Weathered Image
Planetary Sound

  Date:
Time:
Bidston Observatory
Coordinates: 53° 24′ 02″ N, 3° 04′ 23″ W
My hand was aloft, tightly grasping the metal antenna and pointing it vaguely north. Through a fumble of wires, this handheld receiver was connected to a laptop emitting a regular sequence of high-pitched beeps, clicks and mechanical whirrs which cut through the enveloping static. Wind blew in my face, and I shook slightly, with my arm raised for over ten minutes. At points the beeps faded into the surrounding noise but, with a slight reorientation of my arm and a turn of the head to hear more clearly, beeps cohered again into a definitive sound.
It had been like this since 10:48pm, when an ocean of static slowly receded and a faint recurrent sound emerged from the ‘ether’, growing stronger with each minute. The satellite pass had been a bit rushed - through train delays and a locked front door, the set-up time slipped away from me, providing a rough first attempt as I sought out this operational sound amongst the radio fuzz.
With the laptop balanced on the edge of a bench, some notes I had hastily scribbled down in a brown notebook on the journey over gave the frequency and modulation figures that were needed to receive a signal transmitted from the NOAA-19 satellite moving across the sky some way north of my own location.
There was a shimmer of wind turbines jutting up from Burbo Bank on the horizon, similarly buffeted by a sea wind. The remnants of a faded sunset left the high trailing clouds a muddy purple and a storm was on the way in the following days - my skin was sticky despite the breeze.
It felt very intimate - a hapticity connecting this passing satellite with the specific atmosphere unfolding on the roof of the observatory, across a network of environments through which the signal passed, including me. My own movements leading up to this point informed a haphazard satellite connection, alongside the specificity of the building itself and our surrounding weather systems. As the orbiting NOAA-19 satellite surpassed our shared horizon, its radiophonic beeps seemingly resisted a submission to noise. Amongst shifting auditory information, I was unsure whether the beep remained. Like a ringing in my head, there was a ghostly tone that still felt real to me - an aural imprint enduring past its material possibility, rippling and returning like the tide I could see in the middle distance.
I had been thinking about what to do whilst staying at Bidston Observatory on a research trip. In noticing the fragility of the signals and the cybernetic movements I made to find them, I felt an embodied sense of sounding out the building as an extension of my own techno-body. Sitting with the noise, that uncertainty still signified something. It helped fuzz the real and the imagined, the heard and the felt into a sensorium of interloping indeterminacy - intuitive, where fiction and fact merged into a particular true history.
I was seeking a similar interaction between the building’s prior use and its contemporary reorientation; from earth science techniques of timekeeping and tidal prediction to artistic research and somatic practice.
The ringing stayed in my head like tinnitus. Not a particularly pleasant sound, operational for digital computers rather than humans, but the sense of embodied connection with the sublime realm of planetary communications was unnerving. I was struck by the temporal and sonic rhythms of this satellite as I followed its various orbits – something Wolfgang Ernst might call its “sonicity” . I was confronted by the contradiction of intimacy and dislocation in using these methods, where my machinic ear caused a twist of the hand and a shift in my body, orientating towards an unseeable yet reachable orbiting technical object of extra-statecraft . 
There doesn’t seem to be a precise format for this, but for that I’m almost grateful - It’s hard to maintain a coherent beep when tracking a satellite pass. With your arm achingly held above your head for 15 minutes, the embodied fuzz of muscular wear and elemental weathering leave an impact in the resultant visuality. A satellite image of variant focus, where operational sound, accessibility and static noise form a timeline of stratified cartography. That first attempt formed an illegible frame with very little earthly imaging visible, but I was more interested in the noise 



Semaphore station flag information for Bidston Hill (1826)
Triassic Kemper Sandstone
The One O’Clock Gun at Morpeth Dock
Explosives Act Registry for Time Gun, 1929
Anemometer Dial in the Weather Station
Dome Stairs Over-Construction
Bidston Observatory Postcard
Regulation Testing of Marine Chronometers, 1906
Valerie Gane operating Doodson-Lège Tidal Prediction Machine
Wet Studio Shelving (previously housed the Doodson-Lège Tidal Prediction Machine)
Desert Blown Triassic Sandstone, Bidston Hill
Tidal Prediction during World War II
Storage Room
Inner Dome (East)
Window to Dry Moat

Audio Sources:


1- Hydra Recording, One O’Clock Gun
2.  Time Gun Recording, 2019    
2- Open-Wave Receiver Radio, Western Dome
3- Dialogue with Tal, Kitchen
4- Ether Recording , Weather Station
5- Vocals  (Re-pitch and Delay), Sub-Basement
6- Textures and Field Recording,  Sub-Basement
7-  Vocals + contact mic, Eastern Dome
8- Hydra Recording, Weather Station
9-  In Your Coded Signal Dance recital    
10- Open-Wave Receiver Radio, Weather Station
11- Hydra Recording, One O’Clock Gun
12- Repitched  Photon Smasher Recording, Radio Studio 13 June 2025                                     18 July 2019                                           30 August 2025      
06 July 2025                                  
29 August 2025                          
12  June  2025                                   17 April 2025
05 July 2025
30 August 2025
03 September 2025
30 August 2025
13 June 2025
30 August 2025                      

00:00-06:34
01.07 - 01: 50  
02:41-04:42    
04:30-07:30
07:25-10:16
10:01-11:20
11:06-14:20  
14:04- 17:34
15:07-17:18
18:30-21:10
17:52-20:01
18:14-23:25
18:27-22:27