Details: Years Ago, my grandmother, the astronaut, passed away at a ripe old age, singing. Around that time, Gaia’s space observatory satellite, carrying twin-telescopes at the earth’s orbit, began mapping our Milky Way, recording celestial bodies, star positions, motion, brightness and spectra. This ancestral radio project stages a translocation: by converting the geographical coordinates of her final resting place into its astronomical equivalence — a cosmic twin, and using the data from this region of our galaxy to create a soundscape, I also center through my own mother’s voice, her mother’s favourite songs, prayers, oral essence and libations for the afterlife. Utilizing parameter-mapped sonification, the sonic pieces were made scaling through 10,265 stellar objects. 

The ancestral radio debuts as a prototype, serving as an audio station and Wi-Fi radio frequency transmitter, and takes the exterior of a calabash, a plant fruit often used for ritualistic, ceremonies, cultural and musical purposes. It is a conduit, a listening altar, a portal, an invitation to remember the ones dearest to us who have become ancestral-astronauts, to reimagine the dialect of our universe as something ethereal, both without and within us. Here I hope to recast love (as the one my grandmother has for me) as the technology through which we touch and reach for that which is beyond the fingertips of empirical science. 

This project does not stand alone. It was conceived as part of the Ancestral Lab Exhibition, which I and Cate Lartey was invited to, by fellow artists Safiya Yon and hn. lyonga, within the context of the Human Machine Fellowship, an initiative of the Akademie Der Kunst, Berlin and Ewerk Lukenwalde. 

Exhibition media link:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1nyLnHrHtDy4xeUMOjIZvV7Mbm324N3Eg


Project link:
https://www.kunststrom.com/mensch-maschine-return-to-earth.html