artists statement

Ground Station produces music in real time by following the current azimuth, elevation and signal strength of up to 12 of a possible 32 Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites. Ground Station is, in a sense, an audible reflection of the activities of the GPS network it watches. Whereas GPS was developed as a positioning technology to aid in warfare, Ground Station inverts the traditional use of this data by watching the positions and movement of the satellites themselves. As GPS data is fed into Ground Station, it is processed by an algorithm designed by the artist that filters and transcodes this data into musical notation. This unique, continuous musical score is then played live through speakers or, in certain versions of the work, on a Disklavier piano.

In effect, Ground Station works by borrowing data from the US military’s GPS network. There are thus two sets of authors for the music that Ground Station produces: the artist-programmers who create and contextualize the work, and the military infrastructure that maintains and oversees the GPS network. The connection between these authors is a definite one. Ground Station is compositionally dependent on the data it receives from the GPS network and, in turn, on the military’s own uplink stations that control the satellites. The central role of the Schriever Air Force Base in the music produced by Ground Station is indirect yet significant, as this music depends on satellite trajectory, which is under direct military control. Without this ground control, the music produced by Ground Station would eventually fade and cease - a parallel with the decay of the satellites themselves.

System aside, Ground Station was not conceived to champion technology or the possibilities of computer-based musical composition. We have little interest in the aesthetics of the “music” produced by the piano. Rather, our goal is to produce music as a kind of cultural artifact of when and where we live. Ground Station relies on the supposition that musical composition is a product of the time and place in which it is created, rather than relying on its formal or syntactical qualities. A piano played under the rocket fire of wartime Beirut, for example, and Ground Station’s piano-manifested satellite data are both musical compositions that reflect specifically upon the social state of the cultures they are created within.

Ground Station sets out to make visible the different cultural approaches to technology, and to make audible the invisible data that connects these approaches. In this sense, Ground Station’s performance is not one of music, but of an oral translation of the current technologized society that we inhabit.

.- Daniel Jolliffe & Jocelyn Robert, January 2003

Text published in the booklet of the Audio CD Ground Station.- Surrey: Surrey Art Gallery, 2003.- 48 min 7 s.