This summer in Pittsburgh, the Wood Street Galleries' exhibit "Out of This World" currently showcases artists who tinker with strange new ways to experience the cosmos. Vera-Maria Glahn and Marcus Wendt's soothing interactive installation Orbiter lets viewers lie down on the ground and look up at a video approximation of the night sky, limned with faint concentric rings. By pointing their fingers at the ceiling, participants create new "stars" that circulate and generate looping tones. Jean-Pierre Aubé's Titan and beyond the infinite (2007) uses data recorded in 2005 by the Huygens probe from one of Saturn's moons to create 2001-inspired slit-scan video trip-outs; the show also includes a video version of his VLF.Natural Radio (2000-Ongoing) project, which uses the sounds of naturally-produced electromagnetic signals, a phenomenon increasingly blotted out by human-made telecommunications. Geekier frequencies can be heard in Maria Antelman's taH pagh taHbe (2006), a video composed of still images of NASA hanger interiors set to a Klingon translation of Hamlet's "To be or not to be" soliloquy (no doubt using the preferred Klingon Language Institute version as her source.) Rounding out the astronomical theme, Gail Wight's Blow Out (2006) consists of forty-four photos of different smashed test tubes, white constellations of glass shards against black backgrounds, each looking like unique, exploding galaxies. - Ed Halter
Image: Jean-Pierre Aube, Titan and beyond the infinite, 2007