OMICRON

2015 | Sound + Video Art Performance | Stereo Audio | Green Bank, West Virginia | 0:35:00

Omicron is a site-responsive performance and exploration of microscopy and macroscopy— radio astronomy, bacteria, and microalgae; human effort, the seeming meaninglessness of tiny lives, unshakable hope, parallel worlds, seeing the unseeable, and the power of little things.

Projected video of microalgae, diatoms, and other tiny, single-celled organisms reflect the living things dwelling in a proverbial mud puddle in the shadow of the world's largest moving manmade object on land: a massive, fully steerable radio telescope in Green Bank, West Virginia. Sound is a combination of synthesized audio and multilayered field recordings of Appalachian marsh and forest landscapes alongside sonified radio telescope data. 

Both microorganisms and deep space objects can only be seen through scientific instruments that extend the human range of vision. The shapes of the microorganisms somehow parallel the shapes and forms of heavenly bodies and radio signals— radiant orbs, clouds, streaks, and clusters drifting in an infinite space.