This Weekend, the Ionosphere Becomes a Canvas

High above our heads, the ionosphere haloes the world with a haze of charged particles. The ionosphere was as soon as important to world telecommunications, as a result of shortwave radio indicators mirror off it, and to allow them to bounce throughout the planet. Fiber-optic and satellite tv for pc communications have largely displaced shortwave radio. But the ionosphere nonetheless provides distinctive alternatives, resembling the flexibility to create really world items of artwork. That’s what Amanda Dawn Christie, based mostly in Lutes Mountain, New Brunswick, Canada, is doing this Sunday night/Monday morning. She’s utilizing an unlimited array of radio antennas—and you may very well be a vital a part of her art work.

Christie is one in all a small cadre of transmission artists. These artists don’t simply use radio waves as handy carriers for issues like music. They have an interest within the waves themselves. “I’m working with energy as a material for artistic creation,” explains Christie. IEEE Spectrum beforehand lined a few of Christie’s earlier work, which was impressed by the fading away of outdated shortwave radio stations. Her newest work makes use of the superior know-how of the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) in Gakona, Alaska.

What is HAARP? And how does it work?

HAARP was initially established as a analysis facility by the U.S. Air Force and U.S. Navy within the early Nineteen Nineties, however in 2015 the ability was turned over to the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, and its Geophysical Institute. HAARP’s most seen function is the Ionospheric Research Instrument (IRI), an array of antennas unfold out over 13 hectares that may transmit indicators between 2.7 and 10 megahertz. Normally, scientists use this array, together with ancillary devices, to probe the ionosphere and phenomena inside it, such because the spectacular aurora seen when the photo voltaic wind is funneled by magnetic strains of power into Earth’s higher ambiance.

Christie’s piece—entitled Composition No. 3—has been created “specifically to engage with some of HAARP’s capabilities,” says the artist. “Because it’s a phased array with 180 antennas, you can do quite a lot with it. Counterrotating beams, directing it at different places….I’m most interested in ‘Luxembourg’ experiments, in which you send up two frequencies 500 kilohertz apart, and they mix in the ionosphere and come down together. It’s like using the ionosphere as a giant mixing board.”

“The artwork is not complete until it interacts with the atmosphere….I’m collaborating with both the atmosphere and with the listeners.”
—Amanda Dawn Christie

Composition No. 3 is, because the identify suggests, Christie’s third piece for the HAARP array. She beforehand visited the array in 2019 and 2022. Her first go to was supposed to be only a technical check to discover the ability’s capabilities. However, questions on funding meant there was out of the blue no assure of a later go to, so Christie rapidly put collectively an inventive program incorporating slow-scan tv (SSTV) photos and audio messages. Her second go to was extra bold: Among different issues, she used the HAARP array to create an air glow within the ionosphere, basically a synthetic aurora. Christie says her newest work, which will likely be broadcast solely as soon as and will likely be her remaining transmission from HAARP, will incorporate what labored greatest from her earlier compositions and embrace new components. These embrace transmitting photos that may be seen solely by a digital waterfall show of the obtained sign. Composition No. 3 has 10 distinct actions, some contributed by different artists, so listeners with out entry to digital tools will nonetheless be capable to take heed to objects like radio-related poetry in different actions.

Christie would love anybody who picks up her transmissions to log a report by way of a kind on her web site and share any recordings or screenshots they make. These reviews will then go right into a concluding artwork piece. For anybody serious about turning into a part of Composition No. 3, at the same time as only a listener, Christie’s broadcast will start at 03:30 UTC on Sunday and final for an hour. The actual frequencies will likely be posted earlier than the transmission, however they’re anticipated to be near 9 MHz, a little bit beneath the 31-meter band utilized by many shortwave broadcast stations. SSTV photos will likely be despatched utilizing the audible Scottie S1 protocol, which will be decoded utilizing a smartphone app held as much as a radio’s speaker, for those who don’t have something extra elaborate. Christie guarantees that anybody who does submit a report will obtain an artifact originating within the glory days of broadcast radio: a bodily QSL card despatched by way of the mail.

Reception is as essential to the work as its transmission, says Christie. For these with out entry to their very own shortwave radio, and ideally a software program outlined radio, Composition No. 3 will likely be simulcast on-line. But “I feel like the artwork is not complete until it interacts with the atmosphere and is [received],” she says. “I feel like I’m collaborating with both the atmosphere and with the listeners, because there is also an element introduced by people. For instance, as they are decoding SSTV, how they’ve got their phase and skew settings set. What they receive depends on their equipment and how they are set up, so I feel like it’s a joint work.”