Send / Receive Satellite Network

About the work

From the choreographer:  “I first remember sensing a rising tide of horror at the prospect of seeing a face from New York appear on the right hand monitor and call us out name by name: Terry Fox, Sharon Grace, Carl Loeffler, Alan Scarritt, Richard Lowenberg, Margaret Fisher. The power held by the monitor was immense. A few days before, Brad Gibbs, head of communications at Ames Research Center of NASA at Moffett Field in Mountain View CA, had confided his own fears of satellite communication to us. He felt this was an instrument as yet unchecked for the terrific ramifications it could hold and the political and psychological impact of which it was capable. The potential of satellite communication systems in the hands of the public scared him.” Download Fisher's 6-page account.

sendreceivesatellitenetwork.blogspot.com:  The demonstration was entirely co-ordinated by artists with the support of PISA (Public Interest Satellite Association) and NASA. The now defunct CTS satellite, an experimental satellite jointly owned by NASA and the Government of Canada, was used for the demonstration. The participants were visual artists, video/filmmakers, dancers and musicians, and the demonstration consisted of both verbal interactions and non-verbal performances. Dancers Nancy Lewis (NY) and Margaret Fisher (San Francisco) responded to each other's movements; sculptor Alan Scarritt did a feedback loop which later formed the basis for an installation at the Museum of Modern Art. The Franklin Street group demonstrated the infrared laser link they had set up to get the signal from the Battery City Park landfill, where the New York participants were located, to Manhattan Cable's upstream trunk line so that it could go out to cable viewers...Because of the pioneering nature of this demonstration, there were a number of technical problems which resulted in our transmission time being cut in half.