Meteor project II

A shooting-star is a small piece of interplanetary matter, called a meteor, entering the Earth's atmosphere and 'burning up' at a height of about 100 km. These small particles are moving very fast relative to the Earth and when they enter the Earth's atmosphere they are rapidly slowed down. This means that they loose a lot of energy, which appears as heat. Both the particle and the air that is forcing its way past are made very hot. The particle, unless it is large, is completely evaporated and the air in the path of the meteor is ionized. We see light from the emission of radiation from the ionized gas and from the white-hot evaporating particle. The trail that we see is the hot gas gradually cooling down.

Meteor trails can reflect radio waves from distant transmitters back to Earth, so when a meteor appears one can sometimes receive fragments of broadcasts from radio stations up to 2000 km away from the observing site. This work includes the recording materials that are transformed from radio waves and are reflected by meteors. These recording materials are filtered by a professional spectrum equipment from many observatories to investigate if it is the real sonic reflection of a meteor. Sometimes the artist could collect the fragments of radio broadcasts when the reflected waves drop where the artist placed.

More than couple of hundreds meteors are entering the Earth everyday. Many of them are not specified where they came from or what they made of. Recently the scientists figured out that the Earth is surrounded by antimatter belt which are trapped by the magnetic field of the Earth. Since my mirrored materials are only the traces of meteor as invisible, I am imagining them somehow made of unknown matter or matter but experienced such an antimatter.

The spectrum of images that is captured by the radars of different observatories make the video projection with the pyramid structure. When the image appears, the corresponding recorded sound will be played in a 8 channel speaker system which makes the sound travel around the central projection as if it was a comet's orbit.


Introduction text

Meteor project II: Things in the air, Perseid, 87.5Mhz, 2016
installation
8 speakers, speaker stands, laptop, audio interface, projector, pyramid structure
dimension variable