Band Scan is an ongoing project that transforms the invisible electromagnetic activity of a place into image, sound, and durable artifact.

Using an analog radio receiver, custom software, and a developing electromechanical scanning instrument, I traverse a radio band from one end to the other. As the receiver moves through the spectrum, broadcast signals, interference, static, and the spaces between transmissions are captured and translated into a visual field. Rather than producing a conventional spectrogram that continually replaces one moment with the next, Band Scan accumulates the encounter: each position on the dial contributes a spectral slice that remains in the image. A completed scan is therefore the residue of a journey through an electromagnetic environment at a particular place and moment.

The project grows from my continuing investigation into how our shared physical reality is created, where it comes from, and how phenomena beyond ordinary perception become part of what we experience as real. Radio provides an especially fertile material for that inquiry. An electromagnetic field surrounds us continuously but becomes perceptible only through systems of reception and translation. In Band Scan, energy becomes signal, signal becomes sound, and sound becomes image. The resulting artifact is not a depiction of that invisible environment so much as a consequence of encountering it.

Band Scan also considers the electromagnetic spectrum as a property of place. The radio environment of a community is shaped by its broadcasters, institutions, infrastructure, geography, interference, and collective activity. A scan can consequently be understood as a kind of electromagnetic fingerprint: a locality-specific record whose patterns invite comparison with those made elsewhere or at other times.

This opens the project beyond individual images and performances. An accumulating archive of Band Scans could become a platform for artistic and interdisciplinary inquiry: Which characteristics remain stable within a place? Which change across communities or over time? What aspects of collective life leave discernible traces in the electromagnetic environment? Alongside the visual artifacts, the system can preserve the underlying spectral data, allowing future comparisons and forms of analysis that need not yet be anticipated.

Band Scan can take multiple forms: as a live performance in which scanning becomes an act of listening and drawing; as an autonomous installation in which a motorized receiver repeatedly surveys its environment; as a series of site-specific works; and as a growing archive available for comparative artistic and research inquiry. These forms share the same fundamental act: moving through an otherwise imperceptible field and allowing what is encountered there to acquire material presence.

Band Scan creates durable artifacts from phenomena that ordinarily leave no enduring trace.