A séance, in its widest sense, is a meeting between two or more bodies. In this contribution to the transmission ecologies series, Sasha Engelmann explores satellite séances: meetings between humans and satellites through the medium of radio. The weather satellite NOAA-19 orbits over central Germany on a balmy day in July, its analog signal translated by a DIY antenna and relayed to an unknown number of listeners. Apollo circles the moon. Voyager meets the turbulent storms of Jupiter. These satellite séances move through radio environments filled with many other meetings. A ghostly voice emerges from a sea of white noise. Magnetic fields and moving particles produce the ‘electromagnetic dawn chorus’, a phenomenon long compared to the sound of birds greeting the rising sun.

Sasha Engelmann (HR/US) is a London-based geographer, writer and artist. Her practice-based research investigates interdisciplinary, feminist and creative approaches to environmental knowledge making. Since 2014 she has been a member of the Aerocene Community, a network of practitioners who make, launch and fly solar-powered balloon-like sculptures in order to query the intersections of global aeromobility, advanced capitalism and fossil fuel extraction. Together with researcher-activist Sophie Dyer she leads the feminist amateur radio project and community initiative open-weather. She is Lecturer in GeoHumanities at Royal Holloway University of London.

Curated by Afroditi Psarra, "Transmission Ecologies" explores the turbulent world of radio signals which propagate around us. Each show features a guest sound artist who broadcasts their radio experiments using EMFs, interference patterns from devices, HAM, RF field recordings, satellite signals, space astronomy research, etc. to formulate their interpretations, compositions, and translations of the invisible and unheard layer of telecommunication technologies.