Aerocene Symposium
Palais de Tokyo, 2018
In collaboration with radio telemetry engineers at the Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute in Rosman, NC (US), Pampillonio orchestrated a stream of the live signal from pulsar PSR J1652+2651 for the Aerocene’s “Aero-Acoustics” workshops, as part of Tomás Saraceno’s exhibition ON AIR, curated by Rebecca Lamarche-Vadel.
A 26-meter radio telescope was used to track the pulsar’s hydrogen line at ~1.4 GHz, and transduce the signal from the electromagnetic axis to the acoustic. To complement composer Alvin Lucier’s “Moon Bounce” and “Silk” concerts — and the symposium’s theme of interplanetary ecologies — the signal was then broadcast as an “Appalachian bounce” from Pisgah, NC, to Paris, France.
In addition to this, Pampillonio provided the text-score titled Pulsar Concerto, which concerns electrophonic listening and the vertiginous sense of deep time/rhythms inherent within receiving the pulsar’s 10,000 year old signal. The workshop was facilitated by Sasha Engelmann and Samuel Hertz.