Sky Ear: at the intersection between art and technology

Usman Haque will launch
Sky Ear, next 4 May 2004 at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, London, coinciding with the lunar eclipse.

It will be:

a one-night event in which a glowing cloud of mobile phones and helium balloons is released into the air so that people can dial into the cloud and listen to the sounds of the sky.

The cloud will be made of one thousand large helium balloons each responding to the electromagnetic environment (created by distant storms, mobile phones, police and ambulance radios, television broadcasts, etc.) with coloured blue, red and yellow lights.

The balloons will be enclosed in a carbon fibre and net structure 25m in diameter tethered to the ground by 6 cables and held aloft at a height of 60m where it will remain for several hours.

Using mobile phones people will be able to listen to the actual sounds up high, the electromagnetic sounds of the sky as well as streams of “whistlers” and “spherics” (atmospheric electromagnetic phenomena that are the audible equivalent of the Northern Lights).Of course, the action of calling the cloud changes the electromagnetic environment inside and causes the balloons to vary in brightness, colour and intensity.

The invisible electronic radiation pervading the air will be revealed thanks to the interaction between the people calling the flying mobile phones.

A symphony of glowing colors in the dark will sing on the background of the moon disappearing.

The wireless spectrum will become visible with colors and will act as a sensor of what it’s happening in the electromagnetic fields surrounding the area of the show.

“You can enter into something like a conversation with the cloud.”

“I think that art recently has reasserted itself as a creative research tool,” Haque says. “It is artists who are these days best able to explore the changing relationship of people to their environments, interactions between people and objects, between objects and spaces.”

The Sky Ear project lies at the intersection between art, science, technology, entertainment and social studies.

In particular the ground of art and mobile technology, seems to be one of the most prolific for experiments and research.