“Sending SG4L” was series of audio and video podcasts accessible via iTunes created for the 2006 online exhibition “Surge,” curated by Galen Joseph-Hunter and Lauren Cornell for free103point9 and Rhizome, and presented at Participant, Inc in New York, and the Observatori Festival, Valencia, Spain.

Sharpe’s previous works “Haunt>Pass” and “Passing SG7777” used short-range Bluetooth wireless technologies to create ad-hoc distribution networks in social events (museum openings) and performance (Passing SG7777 included a ‘séance’ performance) to distribute or install images and text on devices as part of an installation. “Sending SG4L” was similarly created to be primarily experienced on devices for small-screen, intimate experience, but used the internet and RSS feeds as the means of transmission.

“Sending SG4L” is part of a series based on Marconi’s early wireless stations. The project considers that the space where electronic transmissions take place is full of mutable ‘things’ and asks what the signals or messages sent during transmission might encounter in that space or what embodiment or subjectivity in a wireless space might be. “Sending SG4L” is a loose multimedia narrative about a ghost that is actually a signal — lost in one of Marconi’s first transatlantic wireless transfers — and how this signal collides in Hertzian and real space over the Atlantic with other ghostly forms (other electronic data, remnants of the old Marconi stations, flying kites at the station of Signal Hill, and ghosts of frozen bodies – among the icebergs off Newfoundland). Leslie Sharpe recorded visuals and sound for the project onsite and later edited these with other sound and imagery of her own creation. The narrative is also influenced by traditional folklore of the region, which has a strong narrative tradition around those lost at sea that takes form in ghost and fairy tales.