Meteor Radio Echoes

This work was shown in APT+ONE at the APT Gallery, and was part of Deptford X Fringe, APT LIVE and APT Open Studios 2018.

'Meteor Radio Echoes' engages with the sound visualisation of radio echoes deflected from the ionisation trails of meteors burning in the upper atmosphere. These have been back projected onto a 20” glass Fresnel Lens from a Mole Richardson searchlight attached to a steel drum. An online SDR recording has recorded Graves Radar Frequency radio echoes deflecting off the ionisation trails of the 2017 Perseid Meteor Shower. SDR software enables personal computer users to record meteors live and so adds to citizen science allowing anyone to become part of the scientific community.

The curators of APT+ONE asked each member of A.P.T to submit a work of their own as well as a work by an artist of their choice whose work they have a close relationship with. They were interested in the dynamic between the two works and also requested a short statement explaining why a particular artist's work was chosen.

Artist Statements:

Nicola: "My first encounter with Alistair McClymont was at Somerset House, seeing him discuss a radical approach to his Beam Time residency at the Central Laser Facility in Rutherford Appleton Laboratories, Oxfordshire. His proposal was to recognise the scientists/technicians as artists and himself as a scientist, which was later evidenced as a co-produced artwork and a co-authored scientific paper. He also showed us his previous work that engaged with scientific processes as visible experiment combined with a conceptual rigour and use of materiality that really interested me.

When considering resonances between our works, maybe it is a fascination with scientific data and processes, contemporary computer capabilities as well as older technological equipment, that forms the basis for a dialogue. Sound is another interest in common although we work with this in different ways. Perhaps it is the differences in the way that we approach the resonances in our work that makes showing projects in dialogue work well. For APT+ONE, I have made a work that sets up liminal resonances with Alistair’s choice of work for this project - his app/web version of Unix Time."

Alistair: "Unix Time is an artwork that exists as an iPhone/iPad application. Unix Time shows a 24 hour time lapse of the sky, with one minute of real time taking one second. A long number is overlayed on the sky showing the current time in unix time, the number of seconds since midnight, 1st January 1970. Every second this number increments by 1. Unix time can be seen as the birth time of modern computing, an alternative epoch to the Gregorian."

• http://www.nicolarae.co.uk/projects/soun...
• http://www.alistairmcclymont.com/artwork...