Cosmic Static, a sonic installation by Fayen d’Evie and Jen Bervin, with sound artists Bryan Phillips and Andy Slater, experiments with the dynamics of ‘cosmic eavesdropping’, combining a repurposed sculptural radio telescope feed from one of SETI’s arrays with ultrasonic projections of field recordings from telescope arrays, antennae farms, and stories of individuals dedicated to listening for extraterrestrial signals, including scientists Grote Reber, Laurance Doyle, and Jim Palfreyman. As the audience moves within and around the ultrasonic beams, encountering discrete phrases at some moments and wandering into polyphonic disturbance at others, each body listens in on a different poetics and collectively activates the kinaesthetics of close listening in community.
The stories encountered in Cosmic Static include narratives from Grote Reber, the founder of modern radio astronomy, who listened to radio emissions from space alone for over a decade before the nascent field coalesced. Reber built the first parabolic antenna in his backyard in Illinois in 1937, and in 1954, moved to Tasmania—where the ionospheric density is low—to listen to the quieter southern skies using interconnected wires and dipoles in sheep grazing lands. The work also traces the research of SETI astrophysicist Laurance Doyle, who studies the language complexity and signal transmissions of non-human species—from plant-insect communications, to monkey whistling and baby dolphin babbling—to develop methods of discerning intelligent extraterrestrial signals amidst the galactic noise.
Fayen d’Evie and Jen Bervin collaborated with sound artists Bryan Phillips and Andy Slater, scientists Laurance Doyle, Jim Palfreyman, Jon Richards, and Jill Tarter. Special thanks to SETI Institute, SETI Institute’s Allen Telescope Array, Liquid Architecture, Melbourne University Law School, the Ian Potter Museum of Art, the Grote Reber Museum at the University of Hobart’s Mt Pleasant Radio Observatory, A Published Event, and the Monash University Curatorial Programme for assistance in realizing Cosmic Static.