'Magnetospheric Frequencies' at AstroLAB

Nicola Rae was co-curator of AstroLAB 2014, and also exhibiting artist and contributor.

Curatorial Statement
by Paul Malone and Nicola Rae

AstroLAB
The very inaccessibility of Space lends itself to speculation, interpretation, and differing conceptual inhabitations. These often fictional narratives extend into how we view the world in all of its aspects; social, philosophical and metaphysical. Consisting often of the most flimsy of evidence; a few grains of photographic emulsion, a mathematical tower of cards or an ethical conviction, this arena lends itself towards wide horizons of enquiry. The charting of this world has only just begun, using heroic yet barely adequate tools as well as audacious attempts at understanding.

AstroLAB is an exhibition as laboratory that includes art works by twenty international artists. Each artist has been invited to freely interpret aspects of the astronomical and these works inform each other through juxtaposition, spatiality and sound. Some works have been generated experimentally in a few days specifically for this show, while others have been the result of research over a longer length of time.

One of the roles of an artist is to generate the conceptual freedoms necessary to enable an aesthetic apprehension of alternative ideas. Sometimes this requires approaching the subject obliquely, so as to catch it unawares. And so it is with the mapping of alternative directions in our understanding of the astronomical. This can take the form of inversions, metaphor and the questioning of collective cultural understandings and theories. Our Laboratory aspires to engage with all of these possibilities within a 'Planetarium of the Imagination'.

Artist Statement: Nicola Rae

In this installation magnetospheric plasma waves have been visualized by the sound emission analyzer Overtone Analyzer, and have then been partially refracted through a roughly-sawn acrylic tube into a revolving motion. These plasma waves were detected by two orbiting NASA Radiation Belt Storm probes, located within the magnetosphere between 60 to 36,000 miles from Earth. Plasma waves within the Radiation Belts are generated by highly charged electrons and protons that spiral along Earth's magnetic field lines. Some of these radio signals when received as sound are known as 'chorus waves', due to their similarity to the sound of a dawn chorus, and others are called 'whistlers' or 'proton whistlers'. Since 2012 this near real time monitoring of space weather has allowed better predictions of Radiation Belt storms for the safer passage of astronauts and spacecraft in future. Space weather is affected by the Sun and also influences our own weather: it is also the source of aurora in the night sky.

No sounds can be heard in space yet radio waves traverse this environment and can be picked up by receivers on Earth. Names are given to these plasma waves that relate to sounds within our sensory experience on this planet, yet these electro-magnetic phenomena are charged particles from the Sun responding to the influence of the Earth's magnetic field. This digital projection explores a parallel experience of light as sound, responding to the actual frequencies that have been received as radio waves. The visualizations of these sonic frequencies have then been refracted, through DIY adaptation, into the revolving, circular motion of interplanetary plasmas.

NASA audio files accessed at Space Audio; Factual information accessed through the NASA website and Space Audio.

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