These Artists Are Turning Space Junk into Sound Art

CubeSats adrift in space. Image: NASA

In July of 2006, British astronaut Piers Sellers was repairing the International Space Station when he discovered that his spatula was missing. For the next couple of months, the spatula orbited earth while space trackers followed its journey on computer screens. The spatula, which came to be known as Spat-sat, soon disintegrated in earth’s atmosphere—but its story lives on.

The Spat-sat is the unlikely focus of Adrift, a new digital art project by Australian filmmaker Cath Le Couteur and British sound designer and artist Nick Ryan. The project tells the story of hidden space junk through a film, a sound installation, and a website that all work together to make more tangible the idea of space debris.

We caught up with Le Couteur and Ryan on Skype to learn more about the film, how to make a sound installation inspired by mute space, and about space junk in general.

The Creators Project: So tell me about Adrift?

Cath Le Couteur: Basically, we want to tell the story about hidden space junk. I've had the idea for something like this for a couple of years. I was entranced by the story of the British astronaut Piers Sellers who dropped his spatula in space. The more I read the more I realized how dangerous it was—this spatula could wipe out the International Space Station. I did some research and discovered all these other kinds of space junk.

An American astronaut lost his glove. The image of the solitary glove spinning around in orbit above us, I found that haunting and kind of melancholic, but also kind of beautiful. The final product will be a film, a website, and a sound installation that aims to tell the story about space debris in a way that provokes the audience to connect with it emotionally.

Is space junk a real problem, though?

Le Couteur: Yes. Space junk is becoming a real 21st century crisis. There's more than 300 million pieces of space junk up there. It's threatening to wipe out the International Space Station and there's no solution for it. It's becoming more and more of a problem. They think that 2015 is going to be the moment where we may experience cascade—what's also called the ‘Kessler effect’—which is when there's so much junk out there that every time it collides it'll just create more and more. Humans have this kind of junk gene, where we can't go anywhere without leaving our crap.

Man-made objects in orbit around the Earth that no longer serve a useful purpose. Image: NASA

So why did this interest you?

Le Couteur: I just thought, there's so many things this raises. I started discussing it with Nick and the idea of bringing this stuff into life. We wanted to personify space debris and make something that really asked the single question: Is it possible for us to connect with this debris that's orbiting silently above our heads?

We’ve already filled the oceans with junk. Do you think space is humankind’s newest dumping ground?

Le Couteur: In the sixties, at the time of the moon landing, there was this excitement about the technology. It was this kind of promise of an amazing future. It's now fifty years on, it's no longer new, technology just here to stay. Those promises where never kept. Today, everything is going into financing robotics, which is really sad. There's something about that human quest of exploration that I find very interesting. I understand that it's difficult to justify the amount of money it costs, to go into space. I feel sad that it feels like my generation will never see another moon landing or going to Mars. We need to develop cheaper technology to make it happen. I hope that happens.

Nick Ryan: I met the guy who runs Virgin Galactic last week. He was talking about how the private sector is financing cheap, reusable vehicles, that is helping technology on earth. It feels like it's all refocusing back to earth. Even the advance in consumer space travel is still about the revenues that come from patents. This creates new technology on earth instead of expanding us outwards. It's not really about anything new, it's just more of the same.

Did we take a technology detour along the way?

Le Couteur: Yes, totally. Interestingly, me and Nick first met in London in 1995 in a place called Cyberia. It was the world’s first internet cafe. That period of time was so wonderfully exiting with all the possibilities technology gave us. For example, we made a virtual diocese for a bishop, but he was sacked by the Vatican for being pro-gay and pro-women. There was just so much optimism back then. We never envisioned that we'd be in a Snowden-era now, where's there's such a focus on surveillance and commerce. Now it's just government spying, commerce and drones. Back then, there was so much more hope for what technology could give us in the future.

Ryan: There was this Californian, '60s hippie ideology back then. That utopian kind of ideology actually laid the foundation for stuff like social networking. But now they're actually spearheading this kind of global revolution in commercializing creative thinking in a very, very cynical way. Look at Apple. It's disenchanting, really. What people think of as technology is not space technology or industrial technology. It's lifestyle technology, which is very reductive and limiting.

Hole created after space junk collided with a satellite. Image: NASA

Tell me more about the details of the project.

Ryan: I want to use sound to transform information. The sound that you hear is representative of the data. A few years ago I wrote a piece of music called "Cortical Songs," which was an attempt to use the orchestra to play rhythms of firing neurons in the brains of mammals. We used real biological computer models of a set of neurons. The result was intended to represent the activity in an aesthetic way. In this project I wanted to give a voice to things, which are normally inaudible. To make things heard that would otherwise be silent. The thing about space debris is that if it was closer to us, it would make a lot of noise. But because it's in space it doesn't make any noise.

How did you end up making this project?

Le Couteur: We heard about The Space's open call through some friends. It's kind of surprising, since none of us really come from the art-world. I'm much more of a film maker, but that's what I loved about The Space it's open to all artistic disciplines. It didn't matter if you're a sculpture or a filmmaker. It seemed like a place to experiment and there's still a lot of unknowns about our project. I feel confident that we're allowed to fail and solve the problems as they come. We set up two Twitter feeds, @Projectadrift and @problemadrift, because we’ve anticipated that we'll have lots of problems.

So, what is it you want to do with this project?    

Le Couteur: What we really want to do with this project is to ask: can we connect with this? Is there a way to emotionally connect with wants happening above our heads? We hope we can provoke that. Or, can we provoke other thoughts? Does it provoke a sense that we need new ideas, because we treat space as we treat the oceans? I don't know how people will connect, but that's the question: can we create an experience where they can?

Ryan: The film will be much more narrative driven. It's telling a story through three people, an astronaut, a space debris tracker, and an author, who sent the first musical debris into space. With the sound installation I want to communicate this idea of debris with a very physical connection. Although it's about making music, it's much less narrative driven.

The Zimmerwald Observatory, Switzerland which partakes in tracking space debris. Image: The Zimmerwald Observatory

How?

Ryan: I intend to build an instrument. It's going to be in a room and people can come see it. It will be extremely manual with everything handmade, much in contrast to space debris. This instrument will take the live data stream from actual space debris. It will actually cause the mechanics of the instrument to change over time as they float overhead—like a music box. The instrument will also score the film. The website will bring the film and sound installation together. If you see the film online, the music will match what's going on in space while you're watching the film. It's like a live soundtrack to the film. There will also be a live feed, so you can see what's drifting around above you in real time.

I see the sound installation as a physical front-end to what is otherwise digital information. When we started our careers you couldn't stream film online, now it's the primary delivery platform for film. The video has matured in such a way that we now can present things in multimedia and have a physical companion that people can visit. We don't see this as a digital art project. We see the online space as a platform thats articulated in different media.

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