Transit 5B-5 is currently one of the oldest satellites orbiting Earth. Although officially decommissioned, this space debris continues to orbit, occasionally emitting signals, in a sort of unpredictable limbo, like many of its counterparts. Sangbong Lee’s installation Space Odradek is arranged as if it were the room of a space archaeologist obsessed with monitoring these zombie satellites. The installation’s aesthetic is explicitly inspired by Odradek, the mysterious protagonist of Kafka’s short story of the same name—an object whose form cannot be traced to any function, seemingly alive yet elusive. Satellite orbit data is displayed on a blue-light monitor and plotted on a plotter that graphically translates the inclinations, unrolling an infinite geometric pattern on the floor. Some mechanical and kinetic devices mounted on movable rods mirror the movements of fourteen zombie satellites, intercepting their inclinations and intermittent, random signals, whose frequencies are amplified throughout the space, producing dense metallic sounds and the static typical of radio wave reception. Freed from functional servitude, the satellites seem to devote themselves serenely to cryptic transmissions and geometric dances. An obsolete technology, stripped of its technical purpose, appears to have acquired a sort of aesthetic awareness, communicating information through rhythms and sounds that leave the audience disoriented within a synesthetic system more akin to a poetic composition than to an informative report.

 

Sangbong Lee – Space Odradek: Zero1ne Day

 

Sangbong Lee – Space Odradek: Dive into the Spooky Invisible