Thomas Ashcraft is an artist, independent scientist, experimenter and naturalist currently based in New Mexico, USA. For the past 20 years, he has been engaged in a radio astronomy practice concentrating on Jupiter and Io, the Sun, meteoric fireballs and space dust. Lately he has become an observer of transient luminous events (TLEs). The data he has collected in his observations has been of interest to the scientific community and has been studied by NASA and ESA’s SOHO (Solar Heliospheric Observatory) team and the Sentinel Fireball Network. Ashcraft’s work has created a new role for the artist, that of “electroreceptor”. As a byproduct of his scientific observations, he has discovered that certain electromagnetic waves from outer space can be exhilarating when experienced as pulsating sound within the central nervous system. This exhibition presents examples of this phenomenon. For “Invisible Fields”, Ashcraft is presenting a working laboratory in the Arts Santa Mònica gallery. The lab in the gallery will be linked to his lab in New Mexico, where Ashcraft tracks the radio waves emitted by celestial bodies. His nightly radio and video observations will be added to the installation over the course of the exhibition.
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