The Substation

Registrations: Hidden Door Journal

Part exhibition, part séance, part print room: a factory for the uncanny.

Performances & Gigs

Event Details

Category

Performances & Gigs

Event Starts

Oct 3, 2026 16:00

Event Ends

Oct 10, 2026 18:00

Venue

The Substation

Location

1 Market Street

Ticketed public programs:

  • Saturday 3 October, 4–6pm
  • Saturday 10 October, 4–6pm

PRESENTED BY THE SUBSTATION & MELBOURNE FRINGE

Registrations unfolds across two Saturdays and an exhibition at The Substation as both public program and publishing experiment: Issue 3 of Hidden Door Journal, produced by Ranch Pressing in real time and under pressure.

Part exhibition, part séance, part print room, the project treats performance as inscription — something registered, duplicated, transmitted, worn into matter. Sounds, gestures, voices and their residue become transcripts, proofs, annotations, copies: published as they occur, before they disappear.

Set within the industrial architecture of The Substation, Registrations is a factory for the uncanny. Dead air. Corroded transmissions. Signal noise. Across performances and durational acts of reproduction, the program turns toward conditions increasingly difficult to ignore: mortality, necropolitics, disappearance, survival, return. Life and death are not treated as beginning or endpoint, but as atmosphere, infrastructure, afterlife.

Radiotherapy recordings, suburban séance tapes, sonic residues and spirit duplications—analogue publishing as real-time feed, repetitive labour, insistence against loss. To register something is to sense, but also to make a copy. The copy is the trace that outlives the event and begins a life of its own.

A joint project between Hidden Door Journal and Ranch Pressing.

Traces from the exhibition will remain open to the public from Wed–Sat, 11am–5pm following the ticketed public programs until 17 October.

 

CONTRIBUTING ARTISTS

Saturday 3 October, 4–6pm

  • David Chesworth and Sonia LeberArtist duo will present a new performance, featuring sound collected from over 90 hours of actuality séance tapes recorded by a family in Auckland and Australia, between 1958 and 1972.
  • Jonnine NokesJoel Stern, and Melanie Evans: Living with brain tumours, the three artists bring their practices in experimental music and art into contact with recordings, medical scans, clinical documentation, memories and altered states of consciousness arising from their conditions and treatment.

Saturday 10 October, 4-6pm

  • Sam Dunscombe: Clarinettist, composer, electronic musician, and recording engineer working at the intersection of experimental music, audio engineering, and spectralism.
  • Karina Utomo: Extreme metal vocalist, multi-modal artist, and beekeeper

For more information click here