Electrona in Crystallo Fluenti

About

The sound composition consists of analog synthesizers, field recordings of the ionosphere and environment, and custom-built software mapping and sounding space debris (using NASA live feed data) over two specific coordinates-host locations in New York, and Keddie's studio in lower New Hampshire.

The projections are a culmination of live recorded sessions using the artist's software that maps the charted debris. In this iteration, the debris will be represented as visual static that shifts form through digital modulation informed by properties of the debris artifacts. 

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Exhibition programming will include Keddie's live performance on the occasion of the release of her record on the gallery's vinyl imprint.

A Statement by the Artist:

As societies follow an ever-widening apparatus of cognitive dissonance, we embrace fantastic renderings, simulated realities, and the mirage of nostalgia to escape our own existence. Regarding the outer planetary realms of rendered celestial space, we utterly neglect the crowd of 20,0000+ debris objects orbiting around our planet. But what comes of their existence in this outer planetary orbit? Do these entropic objects still bear a resemblance to their initial form? How do these artifacts of our collective media ecology tell our story? 

Our planetary midden is a by-product of human technological evolution. Dumped, and buried, it also orbits above us. Much of the debris comes from rocket stages, defunct satellites, and past object to object collisions. In orbit, we can find everything from solar panels, a lost bag of tools, to a sea of microscopic flakes of paint. In Lower Earth’s Orbit (LEO), we can witness history without excavation. 

With the work, entitled, Electrona in Crystallo Fluenti [ECF], I imagine how these debris particles interact, or how they may still carry the touch of a human hand that enabled their existence. Debris objects move in specific and sometimes erratic responses to shifts in the parameters of their orbital existence, as well as to each other. By way of sound, my hand can hand enter this orbit, through live composition with real-time orbiting debris as an ever-expanding language of probability and discourse. 

I am using electromagnetic waves as an identifier for each debris particle that is modulated by their properties and with additional sequencing and tonal shifts. Developed by VR designer, Ethan Miller, the software visualizes data fed by NASA to track debris in real-time orbit over host coordinates. An OSC interface triggers impulses to sound particular debris objects in real-time. My visualization of this data is a dreamed virtual space made up of white noise that is informed by basic properties of debris (distance, proximity, and variance). Through the televisual static, an object’s voice mirrors its circumstance, moving as a disenchanted body through obstruction, then gone again into entropic submission. 

In this multi-channel installation, I am pairing analog electromagnetic interference with the recorded sessions mapped through this customised virtual software. The four -channel work projects recorded sessions from above New York City in 2020 and Beacon, New York in 2021. The sound is a stereo mix of both of these live sessions taken in subsequent years. What you see and hear is a time encapsulation from space made audible and visible, again. 

This work and research was initiated while a resident artist in Finland, and made possible by the Kone Foundation in 2010. Live sessions have been performed since, at ARoS Art Museum (Aarhus, DK), Saari Residency (FI), Fridman Gallery (New York/USA), Epsilon Spires (Vermont/USA), Coaxial (California/US). I composed an album incorporating this software at varying coordinates within seven compositions, entitled, Apsides, with Chaiken Records, 2020 (NYC/US). For this installation, there is a limited edition vinyl release produced by Fridman Gallery (NYC/US) from these particular live sessions that were performed at both gallery locations. 

The album presents Side A, or a live recorded session at 169 Bowery, Fridman Gallery as part of the Solos Festival on May 28, 2020, directed by CT SWaM and Daniel Neumann. The work was a composition pairing a live session with pre-recorded sessions from the artists temporary studio in rural New Hampshire along with nightly ionospheric recordings. The performance took place from within a locked gallery, due to pandemic restrictions. Side B is a live recorded multi-channel session from outside of Fridman Gallery on 475 Main St., Beacon, New York on May 1, 2021. In place of liner notes, a short text by poet and writer Marianne Shaneen exists. This written work stems from her initial response to witnessing a live session as a member of the audience. 

In addition to the installation, a series of prints have been made that focus on the momentary shift between frames in the frenetic animation of a live recorded session. The prints are again an encapsulation of energy, time, and the building and collapse of signals. The color masking present in these works detail shifts in an opening (or closing) aperture-playing with the reveal of our floating tech-junk.
 

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Victoria Keddie is an artist working in varying media and broadcast. Keddie’s work explores electromagnetic systems, media ecologies, and the machinic body. For over 8 years, she has been the Co-Director of E.S.P. TV, a 501(C)3 nomadic TV studio, and episodic cable access serial, that hybridizes technologies to realize synthetic environments and deconstruct the televisual for live performance. Keddie focuses on exposing the particular gestures of the body in tandem with tools of broadcast and transmission and deciphering the patterns that have become an operative language with machines. She is currently signed with Brian Chase's label: Chaikin Records.