Band Scan is an evolving sound and visual installation that uses ambient radio energy to create what might be described as an electromagnetic fingerprint of a community.

Every place exists within an invisible landscape of electromagnetic activity. Radio broadcasts carry music, news, religion, politics, commerce, language, and other expressions of collective life. Between the stations are static, hum, interference, clicks, and bursts of noise. These sounds, often dismissed as meaningless, arise from human and non-human activity, machines, the landscape, the atmosphere, the earth, and the sky.

Taken together, these signals may constitute a kind of portrait of a place—an artifact of humans and nature coexisting in a particular location, at a particular moment.

Band Scan uses an analog radio whose tuner slowly traverses its broadcast band. The received audio is heard in the installation space while custom software interprets characteristics of the signal and translates them into a continuously evolving visual projection. Successive scans accumulate, allowing persistent characteristics to strengthen while transient events appear and recede. A single scan captures a moment; repeated scans create an image through duration.

The work asks what this invisible environment might reveal about the communities we inhabit, and how those portraits might differ across locations and over time.

I establish the rules of translation; the environment supplies the energy. The artwork emerges from that encounter.