Satellites, nicknamed “birds” in aerospace and ham radio circles, are critical to our lives but are essentially invisible. They fly overhead and are tricky to spot–sometimes we only hear faint signals to identify their presence in the vast dark woods of the cosmos. Heidi Neilson’s exhibition Strange Birds exposes and investigates our relationship with satellites from numerous angles: in time–our history and future visions–as well as how these orbiting devices extend our sensory capacities and allow us to participate in environments which we would be unable to perceive well, or even survive at all, ourselves.

Neilson’s practice in actively receiving transmissions from satellites is evident in the works on view. Remote Magnetometer and Solar energy only needs a color so we can see it both use data from her satellite ground station collaboration, Here GOES Radiotelescope (Heidi Neilson & Harry Dove-Robinson). Here GOES Radiotelescope receives all of the data from NASA/NOAA’s GOES-16 weather satellite year-round from the grounds of Wave Farm, a non-profit arts center in New York which focuses on radio and transmission arts. Remote Magnetometer is based on the actual Magnetometer instrument on GOES-16, ‘playing’ the data from that instrument, and Solar energy only needs a color so we can see it combines for an animation multiple images of the sun at different wavelengths captured by another of GOES-16’s instruments. Relaying data from satellites through this independent receiving station and enacting the data through these works envisions both the foreign environment of Earth’s orbit and the connections between our earthbound and space infrastructure.

The future of people in space, and how this has been imagined in the past, is on the mind of Neilson in her work Past Visions of the Future Now (longitudes). The work is an in-progress photographic exploration from the standpoint of sites where experiments in utopian societies have been attempted. Rather than photographing the sites themselves, Neilson has photographed a location in Earth’s orbit in which past ‘colonization’ schemes– giant spinning spaceship habitats–have been speculatively placed. Channeling the tentative and complicated plans toward human extraplanetary expansion from the standpoint of past utopian attempts is like comparing types of existential emptiness. But these seemingly random, though actually very deliberate, photographs have a quotidian friendliness to them, capturing daily weather, clouds, blue skies, and occasional horizon or architectural clues to our actual whereabouts on the ground.

The history of human presence in Earth’s orbit is touched upon in her print and book works. The presence of space junk is outlined in Orbital Debris Simulator by using space toys as stand-ins for the invisible junk itself. A print series commemorates some particular vintage satellites, framing them as objects of cultural history and celebrating their purposeful and analog design. Other books are repositories of images from space which Neilson has collected using handbuilt sculptural antennas, such as those mounted within beachballs and requiring the ball’s inflation to remain in working order.

As Neilson shows us in these works, we use satellites functionally but also they enable us to see our hopes, dreams and capacities as humans more clearly. Ultimately these devices flying across our skies are really ourselves, disembodied, as we try to better understand the world and ourselves in it.

 

Bio

Heidi Neilson is an interdisciplinary artist whose work explores connections between people on the ground and off-planet conditions and infrastructure. She works in multiple mediums including radio transmissions, sound, prints, books, sculpture, electronics, and video. She is currently co-operating Here GOES Radiotelescope, a sculptural receiving station for the GRB transmission from GOES-16, a NOAA weather satellite, and mining the volumes of earth observation and space weather data collected by the station for a variety of projects. Other recent work includes Moon Arrow, a mechanical sculpture which continually points at the moon, and Sonic Planetarium, an immersive sound installation made from recordings of orbiting satellites.

From the New York Foundation for the Arts, Neilson is a 2023 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Digital/Electronic Arts and a 2015 Fellow in Interdisciplinary Work. Neilson has been awarded Individual Artists grants from the New York State Council on the Arts (2024, 2022), a Media Assistance Fund for Artists Grant—New York State Council on the Arts in Partnership with Wave Farm (2018), Art Matters Grant—Art Matters Foundation (2013), and Individual Artist Support—New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, Queens Council on the Arts (2021, 2018, 2007). She has been awarded artist residencies at the NYC Urban Field Station, SPACES, Wave Farm, Klondike Institute of Art & Culture, Provisions Library, Elsewhere, Lower East Side Printshop, Center for Book Arts, Visual Studies Workshop, and Women’s Studio Workshop. Her work has been exhibited internationally, and her artist books and other works are held in over 100 collections, including those of the Brooklyn Museum, Cleveland Institute of Art, Columbia University, the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, and Yale University. Writing about her work has appeared in Hyperallergic, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and Popular Mechanics, among others.

Neilson holds a BA in biology from Reed College and an MFA in painting from Pratt Institute. She is a board member of Wave Farm, teaches art and design at Parsons School of Design | The New School, and lives and works in New York. Her ham radio call sign is KD2ESI.

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