Electronic art: a mesh antenna picking up EMF and RF energy #Art

Art consisting of a knitted copper mesh antenna picking up EMF and RF controlled by a stepper motor and connected to a DIY signal amplifier.

This is a work in progress – Afroditi Psarra’s collaboration with Stefan Tiefengraber in the online exhibition “No Place Like The Future”, organized by the Austrian Cultural Forum.

“TRANSMISSION, PATTERNS, AND NOISE”

​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.

See the demo here on Vimeo and more in this post.