transmissions (voices of objects and skies) was created for the exhibition transmissions from space at the fresno metropolitan museum. the entire body of work included sound, painting, drawing, and sculpture – everything inspired by john glenn’s first transmission from space, as well as rimbaud’s poem “vowels” in which each vowel is given a color equivalent.
i was initially attracted to glenn’s text because it sounded like a kind of psychedelic epiphany. in the short transmission, he speaks of thousands of tiny luminescent green lights covering the widow of the capsule, and his description of it is reminiscent of a vision or hallucination. i first worked with the text in 2002 for a large scale painting.
this body of work was one of the first times i used a single source to generate a body of work in different mediums. for the fresno museum, the sound work was composed along a line that ran kind of like an extended W form, in relation to some display cases that had previously been in the exhibition space, but were removed, except for their pedestal-footprint. for the second iterations of the piece – for “in resonance” at the seattle center, and western bridge, the piece took its final form which was more of a sculptural presence than an installation – as it hangs as a large single cloud-like cluster that one can walk inside of.
the installation consists of 102 color coded tin cans, hanging in a dark room – one for each vowel of glenn’s text, and each painted in relation to the vowel color equivalent as keyed from rimbaud’s poem – thus there are 15 blue cans because the letter O appears in glenn’s text 15 times. 64 of the cans contained small audio speakers playing an 8 channel soundwork, while other cans contained small 4 watt colored light bulbs.
the source material for the audio was amateur recordings of satellites by amateur astronomers from the 1960’s through the 1980’s that i found online, including the first transmission of a u.s. satellite. these sounds were processed and transformed electronically.
some of the satellite sounds used were:
satellite: China 1, tone telemetry and tune “The East is Red”, 25 April, 1970 satellite: Cosmos 359, failed Venus probe in violent tumble, August 22, 1970 satellite: Sputnik 1, made in Dallas, Texas on October 7, 1957 using a military surplus AN/FRR3A HF RTTY receiver. satellite: Atlas, recorded in the 60’s by U of Florida Student Satellite Tracking Station. satellite: OKEAN 1, image transmission, January 7, 1990. satellite: SCORE, President Eisenhower’s message to the world, Dec 19, 1958 at 2015 UT, 132.435 MHz.