In 2015 I built a quadrifilar helix antenna that picks up APT transmissions from NOAA satellites broadcasting a right-hand circular polarized signal at 137MHz. I used an rtl-sdr dongle, an inexpensive DVB-T tuner repurposed for amateur radio, as a receiver, stored the signal as a .wav file and decoded the image with free software called WxtoImg.

There is an assumption in most science fiction that all intelligent machines want to be human. Satellite Speech begins with a recording I made with this antenna that gradually morphed into a musical character who learns from radio transmissions to recreate our music but prefers to remain a machine. NOAA signals have been broadcast from satellites since the 1960s, but the message I heard emerging from static noise for the first time seemed distant and implausible and though it carried only an image of clouds over the American northeast it felt like the message must have contained something more. In these movements the satellite awakens, listens, reflects, imagines, and disappears.