Sensing sferics: Electromagnetic noise and environmental signal

Abstract

Each time lightning bursts in the Earth’s atmosphere, it releases radio waves that ricochet between the planet’s surface and its ionosphere, a layer of charged air lying between 80 km and 1000 km above our heads. This article explores these radio atmospheric signals, or ‘sferics’, across a range of media and sound arts. It argues that even as artists idealize sferics as a direct path to a kind of planetary unconscious, there remain attempts to incorporate sferics within existing cultural models of both quantitative and qualitative data. These models insist that environmental phenomena, no matter how immaterial, serve some aspect of human productivity. In short: the pursuit of sferics in media arts is also the pursuit of their use-value. To make this argument, I explore a range of sonic, visual and radio artists who incorporate sferics into their work in a variety of ways, with an emphasis on the media techniques they use to listen to, record and transmute sferics. Through readings of works by artists and scientists such as Mads Haahr, Matt DesLauriers and Alvin Lucier, I demonstrate how practices as disparate as cryptocurrency and field recording share at their root media techniques for the subordination of the environment to regimes of human signification and value production.