Beacon Sjoerd Leijten Olle Kruit 2016

The aether is full of radiomagnetic waves. Wifi, mobile telephony, radio stations, yet also the electromagnetic waves of distant comets float through the air around us. BEACON is an installation performance in which the aether is scanned for all kinds of signals. The found signals are channeled into an ongoing cosmic composition.

The beacon consists of three compartments with speakers, raspberries, software defined radios and antennae. Software is developed in telecommunication environment GNURadio and audio programming language SuperCollider. A controller has been made from melted plastic to control parameters like the tuning frequency, the band width and the demodulation type. In the top of the beacon there is an AM transmitter, which enables the beacon to receive radio waves, manipulate them and then send the distorted waves back into the aether.