Kunstenaar - Art Office

le Voyage dans la Lune - 'le Voyage dans la Lune' is a video work inspired by the homonymous B/W film by French director George Méliès. The animation is composed by 26 Moon-reflected images of the Lunar phases kindly provided by Michael Oates (Manchester Astronomical Society). On the 20 September 2011, the 26 images were sent to the Moon in a sequence (one after the next) as radio signals by Bruce Hàlasz, a radio amateur in Brazil; the radio signals, reflected by the Moon's surface and scattered all over the Space, were partly received by at Dwingeloo radio telescope, a 25 meters dish in The Netherlands. The original signals traveled approximately 768.000 Kilometers, the distance to the Moon and back, losing some data on the way, thus giving the Moon-reflected images a 'noisy' and very unique appearance.

Blue Marble - Blue Marble is a video work commissioned and presented as part of the official reopening ceremony of the Dwingeloo radio telescope, on 5 April 2014. The video is realized with the technology Visual Moonbounce, developed by the artist during her residency at the Dwingeloo radio telescope. For this video, the original Blue Marble image was sent to the Moon as radio waves by a station in Italy and received as reflection of the Moon's surface by the Dwingeloo radio telescope in The Netherlands. The process was repeated eleven times, until the original image faded away into entropy. The distortion of the image is caused by the long distance travelled by the radio waves, approximately 800.000 Km for each journey to the Moon and back. In this work the radio waves travelled approximately 8.000.000 Km in total.

Moon Relay - The video installation shows images of nuclear explosions reflected by the Moon's surface, using the technology 'Visual Moonbounce', developed in 2009 by Daniela de Paulis during her residency at the Dwingeloo radio telescope in The Netherlands. The images have been sent to the Moon as radio signals by a station in Brazil and, after being reflected by the Moon's surface, have been received by the Dwingeloo radio telescope and reconverted in the original images. The evident distortion of the images is caused by the great distance travelled by the signals, approximately 768.000 Kilometres. In the exhibition setting the images are projected in large scale, in order to emphasize their hallucinatory content and saturated colours, by overstating their distortion.

OPTICKS - OPTICKS borrows its name from the pivotal essay by Isaac Newton on the reflection and refraction of colours. OPTICKS is a networked live performance during which digital images submitted by the public are sent to the moon as radio signals, using several antennas around the globe. The performance is streamed on the web in real time and includes a panel of artists and scientists gathering and talking around the topic of the Moon, while the images are sent to the Moon and back in real time. The performance has been presented since 2009 and brings together radio operators, scientists and the general public from around the world.

Writing on the Moon - Writing on the Moon is inspired by Italo Calvino's novel Cosmicomics and in particular by its first chapter, The Distance of the Moon. The video shows words 'literally' falling off the Moon's surface, as suggested by the novel, which takes scientific facts and builds imaginative stories around them. The words, converted into sound tones and transmitted to the Moon as radio waves by a station in Brazil, are reflected by the Lunar surface, received by the Dwingeloo radio telescope in The Netherlands and displayed while they return from the long journey, creating a poetic visual cascade, in a playful act of free associations. The distortion of the letters is caused by the long distance travelled by the radio waves (approximately 800.000 Km) and by the rocky and uneven Moon's surface, which scatters the radio signals all around the space, as they touch its ground. The words, which can be read vertically, symbolically echo the special Moon condition described in the novel, for which objects simply fall from the Lunar surface, onto Earth.....

COGITO in Space (performance, 2013-2018) - Abstract. COGITO in Space is an experiential narrative sending thoughts into outer space as radio waves. The project exists both as a mobile installation and as performative event staged inside the cabin of the Dwingeloo radio telescope in The Netherlands. For both versions of the project, a team composed by three neuroscientists prepare the subject with a lab grade electroencephalogram (EEG) device and a virtual reality (VR) headset, showing an experimental video of the Earth seen from space. The brain activity stimulated by the video is recorded and simultaneously transmitted into space in real time, using the antenna of the Dwingeloo radio telescope.

A Sign in Space (Light installation, 2016) - Commissioned for the New Realism exhibition at Science Park in Amsterdam, A Sign in Space is my second work inspired by Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics. The work reflects upon the process leading to the production of visual representations of cosmic phenomena. The images selected for the piece represent the centre of the Milky Way, first captured by the Swift satellite and then cleansed of defects caused by the satellite’s mechanical failures and degradation over time. Here the images, meant to represent concrete celestial phenomena, yet cleansed of any sign of physical occurrence in time and of any spatial reference, are shown as exercise of pure mental abstraction, as windows into the void, with white signs floating onto it. The title of the work alludes to the almost surreal, yet distinctly human tension of finding one’s place within the infinity of the cosmos by tracing deliberate, yet meaningless, signs onto the void.

The Metamorphosis of a Periplaneta Americana (performance) - On 15 April 2020 I transmitted into space the neural activity of a locust and a cockroach recorded by the research team lead by Prof. Amil Ayali at the University of Tel Aviv. I visited the lab at the university in 2014 to conduct some research on the neural recording of insects. The sound recording of the neural activity was sent into space by the radio operators of the Bochum Radio Observatory in Germany. The Metamorphosis is the follow up stage of my ongoing project COGITO in Space The title of the work is borrowed from Frank Kafka's novel in which his fictional character one day wakes up as an insect and experience reality through an alienated body and sensory system. The novel provides an impressive example of a human speculating about the experience of life and reality from the perspective of another living being.

Mare Incognito (performance, film, 2022) - Mare Incognito is an interdisciplinary project by media artist Daniela de Paulis. Mare Incognito explores the gradual dissolution of consciousness and of the thinking process while falling asleep. We are especially interested in exploring the moment during the sleep cycle while awareness seems to dissolve and while the self gradually detaches from the continuous life narrative. The perceived loss of consciousness during sleep is the only moment in daily life when the thinking process gradually shreds into an unfathomable void, an experience possibly similar to the moments of dying. Mare Incognito poetically explores and draws reflection upon the process of dying as a daily experience in human life. In the performance, we conceptually link the dissolution and symbolic death of the self as experienced during deep sleep with the darkness, coldness and vacuum of outer space and explore how such immeasurable forms of space and emptiness might poetically resonate with each other. The title of the work hints at a journey into the obscure oceans of inner and outer space. http://somnospace.diejungeakademie.de/

The Dream of Scipio (video installation, 2018-2022) - This is an ongoing project, partly developed as part of the 'Exploded View' project by Krien Clevis, set at the Parco Regionale dell'Appia Antica. The work delves into 'The Dream of Scipio' (Somnium Scipionis), a section of 'On the Republic', a literary dialogue on Roman politics, written in six volumes by Cicero. 'The text was rightly seen as a condensation of important ideas from ancient philosophy and cosmology by scholars in the middle ages. Scholars now recognize it as a superb example of a popular meditation technique widely practiced in different schools of classical philosophy, and known today as the 'View from Above'. For this piece, I will recreate the first flight in history over ancient Rome, in the Parco Archeologico di Centocelle, a section of the Parco Regionale dell'Appia Antica. The original flight was demonstrated by the Wright Brothers on the 15 April 1909 and documented as part of the first aerial footage in history. For the flight, I will use a replica of the 'Flyer' used by the Wright Brothers, and the runaway running through the park.

A Sign in Space - On May 24, 2023, a simulated extraterrestrial message was transmitted towards Earth by the Trace Gas Orbiter, a spacecraft of the European Space Agency orbiting Mars. The radio signal was received by the Green Bank Telescope and the Allen Telescope Array in the USA and by the Medicina Radio Antenna in Italy. The event was part of the interdisciplinary project A Sign in Space and was streamed ive by the SETI Institute, with thousands of people watching in real time. A Sign in Space is a visionary art project involving the worldwide search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), professionals from different fields and the broader public in the reception, decoding and interpretation of the message. The project is a combination of theatre, live performance art, electronic literature, ARG (Alternate Reality Game), science, including radio astronomy and SETI. It also crosses disciplines such as space studies, anthropology, philosophy, semiotics, computer science, poetry and several others. After one week following the reception of the signal, thousands of participants from all over the world gathered on the online platform Discord, and managed to extract the message from the raw data of the radio signal received by the various observatories. The message extracted has been represented by the Discord community as an enigmatic image with a black background dotted by groups of white pixels. Since then, the community has continued further decoding the message, experimenting with thousands of possible interpretations. On 7 June 2024, a father and daugther team successfully decoded the message, however until now there has been no conclusive interpretation of the message. The project aims at questioning human communication through one of the possibly most radical scenarios, in which humankind attempts to create meanings around a message crafted by an extraterrestrial intelligence. A Sign in Space has been reaching a broad public since its early stages. The project, designed as a work of cosmic theatre, has created an imaginary event to be experienced both subjectively and collectively by people from various cultures and geographical locations. In A Sign in Space, people active in the decoding process are members of a micro-society, engaged in the process of meaning making. A Sign in Space asks how do we, as humans and as a complex multitude of societies with very diverse cultural backgrounds, have been assigning meanings to concepts, events, phenomena, throughout our evolutionary history. How does the process of meaning-making unravel and evolve? A Sign in Space asks these questions, using one of the possibly most radical scenarios that we might experience as humankind: attempting to assign meaning to a message from an extraterrestrial intelligence. How can we possibly assign meanings to something so detached from our terrestrial experience? What would that signify for humankind? How can we attribute meaning to something that is possibly beyond our cognitive abilities? Although in A Sign in Space it is desirable that participants will eventually discover the actual content of the message designed for the project, the many interpretations presented by the global public are an incredible display of human creativity, intelligence, inquisitive abilities. The decoding process has been allowing participants to experiment with existing technologies in innovative ways, to explore scientific and artistic concepts and to reinterpret those in a multitude of forms. Besides participating in the exploration around the possible content of the simulated extraterrestrial message through scientific and creative reasoning and by applying various visual and acoustic tools, participants in the project have been discussing with each other fundamental topics about human and non-human intelligence, about the emergence of life on Earth and beyond, about the limits of human knowledge and abilities.