Jean-Pierre Aubé

ELECTROSMOG
05.03–06.09.2012
Room 1

Within the International Digital Arts Biennial

ElectroSmog: A common term referring to all artificial radiation caused by electric and electromagnetic fields. Electrosmog is present everywhere. It is invisible and inaudible.

”In order to make electrosmog audible, I designed a system composed of an antenna, a radio receiver and a computer system. I programmed software to act as a kind of super remote control that automates the capturing of radio frequencies. Ultra rapid, the software captures 10 frequencies per second, analyses them and classifies them in a database. Reconstructed from millions of audio clips, ELECTRO W. T. is a radiophonic world tour, a recomposition of the electromagnetic landscape.”

Radio frequencies and waves in their broad sense have been fuelling Jean-Pierre Aubé’s art for several years now, this artist who previously focused primarily on landscape photography. Though the tools he uses have changed since he began his practice, his interest in the environment has never wavered. It is after realizing that the specific “space” of radio frequencies is not only completely occupied by telecommunication devices, but also marked out and governed like any other “territory,” that he began to address this subject with his Save the waves (2004-2005) project. The project currently presented at CLARK is part of the Electrosmogseries in which Aubé uses a system of his own devising to rapidly scan all the radiofrequencies in a given place. This portable system is comprised of an antenna, a radio receiver and a computer software that functions automatically. At a rate of one tenth per second, it tracks a large part of the bandwidth in order to capture the sounds of a radio frequency — shortwave, AM or FM, cellular telephones, etc. — and it then catalogues the gathered information in a database.

For Electrosmog (2012), this process was repeated in five different cities, Berlin, Mumbai, Istanbul, San Francisco and Hong Kong. Used in a visual and a sound perspective, the gathered data serves as a starting point for the artist’s project, which involves both viewing and listening. A video projection displays cityscapes overlaid with vertical stripes which are a transposition of what these sound signals produce when transmitted on a TV set. In complement to the video component, sound works are broadcast over five speakers. These pieces reveal some of the particularities that differentiate the cities from one another; something that the artist picked up upon after analyzing the gathered sound data. For example the piece TV analogue – SFO draws attention to the fact that analogue television, even though it is an obsolete technology, is still present in San Francisco where it is used to broadcast télé novellas, tele-evangelist and stock market news programs. The pieceFiredrake – HKG reveals the strategy that the Chinese government uses to scramble the shortwave frequencies from foreign stations that reach China and which are censored there: music which bears the code name Firedrake is superposed over the waves to camouflage the content. In this particular piece, the speed of the musical score modulates in relation to the intensity of the applied scrambling; an information which the system is able to detect. Electrosmog thus makes us aware of certain socio-economic characteristics of each of the five cities, which are revealed through their sound “sprawl” — an aspect of their reality we rarely have access to.

Jean-Pierre Aubé

Biennale Internationale d’art numérique 2012

Elektra – Festival Internationale d’art numérique