Homegirl planted a cell phone in a melting glacier. You can call it.
As part of Scottish artist Katie Paterson’s Encounters exhibition at Modern Art Oxford, a white neon sign displays a phone number that connects curious visitors to a live transmission of the gurgles and pops emanating from Vatnajökull, a massive glacier in the remote interior of Iceland.


Signal-to-noise ratio is the relationship between meaningful information (a signal) and external factors (background noise). In a broader theoretical sense, it can refer to seeking out meaning from complexity. Paterson toys with this balance and explores the curiosities within some of our universe’s infinite blips: remote ones, old ones, ones long gone.
Earth-Moon-Earth (EME), or “moonbounce,” is an experimental kind of radio transmission first proposed in 1940 by a British communications engineer. With EME, messages are sent in Morse code from Earth, reflected off the surface of the Moon, and then received back on Earth. Later realized by the US military after WWII, today the technique is used by amateur radio operators across the world. Currently, EME provides the longest communications path for any two radio stations on Earth. Paterson translated Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata into Morse code and sent it to the Moon via radio waves. Ostensibly “remixed” as it bounced off the contours of the Moon’s surface, the sonata was then retranslated into a new score and played by a grand piano at Modern Art Oxford.


She also worked with astronomers, astrophysicists, and “supernova hunters” throughout the world to collect, catalog, and plot every known dead star in the universe (there are roughly 27,000). She laser-etched the map of these cosmic corpses onto 2x3-meter sheet of black anodized aluminum. CHECK IT.

via SEED