About the Work:

The intensive sensing of the earth and its terrestrial environments for the purpose of monitoring climate change is mirrored by the equally intensive sensing of the distant corners of the universe. Are these efforts somehow connected? Signal/Noise is a short looping film edited together from webcam footage of the radio telescope in Effelsberg, Germany, which constantly searches the vast amounts of background cosmic radiation for faint signals that may provide key information about the origins of the universe. These opposing perspectives of observation-of-earth (looking towards our future) and observation-from-earth (looking for our most distant past) seem to coalesce for me in the footage, while the sound – composed of radio wave patterns recorded by NASA and the European Space Agency – evades despite its distinctiveness any immediate interpretation.