The Time Before The Fire

8 Aug-31 Dec 2022

Overview

Far above, over our heads a hidden choreography of national and commercial power struggles is playing out. Military, communications, GPS, imaging, monitoring, surveillance – satellites live fast and hard. Existence maintaining baseline performance in the New Frontier is precarious. 

Alongside them are the ghosts –  thousands of decommissioned siblings that have outlived their usefulness. They will tumble along their graveyard orbits for years or centuries before they hit the atmosphere and burn. At that moment of decommissioning they cease to be high functioning servants and become – what? Observable only as occasional glints between the stars or through increasingly strange radio signals, who knows what they might evolve into.

The Time Before The Fire is a new online residency by UK based artist Nye Thompson. For this commission, Thompson will present ongoing research alongside new work that looks at power, surveillance and machine agency through the discrete constellations of ghost satellites that inhabit the upper atmosphere.

We invite you to return to this online space, where over the coming months it will be populated with new content, which include an open call to satellite gazing, a recorded conversation between the artist and Prof. Lucie Green, an expanding body of research material and a new moving image piece.

Please follow us on our social media channels where new content will be announced for the course of Thompson’s residency.

Media