Voyager II
Digital Animation. 4:50 minutes. 4:3. 2013
This animation is comprised by sequences of photographs of the sun, the moon and my shadow while walking in the Atacama Desert over a period of a week. Motivating this work was a heightened awareness of the synchronous relationship between the sun, the moon and my location in space as indicated by my shadow. This awareness was coupled with musings about the Inca travelers who once roamed the same area, and for whom the sun and the moon were not only constant companions but gods and deities. The sounds heard in Voyager II are sampled from an original recording made by the Voyager II spacecraft as it entered Jupiter's magnetosphere on July 2, 1979. These sounds were produced by vibrations of particles in the electromagnetic field surrounding the planet. These are the actual sounds of space, amplified to make them audible to the human ear. Apart from being remixed and, in some instances, isolated by frequency, they are the unfiltered sounds of the original recording of space near Jupiter (Obtained from the Radio and Plasma Wave Group, Department of Physics & Astronomy, University of Iowa).