Signal Tide
Kovács/O’Doherty

Kovács/O’Doherty developed a project that used satellite technology to create a poetic response to the erratic signals of LES-1, a defunct spacecraft that ceased to function in 1967 but unexpectedly started transmitting again in 2013. Titled Signal Tide, the work was a sound and extraterrestrial radio installation, which combined the satellite’s wavering signal with a special musical score, outside LACMA’s Pavilion for Japanese Art.

 

Kovács/O’Doherty, tracking satellite signals, Stolzenhagen, Germany, May 2017.
Tracking satellite signals, Stolzenhagen, Germany, May 2017. © Kovács/O’Doherty
Tracking satellite signals on the roof at LACMA, August 2017. © Kovács/O’Doherty
Tracking satellite signals on the roof at LACMA, August 2017. © Kovács/O’Doherty
Spectrogram image excerpt from the signal of the LES-1 satellite. © Kovács/O’Doherty
Project Website
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Signal Tide — Two Passes: A Special Audio Mix
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Artist Notes on Technical Development
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Program from 2017 Performance1.9 MB
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Other Project Documents4.67 MB
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About the Artists

Kata Kovács and Tom O’Doherty have worked as a collaborative duo since 2011. Their work combines elements of durational and time-based art, minimalist movement, and electroacoustic music and sound. This work often applies rigorous processes to simple but frequently-overlooked phenomena — they are interested in processes, sounds, and movements that come close to imperceptibility, and the ways in which this material can be transformed through repetition, patterning, layering, and archiving. They live and work in Berlin, Germany.

Artist Website

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