Invisible Waves with Phil Coy & Dr Hugh Mortimer

Invisible Dust education project

Invisible Waves uses art and technology to engage secondary school students with space science and the role of satellites, which are increasingly important to understanding climate change. It was led by artist Phil Coy in collaboration with Dr Hugh Mortimer, based at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL).

The project film below includes Hugh and Phil’s musings on the use of satellite imagery in science and art, and explores their crossover, and the involvement of the young people from Hounsdown School in the project. It starts with a recreation of a piece of Phil’s earlier work #blackspot, and ends with snippets from the students films.

Phil worked with students to create their own short films, snippets of which are at the end of the film. The film starts with a reimagining of an old artwork by Phil from 2005 #blackspot.

#blackspot 2013: 2013 is the 100th anniversary of the painter and Russian artist Kazimir Malevich, who created the ‘Suprematist manifesto’ and these ideas leak into the film. Students from Hounsdown School read from the manifesto and then marked out a representation of a single pixel from a satellite image from space on the ground. They used a 30m square of black agricultural plastic to show the space created by the pixel from space. They documented this experience with their camera phones. Their videos have been data-moshed together with music from the score of Malevich and Mikhail Matyushin’s Futurist opera ‘Victory Over the Sun’ (also 1913) and uploaded as #blackspot (2013).

This education project is part of the wider project, which sees Turner Prize winning artist Elizabeth Price create new works after a residency at RAL.