Tyler Coburn's Remote Viewer exhibition explores telepathic communication and military surveillance histories

Tyler Coburn's exhibition Remote Viewer at Koenig & Clinton in New York from April 20 to July 27, 2018, investigates telepathic visual communication through historical archives and contemporary art objects. The artist engages with Mary Sinclair's 1930 telepathy experiments documented by her husband Upton Sinclair in Mental Radio, where she attempted to duplicate drawings received through mental broadcasts. Coburn animates 65 of Sinclair's successful drawings in a video projection titled Remote Viewer (animation), 2018, creating cryptic light writings. A white MDF object resembling bed linen, Remote Viewer (object), 2017, made with Bureau V, occupies the gallery floor alongside a contextual text at the front desk. The exhibition connects Sinclair's work to Cold War military programs where the US investigated extrasensory perception for intelligence purposes, responding to Soviet psychic spy rumors. Albert Einstein wrote a foreword for the German edition of Sinclair's study, reflecting broader cultural fascination with parapsychology shared by artistic avant-gardes and military institutions. Coburn's practice examines communication, warfare, and surveillance technologies through artistic defamiliarization, making everyday technologies strange by juxtaposing them with theories of the body and psyche. The exhibition draws parallels between historical remote viewing programs and contemporary drone technology's precision visualization of distant targets.