Solveig Settemsdal is a multidisciplinary Norwegian artist who took part in the RIXC Baltic-Nordic Art, Science and Techno-Ecologies Residency from February 1–March 31, 2024. The artist is working across mediums including sculpture, video, photography, drawing and sound. Her practice studies the fluidity and transience of materials alongside how objects and ideas transform over time, through analog and digital media.

As part the residency, and based on the field work and the videos shot at the RIXC residency partner location Irbene Radio Telescope, the artist created a new video artwork (work in progress) consisting of 2 videos titled There's only sky, complemented by text. The video artwork creation process was curated by the Latvian artist Rasa Smite.

During the residency with RIXC the artist grappled with the complexities of learning Unreal Engine - a programme for games design - and the science behind radio telescopy, finding tangible analog and visual proxies wherever possible.

In the work, a selective transcript from an Unreal Engine workshop overlays footage from the Ventspils International Radio Astronomy Center at Irbene, Latvia. The soundtrack is a field recording of rain hitting the decommissioned radio antenna dish at Irbene; rain forming a physical proxy for the gathering of signals from space.

Layers of reality and unreality are intertwined with a liquid interpretation of radio reception, and an unreal fern. Ferns originated some 400 million years ago. In this experiment, it is ever accelerating, splitting, eventually fully fragmenting.

The Residency Program supported by Nordic Culture Point took place for Baltic and Nordic artists who work on the edge of art, science and techno-ecologies, exploring the complex relations between the human, nature and digital technologies, and focusing on new concepts such as “naturecultures”, “sensing environments”, “living technologies”, “terrestrial coexistence”, “naturally / artificial intelligences”, which recently have been re-examined at the heart of our society.

Solveig Settemsdal (Norway). There's Only Sky, 2024.

RIXC Center for New Media Culture has received mobility funding from the Nordic-Baltic Mobility Programme for Culture to establish RIXC Art Science Residencies.