Curated by Eleonora Raspi, Vincenzo Napolano and Valerio Boschi
2022
Fringes of Interference, Listening to the Cosmos, by visual artist Luca Serasini and sound designer Massimo Magrini for the European Gravitational Observatory is an interactive land art installation that recreates, on a much larger scale, the figure of interference fringes, the light signal through which gravitational waves are detected and take a ‘visible’ form in the Virgo interferometer. Connecting to the web-app, you can immerse yourself in the soundscape created by Massimo Magrini: remote cosmic echoes mingle with the nearest environmental ‘noises’ (even those that are inaudible), such as the vibrations of the Earth or the hissing of the wind, the beating of wind turbines, the impact of sea waves on the Tyrrhenian coast, and man-made noises. In this way, the installation explores and interprets the Virgo experiment’s ability to ‘listen’ to faint cosmic signals generated millions or billions of light years from Earth, and to monitor, at the same time, the signals coming from the natural and human environment in which it is embedded.