A Brief Introduction to Gremlins
as Aesthetic Devices
Heather Contant
without a definite center or edge”
[7]. Gremlins become an audible
seam in the supposedly seamless
global communications mesh that
Watson and Bell started to weave
when they invented the telephone.
a b s t r a c t
The sounds of electromagnetic
interference, or “gremlins,"
result from interactions among
objects in the 21st century’s
sphere of media ecology. Questo
article examines how artists use
these sounds in their work by
employing ecologically minded
creative practices reflective
of the interactions that cre-
ated these gremlins in the first
place. It analyzes three creative
metodi: the artist workshop,
recorded music and live perfor-
mance. The conclusion offers
an original score for group-
improvisation with gremlins.
Emergent Properties
When Felix Kubin put his “Mother
In The Fridge” during an episode
of WFMU’s Radio Boredcast, various
gremlins emerged and listeners
heard the impact of everyday objects
on our experiences of communica-
zione. In this improvised radio drama,
Kubin called his mom on his cell
phone and then placed “the phone
(= my mother) in all kinds of differ-
ent sonic environments” [8], come
as the fridge, a trashcan, a pot on
the stove, eccetera. As his mother’s vocal
qualities changed, she inadvertently described the effect of the
phone’s environment on the quality of the call, saying, “Felix,
it’s not too clear when you talk now” [9]. Gremlins accompa-
nied her requests to “please take me out” [10], as the phone
entered into new ecological relationships with the electromag-
netic pulses of the different things it encountered. Kubin lets
us hear the “thing-power” [11], to borrow a term from Jane
Bennett, that objects exhibit in the communications mesh. No
single entity, “no one materiality or type of material” [12], ha
complete control over the situation in this radio drama—not
Fig. 1. a constructed snuff sits next to its schematics.
(Photo © Jan Mun/Harvestworks)
I always called them “gremlins” [1], those electro-
magnetic interference sounds that emerge from your speakers
when you leave your cell phone too close to your audio work-
station. Any number of devices can cause gremlins: Wi-Fi, baby
monitors, anything that transmits and/or receives wireless data.
Gremlins have a distinct rhythm, a language of their own—“blip
ba da blip ba da blip ba da buzzzzzzz . . ." [2]. I have always
found them intriguing and welcomed them into my acoustic
ambiente.
Telephone Connections
Technically, the sounds that I refer to as “gremlins” occur when
a conductive material becomes an unintended transducer of
the electromagnetic activity caused by radio waves carrying
digital data. In Shintaro Miyazaki’s research about algorhythms,
or the audible rhythms produced by algorithmic computer
processes, he offers an explanation of this phenomenon:
In almost every information technological device, one can find
integrated circuits, microchips, or other semiconductors, Quale
allow one to control electric potentials, and thus the flow of
electrons, in a very precise way. Changes of electric potentials
applied to an electro-mechanical transducer (such as a loud-
speaker) produce, if they are periodical and change between
twenty and twenty thousand times a second, hearable musical
tones. Even short changes of electrical polarity are hearable as
short crackles [3].
Radio frequencies outside of the familiar AM and FM bands
that transport wireless data can cause such fluctuations in the
electrical field to occur. Natural events, e.g. a bolt of lightning
or the aurora borealis, can also spark such changes. In 1876,
as Thomas Watson assisted Alexander Graham Bell with the
invention of the telephone, he heard sounds “curious and
captivating enough to keep him up” [4] all night. Douglas
Kahn explains that these were the sounds of nature’s elec-
tromagnetic sphere transduced by a half-mile-long grounded
iron wire [5].
In the 21st century, Tuttavia, we hardly ever hear evidence
of Earth’s electromagnetic environment. Our louder and more
local environment of media chatter drowns it all out. Mobile
devices, network protocols, encoded messages traveling at the
speed of light and human desires for information assemble
into a “massive and dynamic interrelation of processes and
objects, beings and things, patterns and matter” [6] Quello
Matthew Fuller calls media ecology. Therefore, when we hear
the sounds of electromagnetic interference in the voice of a
gremlin, we hear the results of sentient and nonsentient be-
ings interacting in “a vast sprawling mesh of interconnection
Heather Contant (researcher), 13 South Beechwood Road, Niantic, CT 06357, U.S.A.
E-mail:
Supplemental materials such as audio or video files related to this article are available
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even Kubin himself, who maintains that
he did not tamper with the gremlins in
the final mix [13]. Piuttosto, what we hear
is the interaction among entities that causes
gremlins to emerge—and when they
do, they act as a musical track, lending
a rhythmic backdrop and emotional re-
inforcement to the story. They seem to
freeze—becoming solid things in their
own right—persistent symbolic remind-
ers of the ubiquitous ecological relation-
ships at play during Kubin’s conversation
with his mother—and for that matter, In
all conversations with all mothers.
Tactical Moves
Perhaps it should it come as no surprise,
Poi, to discover that artists who use
gremlins in an aesthetic manner tend
to employ practices reflective of the eco-
logical interactions that generated these
sounds in the first place. Such ecologi-
cally minded practices, whether referred
to as participatory, community or socially
engaged, implement and/or promote
more egalitarian modes of production
than currently exist in the top-down hi-
erarchy of art world capitalism. Nicolas
Bourriaud introduces Relational Aesthet-
ics with a critique of “the much vaunted
‘communications superhighways,’ with
their toll plazas and picnic areas, [Quello]
threaten to become the only possible
thoroughfare from a point to another
in the human world” [14]. He outlines
an alternative that “creates free areas,
and time spans whose rhythm contrasts
with those structuring everyday life, E
encourages an inter-human commerce
that differs from the ‘communication
zones’ that are imposed upon us” [15].
Although ecological aesethetic practices
like Bourriaud’s have become relatively
widespread during the 21st century, Essi
have yet to become the norm in the econ-
omy of cultural enterprise. Perhaps the
artists that use gremlins in an aesthetic
manner are attracted to ecological art
practices because they genuinely wish “to
find a more horizontal representation of
the relation between human and nonhu-
man actants” [16]. Ovviamente, it could also
be an unconscious coincidence on their
part, since the same networks and tech-
nologies that make it easier to implement
these ecological art practices also cause
the population of gremlins to skyrocket.
My efforts to trace a linear history of
the use of gremlins as aesthetic devices
have proved fruitless. The “multiplicity”
and “heterogeneity” of projects that use
them indicates a rhizomatic structure at
their root [17], which makes it difficult
to assemble them into a single authorita-
tive narrative. So, in lieu of one universal
history of gremlin-related artwork, I will
offer the following three examples as a
brief survey.
Artist-Led Workshops
In February 2012 I participated in a
workshop led by artists Mario de Vega
and Víctor Mazón Gardoqui at Harvest-
works in New York City where I built an
open-source “portable device able to am-
plify and demodulate frequency ranges
between 0.1 A 2.4 GHz” called Snuff
[18] (Fig. 1). My fellow participants
Fig. 2. a snuff workshop participant assembles his device. (Photo © Jan Mun/Harvestworks)
and I squinted and squirmed in order
to solder tiny components, such as the
AD8313 Logarithmic Detector chip, ad a
printed circuit board (Fig. 2). As the art-
ists explained the functionality of these
gremlin-wrangling devices, which trans-
duce the electromagnetic radio waves
that surround and penetrate us like “data
traffic” [19], they became traffickers of
informazione. Their discussion resonated
with Bourriaud, who curated an exhibi-
tion called Traffic in 1996 to demonstrate
the ecologically minded artistic prac-
tice of relational aesthetics [20]. Other
artists have dealt with gremlins in device-
making workshops as well: While Shin-
taro Miyazaki researched algorhythms
academically, he developed a series of
workshops with Martin Howse [21] A
construct a device that also used the
AD8313 chip called Detektor [22] (Fig.
3). According to Caleb Kelly’s insightful
study of glitches (cousins of the gremlin)
in vinyl records and CDs, such devices al-
low consumers to experience their me-
dia technology in unintended ways by
“clearly challenging the simple one-way
production-consumption model” [23].
For Claire Bishop, a workshop-based
practice “suggests a new understanding
of art without audiences, one in which
everyone is a producer” [24]. When I
left the Snuff workshop, I felt like I had
a magic lens for peering into the gremlin
mondo, but I was a little worried because
I had no idea how to properly wield my
newfound power.
Phase of Discovery
Fellow workshop attendee Phillip
Stearns put it best: “We were given this
tool and it was up to us to figure out how
to integrate it into our practices” [25]
(Fig. 4). I initiated a discovery phase with
my device, mixing gremlins back into the
human-hearing range of environmental
field recordings during a short project
called “Gremlins Attack Soundscape”
[26]. My results showed that locations
with large amounts of human-produced
sounds corresponded to a high level of
gremlin activity, whereas locations with
fewer human-produced sounds and more
sounds of “Nature” [27] corresponded to
fewer gremlins.
Recorded Music
At this point, I realized that my an-
thropomorphizing of the gremlins had
caused them to take on a life of their
own. I started to see them “as their own
end product, worthy of consideration,
scrutiny, and even awe” [28]. I began
to care deeply about the way that the
58 Contant, Gremlins as Aesthetic Devices
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art world appropriated these sounds,
especially when it came to music. IL
music industry has a well-deserved repu-
tation for coopting, popularizing and
ultimately wearing out sounds—this has
happened many times before. It came
as some relief, Poi, to find that so far
the most mainstream band to incorpo-
rate gremlins into their music is a reclu-
sive Scottish collaboration between two
brothers, Boards of Canada. Commonly
abbreviated BoC, this band continues to
use analog equipment in the digital age
and maintains a relatively low profile, Di-
spite having tracks featured in car and
clothing commercials. On Record Store
Day 2013, they announced their new al-
bum Tomorrow’s Harvest by transmitting
a convoluted series of secret messages,
which were collectively decoded by their
dedicated fans online. The puzzle began
with the discovery of a 12-inch record at
Other Music in New York City. When the
lucky buyer “played the record, pretty
music burst forth, followed by six num-
bers, 936557, spoken in a robotic voice”
[29]. In the following days, passionate
Internet sleuths and BoC listeners con-
verted these messages into longitude
and latitude coordinates, plotted them
on a map, connected the dots and dis-
covered the outline of a hexagon [30].
(BoC works in a studio called Hexagon
Sun.) By the release date, BoC enthusi-
asts had solved this mystery and could
look forward to new mysteries in the
new album.
Tomorrow’s Harvest includes a song
called “New Seeds,” described as “a sym-
phony of mobile phone interference
(or some equivalent digital noise)" [31].
It begins with the sound of gremlins,
whose insistent rhythms are mimicked
by other instruments. New musical pas-
sages organically emerge, growing from
the sonic seeds of electromagnetic in-
terference. Mike Sandison, one of the
brothers in the band, explains that the
song was composed by recording instru-
menti, “feeding those sounds through
stacks of destructive hardware and resam-
pling them to make unrecognizable new
sounds” [32]. This process gives gremlins
the opportunity to evolve in the mind of
the listener, who might have thought
they were an audio system malfunction
or even a mistake in the recording it-
self. Upon hearing the song again and
realizing that the gremlins were inten-
tional, the listener’s audio palate expands
because “through repetition we begin to
understand the mistake and aestheticize
it” [33]. “New Seeds,” then, is the result
of multiple ecological relationships. It
starts with two people who come together
Fig. 3. a constructed Detektor. (Photo © Martin Howse)
to improvise or exchange musical notes,
continues when the results of this human
partnership interact with circuits that ex-
ert their own power on the texture of the
audio, and concludes when the amalga-
mation of elements reaches the ears of
fans who gain an opportunity to interpret
the sounds of gremlins in a new context.
Live Performance
In recorded music, listeners can learn
to appreciate gremlins without fully
grasping their significance as indicators
of media ecology. During a workshop,
participants can gain a deeper under-
standing of gremlins’ inner workings,
but might not contemplate their musical
appeal. In a live performance, Anche se,
these practices intermingle and invite
people to learn about both the grem-
lin’s materiality and its aesthetic poten-
tial. Christina Kubisch began noticing
gremlins when they crept into her “‘in-
duction’ installations: electrical cabling
fixed to walls or hung in spaces within
which sounds or music were routed and
received by individual hand-held remote
telephone amplifiers” [34]. Their tena-
cious interruptions piqued her interest,
and she even created a live performance
in which they could thrive. Electrical Walks
turned the spotlight onto the gremlins,
bringing the algorhythmic sounds of the
21st century’s communications mesh
center stage. Attendees to these perfor-
mances wear a special set of headphones
custom-designed by Kubisch with “coils,
and amplifiers and some other little se-
crets” [35]. They get a map of the area,
usually located in a city center, marked
with points of electromagnetic interest
as a rough guide for wandering around
and listening to gremlins freely in any
manner they choose. According to Bour-
riaud, the abundance of urban wander-
ing practices conducted by ecologically
minded artists suggests a fascination
with “the transformation of their imme-
diate environment” [36]. In Kubisch’s
lavoro, wandering facilitates a temporary
transformation of public space as partici-
pants slowly and deliberately promenade
through neighborhoods wearing their
oversized headsets. In this practice of
ecological art, “the artist sets up some pa-
rameters, starts the process, and watches
what happens” [37]. You can watch what
happens too in the video documentation
of Electrical Walks. Attendees become the
composers of their own unique gremlin
symphonies by moving through the ur-
ban environment, listening intently and
adjusting their relationships with the
things that surround them.
Audience Participation
For me, the most exciting moment in
Kubisch’s documentation shows two
participants discovering their ability to
affect and appreciate the electromag-
netic sounds of their environment by
playing their cell phones like musical
instruments [38]. They seem to “call
up” gremlins by raising their phones
into the air like a conductor’s baton.
After my sustained inquiry into the use
of gremlins as aesthetic devices, I have
concluded that this is the gremlins’ favor-
ite way to participate in the creation of
art. They like to be summoned from the
Contant, Gremlins as Aesthetic Devices 59
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Industrial (2010):
ary 2014.
20. Nicolas Bourriaud, Traffic (Bordeaux: CAPC Mu-
sée d’Art Contemporain 1996) unpaginated.
21. Email correspondence with Shintaro Miyazaki.
22. Shintaro Miyazaki and Martin Howse, “Detek-
tori: Rhythms of Electromagnetic Emissions, their
Psychogeophysics and Micrological Auscultation,"
ISEA 2010, Conference Proceedings, Ruhr (2010) pag.
136–138.
23. Caleb Kelly, Cracked Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2009) P. 59.
24. Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and
the Politics of Spectatorship (London: Verso, 2012) P.
241.
25. Conversation with Phillip Stearns. He ended
up using Snuff recordings as a score for the video
documentation of his installation, Impact Study No.
1—Light Installation—Phillip Stearns—Lumen 2012,
23 Giugno 2012. Available at
26. Heather Contant, “Gremlins Attack Soundscape:
Purposeful ISM Interferences on Pristine Sound,"
The Global Composition, Conference Proceedings (2012)
pag. 443–445.
27. Morton [7] P. 3.
28. Ian Bogost, Alien Phenomenology or What It’s Like
to Be a Thing (Minneapolis, MN: Univ. of Minnesota
Press, 2012) P. 120.
29. DJ Pangburn, “Did Boards of Canada Create the
Weirdest Musical Rabbit Hole Ever?,” Vice Moth-
erboard (28 April 2013):
30. Pangburn [29].
31. Joe Clay, “Boards of Canada’s Tomorrow’s Har-
vest, Track-by-Track,” The Quietus (27 May 2013):
32. Jon Pareles, “Brothers Who Make Electronica by
Hand,” New York Times (11 Giugno 2013):
33. Kelly [23] P. 261.
34. Kahn [4] P. 239.
Fig. 4. Phillip stearns figures out how to integrate snuff into his artistic practice.
(Photo © Jan Mun/Harvestworks)
aether by collaborative groups of listener-
producers willing to playfully interact
with their media ecology and sonic en-
vironments. Pauline Oliveros, who advo-
cates acoustic improvisation through her
Deep Listening practices, text scores and
sonic meditation, reminds us that col-
laborations are important because they
are “a community of effort—preferably
an equality of effort. Listening to one an-
other in mutual respect is central” [39].
In keeping with this spirit, I wish to add
one more contribution to this brief sur-
vey of gremlin-related artwork: my own
improvisation score for a community of
humans and gremlins.
Call Up the Ghost of the Telegraph
Perform this [40] in an environment
able to make electromagnetic activity
audible to human ears. This can be ac-
complished by arranging devices (De-
tektor or Snuff), induction coils, poorly
shielded cables or any other gremlin-
transducing things around a space. Questo
piece requires no clear beginning or
end. Here are the instructions for all
audience-participants in attendance
(everyone and everything is considered a
performer):
When you get bored: play with your
communications device; interact with
your media ecology in some manner.
When you hear something interesting:
stop playing with your device; and listen
to your media environment.
references and Notes
1. The companion CD to Leonardo Music Journal
Volume 17 (2007), curated by Sarah Washington,
explored “The Art of The Gremlin: Inventive Musi-
cians, Curious Devices.” The human gremlins dis-
cussed in her article differ from the nonsentient
gremlins discussed in this article; Tuttavia, both types
of gremlin possess a similar aesthetic spirit.
60 Contant, Gremlins as Aesthetic Devices
2. Chris Higgins, “Why Cell Phones Make Speakers
Go ‘Blip Blip Blip Buzz,’” Mental Floss (13 Dicembre
2007):
cessed 1 Gennaio 2014.
3. Shintaro Miyazaki, “AlgoRHYTHMS Everywhere:
A Heuristic Approach to Everyday Technologies,"
Thamyris/Intersecting, No. 26, 135–148 (2013) P. 136.
4. Douglas Kahn, Earth Sound Earth Signal: Energies
and Earth Magnitude in the Arts (Berkeley, CA: Univ.
of California Press, 2013) P. 3.
5. Kahn [4] pag. 26–27.
6. Matthew Fuller, Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies
in Art and Technoculture (Cambridge, MA: CON Premere,
2005) P. 2.
7. Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Camera-
ponte, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2010) pag. 29–33.
8. Felix Kubin, “Felix Kubin: Mother in The Fridge—
For Radio Boredcast,” WFMU (2 Marzo 2012):
Gennaio 2014.
35. Christina Kubisch, “Electrical Walks: An Intro-
duction to Christina Kubisch’s ‘Electrical Walks’ Se-
ries of Works,” Vimeo (4 Dicembre 2012):
9. Kubin [8] mp3.
10. Kubin [8].
11. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of
Things (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 2010) P. 2.
12. Bennett [11] P. 24.
13. Email correspondence with Felix Kubin.
14. Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, Simone
Pleasance and Fronza Woods, trans. (Dijon, France:
Les Presses du Réel, 2002) P. 8.
15. Bourriaud [14] P. 16.
16. Bennett [11] P. 98.
17. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand
Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Brian Massumi,
trans. (Minneapolis, MN: Univ. of Minnesota Press)
pag. 1–25.
18. Harvestworks, “Sonifying Wireless Data: Snuff
Workshop,” Harvestworks (25 E 26 Febbraio 2012):
19. Víctor Mazón Gardoqui, “Traffik_R-aw: Sum-
merlab’10,” La Laboral Centro de Arte y Creación
36. Nicolas Bourriaud, The Radicant, No. 17 (Nuovo
York, NY: Lukas & Sternberg, 2009) P. 92.
37. Morton [7] P. 105.
38. Christina Kubisch [35], at about 8:40–8:55.
39. Pauline Oliveros, “Deep Listening: Bridge to Col-
laboration,” Sounding the Margins: Collected Writings
1992–2009, Lawton Hall, ed. (Kingston, NY: Deep
Listening Publications, 2010) P. 26.
40. The title of this piece comes from Fuller [6] P. 47.
Manuscript received 2 Gennaio 2014.
Heather Contant loves sound, stories and
ideas. She mixes these interests together by un-
dertaking vast, long-term research projects that
result in a menagerie of artistic and scholarly
objects. Her current long-term project is Ph.D.
research at the College of Fine Arts (COFA)
in Sydney, Australia. She is investigating in-
stances where political-aesthetic energies and
creative transmission practices collide to form
a particularly “charged atmosphere.”
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