Find out about the concept of using machines to commune with ghosts – known as instrumental transcommunication – and how this practice evolved from traditional mediumship.

Sheffield-based artist Tyler Mellins will reflect on how these ideas have informed his own work, as well as how they are prevalent within particular works – and the overarching themes – in the latest exhibition at the Millennium Gallery, Not Without My Ghosts: The Artist as Medium.

Featuring a variety of historic and contemporary references, this talk will examine the connections between spiritualism and the advance of technology from the 20th century to the present day. It will also highlight similarities in approach across spiritualism, psychoanalysis and art to gently question whether ghostly phenomena might originate from within our own subconscious. It will draw on Mellins’ experiences as a practicing artist, spiritualist and paranormal investigator.

Tyler Mellins studied at Sheffield Institute of Arts and is now based at Yorkshire Artspace. He is currently on a two-year residency with Site Gallery as part of the Freelands Artist Programme.

Mellins makes multi-screen video works and installations, as well as experimental texts and sculpture. His practice explores exchanges of information, especially those in which data is disputable, obsolete, or otherwise unverifiable via the scientific method. Mysticism, spirituality and the occult are therefore significant themes for Mellins, and his works create spaces for active imagining beyond scientific reason. His current work explores the pseudoscientific practice of ‘instrumental transcommunication’, considering the potential of modern technology to make contact with spirits. Informed by Jungian psychoanalysis, he is interested in such practices as modes of exploring the unconscious mind.

This talk is part of the programme of events complementing the exhibition Not Without My Ghosts: The Artist as Medium, which is open at the Millennium Gallery until Sunday 26 June 2022.

Image: Vidya Gastaldon Healing Painting (désastre mauve), 2016. Photo © Claire Dorn. Courtesy of the Artists & Art Concept, Paris