ASTRO BLACK MORPHOLOGIES
Astro Black Morphologies is an immersive dub, techno, and avant garde
electronic sound and image installation and sound performance, created using
transformed x-ray data from the black hole Cygnus-XI.
In his 2002 paper ‘The Music of Black Holes’, astronomer Phil Uttley noted that x-ray data collected from Cygnus X-1, a black hole in the Milky Way, was implicitly musical in structure. The ‘music’ existed in the form of thousands of digits recorded by NASA’s Rossi X-Ray Timing Explorer.
Flow Motion – artist-musicians Eddie George & Anna Piva – have been working with Uttley and Tim O'Brien from Jodrell Bank Observatory since 2003 to transform these numbers into sound, and with software artist Adrian Ward on evolving the numbers into images.
Visitors to the installation enter a darkened space immersed in a layered soundscape of textures and tones, bass frequencies and melodies generated from Cygnus X-1's x-ray data. These are interwoven with treated radio astronomy sounds from our solar system - Saturn, Jupiter, and Earth's planetary atmospheres, and the pulses of the star clusters of Tucanae. Movies projected on the walls and floor provide digital visualisations of the x-ray data while, drifting through the mix, traces of voices recite fragments from the numerical sequence.
The John Hansard Gallery
Southampton, UK
5 April - 14 May 2005
The Dana Centre at the Science Museum
165 Queen's Gate, London, UK
9 - 24 June 2005
Sound performance: 8 June 2005
Deep Space Poetics - discussion event: 16 June 2005
Vivid
140 Heath Mill Lane, Birmingham, Uk
28 October - 5 November 2005
Astro Black Morphologies is presented by artist group Flow Motion with the Arts Catalyst, in association with the John Hansard Gallery & SCAN new media arts agency. It is funded by the Arts Council of England.
For more information read the interview with the artists here
(with thanks to the John Hansard Gallery)
Flow Motion are electronic musicians and sound artists, Eddie George and Anna Piva.They produce multimedia installations and sound art performances, and record as Hallucinator. Their work has been shown at the Centre Pompidou in France, Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art and the International Institute of Visual Arts in London.
To hear an example of their music under their alter ego, Hallucinator, go to: http://www.boomkat.com/item.cfm?id=12112
Scientist Phil Uttley is the National Research Council (NRC) Research Associate in Astrophysics at the X-ray Astrophysics Laboratory at NASA Goddard Spaceflight Center, in Maryland, America.
A press release on ‘The Music of Black Holes’, which Phil Uttley presented to the UK National Astronomy Meeting in 2002 can be found on:
www.ras.org.uk/html/press/pn02-09.htm
For more information on black holes and Cygnus X-1 visit http://www.nasa.gov,
