The sound of stars

Artwork: Charlotte Charbonnel, Asterism, 2014

What do stars sound like? French artist Charlotte Charbonnel’s installation, Asterism (2014), recently featured in the exhibition Metamorfosi at LABS Contemporary Art in Bologna, Italy, attempts to answer this question.

In collaboration with NASA, Charbonnel was able to translate the pulsations of stars into sound from the long wave signals that stars generate. The sounds of stars were then diffused into elegant tripod structures topped by glass spheres to be listened to. Similar to many of her installations such as Nebula I, where she etched the ephemeral instance of a cloud (see my art story for this work here), Charbonnel presents what is immense and intangible yet permeates our very lives whether as energy, vibrations, light, or the changing forms of matter, as fleetingly comprehensible to our senses. With eloquent and poetic precision, Charbonnel’s artwork creates spaces to dwell in wonder at what is rarely discovered or thought about by many people as they go about their everyday lives.