Abstract:
»Radio Painting Station: Looking for the Waterhole«
2017, installation, radio telescope with painting robot
In 2002, physicist Stephen Wolfram asserted that »our whole universe may be governed by a single underlying simple program.« [1] The complexity we
experience in our life world, including us, is the result of a simple program,
perhaps one or two lines, that has been running for a long time and for which we
have not cracked the code. »Radio Painting Station: Looking for the Waterhole«
[2] takes up this proposition and sets out to observe the cosmos above
Karlsruhe at 24:00 hours and plot differences in a series of four compositions.
The subject of »Radio Painting Station: Looking for the Waterhole’s«
observations is the hydrogen line: the spectral emissions produced as neutral
hydrogen atoms in the interstellar region undergo state transitions as they
absorb energy. The work itself is a »mise-en-scène« where a radio telescope
concentrates, filters, amplifies and digitizes these emissions [3] for a
mechatronic system to codify as a series of paintings in a durational format from
December 15, 2017 to January 14, 2018. The chosen concentric mode of
visualization has an onomatopoeic relationship with its atomic referent, and allows, through comparison, a language of difference to emerge.
The artist wishes to acknowledge the support of Kamahi Electronics, ZKM, The University of Auckland and the Chartwell Trust.