Katie Paterson

© Katie Paterson

Katie Paterson in her studio, London, 2008

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A player piano renders the familiar strains of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, but the melody contains errors, missing notes, incomplete phrases. Without a human hand to perform these mistakes, one can only surmise that the score has been somehow nibbled at, like a moth-eaten sweater. Indeed, the piano in Katie Paterson’s Earth-Moon-Earth (Moonlight Sonata Reflected from the Surface of the Moon) (2007) plays a tune that has undergone a series of absurd and poetic transformations. Beethoven’s notes (strictly speaking, their letter names) were translated into Morse code, then transmitted via radio to bounce off the surface of the moon. The returning signal was reconstituted as a musical score and the piano programmed accordingly. Though the tune is instantly recognizable, such transmutations, along with the player piano’s mechanized rendition, quash the sonata’s romantic nuances. The degradation has occurred in the void between earth and moon, but the enduring image is that of the missing notes abandoned on the moon’s surface, echoing through its craters and serenading unknown life forms.

The piece was part of the 27-year-old London-based artist’s first solo exhibition at Modern Art Oxford. Alongside Earth-Moon-Earth was a neon telephone number inviting the viewer to experience Vatnajökull (the sound of) (2007-08). Call the number and you are connected to a microphone plunged in the meltwater of an Icelandic glacier. To hear the cracking and gushing of the polar ice cap is a sobering and exhilarating experience; that telecommunication can collapse distance and yet leave it ultimately intact is a delicately phenomenal thought. While these works look very much like gallery-based art, their implications pull us in all directions — to the moon and back, and then to one of the most alien landscapes on earth — making us feel at once powerful and pathetic.

To actualize a project as ambitious as Vatnajökull, Paterson relied on Icelandic locals to advise on location, employed tech-nicians to configure the equipment, and sought financial support from the telephone network provider Virgin Media. Working with a corporate entity such as Virgin presented issues that don’t usually encroach on an artist’s decision-making processes, but such businesslike negotiations are becoming a more involved aspect of Paterson’s process. For Earth-Moon-Earth, for instance, she worked with amateur radio enthusiasts, known as "moonbouncers," who regularly bounce messages off the moon, thereby utilizing an existing net-work to generate unconventional content. Light bulb to Simulate Moonlight (2008), however, required rather more high-end laboratory and manufacturing assistance. Paterson approached OSRAM, a manufacturer of daylight bulbs, to develop and produce a bulb that emitted the quality of light of a full moon. An engineer took light-meter readings, plotted graphs, and tweaked variables to find an accurate reconstruction of wavelength and amperage, an appropriate color coating for the bulb, and so on, to produce a light with muted, silvery qualities. A factory line manufactured the bulb in an edition of 289, which, if each bulb were left to burn until spent and then changed for the next, would last 66 years — the global average human life span.

By working with the immanent qualities of objects and the meanings they release through usage, Paterson avoids a didactic or proselytizing tone. Vatnajökull, for instance, has obvious ecological overtones; yet using a cell phone to connect to a melting glacier is far from bucolic. Like the replicated romance of the Moonlight Sonata, the piece pivots on what appears to be a tool for connectivity revealing itself as one of alienation. The concertina-ing of distance produces an illusion of closeness that ultimately gives way to a realization of its impossibility.

Just as the banal lightbulb and mobile telephone harbor weighty notions of life and death, distance and connectivity, the ordinary record players in Langjökull, Snæfellsjökull, Solheimajökull (2007) release associations of a remote and sublime landscape. Water collected from Icelandic glaciers has been made into frozen records and pressed with a sound recording of the water trickling and gushing in situ. The records contain the promise of fidelity, but when they’re played, their crystalline surface interferes with the recorded source sound so that we hear both the distant melting glacier and the grooved ice before us, rather like a painting on the cusp between figuration and abstraction.