Welcome Wanderer

Welcome Wanderer is a multimedia device capable of transforming the passage of the billions of stars of the Milky Way transiting above it into automatic composition and graphic streaming. The core of the project is the automation and geolocalization of the Gaia DR2 star catalogue produced by ESA, which includes the location of some 4.5 billion stars within the Milky Way. From where the Welcome Wanderer is located, the software that controls it is able to recognise the stars that are passing overhead and send the data to the devices that activate the artworks. 

Welcome Wanderer aims to expand the boundaries of the visible and amplify the immensity of what surrounds us in order to emphasise the isolation of our planet from the rest of the Galaxy and highlight the common destiny of all humanity on the same journey towards the unknown. 

The first presentation of the project was in an exhibition curated by Treti Galaxie in the spaces of the Clima gallery in September 2021. The exhibition featured streaming video with a glazed ceramic sound system composed of ten speakers that diffuse sound 360 degrees to imitate the omnidirectional light of the stars. A series of female voices are assigned to the individual pieces of information related to the stars that in transit go to create an ever-changing automatic composition. Through the evocative experience of sound, the activation of the voices intends to recall the stars through the human voice, to forge that impossible and lost bond that united the spiritual conception of mystery to the infinity of the firmament.

Exhibition text by Matteo Mottin

Welcome, Wanderer! 

We are on planet Earth. It’s a humid and very crowded place. In summer it’s hot, in winter it’s cold. Right now, for one reason or another, the dominant species is the human race. The human being is a type of mammal that self-regulates through intersubjective tales, tales that are reported as true only as long as a large number of human beings believe they are. At this time, the most credited tales on Earth are money, religion and nationalism. The human being has the tendency to physically eliminate those who contradict such stories. We are in Milan. The air is heavy with the fumes of the numerous hydrocarbon combustions, but the dreamyand indifferent calm of the rain occasionally renders its purity. We are in an art gallery. It is a place to showcase artworks, which are things created by artists. Generally speaking, those things tend, sometimes surprisingly, to predict the unfolding and twisting of the above-mentioned tales. This implies that galleries are often eyed with suspicion and distrust by the human population. Before and around you, dear Wanderer, you have an artwork that turns the movement of the stars into music. This is how it works: in the silicon components of a computer a huge amount of information has been imprinted about the position, temperature, luminosity, gravity, chemical composition and so on, of a billion and seven hundred million celestial bodies. This implies that, in a sense, the computer knows everything that at present is possible to know about them. This series of information was gathered from the measurements collected by a satellite called GAIA. In the computer there is also a program, which is a complex sequence of instructions used to manage the electrical signals within it. These instructions combine the information of each star with the information of a given position on Earth. Assuming that the continuous crossing of data constitutes the computer’s imagination, it is as if at that given position appeared a perpendicular line as long as the entire galaxy. In terms of electronic imagination, whenever a celestial body touches this line, the computer communicates it to another part of the program, which translates the information into music score. The computer’s imagination has been specially coordinated with the time and space in which this art gallery is located, and it is set to reflect and render, in the form of sound, the encounter between the planet Earth and the wandering stars of the Milky Way. Oh happy Wanderer, this occurrence is not rare at all: twelve million stars pass above Milan every day, and none of them fall. The music score is performed through various timbres of human voice, here no longer employed in the transmission, attack or defense of fickle intersubjective tales designed to withstand the unknowable heaviness of the void, but as a connection between the continuous celestial movement and the apparent earth’s immobility. For human beings, the Universe is not made up of atoms, but of stories. That’s why the artwork you’re listening to has no word. And as you listen, oh sweet Wanderer, enter the listening and become listen. Only this way you will be able to realize the vastness of the spaces without sound that inhabit our connected gravitation, and to give the right value to the unknowable process that made matter material, and, as your distant sister, mother, ancestor, to recognize it in its playing. universe, We are the breath of the stars, wandering fruits of a random cosmic fluctuation in an untold immeasurable process that has no purpose. Sweet Wanderer, the star that, calling her ride, briefly shone on the hour of our meeting must continue on its long wandering, and if you have followed me so far, you will agree that it is without regret, remorse or sadness that we will watch it pass. Life is mere opinion, and the universe, change. 

La Notte di San Lorenzo Ocean Space - TBA21–Academy Venice, 2022 

In the summer of 2022, a first performance with a live choir was realised in which the star transit was performed live. On this occasion, the transit over the Atlantic Ocean one million years ago was performed,

Singers: Maria Chiara Ardolino, Dima Bakri, Mariachiara Cortez, Giulia Marchetti , Cecilia Mezzoli, Izabella Milto, Silvia Regazzo, Cecilia Rossi. 

Review by Giovanna Manzotti, Frieze Magazine, April 2023 

Sound demarcates boundaries and delineates spaces of intimacy and participation. It serves as a vehicle for the expression of disparate feelings: affection, pain, joy, restlessness. It unfolds emotions and faded memories. Sound defines volumes and creates vibrations. It resonates in liquids and on surfaces, reverberating through the air and within human bodies. The substance and behaviour of sound is the focus of Matteo Nasini’s recent solo exhibition, ‘A Distant Chime’, at Clima in Milan. For this project, his fourth solo presentation at the gallery, the Rome-based artist and composer has created an installation comprising three arched metal forms on which sit clusters of mechanically activated percussion instruments that generate musical notes in response to electrical impulses. Spanning the first room of the gallery, these elements are connected to a cube-shaped control unit in the second space via plastic tubes and cables, which coil snake-like along the wooden floor. When I spoke to Nasini about the work at the opening, he described this box as the ‘brain’ of the whole system: it contains a computer with audio software capable of recalling the Gaia catalogue – an archive of the position, brightness, distance and proper motions for more than a billion stars. 

The result of a long-term collaboration with a physicist, a computer developer and an architect, Nasini’s installation depends on a series of sophisticated calculations and algorithms. When a star in the Milky Way passes through the sky above the gallery, the computer identifies it, detects information about its distance and intensity, and communicates this data to the audio software, which generates a series of numbers corresponding to musical notes. These notes then reverberate within a harmonic system, randomly activating the percussion instruments. The outcome is an ephemeral, aleatory sequence of music that corresponds to the harmonies generated by the celestial bodies orbiting above us. ‘A Distant Chime’ is part of the artist’s ‘Welcome Wanderer’ project, previous iterations of which have included a performance at Ocean Space TBA21, Venice, in 2022, and a solo exhibition at Clima in 2021. Also consisting of an installation capable of translating the stellar movement of the Milky Way into an automatic musical composition, ‘Welcome Wanderer’ was expressed through various timbres of human voice as a polyphonic chant. In ‘A Distant Chime’, however, the human element has been entirely eliminated through the use of automated, mechanical devices. In theory, the artwork could perform the score – which would last approximately 220 million years, based on one revolution of the Milky Way – in perpetuity. In Harmonices Mundi (Harmony of the World, 1619), the German astronomer Johannes Kepler attempted to find common rules between music and the movements of the solar system, following a theory that originated in Ancient Greece and was pursued by Pythagoreanism. Kepler observed in the book that he wished ‘to erect the magnificent edifice of the harmonic system of the musical scale … as God, the Creator Himself, has expressed it in harmonizing the heavenly motions.’ Grappling with a phenomenon that is almost beyond human comprehension, ‘A Distant Chime’ succeeds in revealing the emotional texture of a score which – despite its remote celestial origins – speaks to the universality of existence. On the day I visited, the stellar transit above the gallery was calm. Who knows how it will be tomorrow?