Installation  |  Jodrell Bank Calling  |  AND

We were commissioned by Abandon Normal Devices to create a film as part of the Watch the Skies! BFI sci-fi season at Jodrell Bank.

Having created a film for Elbow’s Jodrell Bank gig a few years back, we jumped at the chance to further explore Lovell’s legacy. Some amazing resource material to work with and a chance to break out of the YouTube windows and onto the super structure that is the Lovell Telescope via some heavyweight projectors.

The commission provided an opportunity to re-ignite a few creative collaborations from within Soup and draw on numerous imaging techniques that we’ve only really scratched the surface with prior to this project. Soundtrack came courtesy of Graham Massey’s re-working of sound sourced from the Lovell telescope, taking the data and properties for the work jodrell has done with pulsars and re-presenting it in a sonic context. 

The film draws on a transcript between Bernard Lovell, the creator of what we now know as Jodrell Bank and Roger Caras, VP of Kubrick’s production company, tasked with interviewing Lovell during the production of 2001: A Space Odyssey. The aim of this piece was to encompass the science, history and personality of Jodrell Bank, working with individuals from Jodrell in the re-interpretation of the Lovell interview.

A point of reference for us has been the work of video artists Woody Vasulka and Brian O’Reilly. Their Rutt Etra visual synthesiser was designed to manipulate a live video signal, controlling waveform and voltage to manipulate an image and convert sound into image and vice versa. Having spent the last year devising an analogue synthesiser based on the principles of the Rutt Etra, it felt like the perfect opportunity to utilise it, interpreting the content through original analogue synthesis, right through to modern digital visualisation techniques, using infra-red sensors to build 3D images. A celebration of the electromagnetic spectrum in all it’s glory.