (architectural discourse) and Women and Performance. Her new critique of John Beech’s prints can be found on the web at 30×30cmproject.

In New York, she has exhibited at Smack Mellon Gallery, TGN, the Winter Palace and HEREarts and was awarded a Bessie for performance installation and new media 2001/2002. In Chicago, she has shown work at Links Hall, Chicago Cultural Center, Roots and Culture, and Gallery 400. Southern Exposure (San Francisco) will install “This Dream; This Frequency” in May; pirate radios will stud the neighborhood, broadcasting the nocturnal dreams of US soldiers stationed in Iraq and mixed with Mesopotamian dreams found on ancient clay tablets.

This summer she will teach “The Taxonomy of Resurrection” at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she has also taught “Dropping Out: The Aesthetics of Disappearance”, and “Visualizing Aggression: Documenting America at War.” She was previously faculty at NYU, and has taught at SUNY-Purchase, Ox-Bow, and Southern Utah University Archeological Field School.

For more information, please visit welcomedoubleagent.wordpress.com.