Earth Signal Universe Wide
About the Art Work
Earth Signal Universe Wide is a radio sculpture created via radio transmission performed by several earth-bound stations as well as the International Space Station. The transmission’s magnitudes expand beyond the confines of the solar system, get refracted by celestial objects, travel at the speed of light through the vacuum of space and dissipate as they travel away from the locus of transmission on the ISS.
Radio waves inside earth’s atmosphere and ionosphere encounter damping caused by surfaces, the air, and geomagnetic weather, and will always eventually dissolve in such a material environment. In space, radio waves never lose their energy, only decrease in amplitude as they fanout onwards and away to infinity. Earth Signal Universe Wide is thus a gradient of energy, a never-ending brush stroke that begins at the International Space Station and ends at the far reaches of the universe. The carrier wave transmitted to the ISS is modulated by a signal generated by a seismometer installed on earth, delineating an earth signal as large as the cosmos itself. The work is thus cultural and human: the transmission of a message from earth’s inhabitants that is an expansion of the earth in and of itself.
Yanai Toister and Nimrod Astarhan
About the artists
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Nimrod Astarhan
Nimrod Astarhan is an artist, technologist, and lecturer in the Multidisciplinary Art School at Shenkar College of Engineering, Art and Design where he teaches Digital Art Practices. As an artist working in the fields of Sculpture and Digital Media he has exhibited and organized group projects in Israel, Germany, and Belgium and worked on commissioned projects for museums, international festivals and biennales. Recent showings include The Israeli Center for Digital Arts, Die Digitale Düsseldorf and the 8th Conference on Computation, Communication, Aesthetics & X. Recipient of the Rabinovitch Foundation for the Arts grant. Initially trained as a software engineer, he gained over 11 years of experience in the software industry, leading startup teams and architecting solutions before committing to his artistic practice. Nimrod is a recent graduate of the Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art and an Art and Technology Studies M.F.A candidate at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Yanai Toister
Yanai Toister (Ph.D.) is an artist, writer, and educator serving as associate professor at the Unit for History and Philosophy at the Shenkar College of Engineering, Design and Art in Israel (which he directed from 2017 until 2022). Toister’s artworks have been exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions (including Sandroni.Rey, Los Angeles; Dvir Gallery, Tel Aviv; Kunstahalle Luzern, Switzerland; Bolsky Gallery, Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles; Maison Europèenne de la Photographie, Paris; the 11th International Architecture Exhibition at the Venice Biennale; Kunstmuseen Krefeld, Haus Lange, Krefeld, Germany; Israel Museum). Toister’s writing has been published in various books and journals (including: Philosophy of Photography; Journal of Science and Technology of the Arts; Mafte’akh Lexical Review of political Thought; Ubiquity; Photographies; Journal of Visual Art Practice). Toister’s book Photography from the Turin Shroud to the Turing Machine has recently been published by Intellect/University of Chicago Press.