[prototype]

HD217014 is a video sketch / prototype that uses astronomical data to investigate the interconnectedness of light and information in space research. Using spectral data acquired by the T193 telescope at Haute Provence Observatory in France, the work breaks down more than 300k light data points into video stream of various resolutions. Spectral absorption lines are dark lines in otherwise continuous light spectrum that are obtained by passing the star’s light through a very precise prism and diffraction grating in a spectrograph. Each star has a different spectral pattern that carries the information about different chemical elements in the composition of the star and its planets.

HD217014 or otherwise known as ‘Peg51’ is a star in the constellation of Pegasus which hosts the first exoplanet ever discovered. Using a radial velocity method, two scientists Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz detected an unusual color shift in the light spectrum of the star that led to the discovery of ‘Peg51b’ planet in October 1995. For this discovery they won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2019.

The sound uses various frequency filters and recordings of bird songs captured during the residency at the Haute Provence Observatory. It is inspired by a paper published by a retired NASA researcher last year that argues that a very short light signal coming from HD217014 detected in 2020 was wrongly assigned to the interception by birds as well as by the optogenetics research that intercepts the evolution of birds’ song by controlling their neural activity with light.

Collaboration: David Tiemstra (creative coding), Nenad Popov (sound patching).

Support: Haute Provence Observatory, CAIRN Centre d’Art and the Entre Serras project.