land & sound art installation about gravitational waves – in collaboration wih EGO/VIRGO, Materia Prima Foundation, Cooltsalon, Over the Real et Al.
grass, earth
Land art by Luca Serasini
Soundscape by Massimo Magrini
Curated by Eleonora Raspi, Vincenzo Napolano, Valerio boschi
EGO VIRGO interferometer, Cascina (PI)
50 x 50 mt, 2022
How do we capture the sound of our universe? Waiting, stillness and listening are the key ideas behind the installation Frange d’interferenza, in ascolto del Cosmo (Fringes of Interference, Listening to the Cosmos), by visual artist Luca Serasini and sound designer Massimo Magrini for the European Gravitational Observatory. Fringes of Interference explores and interprets the Virgo experiment’s ability to ‘listen’ to the feeble cosmic signals generated millions or billions of light years from Earth and to monitor at the same time the signals coming from the natural and human environment in which it is embedded. The interactive land art installation occupies one of the observatory’s green spaces and recreates, on a much larger scale, the figure of the interference fringes, the light signal by which gravitational waves are detected and take a ‘visible’ form in Virgo. In addition, visitors are immersed in a soundscape created by Massimo Magrini, connecting to an online app and only works when they are in the vicinity of the installation. In the installation, the detection of remote cosmic echoes mingles with the monitoring of environmental ‘noises’ (even those that are inaudible): the vibrations of the Earth or the hissing of the wind, the beating of wind turbines, the impact of sea waves on the Tyrrhenian coast, and man-made noises. Predicted by Einstein in the early 1900s, gravitational waves are ripples in the deep structure of physical reality that scientists call space-time and were first observed in 2015. Since then, the Virgo interferometer, and the two US LIGO detectors, have begun to draw a new cosmic landscape, discovering dozens of extraordinary and violent cosmic events, such as mergers of black holes or neutron stars.
