Samuel Hertz and Carmelo Pampillonio’s Librations is a performance/composition using a radio communications relay, which transmits signals to the moon, that are then reflected back to Earth—a moonbounce. Librations is realized in cooperation with broadcast engineers at the Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute (PARI) in Rosman, North Carolina. Culminating in a composition, radio broadcast, and multi-media essay, the artists’ collaboration throughout the residency period stands as an open field of negotiations between the Earth, the moon, and the sonic/energetic traces reflected between them.

Samuel Hertz and Carmelo Pampillonio are sound artists and researchers who synthesize documentary practices of geophysical and atmospheric forces with the artistic practices of composition, transmission, and installation. Approaching ways in which we can develop notions of affect and ecological entanglement, their work explores complex interactions between non/human timescales, geophysical phenomenology, and sonic materialities.