Benjamin Earl – Week 1 – Observation

July 18, 2022

Hello world, my name is Ben. I am a media artist and researcher based in Rotterdam. I’ve spent just over one week at Casa Sasso now, here is a short list of things I’ve noticed and noted in my notebook:

• Waves
• Bodies (water, sky, mountain, people, bugs)
• Contours
• Models
• Weather

I am here to spend a while with some lingering thoughts and ideas that haven’t quite had the chance to come out yet. A lot of these involve listening, observing and noticing from various angles and perspectives. So far I’ve been working with a little antenna that I brought with me to tap into a group of satellites called NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration). They broadcast radio signals that can be received and transformed into images of the world from above. I’ve been trying to intercept such frequencies by following some of tutorials laid out by Open Weather. So far I’ve managed to listen to a couple of satellites over the last two nights. It is somewhat of a sublime experience I must say. Over the next week I am going to try broadcasting some of these sounds over the radio at goodtimesbadtimes.club. The first broadcast will be at 21:11 CEST tonight.

I’ve been thinking about models and perspectives quite a lot and having conversations with the other residents here about it. As we sit in the garden, we look down upon Locarno on the otherside of the lake. From up here it looks like it could almost be a model city with fake cars, mountains, boats, and people. When we went into Locarno last week, we became part of that model. When looking back on Vairano, it suddenly also looked like a model. I began searching for a webcam on the mountain to see if I could access this perspective on both places at any moment and luckily enough there was one. It looks down from Cardada upon both Locarno and Vairano. I can’t see myself in it, but I’m somewhere in there. I’ve used the webcam as a background for a small journal website that I am updating sporadically with thoughts, thinking and photos. You can find it here at sasso.bnjmnearl.eu

Other things I’ve been up to with the rest of the lovely group here have include swimming, baking, cooking, drinking, writing, drawing, hiking, more swimming, listening, chatting, sitting, sunbathing, hydrating, walking, travelling, looking, coding, recording, reading and getting bitten by mosquitos.

You can find more of me and what I do at:
bnjmnearl.eu
instagram.com/bnjmnearl