Hey! Use My Nervous System!
By Paul Weideman, The Santa Fe New Mexican
Jun. 27–Several days before the opening of his new show, Codices: Heliotown, at the Center for Contemporary Art’s Munoz Waxman Gallery, Thomas Ashcraft was busy on many projects. His multimedia installation in the gallery’s large, darkened space reminds one of the stories of Renaissance scientists; Ashcraft explores all kinds of things rather than specializing.
Among the elements in the show are a grid of adobe bricks on the floor, miscellaneous objects and video segments in homemade dioramas and desks, images of microbes and bacteriophages, and spooky music.
Ashcraft, a native of Springfield, Illinois, lived in Canada and in the Ozarks before he came to Santa Fe about 21 years ago. With a 1989 exhibit at the CCA, he presented items relating to the radiopanspermia hypothesis, which proposes that spores may be transmitted among star systems by radiation. In 1998, SITE Santa Fe organized Thomas Ashcraft: Time Dilation Experiments. Today Ashcraft is, among other things, keeper of a radio observatory at his residence south of Santa Fe, where he collects spectrograms of meteor activity. These, and sound samples derived from the visual data, are posted on his Web site, heliotown.com.
Pasatiempo visited with the artist while he prepared his installation four days before the opening.
Pasatiempo: What are you doing in this huge space?
Thomas Ashcraft: Well, I’m installing my study mood, my tone, and my vision. So you come in here and you’ll be simultaneously in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and in Heliotown — in something that calls itself the biological commonwealth, another state, another condition.
Pasa: What’s the advantage of this condition?
Ashcraft: For myself, as an extrapolator and a visionary, we’re preparing the contingency plan for post-United States or post-New World Order visioning.
Pasa: And this room?
Ashcraft: In the center I have a big grid of adobes. That’s major tonnage. So here’s this massive amount of earth, New Mexico desert, but it’s also a grid. This is a big space, so I got 500 adobe bricks. And there in that little spotlight on the grid is [a sculpture of] a bacteriophage virus. I study microbes, bacteriophages. That’s part of my long study, my naturalism.
Pasa: The grid is like a stage for the bacteriophage sculpture?
Ashcraft: It’s a frame for things to happen. That little guy’s just holding energy there for a moment. I’m not exactly sure what’s going to be happening there. But think about shining a light in some corner of the bottom of the ocean: what’s there, that kind of mood. I’ll be setting up my whole laboratory. Hopefully the creative and investigative processes will be imbued.
Here’s this.
Pasa: It’s a coin of some sort.
Ashcraft: This is the currency for the biological commonwealth. I’m the money stylist.
Pasa: Why the images of bacteriophages on the coin?
Ashcraft: We have to deal in these realms that we carry inside. I feel like I’m negotiating even with my insides — with all these creatures, with my many inhabitants. Yeah, so, like, there’s a ton of stuff going on here.
Pasa: You’re looking forward to some things happening outside, too, on June 23 and 24. [Ashcraft's Web site describes the events as Harnessing Wild Electricities From Outer Space for Information, Sensation, and Pleasure].
Ashcraft: I will attempt to receive radio bursts from Jupiter. That’s the plan, but it may not happen. I have another life as a radio astronomer. Right now I’m stepping into the cultural realm, so I have a little bit of poetic latitude.
Anyway, I’ll be using modified radio telescopes to record the Jovian radio bursts, which were discovered in the mid-1950s. When the moon Io orbits over one of three regions on the planet, certain kinds of bursts happen, and when the Earth is lined up with Jupiter and Io, these beams sweep across the earth, and they’re receivable by shortwave radio.
Pasa: How do you receive them?
Ashcraft: I’ll have my antennas and my radios out there. Electromagnetism comes out of this interaction between Io and Jupiter, OK? When it hits the antennas of my radio telescope, it gets turned into microelectricity. Then I’ll split it off to sound, and the signal goes into my chart recorder. I’m stripping off the housing and considering the little needle as a sculpture, so we have a Jovian-powered sculpture in real time.
Pasa: Are these your antennas? They’re like bamboo poles with metal sections.
Ashcraft: They’re really just holders for copper wire. I’ll have three of these plugged into a steel-pipe boom and extending out. There will be a bunch of those, making a cool field of sculpture. So science, no compromise, no artifice, and yet there’s this beauty aspect, too.
Pasa: On your Web site, you have a lot of audio files derived from celestial activity, but they just seem like white noise.
Ashcraft: Well, I’ve been listening to these for a couple of decades, and with my instruments I can unpack one second of Jupiter and see more of what’s there. I do radio astronomy with the sun and Jupiter and fireballs, meteors, and I work with Sandia National Laboratory.
Pasa: What am I hearing in this room now?
Ashcraft: One of my compositions, which is like sculpted sine waves with a little bit of found sound.
Pasa: What do you do with Sandia?
Ashcraft: They gave me an experimental camera, and I keep a daily archive of fireballs in the sky. Sandia is totally interested in this, because asteroids are a definite, inevitable threat, and they [Sandia scientists] have the power to deflect them. These are like high-velocity-impact scientists. Anyway, all those little “bing” sounds you hear in the recording that’s playing now are like space-dust particles coming into the atmosphere. Then, occasionally, there’s a bigger sound. I merged their camera with my radio-telescope system, and I split the signal through a video-distribution amp, and part of it goes into my iMac, where it gets recorded constantly in iMovie all night long at 30 frames a second. I’m making these movies.
So now I have, like, this regimen of logging all this information: log, log, log. It’s almost like a mental illness, but I’ve turned it to my advantage.
One of the last big fireballs was in May, and I got a call from Valerie Castro [at KOB-TV], who got my number from Sandia. Fireballs are cool. Everybody loves fireballs and big sky events like that.
I really feel like I have a niche in the Rio Grande research corridor, with all these labs from Los Alamos to Sandia and down to the [National Radio Astronomy Observatory's] Very Large Array. It’s an exciting place to be.
Pasa: Who watches all these movies you make of space activity?
Ashcraft: The scientific community. Radio engineers are like the squarest of the square, which is a compliment, in some ways. But here I am in this new form. I’m the electroreceptor. I’m receiving and putting out this sound on multiple frequencies that may be tapped into for potential central-nervous-system effect. I’m exploring this new form. It’s real, but I know I’m on some sort of edge, as I should be.
I’m getting a little bombastic, ’cause that’s what I’m supposed to do — I’m an artist, right? — so I’m declaring, in this case, Jovian electromagnetism as an artistic medium to power sculpture.
details Codices: Heliotown, installation by Thomas Ashcraft Opening reception 5-7 p.m. Saturday, June 28; through Aug. 24 Munoz Waxman Gallery, Center for Contemporary Arts, 1050 Old Pecos Trail, 982-1338
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