Machine performances, Radio Transmission, Slow Scan Television (SSTV), Satellites, Bespoke Software Architecture, Video Installation, 3D Soundscape, Astropolitics
‘CU Soon’ sidesteps the gatekeepers and conventional uses of satellites to propose a different kind of relationship with these hidden machines. The universe becomes the gallery as a series of electronic 'postcards' are transmitted out into space. Referencing the irreverent lineage of mail art, these images are intended as fond messages to passing satellites - postcards from the world they’ve left behind. The satellites intercepting these images momentarily become performers as they broadcast the images back down to the Earth’s surface. The postcards return, scrambled, reassembled into something completely new.
CU Soon installed at East Quay. 6 channel video installation with 3D sound. Duration 13 mins.
Image credits: Jesse Wild and the artist.
A lot of my work explores machine agency, machine as consumer of images, machine as audience. Since the onset of COVID I’ve been thinking a lot about the satellites orbiting the Earth (one state of networked isolation to another?). I was drawn in by the power asymmetry of our relationship, these human-created tools that scrutinise the exposed world in ever increasing detail, while remaining virtually invisible themselves. I also find it fascinating how their existence feels like a technological recreation of a much older Christian cosmological model of the universe: an Earth encircled by heavens that are populated by powerful supernatural forces watching, controlling and even predicting human actions. Like the fulfilment of an unacknowledged need.
As a pivotal part of the global communications network, and the frontier of hard astropolitics, the domain of satellites is a deeply gatekept space, hard to see, hard to think about. It's hard to even find the language to talk about the machines themselves: the chaotic hostility of their environment, their long ghostly afterlife.
My mingled feelings of exclusion, vulnerability and fascination created a desire to reframe my relationship with these absent machines. Was there a way that I as an artist, a woman, a 'member of the public' could somehow touch an orbiting satellite? Could we even create a piece of art together?
So I created a series of digital postcards for satellites - messages from the world they’ve left behind. Working with the Libre Space Foundation these postcards were transmitted into space as radio signals to be received up by orbiting satellites passing overhead. These satellites re-transmitted them back down to Earth to our waiting ground stations.
Each one of these satellite responses is a new unique image. The original postcards have been transcoded and remade - transformed by the touch of the satellite and the noise and glitches acquired during the image’s epic journey into space and back.
Installation video
Texts
'Material Information: INSULAE and CU SOON', Charlotte Kent
'An introduction to Nye Thompson’s exhibition VERTIGO', Irini-Mirena Papadimitriou (PDF)
Print Collection
A collection of prints from 'CU Soon'.