Interdimensional Broadcasting
Sonic Portals and Ancestral Knowledge
By
Zoë Grace-Anne Laycock
BFA, Emily Carr University of Art + Design, 2022

A THESIS SUPPORT PAPER SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF
THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF
MASTER OF FINE ARTS
EMILY CARR UNIVERSITY OF ART + DESIGN
2024

© Zoë Grace-Anne Laycock, 2024

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fig. 1 Zoë Laycock. Sonic Portals: QTW. 2023. Video still from ritual performance.

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Abstract
This thesis support document addresses the iterative installation series Sonic Portals that
uses time-based media to explore intergenerational knowledge transmission.
Sonic Portals: QRV (2024) is a temporary structure that uses carefully considered
materials – felted wool, wood, structural lashing techniques and textile layering, it is framed by
two larger sculptural entities constructed of felled branches and beeswax dipped cedar boughs.
Within the structure is a multichannel sound installation that gathers and synthesizes recorded
media from haunted and energetically charged environments. Through processes of editing,
distortion, looping, and temporal manipulation the installation invites the listener to engage with
the unseen and the Beyond.
Informed by Indigenous knowledge and lived experience, Sonic Portals investigates
interdimensional memory, material practice as haunting, and the non-linear potentials of timebased media. It discusses an artistic methodology that shifts language around media production
towards acts of gathering, acknowledgement, and spiritual reciprocity. This thesis project builds
places for interconnection and haunting as decolonial practice within colonial institutions.

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Table Of Contents
Abstract ........................................................................................................................................... 3
Table Of Contents ........................................................................................................................... 4
List Of Figures ................................................................................................................................ 5
Acknowledgements ......................................................................................................................... 6
On Citational Practice & Footnotes ................................................................................................ 8
Introduction ................................................................................................................................... 10
I dance with them. (A positionality) .............................................................................................. 14
Broadcast # 1 - Sonic Portals: QRV (2024). ................................................................................. 17
Incoming/Outgoing Transmissions: Artistic Method .................................................................... 26
Cosmic Feedback .................................................................................................................. 26
Interdimensional Broadcasting ............................................................................................. 28
Frequency Haunting ............................................................................................................. 29
Applied Frequency Haunting: Key Concepts ............................................................................... 31
Oscillating Simultaneous Time: Indaanikoobijigan. Those you may see with me ................... 31
Blood Memory .......................................................................................................................... 33
Liminal Place-Based: Here I am. Here They are. We are always in-between. ......................... 35
Broadcast #2 - Sonic Portals: ARQ. Radio Check. (2023). .......................................................... 39
Conclusion .................................................................................................................................... 46
Post-Production. (A reflection) ..................................................................................................... 48
Works Cited................................................................................................................................... 52
Works Consulted ........................................................................................................................... 53

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List Of Figures
1

Zoë Laycock. Sonic Portals: QTW. 2023. Video still from ritual performance.

2

Pictured Zoë Laycock. Family photo circa 2002.

3

Entity sculptures viewed from inside the structure.

4

Zoë Laycock. Sonic Portals. QRV. 2024. Install documentation.

5

Zoë Laycock. Sonic Portals. QRV. 2024. Construction in progress.

6

Zoë Laycock. Sonic Portals. QRV. 2024. Construction in progress.

7

Zoë Laycock. Sonic Portals: QRV. 2024. Interior detail, felted wool.

8

Zoë Laycock. Sonic Portals: QRV. 2024. Cedar boughs dipped in beeswax, process detail.

9

Zoë Laycock. Sonic Portals: QRV. 2024. Paracord tension, frame construction process detail.

10 Zoë Laycock. Twilight, August 15, 2022. Three Sisters Mountains, Canmore AB.
11 Zoë Laycock. Sonic Portals: QRV. 2024. Thesis exhibition installation view.
12 Zoë Laycock field audio recording on the banks of the Rio Grande outside of Taos, NM. August
2023. Photo by artists’ partner and unofficial assistant Jesse Goodman.
13 Field research photo from audio gathering site. Banks of the Rio Grande outside of Taos, NM. Photo
by Zoë Laycock. August 2023.
14 Zoë Laycock. Field media gathering near Skwlax te Secwepemculecw (North Shuswap BC.) after a
devastating wildfire season. 2023.
15 Zoë Laycock. Sonic Portals: ARQ. Radio Check. 2023. Installation detail.
16 Zoë Laycock. Sonic Portals: ARQ. Radio Check. 2023. Installation documentation.
17 Actor Max Schreck as Nosferatu. Nosferatu. 1922. Film still.
18 Zoë Laycock. Elk Hand Drum made by artist and used in audio composition (2023).
19 Zoë Laycock. Sonic Portals: QRV. 2024.
20 Zoë Laycock. Sonic Portals: QRV. 2024. Interior Detail.
21 Zoë Laycock. Sonic Portals: QRV. Offering alter installation detail.

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Acknowledgements
I want to thank deeply so many that made this endeavor possible and in no particular order.
My family, mom and dad, Lori-Anne Houle Laycock and Mark Laycock, for your unwavering
support. My little brother Joel Laycock and older sister, Jennifer Houle-Famakinde. Thank you
Yayam, Thelma Houle, for keeping me grounded and always giving me something to look
forward to (even if it’s our next bingo date). Thank you to my partner, Jesse Goodman for your
support, for watching me watch hours of Ghost Adventures, accompanying me as an excellent
assistant on our own Haunted Train Tour 2023, for our precious cabin time and all the worldly
travels to come.

I acknowledge my grandparents who have passed, Grandpa Teddy Boy, Granddad John, and my
Nan, May Laycock, thank you for looking out for me from the other side. I say Kitchi Miigwech
all my ancestors, and every one of their choices that have led me to this moment in time.

Kitchi Miigwech to TJ Houle, for being wildly supportive, for front stoop hangs filled with ghost
stories, consoling cries, and laying down some wisdom, but mostly laughter and keeping it real.

Moving away from my home city to complete this program, I want to thank Connie Watts for
making me feel like I belonged here immediately, and for so volunteering me for so many
amazing opportunities, including alongside Laura Kozak. Thank you, Laura, for showing me
unconditional kindness, understanding, and reminding me to slow down.

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Mimi Gellman, and Randy Cutler, both for your expectations of excellence and willingness to
push my practice. Sara Osenton, Heather Fitzgerald, Sandy Ewart in the Writing Centre and
Jacqueline Turner for countless conversations, flexibility, support beyond the scope of writing, I
am grateful for the experiences and opportunities our relationships have granted.

I could not have done this work without the support and guidance of my supervisor Peter
Bussigel. Kitchi Miigwech for trusting my process, and not only buying in to, but understanding
(and enabling) the w e i r d. Thank you for having my back.

Thank you to those involved with The Health Design Lab, Soft Shop, the DOC, the TARP Lab,
the Libby Leshgold, AGP homies, technicians, staff and faculty, Karen Jeffries of the Dauphine
House, and so many others I have crossed paths with and have learned from over the past few
years, there are many of you.

Finally, the MFA 2024 Full Residency Cohort: Geoffrey Lok-Fak Cheung, Emily De Boer,
Caitlin ffrench (and Arlin), Faria Firoz, Aiden Kirkengaard, Leah Koutroumanos, Kai Liu,
Xiaoyin Luo, Paul McDonnell, Kevin Orlosky, and Mawenzhu Abbi Shi.
Each of you have made a tremendous impact, and are so incredibly talented, sassy,
compassionate, fiery, hilarious, attentive, and overall phenomenal. I truly could not imagine
more of a dream team, and I am honoured to have shared my time with you all.

And to the spirit world, and the land I continue to build relationship with,
Kitchi Miigwech.

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On Citational Practice & Footnotes
This thesis support document is only a small glimpse into my practice, describing aspects
of the deep-rooted and interconnected methodological standards I practice; however, I am also
enacting a refusal. I hold cultural and spiritual knowledge sacred, through oral sharing’s from my
family and community over lifetimes. I am refusing to engage that knowledge in the current
institutional standard of citation, in turn this refusal allows oral knowledge to continue to be
alive. I actively refuse the institutionalizing and staticizing of traditional knowledge that occurs
when it is written down and housed within a colonial institution.
In this way, I continue to enact, to uphold, and to live Indigenous methodologies, I am
honoured to share knowledge I hold through acknowledging my traditional protocols,
conversation, and through acts of reciprocity. I am honoured to allow traditional knowledge to
live within the artwork, to exist ephemerally, and to communicate through experience.
Footnotes throughout this document are used to offer additional understanding to
concepts that I have named, to translations of words and to terms that I am using in ways that
vary from the original or common contexts. They also contain references to memories, dreams,
and other anecdotal content.
There are Works Cited and Works Consulted pages at the end of this document to find
formal MLA 9th citations.

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Shadows dance between realms
while spectres hold somewhere between time and space.
Long forgotten frequencies are reheard, remembered in my blood as the steady rhythm of life
cycles through the body and beyond
I can feel them, waiting, watching, guarding, guiding
I hear them, through running rivers, crashing waves, whispers in the wind, drones from the fog.
I rarely see them waking, aside from unsure glances, peripherals,
faces in the mountains I’ve known my whole life
In the dream realm they are broad, proud, revealed
Immense.
For what is reality when –

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Introduction

“There are things in this world, we will never fully understand…Understand” (Bagans).

Sonic Portals is an iterative series of immersive installations incorporating sound,
projection, textiles, light, shadow, physical and non-physical bodies. Initiating communication to
the Beyond1 builds capacity for connection that surpasses mainstream understandings of
knowledge acquisition and materialistic impressions of reality. This work challenges academia
and colonial institutional knowledge supremacy by engaging with alternative modes of
knowledge transmission and possessing space within a colonial institution. I establish conditions
for the viewer to become an Experiencer,2 by manipulating perception of place and time through
immersive multimedia installation. Throughout this document I consider and give name to
phenomena I experience and engage with to create the thesis project.
Frequency Haunting describes an understanding of energy transmission to process
relational experiences with the way the energetic residues materialize in the thesis project.

I use the Beyond as an umbrella term to reference the spirit world, spectral echelon, extraterrestrial possibilities,
ghosts, astral planes, the intimate and extended unknown as a prospect outside of mainstream, colonial, euro-western
modes of knowledge and understanding.
1

2

I use the term Experiencer intentionally shifting from the term viewer. It is aligned with the Unidentified Aerial
Phenomenon (UAP commonly understood as UFO) Experiencer communities. As interdimensional portals, my
installations enact the possibility to experience, to be within and apart of the work, to strengthen the understanding
of interconnectedness and reject the veil boundaries implied by the term Viewer. Experiencer allows for reception to
the artwork surpassing the visual framework, inclusive of feeling, hearing, movement, scent, and temperature.

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Frequency Haunting gives name to intuition that arises by looking backwards in linear time,
describing haunting as a fluid perception across multiple spectrums. This term is inclusive of
sound holding hauntings, hauntings of the body and embodied memory, and how spirits of place
can shift and interact. Frequency Haunting allows the feeling of the haunt to exist as an active
state of being, without the necessity to solve, but to feel comfort in not knowing. Frequency
Haunting does not imply a resolved understanding but is an active query outside of asking-toanswer.
Through framing the artistic method as a cyclical process of input and output, I describe
each respectively with the terms: Cosmic Feedback and Interdimensional Broadcasting. By
oscillating between these processes, the thesis project centers possession 3 of place and
accompanying outgoing transmissions to both Experiencer and unseen entities of place.
Cosmic Feedback is a process of reflection and consideration of past and future ancestors.
It relies on deep understandings of reciprocity and ancestral Indigenous knowledge of cyclical
time. This holistic reciprocity is a continuous looping of feedback from entities and material
technologies of the past, present and future. Continuous looping, and feedback is reflected in the
Sonic Portals installations through reflection, mirroring projections, and audio loops built upon
themselves.
Interdimensional Broadcasting is an invitation to the Experiencer, and the outgoing
transmission to the Beyond. It is informed by my personal relationships of reciprocity -- Cosmic
Feedback -- the result of simultaneous lifelong participation in ceremony, and engagement with

3

Possession is used by ethnographic filmmaker and scholar David MacDougall in his book, The Corporeal Image:
Film, Ethnography, and the Senses, to refer to the effectiveness of blurring the boundary between viewer, filmmaker,
and film – as the efficiency of captivating corporeal knowledge through the viewing and making of films. I use this
term in reference to occupy and hold space with installation as a spiritual and metaphysical practice as well.

12
paranormal and liminal subcultures. Interdimensional Broadcasting is also influenced by my
closer familial ties to music, television, and radio broadcasting traditions. Frequency Haunting,
Cosmic Feedback and Interdimensional Broadcasting are described in more depth in the Artistic
Method section.
Field research for Sonic Portals oscillates between ethical gathering of media travelling
across Turtle Island by train and terrestrial modes of transportation strengthening my relationship
to the spirits of the land. My current and ancestral relationships to Turtle Island are upheld
though the transmission of traditional ceremony while on site, both where I gather 4 media and
where I build the installations. The thesis project accesses Indigenous place-based methodologies
as a consideration of the physical, and with each act of ceremony, tending the spiritual ecology of
place as well. Simultaneously, I develop the technical skills required to produce traditional
broadcast media, while tuning in to alternative modes of communication.5
The final thesis iteration, Sonic Portals: QRV (2024) uses audio as a tool for ephemeral,
liminal place building. A temporary modular structure installation created through contemporary
and traditional building techniques houses the immersive sound composition. Sonic media, or
sound, bridges the gap between the seen and the unseen, the real and unreal. The nature of
temporal media, like sound, activates place as a conduit for Voluntarily Suspended Autonomy.6
Using sound as a vehicle to transport transmissions through frequencies, Sonic Portals: QRV

I choose the term gathering in opposition to the term “capturing”, as I consider the collection of these frequencies
and media with the same reverence as I would if harvesting any other medicine or natural materials from the land
and spirits.
4

Clairvoyance, rituals, psychic, dreams, ancient ciphers, beyond human language, ancestral consultation, blood
memory, out of body remembering’s, mediumship, radio Q codes, vibrational frequencies.
5

I introduce Voluntarily Suspended Autonomy as a term to reference committing to experience the full time of
temporal media, as a parallel to mediumship, trance, possession to access information or connection. This VSA
parallels the desire to ride the train, potentially violent, dangerous droning transportation, the voluntary suspended
autonomy to seek connection to place. I describe in deeper context in the Post-Production: A Reflection section.
6

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(2024) invites the Experiencer beyond banal visual reality, to engage with a place for the
metaphysical; extending an invitation to the Beyond. My research through Sonic Portals asks the
following: How can invitation and acknowledgement frame an experience? How might
connection to place allow for interdimensional transmissions? How might we support alternative
modes of time within institutional spaces?

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I dance with them. (A positionality)
I am privileged to be raised with a strong connection to Saulteaux/Métis culture. As a part
of the urban Indigenous community, I continue a lifelong practice of ceremony. Due to the nature
of my family’s Indigenous run non-profit organization, my worldview has been impacted by
strong values for community, cultural accessibility, decolonial modes of governance, and
honouring traditional protocols. I am gifted and grateful to have had strong relationships to each
of my grandparents well into my teen years, three of whom have since passed. Although my
homebase was Calgary, Alberta. I spent much of my childhood in the bush, on the land, in the
lakes, rivers, foothills, in the shadows of the Rocky Mountains, and on the road. It was not
uncommon for impromptu family road trips, pilgrimages with purpose – Pipestone Minnesota,
Devil’s Tower Wyoming, through familial communities in southern Manitoba and beyond. These
trips would continue to maintain a stronghold, connecting me with family, with culture, with the
ancestral land.
I investigate how installation, sound, projection, and performance can enhance or critique
the relationships I maintain with ancestors, the land, and spirits, both human and beyond-human.
The thesis project is informed by my unique and intimate relationship to music, audio production
and broadcasting. Both my parents had worked in television broadcasting. My dad, all through
my childhood and up until recent years, worked as a free-lance camera man, filming hockey
games, the Calgary Stampede Rodeo, multiple winter Olympics and other sporting events. 7 I was
often brought along, behind the scenes of these large media broadcasting productions. Our home
always had access to still and video cameras, microphones, amps, and instruments.

7

He also taught broadcasting at the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology; I would visit the campus with him as a
child.

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fig. 2 Pictured Zoë Laycock. Family photo circa 2002.8

My mom is also a singer songwriter, and as a child many of my weekends in the city were
spent listening to the sound of muffled recording sessions in the basement. Prior to their time in
tele-broadcasting and to my arrival, my parents toured with a band, my mom the lead vocalist,
my dad, the band’s sound man. Writing, recording, and producing music has always been a part
of my life. The door to my childhood room in their basement, opens to a fully equipped
recording studio to this day. My patrilineal Granddad was a ham radio enthusiast, raising my
father while mastering radio frequencies and communications. My matrilineal Grandpa Teddy
Boy was a world-renowned old-time Métis fiddle player, traveling the world and sharing his love

This photo was taken in Kananaskis Country, AB, under the watch of Mount Yamnuska. This is the site of many
sweat lodges, my parents’ tipi where we would spend weekends ¾ seasons, and many other familial and closed
community ceremonies. My family and I would scatter my Grandpa Teddy Boys ashes here in 2021.
8

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for music, and the understanding that those musical frequencies hold knowledge and culture
throughout the ages. My understanding of the transmission of knowledge across dimensions,
through ages of technical and sonic media has a deep-rooted foundation in lifelong learning as
well as familial embodied memory, or blood memory (Mithlo).
Through the thesis project I honour my individual contemporary cultural identity living
through experiences as a fringe dweller. My body often feels incongruous in space. Being too
visibly white for acceptance by Indigenous peers, while too culturally Indigenous to be accepted
by white peers, acceptance in outlier circles was always a certainty. I connected with nerd and
heavy metal culture, I believe(d) in space aliens, and ghosts, and sea monsters, and my cultural
upbringing doesn’t deny the potential for those beliefs. I believe in the Little People, Sa’be,9 Star
People and Thunderbirds. The borderlines of what I choose to share is isolating, it is the balance
of keeping my spirit safe, while also my community’s spirituality safe. As a cis-hetero-passing
two-spirit fem, and working in community frontline for many years, has made my boundaries
strong; the state of my own being is rarely disclosed out of self-preservation.
Through the multitude of community and facets of being, I continue wayfinding,
navigating a simultaneous reveal and un-reveal exploring the fluidity between spaces of
invisibility and presences.

Activating the spaces in between the seen and the unseen.

9

Sa’be is the Anishinaabe word for the Sasquatch spirit.

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Broadcast # 1 - Sonic Portals: QRV (2024).
The thesis project final installation is a 22-minute quadrophonic, immersive sound
composition, housed within an octagonal lodge structure, with entity sculptures hanging 12-15
feet above as portal
guardians, acting as
transmission antennae.
The tent structure
is 8’ in diameter and
roughly 6’ tall. The frame
is constructed from CNC
router cut plywood ribs,
lumber, ethically
gathered alder trees,
leather, with steel
brackets and hardware.
The lodges outer skin is
muslin fabric, with
linocut print portholes
that reference the thirteen
fig. 3 Entity sculptures viewed from inside the structure.

moon cycles, the inner
skin is natural dark grey hand felted sheep’s wool. The structure engages paracord and sinew in
methods of hand-lashing the solid components creating a self-supporting tension.

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The entity sculptures are constructed of felled branches, lashed sinew, and ritually
gathered cedar boughs encased in beeswax, draped from either shoulder fastened with cotton &
linen cording. They guard and guide signals to the Eastern facing doorway of the structure from
the Eastern Doorway10 of the spirit world.

fig. 4 Zoë Laycock. Sonic Portals. QRV. 2024. Install documentation.

The Eastern Doorway is the transition from the spirit world into the physical world, it is synonymous with
awakening, birth, and springtime. Waabinong in Anishinaabemowin. The thesis project will be installed on the
spring equinox 2024, honouring yet another layer of this cosmic connection and ancient practice.
10

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Each element of this artwork is deeply considered in both technical logic of the material,
and in the relational or spiritual connection. The plywood ribs are stained with iron water that
was gifted to me from
a dear friend. Iron is
an ancient method of
spiritual protection in
many cultures,
infusing it into the
frame of the structure
aids in the spiritual
integrity of the portal.
The heavy
foundational steel
fig. 5 Zoë Laycock. Sonic Portals. QRV. 2024. Construction in progress.

brackets were a gift

from another dear person, one who’s support without I would not have been able to have as many
successes I am privileged to hold.
Unbleached 100% cotton, or
muslin of the outer skin, is a physically
lighter version of the material used for
tipis, it also references the heavy canvas
layers that are used to construct a sweat
lodge for ceremony.

fig. 6 Zoë Laycock. Sonic Portals. QRV. 2024. Frame construction detail.

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Wool of the inner skin was chosen due to the porous fibre’s impeccable acoustic
dampening ability.

fig. 7 Zoë Laycock. Sonic Portals: QRV. 2024. Interior detail, felted wool.

Shortly after making the decision to use wool, I discovered that my generationally
estranged great-grandfather worked as a wool comber in England for years after presumed dead
by his son and wife, my Granddad, and his mother. This discovery speaks as more than
coincidence and is an example of what I consider as Frequency Haunting. As an intuitive affinity
to use wool, this frequency haunting granted me access to an ancestor and his embodied
experience working with that material. Our hands shared working the same textures and motions,
only separated by nearly a century of linear time.11

The 1939 England and Wales Register documents my Great Grandfather, John W. Laycock, occupation as “wool
comber.”
11

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Cedar boughs are another
layer of protection against
negative energy transmissions. I
encase them in beeswax, outside
of tradition, but to honour a
great-grandfather from another
lineage, who kept bees in
Saskatchewan. They are
entwined with cotton and linen
cord, another gift from a friend.
fig. 8 Zoë Laycock. Sonic Portals: QRV. 2024. Cedar boughs dipped in beeswax,
process detail.

Paracord links to lineages of military
service; two of my grandparents’ rest in the Field
of Honour in Canmore, AB. Days as a child spent
in the shadows of the Rocky Mountains with my
dad often concluded at the Exshaw Royal
Canadian Legion, Heart Mountain Branch #179.12
Sounds that existed immemorial there, of the wind
gusting through the valleys of the Rocky
Mountains, to the gentle yet thundering rolls of
fig. 9 Zoë Laycock. Sonic Portals: QRV. 2024. Paracord
tension, frame construction process detail.

waterfalls and river rapids echo in my memories.

I once won the meat draw here in August 2016 just before a town reunion party. However, I was not present to
pick up the prized butchery provisions on the day of the draw. It was still nice to see my name written in chalk, on
the hanging board over the bar.
12

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fig. 10 Zoë Laycock. Twilight, August 15, 2022. Three Sisters Mountains13, Canmore AB. Digital photo from out the back window
of Dad's truck, Highway #1.

The sounds that exist in my lifetime, whirring and whistling of air passing outside of a
fast-moving vehicle driving down the highway, is a non-silence that still lulls me as a passenger,
head resting on a cold window.
From this moment recorded:
To miss a mountain
It’s funny to miss a mountain, to miss a mountain you’ve barely seen for over a year.
To miss a mountain that I had such a deep relationship with, a familiarity.
They are as much my sisters as they are each other’s.
To be overcome with emotion, with grief and joy like you would be in a bittersweet reunion.
To miss a mountain.
To miss the air around it, to know their silhouette amongst the darkening sky, to know where the stars align with
peaks - ancient beyond my time, but for all of my time.
To grow in their shadow and learn while they wait, while they wait for me to leave and return.
I’m surprised to love a mountain, to feel it, to be overwhelmed
A strange thing to love a mountain
to really know and love a mountain
Is it simply sublime natures beauty that wells salty prisms down my cheeks?
It’s more, it’s more that my face knows their face.
Their faces know mine.
My heart in sync with it, time universally forever
It’s weird to miss a mountain, more than you miss home.
13

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Sound holds immense power in transporting an Experiencer beyond the visual and
physical perception of place. Lisa Cooke Ravensbergen is a multi-disciplinary artist and writer of
Ojibwe/Swampy Cree and English/Irish descent. Ravensbergen’s, immersive sound
installation, The Seventh Fire (2023) successfully parallels the strategy of using ceremony as
inspiration while distorting from actual ceremony, as an intentional broadened access point for
Experiencers. The Seventh Fire (2023) is a 4DSound immersive work produced specifically for
Lobe Studios.14 The place was ephemeral, and Ravensbergen exercised her ability to engage the
Experiencer through sound and with the invitation to be comfortable – to involve the body by
sitting, laying down, offering blankets, cushions, cedar tea, and nourishment.
The Seventh Fire commanded the space, and more importantly– the time, with an 85minute running time for the immersive audio composition. Drawing from this presentation of
media the thesis project, Sonic Portals: QRV also introduces the term/concept Voluntarily
Suspension of Autonomy. Voluntarily Suspended Autonomy is enacted through the surrender of
one’s body to time, to give full attention to stories and to be immersed somewhere beyond the
physical. The Seventh Fire, sonically leads through traditional Anishinaabe storylines, sitting
with aunties and Koko’s around the kitchen table laughing, to be transported through storms and
carried by thunderbird spirits, and welcomed back to hear the warm crackling of a sacred fire.
The Seventh Fire framed an experience as a ritual. Entering the studio visitors were asked
to remove their shoes and to have a cup of cedar tea. Engagement was guided, it was not an
artwork to be wandered upon, but a clear commitment of time and space. This clear introduction
to the work developed a framework for understanding that the Experiencer could prepare for
when entering the space. It reiterates care for protocol and for ritual not only in the audio but as a

A dedicated spatial sound studio in so-called Vancouver, British Columbia equipped with fully surrounding
speakers, in the ceiling, floor, and walls, completed with vibroacoustic floor tiles.
14

24
continuity for Indigenous ways of knowing and moving through time, space, story, and land
base.
This iteration, Sonic Portals: QRV has a deliberate shift in focus, from video projection
and the visual experience to an audio based embodied experience. To focus more intently on
sound as an atypical transmission of knowledge allows for tuning in to the transportive nature
that sound can evoke. Through an immersive sonic composition, the Experiencers reference to
specific place is blurred and distorted. The omission of visual media sets intention for the
possibility of a simultaneously embodied, and out of body experience. Without distraction of
visual projections, the Experiencer is invited to be attentive to subtleties in the audio.

The sound composition honours the Beyond in being the perceived unseen.

25

fig. 11 Zoë Laycock. Sonic Portals: QRV. 2024. Thesis exhibition installation view.

26

Incoming/Outgoing Transmissions: Artistic Method
Cosmic Feedback is the process of acknowledging the Beyond through interconnection
between myself, my ancestors, the land, and the spirit worlds, while using media as a point of
access to receive, consider, and make visible and audible. The process oscillates between the
seen and the unseen.
I maintain and nourish the spiritual ecology of each place by always beginning with
ceremony while on the land or physically travelling to haunted, energy and spiritual epicentres to
gather the media. It is important to introduce myself to seen and unseen beings, by speaking out
loud to each place. Spoken introduction is followed by an offering and acknowledgement, and
asking permission to gather media, audio, or video, as I would with any other traditional
medicine or material gathering from the land.
Gathering the visual and audio media is
entwined with protocol and ceremony, often
unseen in the finished outcome of the work, the
rituals are a necessary action informed by my
own cultural and spiritual upbringing. My mother
passed down to me the teachings and practice of
offering, asking permission, taking only what is
needed, and giving thanks. It can be referenced
in contemporary academic circles as The

fig. 12 Zoë Laycock field audio recording on the banks of
the Rio Grande outside of Taos, NM. August 2023. Photo
taken by artists’ partner and unofficial assistant Jesse
Goodman.

27
Honourable Harvest.15
Through ceremony I open
myself as a conduit to the
alternative modes of
communication necessary to
ensure spiritual safety for
feedback to come. The
materials I use are often
chosen intuitively,16 but their
spiritual implications are
also considered.

fig. 13 Field research photo from audio gathering site. Banks of the Rio Grande
outside of Taos, NM. Photo by Zoë Laycock. August 2023. Note: This hidden
memorial site was revealed to me after acknowledgement, offering and giving thanks.

My artwork is created by bridging contemporary and traditional technologies. Physical
materials alongside media reference the interdimensional,17 by considering the visual, auditory,
smell and tactile elements of each material. Simultaneities of the contemporary and traditional
technologies I use, emerge in materials in many ways: Using digital sound production to loop the
beat of a traditional handmade drum, or a CNC (Computer Numerical Controlled) Machine

I firmly believe that The Honourable Harvest is cultural knowledge and cannot be accredited to a single theorist,
however the term has been recently more broadly understood through Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass.
15

I reject the notion that intuition is only of the individual as a methodology. Individual Intuition is a selfish
rejection of the knowledge and guidance of the ancestors and entities that influence the work. My intuition is guided
through ancient ancestral connections. It reflects the notion of haunted frequencies that live within lineages.
16

17

Oxford English Dictionary defines as: Existing in or moving between different dimensions of space or time. Also:
designating something that enables movement between different dimensions of space or time. Originally and
chiefly Science Fiction. I include the engagement of multiple sensory experiences, sound, smell, temperature, and
feeling while describing immersive installation artworks.

28
Router to cut wooden frame components that are lashed together by hand, using tension to create
a temporary but stable structure akin to sweat lodge or tipi building.
Simultaneous cycles of practice-led, interdisciplinary research, and research through
performance iteration builds on reflexivity that synthesizes subsequent manifestations. Each
installation is dependent on the feedback from the last. Attending to feedback frequencies inform
shifts and experiments going forward, while honouring the time and knowledge of my ancestor’s
passed.
Interdimensional Broadcasting is a methodological product of Cosmic Feedback. Cosmic
Feedback honours my personal cyclical reciprocity with the Beyond, while Interdimensional
Broadcasting is the outgoing transmission that invites human Experiencers into my relationship
with the Beyond. Here, I use the term Broadcasting to refer to the transmission of information or
media by radio and television. The implication of broadcasting information is shared outwards to
an audience of many, an audience exists to broadcast to (Peters, J.). Interdimensional
Broadcasting acknowledges an audience beyond the boundaries of typical human-centred
viewership, with transmissions intended for alternate astral dimensions. As with most
conversation within the physical world, to continue to receive meaningful transmissions from the
Beyond, it is integral to extend transmissions as reciprocal communication.
Interdimensional Broadcasting is akin to using sonar technologies to delineate decolonial
practice and use an Indigenous lens to meaningfully possess space within the colonial institution.
My indigeneity is inherently relational, and so receiving transmission feedback from the
Experiencer is integral to shaping the way my practice is represented as a part of my community
and culture.

29
Multi-sensory observation and deep listening 18 (Brearley) inform theoretical and aesthetic
decisions -- slowness, careful consideration, and reflection are favoured over creating more and
more new experiences. In addition to spanning materialistic human-perceived reality and the
Beyond, Interdimensional Broadcasting invites the human Experiencers bodily senses to engage
with the outgoing broadcast transmissions, including but not limited to sight, sound, scent,
temperature, and extra sensory perception or ESP. Interdimensional Broadcasting is looping back
into multi-cyclical Cosmic Feedback.
Frequency Haunting is the framing of intuitive decision making based on the
understanding or belief in guidance from the Beyond. It describes how certain actions, aspects or
material choices arise again and again throughout lineages and familial histories, as well as
histories of place. I describe specific impulses as varying frequencies, and my work includes
attending to or intuitively tuning in to these frequencies. Frequency Haunting gives energy to the
residues of actions and choices of those who have come and passed, and those who have not yet
come to pass.
Each conceptual framework, Cosmic Feedback, Interdimensional Broadcasting and
Frequency Haunting motivate the technical decisions in my work. The layering of audio and
video, temporal distortions, and loops motivated by these ideas, bringing them into visual and
aural spaces. Implementing digital effects to sounds from nature, allows for comparison between
the tangible and intangible, that distortion builds space between what is initially recorded as
input, and the warped output. Ghosts of the original sounds linger throughout compositions and
ground the media to the timespace where it was collected.

Described by Australian Aboriginal communities Dadirri deep listening is a practice of immense understanding,
almost meditative act of listening beyond words to gain more holistic understandings of what is being
communicated. I use deep listening as an act of not only listening to Experiencer and peer feedback, but deep
listening to the installation space, to the entities, energies and vibrational frequencies that arise from the work.
18

30
My affinity to the Beyond and the spiritual is a frequency haunting, my affinity to radio
and atypical modes of communication is linked to past familial practices. Often, the impulse
comes first, and only through looking back is the haunting nature of the impulse revealed. There
is an implied responsibility to uphold and maintain the frequency haunting, it connects the past to
the future. Community connection is integral to thriving cultural connection, when cultural
knowledges are transmitted collectively, they remain present, and alive. Remaining open to
receive the transmissions can hold and heal, it can carry important knowledge across generations.

31

Applied Frequency Haunting: Key Concepts

Oscillating Simultaneous Time: Indaanikoobijigan. Those you may see with me.

Sonic Portals exhibits my understanding of remaining open to the simultaneous and
multiple realities of time through multiple layers of media. James Vukelich is an
Anishinaabe/Ojibwe language revivalist and cultural teacher. Vukelich describes in his 2023
book, The Seven Generations and the Seven Grandfather Teachings deep rooted understandings
of relationality is built into the Anishinaabe culture and worldview through Anishinaabe
language. As well as having published a book, he shared many language teachings through livestreaming and recorded video, active online since 2012, and gaining more popularity since 2018.
Before my Nimishoomis (grandfather) Lawrence “Teddy Boy” Houle passed away in
June 2020, my mother and I asked about the continuity in dialect and teachings Vukelich shares
with those of our own family and community. My Grandpa Teddy Boy vehemently confirmed
the teachings are congruent with our own,19 reinforcing that the language teachings from
Vukelich are rooted in “the old language”.
Anishinaabe language before shortenings and contemporary slang, “the old language”,
holds strong connection to knowledges before contact and pre-colonization. Approval of the
source of cultural knowledge from my Nimishoomis holds immense value by means of my own

I am Anishinaabe, Ojibway, Saulteaux. Informed by where my family is from, and recollections of familial
conversations. I use these terms interchangeably when referencing my own identity. Saulteaux is a term imposed on
us, it means people that hop. Ojibway means to pucker, in reference to the top of an Ojibway style of moccasin. It is
an overarching term, but it is used in colonial systems as names and descriptions of my family community ties and
political nations. Anishinaabe is the identifier my Grandpa Teddy Boy used later in life, as it is rooted in what we
called ourselves, before contact, in our own language.
19

32
cultural & spiritual integrity. Upstanding pointed nuances of identity and Anishinaabe culture
actively rejects assumptions of pan-Indigeneity.
Vukelich discusses how Anishinaabe Ojibwe root words are used and shifted between
phrases that emulate a holistic worldview and Indigenous understanding that we, being human,
flora, fauna, natural environments, and beyond human, are all relations, we are all immensely
interconnected. Language reveals specifically how The Seven Generations as a philosophy is
connected to an overarching Seven Grandfather Teachings, a set of sacred laws, outlining core
values of Indigenous culture, community, and spirituality.
The Seven Generations, in Anishinaabe Ojibway refers to: Self, Mother and Father,
Grandmother and Grandfather, and Great Grandparents. Indaanikoobijigan, the word referring 20
to great grandparents is the same as the word that expresses my Ancestor; even more compelling,
it is the same word as my great grandchild. Cognizance of cyclical interconnected time, and
importantly interconnected care, is built within the language itself, upheld in ancient words that
are thousands of years old.
Vukelich articulates these teachings which express cellular interconnection to our
ancestors across time and through lineages. I carry this teaching into my practice while
contending with time-based, immersive media. The layers and simultaneity of time allow for the
potential of knowledge to be transferred between ancestors and relatives (human and beyond
human). There is emphasis on the spoken word as the vibrational frequency that occurs when the
words are said aloud is an activation of the transmission of energy that surpasses linear time.
Outside of the confines of a physical body, by honouring tuning into that frequency
aloud, a remembering occurs through material practice, and engagement with place. Activating a

I use “referring” or “in reference to” because there is no way to fully, accurately translate the entirety and
immense understanding that is described through the Anishinaabe language into an English word.
20

33
specific time and place sonically allows for remembering through embodied memory and
through non-physical, atypical modes of communication.
My care for the protocol in conducting myself with the spirit realm is deeply informed by
the Seven Grandfather Teachings: Truth, Humility, Respect, Love, Bravery or Courage, Honesty,
and Wisdom/Intelligence. The teachings are ingrained alongside my lifelong practice of
ceremony while possessing spaces within the institution, introducing, and acknowledging spirit
within a vehicle that has past caused immense harm.
My desire to bind old worlds and new worlds is described through this deep embodied
memory of my culture and worldview, it is a part of my ancestral knowledge.
It is deep within my blood memory.

Blood Memory

Nancy Mithlo, a Chiricahua Apache curator, writer, and professor, discusses embodied
intergenerational knowledge as blood memory, in the 2011 article, Blood Memory and the Arts:
Indigenous Genealogies and Imagined Truths. Mithlo considers the intricacies of portraying
collective and individual experiences of Indigenous artists working with lens-based media by
examining works of Chippewa filmmaker Marcella Ernest, and Ho-Chunk photographer, Tom
Jones. Deepening the understanding of the term “Blood Memory” as both an embodied and
beyond embodied memory that links Indigenous people to the land, histories, and traumas
outside of a Western-Individualistic worldview. Mithlo applies concepts of embodied knowledge
from documentary filmmaker and theorist, David MacDougall, exploring how Indigenous lens-

34
based art enacts an embodied memory while balancing an understanding and inclusion of native
and non-native audiences through manipulation of the gaze, spectatorship, and possession
(MacDougall).
By considering the ways blood memory, as an Indigenous tool and encompassing trope,
can act as an unseen yet invaluable asset to Indigenous artwork, Mithlo describes how it
references beyond biological heritage into community memory, knowledges, and wisdom. Blood
memory brings Indigenous art beyond typical understandings of identity art.
The term, Blood Memory, honours a network of knowledges that may not be understood
by every viewer, but live within work for those privileged to specific cultural understanding.
When this text was published in 2011, Mithlo expressed concern for a lack of Indigenous
representation within institutional spaces. In 2024 there has been a significant shift towards
decolonization21 or at least, more mindful inclusion of Indigenous artists within institutional
contemporary arts spaces. However, the rampant mis-self-identification 22 of Indigenous people,
within academia and institutional spaces, has created tension, mistrust, and lateral violence.
There is a current, real-time appropriation of blood memory, of communal, ancestral, and
familial knowledges, intergenerational triumphs and traumas that create complicated nuances to
identity, and inclusion of spirit within artworks and spaces.
Mithlo emphasizes that audiences do not need to be able to decode Indigenous artwork
but there is a balance between intellectual access and what remains inaccessible. Although

Indigenization is another buzzword that institutions introduce as a framework towards diversity and inclusion. As
if there is a way to even “Indigenize” a longstanding harmful, colonial supremist system of education with centuries
of foundation in the active erasure of Indigenous peoples all over Mother Earth. Ever sick.
21

22

Contemporarily known as “Pretendian/ism”. I do not have the capacity to expand on this phenomenon within this
document, however it is multifaceted, and I encourage the reader to research further into how this actively dilutes
Indigenous culture and aids in the erasure and continued genocide of Indigenous people.

35
artworks may not look recognizably, or stereotypically Indigenous it does not retract from
enacting Indigenous lived corporeal knowledges.
Mithlo focusses on the inclusion of visible Indigenous bodies, familial relation, and blood
memory through the depiction of persons. The thesis projects place-based media gathering is
entwined, I consider the places I gather media from as my relations. Maintaining the relationship
to land-based media holds as much spirit and embodied knowledge as any human relative. I
explore the balance of spectatorship and the corporeal through Sonic Portals installations,
between the viewer and the viewed.
Balanced spectatorship undulating between granting access and refusal engages points of
connection to a variety of Experiencers, with information and codes as easter eggs within the
work for those who understand niche stories and knowledges.

Liminal Place-Based: Here I am. Here They are. We are always in-between.

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, writer, and artist,
considers a shift to land-based pedagogy in her 2014 article, Land as pedagogy: Nishnaabeg
intelligence and rebellious transformation. She emphasizes the importance and remembering that
occurs when engaging in land-based learning, that place and the living organisms of place offer
knowledge to be learned or re-learned. The extension of connection to place is described by
scholars Evelyn Peters and Carol Lafond in their 2013 article I Basically Mostly Stick with My
Own Kind through,

36
Reimagining and interacting with cities as sites of cultural connection and spiritual
practice, where we seek out and honour those pockets of visible “land” and also
remember and revitalize what lies under the asphalt, can bring healing and
(re)connection. (Peters & Lafond).
Building on the concepts of land-based and place-based learning, I challenge the boundaries of
the living and physical world and argue that liminal place-based stretches into the Beyond, the
unseen and the non-physical spiritual ecology of place.
Place-based, or Land-Based honour the site specificity of knowledge
transmission, sharing and collaborative communication.
Liminal, or Liminality is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “characterized by
being on a boundary or threshold, esp. by being transitional or intermediate between two states,
situations, etc.” I am using this term to describe the nature of the Beyond as site specifically
relational in between the physical and metaphysical world. Liminal considers the implications of
connection to the Beyond that lies outside of the physical perceived reality, Liminal Place Based
is a larger aperture for these connections on multiple frequencies of the seen and unseen
spectrums. It is a term that is inclusive of the physical place and the relationships that exist with
the otherworldly with site specificity. This term describes how entities aren’t necessarily all
around everywhere all the time, and how some places are haunted or energetically charged while
some aren’t.

37

fig. 14 Zoë Laycock. 2023. Field media gathering near Skwlax te Secwepemculecw (North Shuswap BC.) after a devastating
wildfire season.23

23

Burnt forest with blackened ghosts of trees not yet felled the haunting scent of embers linger.

38
There is an immensely diverse and site-specific spiritual ecology, or interdimensional
ecology to place. Peters & Lafond speak to understanding the “land beneath the asphalt”
however, sometimes is the walls, the floorboards, the doorways that hold onto the energy, to the
frequency transmissions. Sometimes it is my deceased Koko’s kitchen table that holds the
connection. Sometimes it is the tarot cards gifted to me from my father, when he found them in
his father’s apartment after he passed. It is tapping into the frequencies of connection, being open
to the transmissions wherever they may arise.
Liminal Place-Based is also to be conscious, mindful, and specific to here, where I am,
where you are, in this moment. To me each place, regardless of where or how it is used, holds
something – each place has a relationality to something, even if we do not fully understand.

39

Broadcast #2 - Sonic Portals: ARQ. Radio Check. (2023).
Sonic Portals: ARQ. Radio Check. (2023) is a liminal place-based immersive installation,
employing two short throw projectors, video, and audio components, and larger than human
scale entity sculptures constructed using a mix of natural and salvaged materials: cedar boughs,
felled sticks, sinew, cotton, and reclaimed industrial textile waste.

fig. 15 Zoë Laycock. Sonic Portals: ARQ. Radio Check. 2023 (Installation detail).

Sonic Portals: ARQ. Radio Check. uses physical materials and non-physical media to
create an immersive and space commanding installation. Room filling, parallel projections of
looping land-based video allow for the active and passive manipulation of light, darkness,
casting shadows, and reflection by the media, materials, and Experiencer. The video projections

40
portray movement, providing visual access points to place beyond the four walls of the room, an
ethereal representation that is aligned with experiential temporality. Images of rolling land bases
across Turtle Island, haunted and energetically charged places, engulf the Experiencer, the walls,
the entity sculptures, and ceiling, allowing for shadow and distorted perceptions based on the
movement and interaction within the installation space.
This installation is a conduit between the physical land, the spirits of the land, and the
projection as the apparition of the place to the Experiencer. The video is a document of my
introduction, acknowledgment, and recognition of and to the spirits of each place and between
the spirit worlds.

fig. 16 Zoë Laycock. Sonic Portals: ARQ. Radio Check. 2023 (Installation Documentation).

41

The video projected is in 4:3 aspect ratio that draws from the history of film making and
traditional tele-broadcasting. 4:3 directly references the connection between physical film cells,
and the physical processes of exposure to light and development, a transformation that binds an
ephemeral present moment to a physical object in time. Through the refusal of colour, using
black and white
creates a timeless
space, there is a
history of dreams,
and liminal spaces
portrayed in black
and white in
popular media,
spiritualism, and
occult aesthetic
traditions.

fig. 17 Actor Max Schreck as Nosferatu. 1922. Film still.

Drawing influence from German expressionist cinema, specifically Nosferatu: A
Symphony of Horrors (1922), The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), my use of black and white
references stories of the Beyond, the Other, the liminal and unknown (Malakaj).
Black and white transports the Experiencer without distraction of specificity. The
representation of colour on film is always distorted, it is an imitation and inaccurate from the true
immensity of colour and saturation found while being on the territory. Black and white gives
space from the physical land, it implies the ghost of the land, surrounding and projected upon the
Experiencer’s body as an apparition of place.

42
The parallel projections surround the Experiencer in between moments of stillness,
reflection, subtle rhythm, and moments of vast sublime movement through a human obstructed
natural world. The body that blocks the light from the projection, is further engulfed by it, to
have it pass through, to imagine the layers of connection of the Experiencer to the spectral places
passing on the walls of the installation space. Circled on all sides of the room with moving
images of land bases, upon entering the room the individual is in it — there is no sever between
Experiencer, entity, land, spirits, all are completely connected as all our relations 24 for the brief
time committed to the installation as an act of Voluntarily Suspended Autonomy.
I consider how speculative environments bring forward how to manipulate a space, to
bring the vast spirit of place into a setting for an ephemeral experience in a meaningful way. In a
December 2023 email exchange with artist, David Hoffos they write,
After I made them, I knew they were no longer mine- there was a lonely dreamer out
there that I was reaching out for, the perfect audience, an audience of one, one at a time,
searching in the dark. That's all I ever really wished for in my labours- that the story of
my work be somehow carried and remembered, whether it continued to physically exist
or not.
In reference to Hoffos 2011 iteration of Scenes from the House Dream, at the Illingworth Kerr
Gallery Calgary, AB. Hoffos’ six-year running series Scenes from the House Dream (2011) was
an immersive installation compiled of a variety of dioramas that employed miniature scaled
environments, reflections, and multi-channel video projection depicting domestic, internal, and

All Our Relations as a phrase encompassing the Indigenous core worldview of interconnectedness. All My
Relations is often spoken at the end of prayer, within ceremony and ritual as an acknowledgement to each integral
relationship one has to the universe. Mitakuye Oyasin in Saulteaux was taught to me, at a very young age, by my
mother to speak aloud to conclude ceremony or prayer.
24

43
external spaces. Scenes from the House Dream functioned as illusion-based site-specific
installations. Using video, mirrors, windows, mindful manipulation of light and darkness, and
plays on perspective, Hoffos commanded space.
Hoffos’ installation featured videos showing interior domestic spaces, views from inside
ensuite bathrooms to a bedroom, and exterior spaces. Viewing a front yard from the end of the
driveway through manicured trees and lawns, or the view of a school bus just past the tree line of
a forest. There were instances of seeing active spectral miniatures of yourself, and other moving
human figures through small viewing windows within the installation– all while having to
navigate alone through a darkened space of the revealed and the unseen.
Scenes from the House Dream (2011) informed the thesis project by bridging gaps
between temporal media, physical environment site-specificity, and the distortion of time and
space from the current reality. Hoffos’ installations engaged with a voyeuristic experience of
other worlds from the viewer while building capacity for belief and connection to a place
beyond. Scenes from the House Dream shifted the audience’s role from viewer, to Experiencer,
creating alternative access points to the work through a series of small windows to view through.
The darkened space guided by the low lights of the windows and video projection to move the
body of the Experiencer through the space.
Hoffos’ framing of their installations through the title and didactics allowed for a playful
suspension of logic at the doorway. Building capacity for belief, and to engage with the unreal
other world being presented in the dioramas, through video, light, reflection, and illusion. By
manipulated the perception of a space, the Experiencer can transport themselves into another
place or time through an immersive experience. I draw from Hoffos’ installation intent for
ephemeral interaction with the Experiencer in a transformed and possessed space.

44
In Sonic Portals: ARQ. Radio Check (2023), the visible environment, and playing with
illusion, shadow and light requires the additional engagement of sound as a tool to fill and take
space. The audio is another layer to the reclamation of place.
The audio composed for Sonic
Portals:ARQ. Radio Check. is a
loop that begins and ends with the
beating of a traditional elk hide
hand drum I constructed. The hand
drum is present throughout the
entire 20 minute 25 second
composition, it was recorded as a
single track. As my own enacting of
Voluntarily Suspended Autonomy
and a ritual offering of time to the
fig. 18 Zoë Laycock. Elk Hand Drum made by artist and used in audio
composition (2023).

sound of the beating drum.

Field audio recordings from locations depicted in the video projections include the sound
of running water from the Rio Grande and Mississippi River, from the energetically heavy banks
of Algiers Point, Louisiana, the arrival and departure of massive Amtrak trains, and audio
gathered from Spirit Box25 communication sessions.
Through gathering these audio frequencies from highly energetically charged locations,
the audio attempts to evoke a feeling of frequency haunting to the Experiencer. The audio

Spirit Box is the commercial name of a device commonly used in paranormal investigations, it is a small handheld
radio with a modification to rapidly scan or sweep multiple stations at once. When in use it emits radio static or
white noise that entity voices can then be heard through.
25

45
frequencies gathered allows me to create a broadcast to the spirits of each place. The intention is
that the media gathered holds the energetic residue of each place and allows the entities 26 to visit
or experience the installation alongside human Experiencers.

Entities used here to reference the energetic residues of past people, beyond human, elemental and environmental
beings.
26

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Conclusion
CQ DX: Calling out to the Distant.
My unwavering belief in the Beyond was granted through both ancestral maternal
and paternal lineages. The acknowledging of the human after death, and beyond human carefully
tends to the energy fields that are encountered as humans understand the earth, and in
surrounding planes. My work challenges academia and colonial institutional knowledge
supremacy through engaging with alternative knowledge transmissions and cosmic
communication strategies.
My lineage is comprised of medicine people, ceremonialists, psychics, sound workers,
clairvoyants, mediums, and broadcasters. My material practice holds present techniques and
fibres of my ancestral cloth, a comfort that overpowers the multitude of entity encounters I have
experienced throughout my life.

I am an Experiencer.

Through the sound carries energy across millennia and dimension, communicating with
the spirits of place, to dreams categorized into no longer just dreams. Encounters are a
possession, a suspension of autonomy, a glimpse to the future, a defense against spiritual
warfare. Interdimensional Broadcasting is a practice beyond ghost stories, and cheap thrills, it is
engrained deep within everything I do, whether I choose it or not. To deny or rationalize myself
into a false sense of normalcy, I’m dragged back into the ethereal. Summoned from all
dimensions with no chance of ignorance as an option.
So many things I remember now from a time my blood and bones remember, a time
before. A time before I do. Through Sonic Portals connection is overwhelming and my thoughts

47
are consumed by how I know my hands are doing the same motions, holding the same materials,
making the same waves as so many hands before me. How my hands know, and how unwilling
to surrender this precious epiphany to an institution that has no spirit, a system that will
consume, that will ravish and destroy, over contextualize, analyze, and hunger for more while
retaining nothing. Unwilling to gift precious morsels of the ethereal to a beast that will never
truly understand and does not really want to understand. I want is to keep my ancestral secrets
safe, to keep our knowledge, our frequencies, and transmissions safe within my own worn, tired,
working hands.
I’m reconciling these multifaceted aspects of my own identity through these mainstream
culturally accessible visual languages. With deep understanding and participation in Indigenous
ceremony, I am using references to ceremony as a way of protecting sacred knowledge that has
been appropriated and harmed while using western European ceremony to describe my
understanding. My blood is infused with magic, divination, with connection to the Beyond, I am
a distilled conduit. Everyone and everything that has led to my existence now is what I seek
comfort in, it is the non-physical place I feel most at home.
In dialogue eternally.
Mitakuye Oyasin.

48

Post-Production. (A reflection)
The installation Sonic Portals: QRV engages with time in several ways simultaneously. I
consider Voluntarily Suspended Autonomy through the relationship of ephemerality and the
temporal. Individuals present in my defence presentation took part in Voluntarily Suspended
Autonomy, by simply attending and gifting their time to listen, in hopes of gaining additional
understanding. I describe it as the act of committing to experience the totality of temporal media,
it parallels mediumship, trances, and possession to access information or connection. Voluntarily
Suspended Autonomy can be seen in contemporary media consumption, but it can also vary. It
can refer to the way I was taught to sit and listen to an elder speak for as long as it may take.
Sometimes, very slow as we are listening and understanding over lifetimes. Compared to looking
to The Golden Age of Radio or pre-24-hour television news cycle, it was time that once dictated
how humans received information. There was a time passed, when our knowledge, information
and news was only available to us at a particular time for a particular time. In this way
Voluntarily Suspended Autonomy can be compared to the colloquial “tuning in”.
Voluntarily Suspended Autonomy can be enacted both through care and through desire.
It be enacted to seek connection and represents the most precious human currency to give. Time.
It takes time to build relationships, to build understanding and to build connection. Through
time, we can allow the necessary transfer of energy to gain those connections, internally, within
our own bodies, or brain synapsis, or externally, with other beings, places, and entities.

49

fig. 19 Zoë Laycock. Sonic Portals: QRV. 2024.

A fundamental intention of creating place for interconnection feels successfully fulfilled
with the installation of Sonic Portals: QRV. alongside the thesis defence presentation that
occurred April 9, 2024. I was immensely impacted by the words of a friend and Indigenous
writer, who uses a motorized mobility aid. She was pleased to learn the structure was constructed
with physical accessibility in mind as well, a doorway large enough for her to maneuver into, and
enough space to turn around and exit.

50
She was able to enter the
temporary structure and
made the immediate
connection to a spiritual
place that she had, up until
that moment, not ever been
able to enter for safety and
mobility limitations. She
expressed gratitude to be able
fig. 20 Zoë Laycock. Sonic Portals: QRV. 2024. Interior Detail.

to experience the inside of a

structure previously inaccessible for one reason or another. Later, she shared a piece of writing
that was produced within the installation, stating the reflection would never have come to be
without the place Sonic Portals: QRV created for that time.
For Sonic Portals: QRV to hold knowledge that is not archived through written word is
an immense privilege. The opportunity to use my own voice to channel knowledge I hold close
to my heart, with those people who were willing to suspend their time and to listen, is an equal
privilege, on which I will continue to reflect and grow into.
Taking, giving, and possessing humanly time to deeply, and fully embody listening is to
pay close attention to continue to learn from the past and present, and future -- from
simultaneous imprints of energies in time. In hopes of bringing positive transmissions to
perceivable reality, gives time to perpetuate what it means to “be a good ancestor” as an already
future ancestor. The sound composition and listening place I’ve created embodies layered

51
temporal structures. Both physical and non-physical. The aim of my thesis project is to extend an
invitation for belonging, to acknowledge the interdimensional and hold place for connection.
My aim is that the Experiencer may not feel so alone, and that there is the possibility of
something, Beyond.

fig. 21 Zoë Laycock. Sonic Portals: QRV. Offering alter installation detail.

52

Works Cited
Brearley, Laura. Deep Listening and Leadership: An Indigenous Model of Leadership and Community
Development in Australia.
Ghost Adventures. Created by Zak Bagans, MY Tupelo Entertainment, 2008-present.
“Interdimensional, Adj.” Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford UP, September 2023.
Kaagegaabaw, James Vukelich. The Seven Generations and the Seven Grandfather Teachings.
James Vukelich, 2023.
“Liminal, Adj., Sense 2.” Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford UP, September 2023.
Macdougall David. The Corporeal Image: Film Ethnography and the Senses. Princeton University
Press 2006.
Malakaj, Ervin. “Nosferatu – 100 Years of Horror”. Movie at the Museum: Nosferatu, 20 October
2022. Roedde House Museum, Vancouver BC. Introduction and discussion.
Mithlo, Nancy. “Blood Memory and the Arts: Indigenous Genealogies and Imagined Truths.”
American Indian Culture and Research Journal, vol. 35, no. 4, Jan. 2011, pp. 103–18.
Murnau, F. W. (Friedrich Wilhelm). Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror Silent film. 1922.
Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake. Land as Pedagogy: Nishnaabeg Intelligence and Rebellious
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