Transmission, Patterns, and Noise by Afroditi Psarra and Stefan Tiefengraber

Transmission, Patterns, and Noise was an online collaboration between Afroditi Psarra, and Austrian media artist Stefan Tiefengraber which was realized during the first COVID-19 lockdown in the context of the exhibition “No Place Like The Future” organized by the Austrian Cultural Forum in Washington D.C.

For a moderated conversation between the artists and for a short preview of the work check:

https://www.noplacelikethefuture.org/stefantiefengraber-afroditipsarra

From the beginning of this collaboration, we tried to address the challenges that arose from the current COVID-19 crisis in our personal artistic practices. A common characteristic of our work is that it engages with tangible materials and physical interfaces, and what the current condition has made us reflect upon, is how we could create a piece that would connect the physical spaces that surround us, and connect our two remote locations, Linz and Seattle, in a hybridized way. In this sound installation, we used a copper mesh roll, to create antennas and circuits that can pick up and amplify the electromagnetic transmissions of our intimate spaces. We created a feedback system that uses a sound sensor and a stepper motor to adjust the length of the antennas according to their transmissions, which through this feedback loop ends up controlling the speed of the motors, thus the frequency of the EMF transmissions. By mixing up the soundscapes of our respective spaces, we created a 30-minute long drone piece that documents this passage of time and the endless oscillations, rhythms, and patterns that arise and fade in the turbulent transmissions of our radio antennas.