The Last Transmission
Within the dim confines of Gallery Seven, visitors confront an unsettling installation that shatters the conventional limits of photography. Six towering screens, arranged hexagonally, exhibit fragmented images oscillating between static distortion and crystalline sharpness—each frame a desperate transmission from impossible distances.
This work marks a bold departure from traditional documentary forms, embracing experimental techniques that dissolve the boundaries of reality itself. Each screen breathes with an eerie glow, revealing photographs seemingly captured from another realm: deserted military outposts, silent communication arrays, and landscapes unmoored from any earthly geography.
The installation recounts the final days of Corporal Matthias Jourdain, communications specialist at Remote Observation Post Seventeen amid an unrecorded military operation. Tasked with maintaining contact while isolated in a zone plagued by strange electromagnetic phenomena, Jourdain’s situation deteriorated as supplies ceased and time fractured around him.
Over ensuing weeks, his equipment began receiving transmissions originating from his own location—but sent hours before he dispatched them. The photographs chart his dawning horror as temporal instability coils tightly about the outpost. Shadows detach from their sources; shattered devices hum with life; messages arrive preemptively—all stamped with timestamps defying linear progression.
By day six, Jourdain’s camera captured impossible geometries encasing the post. Dominating the central screen is his final transmission: a recursive image showing himself photographing this very picture—a visual echo spiraling infinitely into itself—conveying consciousness caught between moments.
"It photographs the unphotographable—time's wounds made visible." Dr. Cordelia Thorne, Temporal Phenomenologist
His breaking point came with discovery of his own decomposing corpse within the bunker. Yet still he photographed and transmitted—an agonizing awareness birthed by temporal distortions sustaining him beyond death. The closing sequence chronicles frantic flight through morphing landscapes where every step alters space and time.
Though Jourdain appears to break free from this anomaly at last, whether to death or some other existence remains hauntingly unresolved.
Acquired by Dr. Helena Rask-Andersen following artist Isadora Vex’s enigmatic disappearance during her Copenhagen exhibition, this piece entered Ravensfield’s collection bearing only empty frames alongside a lone note: “The coordinates were correct.”
Viewers frequently report disquieting temporal dislocations—arriving late despite punctuality or losing hours altogether while before these screens. In piercing through reality’s fabric, this installation transcends photography itself, challenging perception and inviting reflection on experiences beyond documentation’s grasp.
