Satellite images, marked by their vertical perspective, suggest strong political power behind them (Steyerl 2011); but access to the signal of those satellite images is democratic—the electromagnetic waves sent by NOAA and METEOR weather satellites, as a physical phenomenon, cannot be blocked from being received by others. On Reddit, YouTube, and other websites, tens of thousands of people with simple DIY antennas and decoders share the weather satellite images they receive. They also share the methods and equipment they use to help one another improve the quality of these signals.

For the last months, I’ve been receiving image signals from a Russian weather satellite Meteor M2. Those images were taken by the satellite from the space. The contents of the images are clouds because the duty of a weather satellite to take pictures is to observe, track and predict clouds’ movement. Every image I received has white line glitches in it because of different interference in the air - from other electronics, from the clouds themselves, from my nonprofessional, flawed equipment and operations.  

I edited every satellite image I received. I took out the glitches from previous days’ images, added them up to the latest image and then printed them out. For example, the 4th day’s image includes all the glitches from the first day, the second day, and the third day. Every image was edited in a similar fashion. The thickness and layers of the papers visually represent the process of collecting and adding up the glitches.

This installation is a futile “closed read” of the glitches, the creation of clouds using the medium of electromagnetic waves; a gradual process of layering the glitches to a point where the audience can hardly tell if the white parts or the imagery lines are the glitches; a celebration of a force of decentralization, which counteracts the sense of power and surveillance implied by the vertical perspective of those satellite images.