Submitted by Ewa Trebacz on June 13, 2019 - 7:34pm
NOAA 14 transmission recording using Cubic SDR, captured at The Wassaic Project in NY during the eTextile Spring Break event
DXARTS Assistant Professor Afroditi Psarra, has been awarded the Bergstrom Award for Art & Science for the development of the artistic project Listening Space.
Listening Space is an artistic collaboration between Afroditi Psarra and etextile designer Audrey Briot (FR) that was born during the eTextile Spring Break camp that took place in upstate New York at the beginning of April 2019. Following their previous explorations of ecologies of transmissions and wanting to experiment with Software-Defined Radio (SDR), the artists, setup a DIY satellite tracking station and aimed at intercepting the NOAA weather satellite audiovisual transmissions. During the course of three days, they observed five satellite passes, intercepted successfully three transmissions and decoded the audio signals into images which they later knitted in order to create a textile archive of the transmissions. Conceptually the project seeks to explore transmissions ecologies as raw material for artist exploration, to understand and re-imagine in poetic means, representations of audio and images broadcasted from space, while regarding knitted textiles as a physical medium for memory storage and archiving.
The Bergstrom Award will allow for an artist in residence program for Audrey Briot, as well as for a technologist in residence for Eleftherios Kosmas, founder of Libre Space Foundation and SatNOGS to visit DXARTS in the Spring of 2020 and organize a workshop on open-source space technologies and using SDR for artistic exploration.
More information about the project is available here: